The wonders of Edinburgh Castle

Edinburgh is a great place to go. The castle there is large. There are three gates to go through if you want to get in. They were perfect for stopping unwanted visitors. The castle is also home of the most terrifying medieval weapon, the famous canon called "Mons Meg." Its weight was 6.6 tons and it fired 400 pound stone balls up to 2 miles! It was used in a siege to knock down enemy walls. The downsides of it were that it could not move farther than 3 miles a day due to it being so heavy and it could only make up to 8-10 discharges a day (because of the heat of all the gunpowder exploding) but you did not really need more than one shot!

Edinburgh castle now houses the Honours of Scotland. The jewels once had a narrow escape when Oliver Cromwell besieged Dunnotter castle after the coronation of one of the Scottish Kings. The jewels were smuggled out, right under the Englishmens's noses. Two brave women did this. One put all except the Sword of State and the scepter under her dress. The other broke the sword in two and hid the pieces and the scepter in a bundle of hay. They walked out pretending to be English. They panicked when one man offered to help them mount their horses; they refused which was a very rude thing to do, but got away anyway. The Stone of Destiny was taken to England because the women could not save it. In 1996 Queen Elizabeth II gave back the Stone of Destiny to Scotland. For security reasons, we were not allowed to take pictures of them.

The one o'clock gun is a gun that fires at 1pm every day. Originally it enabled passing sailors to set their clocks to the right time. Everyone usually wonders, why 1:00pm, what about 12 noon? The Scottish, being so tight, think: 'Why waste 12 bullets when you can use just one?'