St Anthony’s Chapel Ruins

On Friday I was in Edinburgh and I am interested in old buildings. My dad was a builder but I could never get the hang of building walls , my limits were hod carrying , block making , mixing concrete , digging holes and sweeping up. All necessary jobs but something that anyone can do.

Anyway something had caught my eye about some ruins near Arthur’s Seat and Holyrood. I was down near Dynamic Earth and looked on a map and St Anthony’s Chapel Ruins were marked on a map next to St Margaret’s Loch, a small body of water in Holyrood Park.

As it was going dark I decided to wait until Saturday morning to investigate the ruins. I needed to leave Edinburgh at 11:30 am and of course because I wasn't really paying attention it was 10:30 when , wandering near Arthurs’s Seat (which I will climb next time I am in Edinburgh) and taking photographs , I spied some water through some trees.

I speeded up and got there , got accosted by ducks and swans and thought this must be St Margaret’s Loch (and next to it is St Anthony’s Chapel Ruins) or so I thought. Well it actually is. Except it was on the top of a virtually vertical 200 foot high grass-covered promontory. I've included the only photo I took from the bottom but it doesn’t really show what I climbed up.

There were paths up to the ruins but there seemed to bee a sort of vague line running up the steep face of the promontory. I wondered if I could go up that way and do it in ten minutes rather than the twenty minutes on the sensible path that normal people would take.

But as you know I am neither sensible nor normal so I started up the face toward the ruins . There were places to stand , grab , but the grass was slippery but it was sort of easy going even though I felt I was crawling up rather than actually climbing. There were also rocky outcrops which gave a little purchase but were slippery as hell.

Half way up I realised I shouldn’t have done this, but I reckoned going back down would be harder than continuing up. I am sixty four years old and have never broken a bone in my body , despite often finding myself in situations like that because I believe I will be alright. There is a part of my brain that says “YOU WILL DO THIS AND COME OUT IN THE SAME NUMBER OF PIECES YOU WENT IN FOR THOSE THAT LOVE YOU” and that thought spurred me on to get to the top, and I did make it in under ten minutes.

And when I got there it was surrounded by “Keep Out” tape , which I had to go under to get to flat and safe ground. I wanted to take a photo or video of where I had made the ascent but my fear of heights stopped me from doing it.

So once in the forty foot high ruin , with members of the public wondering what I was doing on the wrong side of the ”Keep Out” tape I took a video and some photographs , and I’ve used the video , which includes some by the side of St Margaret’s Loch with the ducks and swans so you can see how impressive these ruins actually are.

I came down on the proper paths and they seemed far more dangerous than the way that I ascended. It was wet , muddy and some of the stone steps were slippery and quite high.

This has all been about me getting to and from St Anthony’s Chapel Ruins but if you want to find more about them this is an excellent article.