The Edinburgh Vaults, explained

I grew up on Blackfriars Street, two closes uphill from the Niddry Street doors, and I spent three student years pulling pints in a Cowgate bar built into one of the South Bridge arches. I mopped a floor that was somebody’s cellar in 1799. So let me say what the listings never quite say: there is no door.

No visitor centre, no ticket window, no board with opening hours. The chambers are private, unlit and locked, behind doors in tenement stairwells and pub cellars, and they open when a guide unlocks them for a booked group. So the question is never which ticket to buy. It is which cellar you want to stand in, and how much theatre you want on top of the history.

Why there are rooms inside a bridge

Work on the South Bridge started in August 1785 and it opened in 1788: 19 stone arches carrying a road just over a thousand feet across the valley, 31 feet above the ground at its highest point. Only the arch over the Cowgate is visible now. Tenements went up along the other 18 almost immediately, which is why most people walk over the bridge thinking it is an ordinary road with shops on it.

The spaces inside and beneath the arches, roughly 120 of them, became storage and workshops for the taverns, cobblers, cutlers, smelters and milliners overhead. They run from about 2 square metres, which is a cupboard, to about 40, which is a room you could hold a wake in.

Why nobody stayed

The money ran out before the waterproofing went in, so the chambers leaked from the day the road opened. Abandonment began as early as 1795, and by the 1820s the trades had gone, driven out by the wet and the bad air. The poorest of the Old Town moved in behind them, among them Irish and Highland incomers, living with no sunlight, no running water, no sanitation and fish-oil lamps. Archaeological evidence puts people down there until around 1860.

Then the chambers were sealed and forgotten until 1985. Norrie Rowan is credited with finding them; he and his son spent the 1990s digging out hundreds of tonnes of rubble. The finds were not treasure. They were thousands of oyster shells, the cheap food of the period, along with clay pipes, buttons, broken medicine bottles and children’s toys. That last one stays with me.

Two undergrounds, and people book the wrong one

This is the mistake I see most. The South Bridge vaults, entered from the Niddry Street side, and the Blair Street vaults are both called the Edinburgh Vaults and both sit under the same bridge complex, but they are not the same rooms. Different operators hold them, you enter from different streets, and a ticket to one will not get you into the other.

Blair Street holds the small museum, the artefacts you can handle, the short film and the audio devices that let you hear the guide in a stone room. The South Bridge side runs the largest and longest-running ghost tours, in rooms left deliberately bare. Neither is better. They answer different questions.

The Close is a third thing entirely

The Real Mary King’s Close gets folded into this conversation constantly, and it should not be. It is a street of 17th-century houses preserved beneath the Royal Mile at the City Chambers, partly demolished and built over rather than given up to damp. It has its own operator, its own hours and its own ticket, and it is not included in any tour on this site. It is also far more polished, with reconstructed rooms and set dressing. If you want a museum, you want the Close. If you want to stand in an empty stone room in the dark, you want the vaults.

What an hour down there is actually like

You meet on the Royal Mile, at 300 Lawnmarket by the red phone box or at the Mercat Cross by St Giles’. There is a walk first, through the closes, which is where a good guide earns their keep. Then a door, a two-foot step at the South Bridge entrance, and a spiral stair down with more steps inside. Floors can be wet, and phone signal stops.

Underground it is cool and damp, much the same in July as in January, and the light stays low on purpose. The rooms are bare, which is the part people are not warned about: you are listening to somebody describe what a brick chamber held. When the guide is good, the room fills up around you. When the guide is running late and shouting over a stag party, it is a cellar.

How to choose between the six

Start with your knees, not the theme. All five underground tours have a spiral staircase, so none of them is step-free; if that rules you out, the Witches & History walk stays on the street the whole way and is the highest-rated of the six. Then the age minimum, which runs from 5+ up to a strict 18+ on the paranormal tour. Only then the flavour: history with artefacts on the Blair Street history tour, atmosphere and a drink by candlelight on the evening whisky tour, kirkyard as well as vaults on the graveyard tour, or the shortest and most-booked route on the flagship South Bridge tour.

Two practical things to finish. Book earlier for a Friday or Saturday evening than for a Tuesday afternoon, and earlier again through August. And read what the listing says about theatre before you pay: the gap between history with jokes and somebody jumping out at you is an operator decision, printed plainly, and it decides whether you come back up pleased or irritated. All six, compared.

Ready to go down?

The most-booked of the six is the one-hour South Bridge walk. If you want the museum, the artefacts and the audio devices instead, read what the Blair Street vaults are, and if stairs are the problem, the accessibility page is the honest one.

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