Usually spitting in public is discouraged, but in Edinburgh it’s a tradition!





Even if you live in Midlothian, you might know little of it beyond the fact that it has the name of a celebrated football team. This region of Scotland borders the City of Edinburgh, and is so overshadowed by the metropolis that it was once called “Edinburghshire.” It’s a rural area, largely ignored by tourists, but there are a few gems here that I’m going to have fun writing about. Let’s start by looking into the curious spitting custom.



The local football club is also called the Heart of Midlothian, but we don’t spit on them. No, we spit on a rough, heart-shaped mosaic on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. This bit of art in the middle of a dull granite street once marked the location of the dreaded Old Tolbooth.

Please don’t spit on the footballers. They probably won’t appreciate it.

Nakamura’s warm up shot , a photo by StartAgain on Flickr.

Now the only thing I know of that comes close to “Tolbooth” is the American tollbooth, which is a box along the interstate holding a brusque government employee who takes your change. The Old Tolbooth, as you’ve probably guessed, was something very different and much more sinister–the place where hardened criminals were sent to die. This stolid, imposing structure built in the late 14th century began life as a municipal building, and was also used as a meeting place for parliament. In later years, though, it became Edinburgh’s center of torture and execution. (One of its most famous occupants was Deacon Brodie , a real rascal who met his doom at the hangman’s hand.)

I was not able to discover why a heart–of all things–marked the entrance to the Tolbooth. Maybe this was the geographical center of the county, or perhaps it was merely a symbol of the building’s importance. Criminals and debtors formed a habit of spitting on the heart as they crossed it to show contempt for the building, and probably for the law and government in general.

The Old Tolbooth may have been demolished in 1817, but it was memorialized in Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Heart of Midlothian, a book that took place during a time of unrest in Edinburgh when a mob stormed the Tolbooth and lynched one of its occupants. If the Old Tolbooth was called the heart of Midlothian, to quote the book’s narrator, “I think…the metropolitan county may, in that case, be said to have a sad heart.”