The One O'Clock Gun was fired for the first time in Edinburgh on 161 years ago today.
It must have been a shock for those walking along Princes Street on January 26th 1861 when a gun first signalled it was one o’clock from the Castle sitting above our capital city, I enjoy the way visitors to Edinburgh stop in bewilderment nowadays when it sounds, and us locals just amble along, taking no notice!
The gun has become an Edinburgh institution, it is fired six days a week from the castles on Mill’s Mount Battery on the north facing side of the castle, but originally it was fired from the Half Moon Battery which faces the Esplanade.
So what's the point of it you may ask? Well it's just a tradition nowadays, but it has all to do with the time ball on the top of the Nelson Monument on Calton Hill drops simultaneously at 1 o’clock too, many Scots won't even know about this.
At 456 feet above sea level the Monument is highly visible from far off. This led to a 762kg time ball being added to the Monument in 1852 to enable captains of ships moored in the Firth of Forth to set their chronometers for accurate navigation by observing the dropping of the ball at one o'clock Greenwich Mean Time each day.
If you know anything about oor Scottish weather, particularly on the East coast, you will know we sometimes get the haar coming in of the sea. Haar or sea fret is a cold sea fog. It occurs most often on the east coast of England or Scotland between April and September, when warm air passes over the cold North Sea,on days like this you can hardly see a few yards so the mariners had no way of seeing the time ball drop, so it was to have an additional auditory signal, or as they say in Ireland "a big bang!"
Don't tell the people of Edinburgh, but their big bang is not the world's oldest, that honour goes to the Noon Gun from Signal Hill in Cape Town which has been fired since 1806.
Over the years some of the gunners have became almost as famous as the gun itself, Tam the Gun being the most well known, but Shannon the cannon is worth a mention, Bombardier Alison Jones became the first woman to fire the one o’clock gun in 2006. There is no truth in the rumour that the time of one o’clock was specifically chosen by the Scots, as only the one cannonball each day would minimise the cost of the exercise.
