I've noticed in general that audio tours are much better than they used to be. Early attempts at such tours tended to just dump all the information the curators has on the place into the guide. Today's tours are better thought out: timing is as important as information content. The best tours add extra numbers for special items in a room--find a room interesting and you get extra information, find it boring and you can quickly move ahead. More and more places are getting the hang of this, and the one at Holyroodhouse is excellent.
As an aside, I'd recommend for any traveler to bring your set of earphones as you travel whether or not you commonly use an MP3 player. So many place offer only low quality headphones or in the worst case you have to hold up a player to your ear, which makes your arm tired and tends to make you want to cut the tour short.
The Palace gets its name from the Holyrood Abbey next door. The Abbey was believed to have a piece of the True Cross (the "Holyrood") in its possession. A few centuries later is was attacked by an anti-Catholic mob and left in ruins. Today is has been cleaned up, and is now a beautiful ruin, especially when the sun shines out.
After the tour, I went over to the new Scottlish Parliament Building. Architecturally, this building is a mess, a mishmash of styles and symbols that make it look like it was designed by a committee of elementary school children. I heard it looked better inside, but a tour group just beat me in, and the long line at the security station deterred me.
Instead, I headed for the highest point in the city, Carlton Hill. This is a giant park with also contains a monument to civic misplanning, the Scottish National Monument, an incomplete replica of the Parthenon that only contains 12 columns. Since it was never completed, it has become known as "Scotland's Disgrace" or (according to my tour guide from the day before) if you are from Glasgow "Edinburgh's Disgrace".
In any event, there are great view from the top--I don't have any pictures to back that up, however, since the weather went from sunny to windy and rainy in a matter of moments, so I broke early for lunch. I heartily recommend Howie's, which had really great food.
1 comment:
Hi Mark
I liked your piece on Edinburgh and ypur comments about audio tours. Had you heard of walk talk tours? - the downloadable audio tours of Edinburgh, York, Manchester and London to play on your MP3 or iPod. Ideal for independent travellers like you - and if you've got your MP3 player with you - easy to download almost anywhere.
Take a look at www.walktalktour.com and see what you think.
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