Cobbles, Bollards and a Chainsaw on a Unicycle: Edinburgh, Fringe Season

Level of Challenge

★★★★★

Demanding

I spent days deciding, and then I decided in fifteen minutes.

I was staying in a small village half an hour outside Dumfries, with press accreditation for the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo that evening. The people I was staying with were heading to work for the day. One of them was joining me at the Tattoo later as my carer. That left a choice sitting in front of me for most of the week: stay at the house, watch television, wait for them to finish work and drive me through, or get the early train into Edinburgh alone and spend the day in one of the greatest cities on earth.

I found every reason not to. A three hour train journey through stations I didn’t know. The cost of it. The blank page of what I’d actually do with a full day in a city I’d only ever seen from the Royal Mile to the Castle. I turned it over for days without landing anywhere, and on the morning itself I was still undecided with fifteen minutes left before we needed to leave for the station.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t tell people to go anyway and then not go anyway myself. So I went.

The Journey There

The three hours turned out to be the easy part. One change at Glasgow, and I made it through to Edinburgh without any real drama. It was the sort of journey that had lived much larger in my head over the previous few days than it did in reality, which is worth saying plainly, because the anticipation had genuinely been the harder part.

What I hadn’t accounted for was the toll of it. By mid-morning, exhaustion had caught up with me, and for a while I found myself regretting the whole decision. Three festivals were running in the city at once, the Fringe, the International Festival and the Tattoo, and Edinburgh was as packed as I have ever known a city to be.

Getting Lost, Properly

I know the stretch from the Royal Mile to the Castle reasonably well from previous visits. I did not know the side streets, and trying to explore beyond that familiar spine turned out to be genuinely taxing.

Two things made it harder than it needed to be. First, the cobbles, which are simply part of walking anywhere in the Old Town. Second, and less expected, the cement bollards positioned at knee height along several streets. A moment’s lost concentration and you become very well acquainted with one. Neither of these is unique to a visually impaired visitor, but for me they demanded a level of constant attention that ate into the energy I already didn’t have much of.

Then my phone let me down. For reasons I still don’t fully understand, I had almost no mobile data in the city centre, which meant my maps weren’t working properly. Every time I tried to search for somewhere to eat, I hit a wall. Even the wifi I connected to was patchy at best. For someone who relies on their phone for navigation as much as I do, losing that tool in an unfamiliar city, on a day I was already running low on reserves, was the closest the day came to a genuine barrier rather than a challenge.

The Pizza Truck

I turned off the main street with no particular plan and found a street food truck selling pizza. Given I couldn’t find anything else, I got a slice and a drink and sat down on some nearby steps, where a street performer was working a large crowd.

This was the moment everything changed.

It’s something I keep rediscovering at these events: the biggest obstacle is very rarely the environment itself. It’s what’s going on in my own head. I sat in the shade, ate, drank some water, and started listening to the singer. I felt the joy coming off the crowd and found myself tapping my foot along with it. By the time I’d finished eating, I was in a completely different place. Motivated. Ready to actually enjoy one of the world’s great cities and its world famous festival, rather than just surviving it.

The Mile

With three festivals running at once, and no organiser, staff or box office attached to most of what happens on the street itself, the Royal Mile is really just a mile of open pavement handed over to whoever turns up with an act. Worth being upfront about that: I had no staff interaction to speak of all afternoon, and that’s simply the nature of the thing. Nobody’s job is to help you find your way. It isn’t good or bad, just a different kind of event to the ticketed venues I usually write about here, and worth knowing before you go if you’re used to leaning on organised support.

What followed was simply walking up and down the Mile for a good stretch of the afternoon, watching whatever was in front of me. Musicians bled into each other’s sets, crowds cheered jugglers, and variety acts filled every corner. If one act isn’t for you, walk twenty metres and there’s another one entirely.

Music seemed to come from every direction at once, none of it drowning the rest out. One performer stopped me properly in my tracks: a Spanish guitarist playing the guitar with his hands while keeping a full drum kit going with his feet at the same time. He had the whole crowd singing along within a couple of minutes, and that kind of easy, unforced participation added more to the afternoon than I’d expected from a busker on a street corner.

A little further on, an opera singer was performing Ave Maria to a crowd that had gone properly quiet to listen. It caught me off guard, coming as it did in the middle of one of the busiest streets I have ever tried to navigate, and for the length of the song it brought a real sense of calm to a sensory environment that had otherwise been relentless all day.

One performer in particular stood out. A juggler working knives, then a chainsaw, all while riding a tall unicycle. What made him genuinely funny was the crowd work as much as the skill. He pulled a young boy out of the audience and spent the rest of the act threatening, entirely in jest, to relieve him of an arm. The whole crowd was in stitches.

The Fringe isn’t confined to the Mile either. I’ve wanted to visit the National Museum of Scotland for a long time, so I made a quick, whirlwind stop, and found a performer working the crowd on the museum steps as well. The festival simply spills into every corner of the city that will hold a crowd.

Because I’d been undecided right up until the last minute, I hadn’t booked a single formal show. People were advertising them on every street corner all day. If I hadn’t had the Tattoo that evening, and had more time, I would have booked something. I might even have stayed over. There’s easily enough here to fill several days.

The Evening

I finished with dinner before heading to the Tattoo, which was every bit as good as I’d hoped. You can read the full account of that here.

Value of the Attempt

I’m not someone who’d call themselves passionate about the arts, though I enjoy them well enough. I was genuinely surprised by how much I loved the Fringe. The crowds, the noise, the sheer generosity of performers giving everything to whoever happens to be standing in front of them, all of it was joyful in a way I hadn’t expected walking off that train exhausted and half regretting the whole trip.

If I hadn’t gone, I’d never have known what I missed. Having gone, it’s already something I want to do again next year, and go deeper into next time.

Reader Challenge and Invitation

Have you let a journey talk you out of a day you actually wanted? I’d love to hear what tipped you into going anyway, and what you found once you got there. Go anyway, even with fifteen minutes to spare.

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.