Smelling old Edinburgh: What happened when I tried UK's first 'fully immersive multi-sensory walking tour'

The cry of “gardyloo" goes out and the splash of water hitting the flagstones amid the shouts of street traders and entertainers has me braced and eyeballing upwards at the windows of Royal Mile’s towering tenements.

But the cascading contents of a chamber pot or ‘nasty bucket’ do not materialise as the cries come from the soundtrack of street noises on the headphones I’m wearing on what’s billed as the UK's first “fully immersive multi-sensory walking tour”.

Celebrating 40 years, Mercat Tours, an award-winning family-run business, has developed a new type of experience, to add to its ghost tours and history walks, to give visitors a feel for the city by stimulating all of their senses, recreating the sights, sounds and scents of Edinburgh’s past.

Linda Bates tells a good tale in the Blair Street Vaults | Janet Christie

A volcano erupts

Starting at the Mercat Cross and heading for Blair Street Underground Vaults, as we walk down one of the capital’s oldest and busiest streets we’re played the soundtrack of previous iterations of the city as gifted storytelling tour guide Linda Bates skilfully condenses millions of years of history from the Pangaea to the present, bringing history to life all around us.

Along with her compelling tales of the city’s evolution, there is the crash and roar of the volcano that now houses the castle erupting, the slow rumbling of the glacier slicing out the city’s topography and voices of the humans that carved out an existence in the city’s landscape.

Arriving at the Blair Street vaults, and HQ of Mercat Tours, as we descend the stairs (pausing to say hello to George the resident skeleton as now is not the time to upset the spirits said to roam the dark, dank underground chambers and vaults underneath North Bridge), we’re assailed by the smell of Auld Reekie’s underground places.

Booze and bodysnatcher

Base notes of damp and decay give way to heart notes of woodsmoke, tallow, fish oil and leather and lingering top notes of booze and bodysnatcher. They’re the sensory legacy of trades that once thrived here in the 1800s before conditions forced them out and criminals and the dispossessed claimed this underground world where the City Guard only ventured reluctantly in squads of a dozen.

We hear the hammer of the cobbler, the multitude of languages over the strains of a fiddle in the tavern, the cries of a child and, behind my ear, a persistent rasping cough.

Back up at ground level as we view the artefacts left by the Vaults’ human inhabitants – leather shoes, a child’s sweetie jar, bones, oyster shells and fragments of claret bottles – one of our party reveals they saw a shadowy man following us through the vaults. And the cough in my ear may not have been on the soundtrack – by this point my senses were beguiled and bamboozled. And this wasn’t even one of Mercat Tours’ Ghost Walks.

So immersive is the multi-sensory tour, it’s a relief to emerge into the sunlight of the modern city with its contemporary lunchtime smells of coffee and ciabatta, where modern plumbing is appreciated anew.

But as Linda reminds us, the Nastiness Act of 1749 was never repealed and it’s still legal to chuck your waste out of a window during the hours of darkness – so if you’re roaming the Royal Mile, keep your eyes, ears and nostrils open, but your mouth shut.