Take a detour through Edinburgh's Little Ireland

A BRAND new tour that aims to shine a light on the history and legacy of ‘Little Ireland’ in Scotland’s capital city has been launched by Edinburgh Detours.

Edinburgh Detours is a not-for-profit educational organisation, which seeks to raise awareness of city’s social history and architectural heritage through guided tours and events.

The tours specialise in blending social history, psychogeography and architecture to offer a different perspective on Edinburgh, its history and its people. It combines education, exercise and community to explore the city from the bottom up, uncovering the hidden history of Scotland’s capital city by reintroducing the stories of workers, immigrants and radicals.

Its bespoke tours act as a gateway into the past to develop our understanding of the present and build a better future, providing participants, whether residents or visitors, with an unusually authentic Edinburgh experience.

And now, via the group’s Little Ireland walking tour, participants have the chance to experience Edinburgh’s Old Town like never before by exploring the area shaped by the Irish over the centuries. This hidden history is told through authentic narratives which uncover the Irish connections to Edinburgh landmarks, politics and culture.

The tour is led, researched and produced by Edinburgh Detours co-ordinator, Jim Slaven. Born and still living in the area, Jim has decades of experience of tours, talks and writing about the Irish in Edinburgh, past and present.

The tour will feature:

• The experience of Navvies building Edinburgh’s canals, reservoirs and railways

• The social history of Cowgate, Grassmarket and West Port

• The hostility Irish Catholics faced in city

• The story of Erin Go Bragh and founding of Hibernian FC

• A visit to St Patrick’s Church

• A new interpretation of wide range of relevant literary sources from Neil M Gunn to James Connolly, from Irvine Welsh to Muriel Spark

Already underway, the tour has proved popular, attracting participants from the US and Ireland, but as Jim Slaven said, when speaking exclusively to The Irish Voice, there’s been a lot of interest from people in Edinburgh too, which is something he is keen to encourage.

“There’s been a lot of people in Edinburgh and the surrounding area who have expressed an interest in it and who have wanted to take part, and that’s very much what the project about,” he said. “It’s about welcoming visitors to the city to learn about Little Ireland, but we also want local people to come on the tours as well to learn about James Connolly, to learn about that almost hidden history of the Irish in the city. Edinburgh doesn't always seem to want to market itself in that way, it’s very much about whiskey and tartan. So, we go against the grain in that respect.

“We want to make sure that people are actually aware that there is this history of Little Ireland in Edinburgh. I watched a documentary about Little Ireland in Manchester and it said it was like six or seven streets—a relatively small area—and for 20 years it was all Irish. Little Ireland in Edinburgh existed for about 150 years and we’re not talking about a small area or a short period of time. Little Ireland, the Irish in Edinburgh and this old town part of Edinburgh are a really significant part of the history of the city in the last 200 years and it’s been almost completely written out of history. So, I think what we would want from the tour is to uncover that history and for people to be aware of the significance of it.”

While the tour will endeavour to educate and inform about Little Ireland (above) in one sense, the wider aim of connecting people with their own history is something that Jim is passionate about, and he also feels that there is scope for other such events to spring from it.

“If you look at the housing schemes in Edinburgh, they’re all on the margins of the city and there are so many people in these schemes who can link their families—their parents or their grandparents—back to having lived at one time or another in Little Ireland,” he said. “So, it’s a living history and yet people maybe wouldn’t identify themselves as Irish in the same way as they might in Glasgow, for example.

“So, with the tour, we’re hoping it can act, in part, as an educational process where people who are of Irish descent in Edinburgh say actually we maybe need to have a rethink about this, about what our ethnicity means to us in modern Scotland and why is it that people aren’t comfortable in Edinburgh expressing their Irishness? Why is that? Why have they chosen to hide that? So, these are the sort of questions that we’re trying to have with local people that come on the tours as well as getting them to think about their own family connections.

“There’s scope for doing so much more as well. For example, there could be an exhibition held where you look at the history of the Irish in Edinburgh, taking in the experience of navvies, for instance and the canal, the railways, things that people are familiar with, but they maybe don’t see them as being connected to the Irish in our experience, which they are. So, I do think there’s scope for doing other things beyond the tour itself.”

For more information visit the Edinburgh Detours website: www.edinburghdetours.com or e-mail: edinburghdetours@gmail.com