Looking up at the castle from the Grassmarket, at the height of the rock, it looms, though the rock is not as visible as it is when the castle is viewed from other angles.

This photo is available on Redbubble: Edinburgh Castle.

The tower of St Cuthbert’s Parish Church, the Kirk Below the Castle.

This photo is available on Redbubble: St Cuthberts and the Castle.

This photo is available on Redbubble: Edinburgh Castle from Cornwall Street.

You often see people with flyers and clipboards wanting to get the attention of shoppers at the farmer’s market. But it’s not often you see someone with a clipboard full of sheets that say “Obama for America”. (Of course, someone attempting to sign up voters for McCain would be even more unlikely.) But there he was: wearing a faded green t-shirt that said I’m so excited to be here. (Update: although I recall a faded green, in this photo the t-shirt looks blue. Weird.) From Colorado, originally, a somewhat right-wing state, but said he was hopeful that some of the 250,000 Americans in the UK could be persuaded to register and vote for Obama – he was an official Obama campaign worker, and said this was the first time any Democratic campaign had made an official effort to get Americans living outside the US to register and vote in a Presidential election. Well, good luck, I said: I hope he wins. (I wonder if Avedon Carol knows about this Obama outreach? Usually if I want to find out what ex-pat Americans know about US politics, her Sideshow is where I go…)

And then I bought a copy of the Big Issue:

This week’s Big Issue has Sean Connery on the cover. He’s back in Edinburgh complaining about the state of the capital. Well, Sean, if you paid taxes here you’d have a right to grumble about it like the rest of us. As you don’t, STFU.

These photos are available on Redbubble: The Market Below The Castle and Big Issue Seller.

This photo is available on Redbubble: Princes Street Gardens.

This photo was taken from here. It’s on Redbubble: Edinburgh Castle from Castle Terrace.

Every photoblog of Edinburgh has to have a photo of Edinburgh Castle: I think it’s a rule. The standard photo is either from Princes Street or from the Esplanade: but if you stand on the traffic island just where Castle Terrace corners north towards Princes Street, a few meters west of Spittal Street, and look up, you see the steep rock face – the cliffs are about 80 meters high – and the medieval walls enclosing the 18th-century buildings.

From a slightly different angle, and larger:

(also available on Redbubble)

“How old is Edinburgh Castle?” a friend’s child once asked me: and was most frustrated when I told her “That question is not answerable.” The rock has been fortified since before Scotland had a written history. Edinburgh Castle has been the military headquarters for the army in Scotland for about eight or nine hundred years, at least since David I’s reign (1124-1153) if not since Malcolm III’s reign (1058-1093).

The chapel built by David I to the memory of Queen Margaret is the oldest building still standing on the rock. Margaret was Edward the Exile’s daughter, Edgar Ætheling’s sister, David’s mother, Malcolm’s wife, and chief instigator of the reform of the practices of the old Celtic Church of Scotland into more standard practices of the Roman Catholic church in Scotland. (She died in 1093 and was canonised in 1251, during the reign of her great-great grandson Alexander III.)

But walk through the Castle – these days, if you’re a foreign invader, you don’t need to scale the rock, just pay an entrance fee and walk through the gate past armed guards who will not shoot you – and you will see that it is built and built and built again; layers of stone and cobbled roads and dungeons and guns making a cake of history on top of the basalt plug. But from the outside, what you see is the craig that the glacier left, steep-sided and invincible to foreign invaders until the century of the aeroplane.

But from Princes Street, in haar and moonlight, the castle looks like this:

This photo is available on Redbubble: Castle: Shadows and Moonlight.