350 million years ago –where I grew up – the Earth heaved up a spear of basalt, reshaping the land forever. Simultaneously, in geological time – give or take the moments that man has existed – joggled by this disturbance perhaps – the buttocks of Arthur’s Seat and the bared grin of Salisbury Crags surfaced. With a final cough, a 1200 metre cube, known today as the Bass Rock, was flicked into the air before it plunged into the sea 15 miles away. Boatloads of ornithologists now visit its craggy, white-top to study the world’s largest population of northern gannets as they perch each day to eat fish and shit.
Castle Rock, having arrived with such elan, drew breath and has rested now for 350,000 millennia. Nothing so far seems to have excited it further.
Recently – around fifty thousand years ago – rejoicing in the warmth of a pre-glacial epoch, early men – a species yet to develop speech – encouraged by shy glances – to impress the girls first clambered to its top. The same bravado and curiosity – so succinctly put by Odell after the first summiting of Earth’s highest point in 1953 as ‘because it’s there.’ A logic that drives us even today. It brought man to the top of Everest and moments later, the Moon.
Being high above the surrounding land perhaps offers some sense of security although the need to carry water up from the marshy lake at its base – known for centuries as the Nor’ Loch – will have vexed the junior members of each tribe charged with its collection.
Since those early days of human ‘truth or dare’, man has dressed the Castle Rock in palisades and simple forts, adorned it with a chapel and, as necessary, raised castle walls and esplanades. It has bathed in the skirl of pipes and thrummed to the rattle of the military drum. Scottish history has soaked into its grey skin and been carried through its veins of quartz. Here Edward the 1st in 1296 – during the ‘Rough Wooing of the Scots’ – hanged the 12 Clan chiefs he had invited to a parley. James the 6th of Scotland travelled to London from the Castle to become James the 1st of the brand-new United Kingdom. The Enlightenment – that fabulous burgeoning of reason over belief – started here and spread to Paris and London and then the World, and I was raised a few hundred yards from its base.
I walked towards it each morning to catch the bus to school. I saw Edinburgh Castle every day of my boyhood as I walked, from my family, New Town house, across Heriot Row and Queen Street cresting George Street and dropping down to Princes Street. High above me as I walked, the Castle, perched on its rock, loomed. The rock from 350 million years ago. When I ventured out at night, the floodlit Castle, appeared suspended, floating above a void of blackness.
As a child of 9, I climbed my first terrifying route up its flanks. Topping the rock, as I scrambled up the stone wall of the Castle, I was greeted and collared by a policeman with a Morris Minor panda car. He drove me home and suggested to my mother that she might better control my spirit for adventure, adding as he left, that I was a ‘pest and mental mad’.
As a teenager, at its base, I stood on an iron-latticed bridge above the main railway line into Waverley Station so that I might be engulfed in smoke from the trains that belched below. It was at the base of the Castle Rock that, having walked her about in an agony of indecision until our feet hurt, in Princes Street Gardens – (built on the land that was once the Nor’ Loch) – I summoned eventually the courage required to kiss a girl for the first time.
It wasn’t however until, I was aged 23, having left Edinburgh for four years at Loughborough University that, on a visit home I recognised, quite unexpectedly one evening, as I walked my familiar route up town that the Castle on its rock, suspended above a black void – right in the middle of the city, surrounded by urban normality – was an amazing thing. A 350-million-year-old, fuck-off rock, with a castle, right in the middle of everything.
The Rock by contrast has been nowhere. It hasn’t returned to recognise – unexpectedly – what an incredible thing are we. From the perspective of its 350 million years, if it could speak, would it have anything to say? I’m not convinced that it has even noticed we exist. We haven’t scratched the surface of its consciousness.
Beaky's Blather 
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