Things you didn't know about... Edinburgh

Check your watch at one o'clock...
If you don't, that means you're a visitor. At that hour every day, at Edinburgh Castle, a cannon is fired. The Edinburgh locals use it to check their watches.

The Royal Mile is actually five streets
The famous Edinburgh Royal Mile runs from Edinburgh Castle all the way to Holyrood House. The five streets are Castlehill, Lawnmarket (which means "linen market"), High Street, Canongate and Abbey Strand.

Away with the fairies
Everybody knows that Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was born in Edinburgh, and that Holmes was based on one of Conan Doyle's teachers at Edinburgh University Medical School. But less well known is that Conan Doyle also spent more than half a million pounds trying to prove that fairies exist.

Deacon Brodie designed his own gallows
Brodie—respectable Edinburgh council member and cabinetmaker by day, burglar by night—was the model for Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He was hanged in 1788, on (legend has it) a scaffold he had himself designed.

The penalty kick was invented by Edinburgh's Hearts
Sort of. During a match between Edinburgh club Hearts and East Stirling in 1890, the Hearts fullback Jimmy Adams saved a goal by handling the ball on the line. Since the penalty hadn't been invented yet, the ref could only give a free kick and Hearts, with all 11 men on the line, were able to get the ball away. East Stirling protested, and the rule was changed.

Robert Louis Stevenson's other name was Tusitala
Or "Story Teller". This was the name given to the Edinburgh-born author by the people of Samoa, whose rights he protected and fought for during the four years he lived there at the end of his life. Trivia: Stevenson's father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all lighthouse engineers.

Ugly or beautiful?
When the Forth Rail Bridge (one of Edinburgh's icons) was built over the Forth of Firth in 1890, the artist William Morris said it was "the supremest specimen of all ugliness". Most Edinburgh folk would disagree.

Leith, not St Andrews, is the home of golf
Here's one to get golfers going. Leith (Edinburgh's port) claims to be the home of golf because (a) the earliest record of golf was found here and (b) the official rules of golf were formulated here in 1744 and only later adopted by St Andrews. Obviously, not everyone agrees...

Blackadder was Duke of...
That's right. His full title was Edmund, Duke of Edinburgh and Warden of the Royal Privies.