I confess I’m a bona-fide Potterhead. I have the Deathly Hallows tattooed on my back and have taken more Sorting Hat quizzes than I know what to do with (Raven-puff, for the record, since I’m nerdy but also miscellaneous). I’ve been to the Leavesden studio tour near London and the Universal Studios theme park in Florida. Yet this tour was something else: it’s enchanting to see the birthplace of ideas. In Edinburgh there are gravestones engraved with familiar names and a colorful street partially hidden from view and a sleeping dragon masquerading as a stone castle. Maybe the most shocking part was that it took so long for anyone to notice Harry’s world tucked beneath ours.
Criminally, not one scene of the eight films was shot in Edinburgh, even though as the guide Arran* said, “Hogwarts is a six-hour train ride north of London, so obviously it’s ours.” Instead this tour was heavy on the books and their inspiration. Even when you consider a story about child wizards and undead villains, reality is stranger than fiction. Take for example the true story of Maggie Dickinson, a woman who was hung by the neck for the crime of concealing an unwed pregnancy, pronounced dead, woke up in the coffin, and spent the rest of her long life heckling people on their way to the gallows by telling them it wasn’t so bad (she was the inspiration for Nearly Headless Nick). Or the infamous poet William McGonagall, whose works are so bad they actually kinda make me like poetry again and who is canonically an ancestor of no-nonsense Minerva. Both of these names decorate Edinburgh – the former as a pub in Grassmarket and the latter as a plaque in the Greyfriars cemetery – but without the guide those names would have remained just as dead as their former owners.
Scottish mythology contains a treasure trove of legendary beasts that were cherry-picked for the stories. On top of those that were dropped unaltered into the plot, like unicorns and sphinx and red caps, there are others that were tweaked into something slightly new. Brownies are little invisible helpers who come in the night to perform chores and are the basis for enslaved house-elves (and in vaguely related news, they’re the inspiration for American Girl Scout Brownies and the associated phrase “Brownie points,” now you know).
Appropriately for a Harry Potter tour, we got a heavy dose of Edinburgh’s dark side too. We perched above the former location of Nor Loch, a lake that was the open sewer of Edinburgh but has since been filled in with a suspiciously verdant garden, quirky statues, and rich people out for a jog. The loch had also been the finish line for many a medieval witch hunt – hundreds of women had been executed here in “creative” and “somewhat logical” ways for the crime of being women. Waterboarding and death by a thousand pinpricks were fan-favourite methods, the latter of which was an attempt to find their devil’s marks where blood had been drawn while making their deals with Satan. No one was safe back then: being ugly and/or ginger was enough to get you executed for witchcraft. “Gingers! In Scotland! We’re lucky there’s any left.” This was followed by a rather uncharitable remark about Ed Sheeran that doesn’t bear repeating.
⇖ Where Rowling wrote a lot of Harry Potter / ⇑ An escape room designed to recruit you to the Dark Lord’s Army / ⇗ Touristing
⇙ Thomas Riddell (and his father’s) grave / ⇘ The beautiful garden that now inhabits the old Nor Loch open sewer
Maybe the wrongly-accused witches’ spirits were fans of Ed, though, because just then the inevitable rain started pattering down again. Scots, like the sheep they um…raise…, generally don’t give much of a shit about rain. The most consideration it gets is a half-zip of their jackets, or maybe a three-quarters zip when the raindrops start coming in sideways. The rest of us delicate pansies unfurled our umbrellas and went for the full-zip-with-hood approach as we carried on up the hill to Edinburghian Hogwarts and then down to Edinburgho Diagon Alley. Our group accordioned every time we started walking, lengthening as people lollygagged to take photos and then shortening as they ran to catch up with the guide. I took the opportunity to bogart his time and got an earful about what he really thought of busking bagpipers. Delightful.
⇐ Different faces of Edinburgh Castle / ⇒ Wallpaper of a Harry Potter souvenir shop through a window on Cockburn Street
The physics of real-life Diagon Alley never made sense to me even after I walked down, around, and through it multiple times. The street has three different names depending on where you’re standing: Victoria Street or Victoria Terrace or West Bow, although the most mystical transition among the three is an enclosed staircase that’s disappointingly stationary and apparently visible to every Muggle passing by. Regardless, it’s a magnetic street. Edinburgh, like most UK cities, is mainly colored the sort of grey that makes you wonder whether the cloudy skies have done nothing more in the past few millennia than seep their way down into the local stone. The upper part of Victoria Street or Victoria Terrace or West Bow or Diagon Alley is no different, but then its feet are splashed with a riot of unexpected color, like the skies haven’t had the time to bleed quite so deep yet. I started going out of my way to walk down the street again to see how that hour’s light was playing with this rainbow hiding at street level. One morning I arrived just before a squall, when the light had space to gallop down the whole length of the street and splashed against the far end, brightening even the grey stone and the livid clouds carrying in a threat from the west. I forgot I even carried a camera until the clouds had nearly reached the sun.
⇐ Victoria Terrace / ⇑ West Bow / ⇓ Victoria Street
The tour drew to a close and I dawdled until I was the last tourist standing. I palmed Arran a £10 note like it was some weird drug deal and laid down a single demand: “Point me to the whisky.” The late afternoon sun was shining again but the wind had kicked up and it was almost strong enough to knock me off my feet. I widened my stance for balance and squinted so I could hear his answer over the roar. Sandy Bells and Bow Bar, he recommended, before he slipped in a neat solicitation: “Or tomorrow night if you’re still around, I’m leading a whisky tasting and storytelling tour with Little Fish Tours.”
Storytelling AND whisky?! Yes please.
He stuck out his hand and I took the bait.
As he walked away, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was the Little Fish in question and that I’d just struck a deal with the Scottish devil.
* Names changed to protect the guilty
Window Seat Odyssey 
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