Edinburgh Vaults

Edinburgh was expanding fast in the late eighteenth century, and two bridges were built to carry that expansion: North Bridge and South Bridge, known locally as 'The Bridges'. South Bridge was proposed in 1775 to span the Cowgate gorge between the High Street and the growing University on the Southside, though work did not begin until August 1785, under the South Bridge Act 1785. The bridge was completed in 1788. Its nineteen arches were enclosed and given extra floors so that the space beneath could be put to industrial and commercial use, and for roughly thirty years the vaults housed taverns, cobblers' workshops and merchants' storage.

The trouble was that construction had been rushed and the bridge surface was never sealed against water. The vaults began to flood, and abandonment started as early as 1795. As businesses left — the exodus largely complete by the 1820s — the empty rooms were taken over by others. The Cowgate had become Edinburgh's slum as the Industrial Revolution took hold, and the vaults became slum housing in their own right: cramped, dark and damp, with no sunlight, no running water, no sanitation and barely any air. Many rooms held families of more than ten people. Fish oil lamps burned against the stench of chamber pots and stale waste. Robbery and murder plagued the chambers. By around 1860 it is believed that even the very poorest had gone, though written records of this period are virtually non-existent and estimates for the final closure of the complex range from about 1835 to about 1875.

The vaults also sheltered illegal gambling taverns and an illicit whisky distillery. On 1 July 1815 the Edinburgh Evening Courant reported a seizure under the arch of the South Bridge of a private distillery that had been working for eighteen months, reached through an iron door hidden behind a bedroom fireplace grate and a trap-door and ladder beyond. Rumour held that bodysnatchers stored corpses in the vaults overnight, but there is no evidence that the serial killers Burke and Hare ever used them. The chambers were rediscovered in the 1980s by former Scottish rugby internationalist Norrie Rowan, who found a tunnel leading into them — and who used that tunnel to help Romanian rugby player Cristian Raducanu escape the Romanian secret police and seek political asylum, weeks before the 1989 revolution. Rowan and his son Norman excavated the vaults in the 1990s, removing hundreds of tonnes of rubble by hand. That people had actually lived down here was only discovered in 1985, when an excavation uncovered middens containing toys, medicine bottles and plates.

It is worth being straightforward about what the record actually contains. The vaults' reputation rests largely on televised investigations — Ghost Adventures and Most Haunted among them — whose teams have claimed encounters with spirits, and on the 2009 BBC recording of voices that nobody present heard at the time and that sound engineers could not trace to any source.

So far there are no established causes, explanations, or reliable sources confirming that any of these incidents were supernatural. What the vaults do hold, beyond question, is the memory of people who lived and died in genuinely appalling conditions — and the toys, plates and medicine bottles found in the middens in 1985 are a more affecting record of them than any ghost story.

The vaults are split either side of the Cowgate arch. Those on the north side form a series of tunnels and chambers used mainly for ghost tours, which are the usual way visitors see them. On the south side, the vaults have been converted into a venue called The Caves and The Rowantree, hosting private events, weddings, private dining, live music and the occasional club night. Within The Caves you can see the building remains of what was Adam Square, demolished to make way for the South Bridge, including original terracotta floor tiles, a hearth stone and the remains of a fireplace uncovered during excavation; a well was found in another room.

If you are visiting in August, the vaults take on a different character entirely. During the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, The Caves and The Rowantree — along with several chambers that otherwise sit unused — are transformed into a major festival venue hosting more than sixty shows a day: music and crowds in rooms that spent most of their working life damp, dark and poorly aired.