In April or May, 2012, I stood at the entrance to Edinburgh Castle after walking along the Royal Mile. There was a booth where they asked you to pay a few pounds for the pleasure of roaming through the grounds. However, we had other things to do and our train was leaving in a couple of hours. It was a missed opportunity because I knew, even then, that I would never return to that spot. However, this morning I found a video on Youtube made by Steve Marsh who explored the castle and put it on the web for all to see.
It was a fascinating exploration and one of the highlights for me was seeing the ritual of firing the One o'clock Gun. This has been going on for years, and was originally set up to alert the ships in the harbour of the right time before reliable clocks were in common use. In one scene, I noticed a map which showed other places in the world where a One o'clock Gun is still fired regularly. This included Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour, Hobart and Fremantle in Western Australia.
The current Edinburgh gun looked like a fairly typical field gun, but a previous gun was preserved elsewhere in the grounds. It's called Mons Meg and was cast in 1449 and presented to King James in 1457. Everything in the UK seems to have a long history and it's great that it's being preserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment