A couple of weeks ago (time goes much too quickly!) we brought the boys to Edinburgh for a couple of days during their mid-term break.

We were looking around at somewhere close we could go to for 3-4 days and ended up landing on Edinburgh by accident.  On twitter I mentioned that my third son who is a little Harry Potter crazy wanted to know if he’d get to go to Hogworths when he turned 11.  Someone suggested booking a ticket on the Jacobite Train for him.  I hadn’t heard of this before so I went to look it up and discovered that this was the actual train used in Harry Potter, including a lot of the scenery that it passes through.  Well we got all excited about this and then after the fact realised that it only ran from May to October!  So it wasn’t much use to us in February.  By now we had our hearts set on Edinburgh so we booked the apartment and tickets.

Even though it was cold it was a great spot for a short break with kids.  We got to see the Castle and oddly the dog cemetery.

Some of the boys climbed Arthur’s Seat with their dad.

I think the view on the way up was worth the climb.

Dynamic Earth was visited.

And there were many visits to the museum.

We visited Mary King’s Close on the final day.  I found it absolutely fascinating that the buildings on top of the ground using existing buildings underneath as their foundations!  From the royal mile down to the river the ground slopes, so when the wanted to build here they knocked the top level but left the lower slope to form half of the foundations.  So this effectively means that this building is  build on layers of Edinburgh history.  The fact that you can actually walk down there and see the per-existing narrow street and lower level was astonishing.