I'm going on a seven day history tour of the Scotland/England border and this is day one,
so if you're interested in the people places and events in Scottish history, then click
the subscribe button at the bottom right of the screen.
In the meantime, let me tell you some stories.
Now if you've been watching Scotland History Tours, then you know that I've taken you up
to Sutherland, over to Skye, all around my own county of Perthshire.
I've even taken you to Ayrshire, to Edinburgh, once I even went across the border to the
English town that belongs to Scotland.
Of course, much of the history that happens to any country happens on its border; the
battles, the standoffs, the negotiations and of course Scotland is no different, and so
I'm going to take you on seven days to find out about some of those events, but to do
it, first of all I'm gonna get a camper van (motorhome), and then on the way to the border
I'm gonna take you to meet Scotland's top vlogger and find out why Craigmillar is his
favourite castle.
Come with me.
This is the first stop on my journey, where I'm going to exchange the Land Rover Discovery
that I use when I take other folk on tour, for a camper van to take you on tout.
My home for the next week will be a camper van generously provided by Tracy at Perthshire
Camper Hire Limited.
Good lass Tracy.
Now that's my wee plug to say thank you, so be sure to use them if you ever want to rent
an affordable camper van.
Anyway she's got a choice of two camper vans to offer me.
Oh she's given them names you know.
Viv is the smaller option.
Now she'd be handy if I was trying to get about the narrow single track roads of the
North Coast 500.
Much more manoeuvrable, although if you had to do a movement of your own, you'd need to
find the facilities.
If you know what I mean.
So for a man of my girth and frequency of bowel movement, let's have a look round Cilla.
Oh there's a fridge, there's a cooker, there's a telly,
and obviously the room for my movements, and some place to store the whisky when the police
come round.
It's a joke kids, don't drink and drive.
Oh aye, I think this will be comfy.
Oh I'm all excited now.
Oh I'm nervous now, oh can I be trusted on the open road?
Is there any incoming?
Oh careful, careful, careful, and we're off.
Ah this is the life.
The world's my oyster.
So where will we go first?
Well I'm heading for the Scotland/England border, but I reckon we can make a stop off
at a castle on the way.
I'm going to meet up with Scotland's top vlogger, Shaun Alexander, to talk a wee bit of history
and find out why one of his favourite places is Craigmiller Castle.
Good to see you.
And I tell you what, you've given us a nice day for it as well.
Well I did arrange it.
It's raining up our way, so I'm assuming that this has something to do with you.
The sun's gone behind the cloud now.
This is Edinburgh every day.
It's always like this.
Is it?
Sunshine on Leith.
Are you a Hibee (Hibernian FC fan)?
No, I'm a Jambo (Heart of Midlothian FC fan).
Anyway listen we're here to see your favourite castle.
Can we go around so we can let folks see it?
Let's do it.
Right okay.
Come on.
So Edinburgh Castle's actually the country's top tourist attraction, but this is your favourite.
Yeah I mean that's quite impressive.
Edinburgh is obviously a great castle and people need to visit it if they come.
Getting quite expensive mind you, but it's still worth a visit.
You're telling me.
But no I love Craigmillar.
There's so much about it that is awesome, but we'll get into all the details, but like
it's even appeared in various different productions.
I think three different major productions in the last five or ten years or so.
I know it was in The Outlaw King.
Yes, so where we're standing right now, this was all fenced off when they were filming
with Chris Pine.
This here they turned this into a medieval village and I've got some footage which I'll
give to you which you can put up, of the medieval village they built here.
Alright, wow, okay.
Was it what they used or was this like for where they get their dinner and stuff like
that, or was this actually part of the [set]?
So basically what it was is Robert the
Bruce and and the main folk, they obviously lived in the castle, but as they were coming
in and out of the castle, it was like villages around it, the roads around it.
So you see them kind of transitioning through the area and it was like a medieval village.
Medieval is probably not the right word.
No it is medieval.
Medieval village that they built, they spent probably two months.
I remember at the time, building this village, it looked amazing, and it was all around this
grass where we're standing now, and it was really cool, so ... I bet we're in one of
the latrines.
but they had like pigsties, they had the whole lot.
It was really awesome.
They obviously spent a lot of money, Netflix right spent a lot of money on this thing,
but anyway it's been in quite a few bits and pieces, and you can see it clearly.
I mean they kind of superimpose a lot of the stuff round about out of it, and they do the
CGI, because presumably they don't have that fencing to keep you out.
But consequently this place used to be deserted nobody used to come here.
When I was growing up, especially used to be empty but nowadays it's obviously quite
busy, because the TV brings people.
I bet we'll bring people.
This is TV.
People will be watching this video and they'll be thinking, I need to come to Craigmillar
now.
It's a great place.
I bet you Catriona Balfe, she'll see oh I saw Shaun and Bruce on the YouTube channel.
Exactly Catriona if you're watching, you've been here before already, but it's a good
place What an appropriate place for Mary, Queen of Scots.
We should maybe go inside and have a chat about some of the history.
This whole area is linked to Mary, Queen of Scots, and there's a lot to talk about.
Let's go.
What a place.
Yeah and these trees to welcome you, it's just like wow and in the springtime they're
all red, full of berries and the whole thing's just impressive.
The floor's all red with berries, and this up here, this tower that must have been built
around 1400 okay because the lands were given the Prestons So from that time this is certainly
mentioned in like 1425 and a charter it talks about this tower, so the tower was already
here by that time, do you know what I mean and then other bits were built on around afterwards
at different times various other bits have been built on and you can see a window's been
blocked up there, but even the fact that window's quite a big window, so this clearly wasn't
a defensive wall at the time that that window was built because it would be wee arrow slits.
Somebody could throw a brick [through the window].
One of the jakeys (drunks) from Craigmillar could throw a brick.
Right so this is the great hall.
Some place.
There's a lot of atmosphere.
So much would have happened.
All the big events
I don't know about all the big events, because Bannockburn didn't happen.
That's true, but all the big meals all the dignitaries would have came and birthday parties
and down
the years kings would have been here; Robert the Second certainly visited here, because
it was him that gifted the last of the land here to the Prestons.
Probably most of the Stuart monarchs have been in this room at one point or another.
That's insane to think about that.
That's when you can really kind of feel a bit history when you're in a place where so
much would have happened, and of course the best known would be Mary, Queen of Scots because
she came here just after her son James was born.
He was the guy that would create Great Britain and she came here to recover right?
She'd had a hell of a time So her husband Darnley, who was a bit of a loose cannon,
right he's got involved because he's an idiot.
He's an absolute bawbag, as you would say in Scotland.
I'm not sure if we can say that but I said it.
He's an absolute roaster, and so he gets involved in a plot to kill Mary, Queen of Scots' favourite
courtier and he leads them.
If you go to Holyrood Palace, you go round that back stair
that they would have taken, up to where Mary was playing cards with her courtiers and they
went in and stabbed him in the back.
After that
Mary's furious with Darley, her husband, but what does she do?
She comes here and a whole bunch of her courtiers are here and they know about this murder and
so they're here discussing how do we deal with this Darnley situation, because he's
an idiot right he's creating problems, he's now sired a new king, so his job's kind of
done.
Can I divorce him or whatever and Mary's big thing was, we can't do anything to jeopardize
the question of the legitimacy of her son, James, so let's try and find a way to get
Darnley out of the picture, but it can't get in the way of James's accession to the throne
after me, and so they spent days here, There was a big wooden table there, and on that
they signed what they called the Craigmillar bond, to say that they were going to kill
Darnley and so I mean history happened in here,
because that changed the whole course that Scotland took because of that, because they
killed Darnley, people turned against Mary and Bothwell, who was one of the guys involved
in this forces Mary into marriage and then there's a standoff at Carberry Hill, down
by Musselburgh between the goodies and baddies, I don't know which were which, and then Mary
goes into prison at Loch Leven Castle, and then she manages to break out 10 months later,
and then they have a battle at Langside, then she flees to England and James becomes the
Child King.
All of that happens, that change of the course of history started here, in this room, and
it's an incredible thing.
That's absolutely unbelievable, but you were talking about other things that went on round
about growing up here.
Can we go up to the roof and have a look around?
You get a good kind of aerial perspective of the whole place from up there, so we'll
be able to have a look and I'll talk you through some things that happened.
Let's do that, let's go.
Ah what a view.
You can see half of Edinburgh from up here.
You can see the back end of Edinburgh.
That's the hospital over there.
From that window you'll be able to see along the other side.
It's a good view.
The other side you can see the castle and all that but I wanted to bring you here to
tell you a wee bit of a story about my kind of history of this area, and why I know it
so well.
So basically looking out that way you can see that big massive white building.
That is now Edinburgh's Royal Infirmary, which is the main hospital of Edinburgh.
I think they bought it in the late 80s, early 90s.
My grandparents bought a caravan park called Little France Caravan Park and so I basically
grew up there.
And kind of walking around the grounds here, I used to take the dogs out for a walk here
all the time, and they had that campsite for about 20 years.
Eventually the council decided, oh we want to put a hospital there, so they got bought
out of the land right but it was Little France, and everybody wondered why it was Little France
and the story goes that when Mary came, she came with a group of French guards, and they
camped out on the land down there, and they liked the land so much I think some of them
ended up staying in the area, so this became a kind of French community just outside Edinburgh.
That name you can still find it down there Little France and everybody thinks it's a
bit weird when they pass.
Why is it Little France.
Well connected directly, because of the French people that came here and of course the French
connection between Scotland and, well France, because that's the best place, if you're going
to have a French connection, Marseille would be the place.
So that caravan park it no longer exists.
The French sold it to your granddad!
They did.
They went down the line and they sold it to my granddad (They are joking).
It's now a hospital.
It's good having the hospital there, don't get me wrong, but also there was a tree on
the caravan park, a famous tree and everyone knew it as Mary's tree, and nobody knows exactly
what the story is, but either she planted or she used to come there and sit on it and
read, but anyway this tree which was a pathetic old stump by the time my grandparents sold
the caravan park because it had been neglected by years.
I think they actually painted along the bottom.
Somebody painted it from the council to try and preserve it.
[It] was in the caravan park, close to the entrance to the main road there, which is
the old Dalkeith Road and it sat there for years, but once they decided they were going
to build the hospital, they eventually decided they were going to remove it and it caused
a lot of uproar at the time.
Everybody's like this is Mary's tree, you can't move this tree, it's history, even though
it's just a stump, but eventually they got their way, despite the protests, and they
removed the tree and nobody knows what they did with it.
if it still exists, but probably not.
You couldn't really plant it I don't imagine.
No I think it was long past it.
It was just a stump, but it was a local legend here that was related to Mary, Queen of Scots
and then when we were kids finding out about the tree and the Little France thing, that's
when we thought oh Mary, Queen of Scots and then you can find out about the story about
the castle, why she was here and all the rest of it.
Well listen, I hope you've enjoyed the trip that Shaun and I have taken to bring you round
what's Shaun's favourite castle and listen, Shaun's got his own channel which is Shaun's
vlog is that right?
Shaun Vlog.
So please go and find it he'll be talking about all things Scottish in his life and
what he gets up to, so please if you want to do that, I'll leave a link to another video
down here one of Shaun's videos go and check it out.
In the meantime tha mi an d chas gum bi lath math leibh.
Tiorridh an drasda.