: >	And don't forget Mons Meg -=- that cannon the Douglases only had 
: >to fire once, and now serves as a noon-day gun over Edinburgh, as it 
: >booms out from the Castle.  

: Er, not the last I saw! The noon-day gun was quite a modern piece, and 
: Mons Meg is on display in a room in the castle.

As far as I am aware, Mons Meg has never served as a time gun at Edinburgh
Castle. The cannon was brought back in the early 19th century to Edinburgh
from a scrapyard (in or near London?), where it had lain neglected for a
long time, but had never been "recycled" because of the difficulty which
its great bulk would have presented to the melting furnace. I do not think
that it has ever been fired since that return to Edinburgh. I believe that
the last time Mons Meg was fired was in the 17th century ...  for some
ceremonial purpose. ( Perhaps others can remind us of the details ). Mons
Meg, in its day, was really one of these monumental boondoggles -- an
enormously costly bit of war machinery which never really worked -
something like the "stealth bomber" of the 1990s, which is rumoured to be
quite incapable of its design performance. 

Mons Meg used to stand near the Queen Margaret Chapel and near the area
which, until the early 1950s, was marked out as part of Nova Scotia (but
whose markings vanished in mysterious circumstances around that time). The
cannon was taken away for some refurbishment (mainly of the wooden
carriage) in the early 1980s and, on its return to the castle, was placed
in its present location where it is better sheltered from the wind and
weather. 

As another minor correction to the original posting about this --  the 
time gun at Edinburgh fires at  1.00 pm,  not at noon.

Alasdair McKay

a.mckay@@ieee.ca        Nova Scotia  Canada.