Little is known about Ellen and Margaret, two “Moorish lassies” who worked as ladies in waiting to the daughter of King James IV in the early 1500s. We don’t even know their real names, because “Ellen” and “Margaret” were the names given to them after they were baptised as Christians. But we do know that these two African women held prominent positions in service at the royal court.

As a theatre-lover who grew up in Edinburgh, August is my favourite time of year. When the festival rolls around, we have the enormous privilege of the world’s largest arts festival arriving on our doorsteps. The whole city bursts to life almost overnight – the fire jugglers and unicyclists spring up on the cobbles of the Royal Mile, the back room of almost every pub becomes a theatre, and the buzz of thousands of hopeful performers fills the air.

With little to do except explore my own city, I’ve been able to dedicate time to wandering down new closes, digging up new stories for tours and discovering figures from Scottish history whom I’d never heard of before. Now that things are finally starting to open up again, I’m incredibly excited to be launching a new series of walking tours throughout the month of May: Edinburgh’s Untold Stories.

Malvina Wells was born into chattel slavery in Carriacou, Grenada around 1804 and died in Edinburgh in 1887. She’s the only known person buried in Edinburgh who was born enslaved, although it is likely there are others. Although the information we have about her is sparse, it points to a remarkable life.

Frederick Douglass was one of the most prominent African American abolitionist voices of the nineteenth century, and many people will be familiar with his powerful speeches denouncing the horrors of slavery. Fewer people are aware that he made several visits to Edinburgh and that you can still find numerous places in the city where he made public speeches or visited local abolitionists.

Because women throughout history have mostly been excluded from male-dominated spheres of power like politics and higher education, their more domestic revolutions were often overlooked. We tend to associate early women’s rights activism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with suffrage campaigns, but women at all levels of society were also engaged with the project of improving daily life.

This week, I wanted to take a look at one of Edinburgh’s amazing women: Elizabeth “Bessie” Watson. She was a women’s suffrage activist from the age of just nine, and a pioneering bagpiper at a time when very few women played the pipes. Her legacy can still be felt today, so how did a wee girl from Edinburgh go on to make such an impact?

In 1869, the first women admitted to any British university began studying medicine at Edinburgh. They fought hard to be allowed to study at all and excelled in their courses, but in 1873 they were denied the right to graduate. Most of them went on to study elsewhere in Europe and returned as some of the first women doctors in Britain. So who were these pioneering women, and how did they end up becoming the country’s first female medical students?

The study and practice of medicine has been a part of Edinburgh’s history for centuries, and the city’s medical school is still an important centre of teaching today. There have been professional organisations for medical practitioners in the city for over 500 years.

Back in the heady days of summer 2020, when lockdown was a novelty rather than a way of life, I decided to use a couple of big walks to visit all the closes of the Royal Mile. A “close” (with a hard S) is a narrow alleyway running between buildings, and the historic heart of Edinburgh is packed with them.

For as long as Edinburgh has existed, LGBTQ+ people have walked the city’s streets. Their stories can be harder to uncover, because for most of history people had to hide their identities from the eyes of society, but once you start digging you find a wealth of LGBTQ+ experiences buried in the fabric of the city.