It is free to tour, but not to photograph inside, and there is a loo downstairs, also free. All important stuff.
Outside, in Parliament Square West, the brick paving is interesting, showing the first paved road,
laid to allow lawyers dry access to nearby Parliament House and the Signet Library. The gold bricks are the locations of the Tollbooths,
the place where the townspeople came to pay their taxes. I’m sure that it was thinking about the gathering of people, rather than the payment of taxes, that caused Sir Walter Scott to describe the Tollbooths as the heart of Midlothian, hence the stones shaped in a heart.
Either that or he loved paying his taxes. In which case, he can come back and pay mine for me.
2 comments:
How bizarre. You don't see 'taxes' and 'love' too often in the same sentence!
The Tollbooths had been gone a long time when Scott wrote all that slushy Victorian stuff. Scott paid his taxes to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs like the rest of us
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