Saturday 26 October 2024--I sleep in late again, and have a Cuban sandwich at Guajira again. I like that place. I walk south along South Bridge and Nicolson Street, then cut across some side streets to the St Leonard's neighborhood, in the shadow of the Salisbury Crags in Holyrood Park. I chance upon the Holyrood Distillery, which opened in 2019, and pop in to browse their shop. I guess I don't need another Glencairn glass. The distillery isn't the reason I've come down this way, but stumbling into it is appropriate enough, as the building was once the goods shop for the Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway, the first line built into Edinburgh, in 1831. Its purpose was to bring coal into the city from the pits in Dalkeith, six miles or so southeast. The line came to be known as the Innocent Railway, thought by many to be because the horse-drawn wagons were safer than the steam-engine technology then in its infancy. That doesn't ring true...perhaps the wag who so dubbed it had the converse of Blake's dark satanic mills in mind.

The rails are long gone, but the obscured path of the railway can be followed east a few hundred yards to the Innocent Railway Tunnel, my real destination. It's said to be the first railway tunnel in Scotland--there's one in Dundee that was completed a few weeks earlier, but this was the first to be used. (I see it called the first in the UK in one source, but that is almost certainly incorrect.) The tunnel, 518 meters long, was closed up when the railway ceased operations in 1968, but it was reopened as part of a walking and cycling trail in the 1980s. There's a grade of about 3% leading up toward St Leonard's, which was too much for the horses. The cars were drawn up on a rope by a steam engine at the terminus. I peer down into the tunnel, and leave it at that. If I ever walk to the Sheep Heid in Duddingston again, I'll take this route.

I return to the hotel to rest up a bit. Ron and I have dinner at a noodle restaurant he found yesterday, a nice change from the usual pub fare. Then we are off to the Bow, where we meet Willie, Mark, Mark's wife, and a couple of Mark's chums, who have all come to help me celebrate my birthday. As I have aged, I seem to have lost the ability to perform simple arithmetic--I subtract my birth year from the current one, and keep coming up with 70, which surely cannot be right. Whatever...the pints and drams flow, and a splendid time is had by all.