Edinburgh’s dark corners: a walking tour of the city’s hidden stories

Invisible Cities’ tours take visitors to the Scottish capital’s juiciest and least-known stories – and with guides who have known homelessness, they are rooted in real experience

Edinburgh is a city that wears “dreich” weather well. The gloomy, overcast greys and short, damp days of winter suit the brooding architecture, and the Scottish capital’s often murky, deviant past.

These are the streets that were bombarded during the wars of Scottish independence, giving Edinburgh’s centrepiece the claim of being Europe’s most-besieged castle. It’s where cages once had to be introduced over graves to stop bodies being dug up and sold to the medical school, and where, round the corner, tightly packed tenements hosted peasants and poets, philosophers and kings. The city is, as the poet Hugh MacDiarmid wrote, “a mad God’s dream”.