Continuing our grand tour of churches ERR’WHERE, we visited St. Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh. St. Giles can be distinguished from the myriad other churches we have visited by its sick stone crown (and also, it’s Presbyterian, and I don’t think we’ve visited any other Presbyterian churches in our travels, but I could be wrong).
I mean look at this thing:
One of the slightly quirky things about Edinburgh is you’ll see random plaques around the city commemorating the home or office of some doctor who discovered some medical breakthrough. Edinburgh had a famous medical school and apparently had a small problem with grave robbing (for science!) in the early 19th century, which led people to build iron cages called mortsafes over their loved ones graves! Anyway, Edinburghers are clearly quite proud of their history and this plaque in St. Giles’ was one of at least two I saw honoring James Young Simpson for discovering anesthesia. We are all in his debt!
The church was otherwise very beautiful. I picked up two souvenirs here, which were two beautiful Christmas ornaments for our tree– one a bagpiping santa, and the other a highland cow, to remember our time in Scotland by!
