Arthur’s Greet

It was half past one on an August afternoon when Arthur’s Seat split asunder, pelting the packed streets with a maelstrom of volcanic stones. It was later reported that one tourist atop the summit was flung to France, their trajectory helpfully livestreamed on TikTok.

Many locals, conditioned to ignore the potentially calamitous by the daily booming of the One O’clock Gun, initially didn’t notice. The city went from daylight to darkness in an instant, but that, too, was nothing unusual. 

Within five minutes eight separate articles appeared on Edinburgh Live speculating about the source of the blast. Anything was possible, and it was distressingly unclear what effect this new arrangement of the skyline would have on council tax rates in EH1 through 16.

The cause soon emerged, quite literally. In the gaping void where Arthur’s Seat once stood was a hulking giant 300 metres tall when crouched and 500 upright. He was dressed in a historical hodgepodge, the type of thing a stag do would stumble out of W. Armstrong & Son in. The tales were true – there really was a giant inside the Seat waiting to burst free in our hour of greatest need! Just a shame he hit his primordial snooze button so many times since 2016.

No stranger to showmanship – the Festival was on, after all – this gargantuan figure fixed his gaze upon the castle and declared, “I AM ARTHUR, KING OF THE BRITONS!”

Tens of thousands of reeling revellers in the city’s streets hobbled to unsteady feet. A choking haze of dust, confirmed by forensic analysis to be composed of seventy per cent free comedy show flyers and AI-generated Highland coo portraits, lingered for days. An especially large pile accumulated around the pulverised remains of a silent disco group on The Mound and was later designated a Scheduled Monument.

The people stood in hushed, overawed silence. Into their very cores cut the at-once ecstatic and terrifying existential realisation that before them stood a living legend. The gates of their minds were thrown open to previously unfathomable possibilities, to the undeniable reality of all the old fireside stories spilling into and subsuming the mundanities of their twenty-first century lives. A new age of heroes was here to sweep away the shackles of post-postmodern nihilism.

It was a glorious communal awakening and it lasted for precisely twenty-eight seconds. Due mostly to awkwardness and muscle memory, the first phones emerged from pockets and began uploading innumerable giant JPEGs to Google’s data centres. Every inch of Arthur’s being became digitised, edited with utmost urgency on Reddit to be NSFW. Within moments of Arthur’s first words, the giant had become content. #AwrightBigMan trended number 1 across all platforms for two weeks.

Their wonder and self-reflection exhausted, the voice of the people turned at once to pedantry. 

“Shouldn’t you be in Wales?” echoed one bemused voice from atop the Scott Monument.
“ARE YOU NOT THE HEIRS OF THE NOBLE GODODDIN? I AWAKE FOR THE SALVATION OF ALL NATIVE KINDRED OF THESE ISLES!“ the giant answered with unwavering conviction.

“Godo-what?” replied another voice from somewhere along the rubble-strewn Cowgate. “My dad’s named Dave.”

“What about me?” arose another from a half-obliterated rooftop in Meadowbank. “I just moved here.”

“I…HMM…” the giant began, suddenly uncertain. “ALL WHO KNOW THESE LANDS AS HOME IN THEIR HEARTS SHALL BE SHELTERED BY MY MIGHT!”  

“That brooch is three centuries too late to belong to an early medieval warlord!” shouted an archaeologist from the rooftop terrace of the National Museum. This apparently crossed a line, and Arthur leaned in to give them a sun-blotting death stare. The scholar desisted, apparently preferring bodily integrity to academic rigour.

“ENOUGH!” declared Arthur, resting one foot triumphantly upon the crest of the Crags. “POINT ME TOWARDS YOUR ENEMIES, THAT I MAY SMITE THEM AND HERALD AN AGE OF PEACE!” Arthur drew a colossal iron sword and aimed its point, unwittingly and to the amusement of all, towards Glasgow.

One brutish voice spewed above the others – “The migrants in boats!”

“AH, YES, THE OLD ENEMY FROM ACROSS THE SEA! WHERE SHALL I FIND THIS HOST? BE THEY ROMAN OR SAXON?”

The brutish voice rose again, “Bloody everywhere, that’s the problem!” The ensuing groans could be heard as far as Fife.

The tip of Arthur’s sword dipped a little at that, and he looked out across the assemble throng. They all spoke in a tongue strange to him, and seemed far removed from his kin of old. It seemed to Arthur that he had awoken in some strange, confused land, as if his Seat had drifted through time and space.

“THAT’S…NOT REALLY MY KIND OF THING”, he sighed. He sat upon the ruin of his hill, ironically fulfilling its name. Being a hero wasn’t what it used to be.

“LEAVE ME NOW. I MUST PONDER THIS NEW WORLD.”

With that, Arthur raised his tenement-sized chin to the sun and sunk deep into thought. A profound discomfort settled on the city, like when an acquaintance sits near you on the bus and you don’t know whether to start a conversation or not, only if that acquaintance could atomise you and everyone you love with a sneeze.

Days turned to weeks and weeks turned to months. Arthur had not spoken since his emergence, clearly at a loss. Drones buzzed relentlessly around his forehead, analysing his micro-expressions for any signs of resolve. The closest he came to it was four months later when one drone strayed too close and flew straight into his right eye. “MERLIN’S BEARD!” he roared in anger, tearing up to the point that flood barriers had to be installed in Duddingston. Arthur raised his sword arm and seemed to briefly contemplate smiting us all before collecting himself back into gargantuan repose.

One year to the day after Arthur emerged from his hollow hill, his TripAdvisor score had settled at 4.1 out of 5 – lower than the reviews for pre-Arthur Arthur’s Seat, but still commendable. Critique centred on visitors’ disappointment that, to quote one reviewer, “He doesn’t, like, do anything…?”. It seemed that people were more impressed by a hill that was just a hill than by a not-so-mythical-after-all giant who failed to do anything especially impressive beyond existing. The inherent awe was not sufficient to crack a 4.5 – for that, the punters demanded action.

That didn’t stop people from climbing him as they did Arthur’s Seat of old, using his tree trunk-sized hair follicles and decorative brooches for grips. Occasionally the climbers swarmed so numerously up Arthur’s shins that he shook them off like midges. 

When the resulting casualties hit triple-figures the Council installed several thousand square metres of fall netting around his base, prompting furious backlash from local conservation groups. “The giant Arthur, who is an integral feature of Holyrood Park’s tangible and intangible heritage, must be protected”, declared one of their reports. “If a fortnightly power-washing of the remnants of would-be climbers off the surrounding area is necessary for maintaining the historical and aesthetic integrity of the King of the Britons, that is a price worth paying.”

Nevertheless, enough climbers reached the top of Arthur’s head that a noticeable bald spot appeared on his pate. Firefighting aircraft were requisitioned to drop thousands of gallons of Minoxidil on it, but any new growth was immediately swept away by the incessant footfall. To locals’ futile cries of “don’t touch the nose!” at the statue of Greyfriars Bobby were soon added calls of “don’t stomp the heid!” aimed at anyone seen walking towards Arthur with climbing gear. 

In the end – at least until time of writing – Arthur’s first words to his subjects were also his last. He was met not by heroic purpose but by dopamine-deprived indifference, confirmed by the fact that nothing Arthur-related has trended outwith hyper-local online forums for over six months. There’s only so much that news cycles and influencers can do with a tediously sedentary giant, after all. Spraypainted scribblings have already reached to his knees, and his once-legendary figure often fails to crack Top 10 listicles of things to see in the city. Even generative AI seems disinterested, with ChatGPT-5 insisting that “the view from Blackford Hill is better”.

Arthur’s apathy has come to match our own, and the giant is now undergoing a process of re-lithification. The most recent survey confirmed that all of him up to his brow has turned back into stone, thus ultimately remodelling rather than destroying Arthur’s Seat. His eyes seem to have settled on staring forlorn into the west – some say towards the mythical lands of the ever-young in Tír na nÓg across the sea, while others observe their near-perfect alignment with the Paps of Jura. A slight wince and deafening squeal of “EEEEEEEEAAAHHHHHH HOOOOOCHAWAWA” were noted when the lithification reached just below his waist.

So it was that the storied hero of old returned to the stone seat from whence he came, and the people of Britain were left to their own devices.