Happy birthday dear Edinburgh, but which one? - Michael Upton

Edinburgh Castle

Roman remains have been found there and a Pictish comb which could date from as early as 600 AD.

That is also the probable date of what seems to be the earliest reference to settlement at “Etin”, and Irish annals apparently speak of Edinburgh in 638AD; Simeon of Durham in the twelfth century referred to Edinburgh having a church in 854 AD, while another chronicle from that century almost certainly refers to the Scots taking control of Edinburgh in 954-962 AD.

The excavations between the West Bow and the Cowgate found stone buildings from the eleventh century.

The city has produced great historians, Robertson, Hume, Mitchison, and many more. They would have shaken their heads in wonder at the assertion that anyone could date the founding of Edinburgh, or say how old it is. But then that is true of anyone of ordinary intelligence and education.

Except it seems the Council, which has taken 2024 as another excuse to waste our money.

“Edinburgh is 900 years old” its website proclaims this year, despite the fact that any of the rest of us could tell it that’s not true.

The Council goes on: “Edinburgh has selected 2024 to mark the start of the 900th anniversary of our city”. This doesn’t even make sense; either 2024 is the 900th anniversary or it isn’t (it isn’t) - it can’t be “the start of” a 900th anniversary which the Council presumably means to roll on indefinitely into the future. And why this arbitrary latching on to 1124 anyway?

Because, says the Council, King David I came to the throne that year, and may have been the first king to give some towns the privilege of being a ‘royal burgh’.

But there is not a shred of evidence that he made Edinburgh a royal burgh 1124 and attributing the change to his reign at all is just an assumption. And even if we could date it to 1124, no one - not even it would seem the Council - is suggesting that David found the Old Town as a nice greenfield site and ordered that a town should be built there.

Conferral of royal burgh status was merely a change in the laws governing a long-established community. To decree that 2024 is Edinburgh’s 900th birthday simply expresses a bureaucratic mindset that doesn’t understand that what creates a community isn’t laws or pieces of paper, but organic growth built of a myriad of free choices.

But let’s not be curmudgeonly - after all, the Council has spent the year very effectively celebrating at least the idea of a 900-year-old city, by letting our roads continue to deteriorate to convincingly look as if they are 900 years old.