Edinburgh Castle Pt 4 - The Great Hall
After the Royal Palace and the Honours of Scotland, the next must-see part of the castle is the Great Hall which is located next to the Palace in Crown Square.
This grand ceremonial hall was completed in 1512 for James IV and used for entertaining dignitaries with great banquets, but all this fine dining and drinking came to an abrupt end when Oliver Cromwell took over at the helm in 1650 and converted it into barracks.
When the New Barracks were opened in 1799 the hall was converted into a military hospital, and then in 1886 it was restored to something like its former glory.
The one thing that isn’t Victorian though is the hammerbeam roof which has been here from the beginning and one of the most important in Britain. Another original feature is the Laird’s Lug (Lord’s Ear) which is a grilled opening above the right-hand side of the fireplace. It was used for eavesdropping and when Mikhail Gorbachev came to the castle in 1984 his security team insisted that it was bricked up.
Around the perimeter is an impressive collection of weapons and armour on loan from the Royal Armouries.
Originally posted 2018-04-24 13:34:33.
I think this would be murder to heat . . . . .
Large rooms like this would probably never have got warm at all years ago (982 now) 😊
Our last house had a big Victorian front room, witha basemtn space under it and the River Tay out the front and fireplace that had ben altered maybe about 1912–badly, alas . I say no more, other than that that house could not be heated. I shudder to think what the guy who bought it’s heating bills must be like.
Or maybe I should say, I shiver…..
It sounds as though it would have been nice in the Summer though.
Well, the heating bills weren’t, cos it even had to be heated then……. Heating bills were more than the mortgage every month.
Blimey! No wonder you moved.
Well… yeah. Lord knows what the bill will be like now. Christmas, cos we were having a houseful, we’d leave the heating on low overnight and then I’d be up at 6, getting the fire lit cos the chimney was that lousy it took like 2/3 hours to get any heat at all. We’d have our coats on in the dining room for the dinner cos it was the old wash house. And during the meal one of us would be running back and forward checking on the fire to see it hadn’t gone out. This house is a dawdle by comparison.
An open fire makes good toast though 🤪
That’s why we still have one. Oh yeah. And even better in 10 years here we’be not even paid for a bit of kindling. We are beach combers and forest scourers and every kind of saw , and wedge’n sledge wielder. Also one of our sons in law has his own joinery biz. We save him a fortune cos he would have to pay to dump the wood otherwise. You cannae beat a real fire on a cold night. What is more the chimney is so good you just chuck a match on it and it goes.
I agree. You can’t beat an open fire – and you’re also cleaning up the environment by using all the wood that’s been left lying around.
Oh indeed…Broughty Beach and the Stannergate are so-oh much better for the carloads we nick. AS are all the places we walk.
I don’t remember this part of the castle, but I must have seen it when I took the tour fifteen years ago.
It’s unlikely that the Great Hall would have been missed off the tour Don