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.

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.