Picture This: Edinburgh’s Old Town Majesty

On the walls of Edinburgh’s Old Town buildings, afternoon light matured into dusk. Skeletal trees on the brink of spring clattered in the sharp winds. Flags snapped overhead. I stood in the gulf between ages: Princes Street Gardens, the site of the old Nor’ Loch, once a reeking cesspool of filth and disease. Today it’s a liminal green space dividing old from the really old.

There’s a tension between Edinburgh’s towns here, like being in the gap between two poles of the same magnetic character. It’s a small joy being on the brink of something. Gilded in the late afternoon light and perched on the bones of an old volcano, the Old Town is an old definition of majesty.