Secret Edinburgh: Merchiston Tower ceiling

In our final extract from Secret Edinburgh, Hannah Robinson proves it always pays to look up…

Rabelasian rafters

Merchiston Tower’s elves

There is something rather extraordinary hidden in the Merchiston Tower. The building itself is worthy of an entry: a medieval red stone tower house hidden in the middle of a modern university campus. It was the seat of Clan Napier and the birthplace of John Napier, the eighth Laird of Merchiston, mathematician, philosopher, inventor of logarithms, and after whom the university was named.

Climb the winding stone steps and you will find a large boardroom with an impressive long asymmetric table sitting on a split-pea green carpet; below is a minstrels’ gallery. You are getting warmer. But it’s not until you lean your head back that you really hit the hot stuff.

Look closely at the ceiling above you. Running along the rough pine boards are some rather unusual hand-painted tempera illustrations. They appear, at first sight, to be ornamental vases, flowers, angels. The explanatory notes on the wall tell you that this is the finest and earliest dated Scottish Renaissance ceiling from 1581, which was transferred here after being discovered at Prestongrange in 1962.

But then you start to notice the details: a winged lizard with a human head, a weird-looking angel emerging from a contorted shell, a bare-breasted Viking lass with a lion’s-head door knocker hanging from her nether regions. It’s all starting to get a bit Hieronymus Bosch.

And that’s when you spot the pornographic elves. Truth be told, you shouldn’t have climbed up to the minstrels’ gallery and stood on a chair to see them. You got too close. And now it’s too late. You’ll never be able to think of Santa’s little helpers in the same way again.

The bawdy images are copies of a 1565 French collection of woodcuts called “The Droll Dreams of Pantagruel”, the work of François Desprez. He himself was inspired by a series of five books collectively entitled The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel by the satirist François Rabelais, which charts the epic and somewhat scatological adventures of two giants, father and son. The text is full of lively escapades. An entire civilisation is discovered living behind Pantagruel’s teeth. He drowns an army in urine. He meets the Chitterlings: a race of half-men, half-sausages. Salvador Dali published his depictions of the same characters in 1974. How they ended up on an East Lothian nobleman’s ceiling is certainly worthy of more study.

10 Colinton Road, Edinburgh EH10 5DT
Visits by appointment only. Contact: [email protected]
Buses: 11, 15, 16, 23, 36, 45

Taken from Secret Edinburgh: An Unusual Guide

Find this and other unusual and overlooked hidden treasures of Edinburgh in Secret Edinburgh: An Unusual Guide, by Hannah Robinson

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