Today we walked to the High Street, the main street, in Edinburgh and toured Edinburgh Castle. The Castle is located on the highest point in Edinburgh and overlooks the Firth of Forth, a tributary of the Forth River that leads to the North Sea. While it has been a refuge for royalty when under siege, the Castle's main purpose was as a defensive and military structure. As such, today it houses parts of the Scottish military and most of the buildings are military museums. The castle itself has an outer courtyard and a stone wall that surrounds a dozen or so stone buildings at the top of the hill. The pictures really tell the story of what we saw. We entered several of the buildings. We viewed the Scottish Royal jewels, the crown, scepter, and sword, and the Stone of Scone, a large stone used as a seat to crown Scottish Royalty for centuries. The most impressive building was the large Banqueting Hall with its massive arched wooden ceiling. The ceiling is entirely of wood, fastened with wooden pegs. Weapons, swords, pikes, and armor are displayed in this room. Lastly, we toured the prisons located underground in one of the buildings. These are dark, dank and really nasty places to have to spend any time at all. We saw the little graveyard for the soldier's dogs, too.

Portable bleachers and grandstand have been set up in the castle courtyard for the Royal Military Tattoo that begins on Thursday and is performed every night for the next month . We have tickets to see the show on Thursday night, so we're excited about that. You can read more about that at http://www.edintattoo.co.uk/