A Call to Gather: The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo

Level of Challenge

★★★★★

Gentle challenge

Why I Wanted to Go

The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo has sat on my list for years. Everybody has seen it on television at some point, usually at Hogmanay, usually half watching. I wanted to know what it was actually like to be there, on the Esplanade, with the Castle behind the arena and the sound coming at you rather than out of a speaker.

This year’s show is called A Call to Gather, with the Royal Air Force as lead service. That title turned out to describe my evening far more accurately than I expected.

The Decision I Nearly Talked Myself Out Of

I was travelling up from near Dumfries. The sensible plan, the one I had been quietly avoiding, was to go into Edinburgh in the morning, spend the day at the Fringe, and stay on for the Tattoo in the evening. On paper that is obviously the better day. In practice it meant a long journey on trains I did not know, through towns I had never passed through, with no real sense of what the changes or the platforms would ask of me.

I nearly did not do it. Then I remembered what I ask other people to do in every one of these pieces. Whatever your challenge is, go anyway. Writing that and then ducking the first uncertain train journey of the summer would have been more than a little hypocritical, so I went.

The Fringe day deserves its own article and will get one. What matters here is that by the time I reached the Castle Esplanade I had already been on my feet in a crowded city since the morning. That is the condition I arrived in, and it shaped everything that followed.

Edinburgh in August: Cobbles, Crowds and Bollards

Edinburgh in August is Edinburgh with three festivals running at once. The Fringe, the International Festival and the Tattoo all overlap, so the city holds thousands of extra people at any given moment. That much I had expected and planned for.

What I had not fully accounted for was the ground. The Old Town is cobbled, and cobbles are hard work with a cane. A cane reads a smooth surface cleanly and gives you information back. On setts it rattles, snags and tells you very little. Then there are the knee-high concrete bollards, which sit at exactly the height to catch you and are almost invisible against a busy pavement. Neither of those is a barrier on its own. Put them together with a moving crowd and they mean you cannot switch off for a single minute.

This is worth saying plainly, because it is the honest challenge of the evening and it happens entirely outside the gates. Everything from the ticket scanners inwards was among the easiest access I have ever encountered. The difficulty was the walk to get there.

Finding the Accessible Queue by Accident

I found the accessible queue without meaning to. There is a stretch of pavement running up beside the cobbles that is smoother underfoot, and I had gravitated to it because my cane works far better there. It turned out to be exactly where I needed to be.

Because I was booked onto the Touch Tour I had to arrive earlier than the main audience, and because I was in the accessible queue we were taken up before the general crowd. That combination meant a quieter approach, more room at the scanners, and none of the pressure of moving with a large body of people on ground I could not read well.

Entering the Event

The tone was set before I had even reached the barrier. We were a few minutes early, so there was a short wait while the staff got the go-ahead to start letting people through. Two young gentlemen on the far right barrier filled that wait by talking to us. Not processing us. Talking to us. They asked whether we had been to the Tattoo before, what we had seen at the Fringe, what we had made of the city. It was small and it was genuine, and it changed the shape of the next few minutes entirely.

Ticketing itself is handled through an app, with the tickets stored on your phone. For me that is a real improvement on paper. There is no fumbling for a printed sheet, no holding up a queue while you find the right corner of the right page. You hold the phone up, it scans, you are through.

Across the Drawbridge

Two members of the access team came to collect us, Amanda and Veronica, both completely unhurried despite what must have been one of the busiest hours of their week. Two other visually impaired guests were joining the tour with their companions. We had a few minutes to wait for permission to cross, and they spent it asking about all of us, where we had come from, what we were hoping for. By the time we moved it felt less like being processed and more like being welcomed.

Then we crossed the drawbridge into Edinburgh Castle on Tattoo night. That is not something the public normally gets to do. Walking over it, with permission, on the night itself, was the moment the scale of what was being offered actually landed.

Sixteen People Who Did Not Have to Be There

Sixteen cast members were waiting for us on the other side. Every one of them had volunteered. All sixteen were in the middle of their final preparations before performing to several thousand people, and they had chosen to spend that hour with three visually impaired strangers instead.

They took it in turns to step forward, introduce themselves, explain their role and describe what they were wearing in real detail. Not a summary. The actual weight and construction of it. After that the group opened up and we moved between them, touching uniforms and equipment, asking whatever we wanted to ask for as long as we wanted to ask it.

A drummer from the Royal Air Force told me her drum alone weighs fifteen kilograms, carried on one shoulder for the whole performance, with a further ten kilograms of equipment on top of that. Said out loud that is just a number. Said by the person about to carry it, while you take some of that weight in your own hands, it becomes something else entirely. The Drum Major showed me his kilt, wrapped nine times around his waist because the cloth is so heavy, and stood patiently while I felt the thickness of it properly rather than brushing past.

The cast was not only British. I spent time with a member of the New Zealand Army Band, and with a cadet from the Qatar Police Academy Band and Drill Team, Rashid, who went further than anyone else that night to make sure we felt looked after. He was clearly unsure of exactly how to help someone who could not see him, and it never once stopped him trying. He was a credit to his force and to his country, and I have thought about him several times since. There were also personnel from the United States and Germany, and a Canadian police pipe band, all equally willing to stop, explain and let us take our time.

The Photographer Who Changed His Mind

A photographer from the event came round with us. Afterwards I overheard him talking to the audio description team, telling them that when he had been asked to cover a Touch Tour he had not been sure what the point of it was, and that having watched it he thought it was one of the most effective things he had seen.

I want to put that in writing, because it is worth more than it might look. Here is somebody whose entire profession is visual, coming away with a clearer understanding of what non-visual access actually looks like and why it earns its place. That understanding is how the next event gets planned better. It is also, quietly, why I keep writing these.

Getting to My Seat

Walking up afterwards I was directly behind a wheelchair user, who was approached by a member of staff almost immediately and helped up the ramp to a position where they would be able to take part properly. Different disability, same standard of attention, no fuss made of it. Several staff mentioned in passing that BSL provision runs at certain performances too.

A steward spotted my white cane on the way up and came over with an audio guide already in his hand. He asked whether I had booked one, and when I said I had, he handed it over and talked me through it: how it worked, where the volume was, where he would be standing afterwards to collect it back in. His enthusiasm matched everyone else I had met. This was not accessibility being administered as a duty. It was accessibility offered as something the team was pleased to be doing, and the difference between those two things is enormous.

Then I got to my seat and found one of the access team already waiting there, holding another audio guide for me. She had noted where I was sitting and come to find me rather than leaving me to work out where to collect it. I have never had that anywhere else. Normally the audio guide desk is back at the box office and getting to it is your problem. Better still, she was pleased rather than put out to find I had already been given one, because it told her the rest of the team had it in hand. That is a group of people checking their own work.

The Show

The Tattoo earns its reputation. The Castle lit and shifting through colour, projections thrown across the stonework, the arena filling and emptying with a precision that is obvious even at my level of sight, and a wall of sound when the massed bands come in together that you feel in your chest as much as hear.

I could not take in fine detail. I could see enough of the light and the movement to follow the shape of the thing, and everything my eyes missed arrived through sound, through the audio description whenever I wanted it, and through my hands from an hour earlier.

The audio description itself was well done, and I mean that as a technical judgement rather than a courtesy. The descriptions were clear and properly timed, and the team went beyond describing the action to give context about what was coming, who was performing and why it mattered. I could put it on when I needed it and take it off when I did not, which is exactly how it should work.

What the Touch Tour Did to the Show

This is the part I did not see coming, and it is the single most useful thing in this article.

When each group was announced and came out onto the Esplanade, I already knew what they looked like. I knew the weight the drummer was carrying. I knew how many times that kilt had been wrapped. I knew the cut of the Qatari tunic and the feel of the braid on it, because I had held it an hour before. So the announcement was not just a name. It was a group of people I had met, walking out to do the thing they had been preparing for while they were talking to me.

The clearest example came when the King’s Colour Squadron took the arena, drilling in front of the massed Royal Air Force bands with a roundel thrown across the Castle behind them. I had held one of those rifles an hour earlier. I knew its weight, where the balance sat, how the sight was covered. So when the squadron began moving as one and the rifles started turning together, I was not watching an unfamiliar routine. I was listening to something I had already had in my hands, being handled by people I had already met, at a speed I now understood.

The Touch Tour is not a consolation prize for people who cannot see the show. It is a different route into the same show, and on the night it made the performance land harder than sight alone would have done. If you are visually impaired and you are offered one anywhere, take it. If you are an organiser wondering whether it is worth the staffing, it is.

Fireworks and smoke closed the performance, with the audio description filling in what was happening overhead while the noise did the rest.

Terrain and Weather Notes

The Esplanade is exposed. It sits on top of Castle Rock with very little between you and the weather, and an August evening up there runs noticeably colder than the same evening at street level. Layers matter more than you think, and a waterproof is more use than an umbrella because umbrellas are not allowed in the arena.

The approach is the harder part. Castlehill and the surrounding Old Town streets are cobbled, with gradients, and in the wet the setts become slippery as well as awkward. If you use a cane, the pavement running alongside is meaningfully better than the road surface. If you use a wheelchair or scooter, the Accessible Vehicle Convoy is worth investigating with the Box Office, because it takes the worst of that approach out of your day entirely.

Final Reflection: Accessible Challenge in Action

This was the most accessible event I have ever attended. Not the one with the longest list of provisions, though the list is long. The one where the knowledge sat in every member of staff rather than in a policy document, and where nobody I met treated any of it as an inconvenience.

The challenge was real, and it was almost entirely outside the gates. Cobbles, bollards, crowds, a long unfamiliar journey and a full day already behind me. That is what the score above reflects. Inside the gates it was as smooth as anything I have experienced, which tells you something worth knowing about where barriers usually sit. They are rarely in the venue. They are usually in the mile before it.

And the Tattoo does not survive being watched on television. In person it is ceremony, history and joy in the same ninety minutes, built entirely around people who serve and the ones who came before them. Being welcomed inside that for an evening, and being trusted with the equipment those people carry, was a privilege I will not forget.

Reader Challenge and Invitation

If you have been putting the Tattoo off because the journey looks hard or the city looks overwhelming in August, that is a fair reading of it. Go anyway. Book the audio description, ask about the Touch Tour, and give yourself far more time on the approach than you think you need.

If you do go, I would love to hear how you got on, what you would tell somebody attempting it for the first time, and whether the Touch Tour changed the show for you the way it did for me.

All accessibility details in this article were verified against the organiser’s published information at the time of writing. This reflection is based on my personal experience on the day. Individual experiences may vary, and none of the points raised are intended as a judgement of the event itself, but as an honest account of how I navigated it with my own access needs.