blood-soaked spires; Yharnam as Edinburgh

video games | an essay on a trip to Edinburgh and its connection to Bloodborne

Nov 15, 2025

*The Greyfriars Kirkyard, captured on a Canon 1200D, 4th of November 2025.*

A SQUARE:, squat room (a cellar on promotion),
Drab to the soul, drab to the very daylight;
Plasters astray in unnaturallooking tinware;
Scissors and lint and apothecary’s jars.
Here, on a bench a skeleton would writhe from,
Angry and sore, I wait to be admitted:
Wait till my heart is lead upon my stomach,
While at their ease two dressers do their chores.
One has a probe — it feels to me a crowbar.
A small boy sniffs and shudders after bluestone.
A poor old tramp explains his poor old ulcers.
Life is (I think) a blunder and a shame.

- William Ernest Henley, In Hospital, “Waiting”.

It is often I see people jokingly compare Yharnam to a Saturday night in London. The aggressively cockney accents, the Yharnamites mimicking the drunkards — it makes sense! But when you look deeper into it, you begin to see some inconsistencies. Though yes, Yharnam may resemble the London of the 19th century, no longer does the city exude the mystery and phantasmagorical gothicism of that era. Now, it is a blue metropolitan oozing modernism.

There is a city, however, that much more accurately matches Yharnam’s essence (that isn’t Prague):

EDINBURGH!

A great essay that goes more in depth about this topic is Natalie Clayton’s “A Tale of Two Cities”, located in The Blood Echoes Anthology. It details Bloodborne’s connection to Robert Louis Stevenson and Edinburgh’s medical macabre. I credit the inspiration for this to Clayton (and the An Agony of Effort video essay series on Youtube!).

Central Yharnam, The Hunter's Nightmare and The Cathedral Ward

London is a metropolitan city painted blue and grey; and though it has got old parts and is doused in history, it is for the most part a wide-open place not necessarily resembling Yharnam. Edinburgh however? The city is built upon the skeleton of former streets; was once the medical capital of the nation during its renaissance ins the 1860s; was famed for its epidemic of bodysnatchers as a result; and was the birthplace of Robert Louis Stevenson, Jekyll and Hyde being an inspiration for the game’s motifs.

Of course, other places in England fits (such as York, where I lived for three years, an amazing city if you’re ever able to go), but nothing fits quite as well as Scotland’s capital with its gothic spires, vertical trajectory and tight streets; it’s dark stone, air of death and an era of decay.

It encompasses a time when death was a performance -- black clothing for a year, mourning as a spectacle, funerals grand and headstones ornate. The Greyfriars kirkyard itself (pictures above) exudes Bloodbornian macabre. I felt right at home.

various structures including The School of Divinity

Dark stone lines the Royal Mile, and if you use your imagination to turn the incessant tourists into packs of half-beastly Yharnamites, you can transform the city into the madness of Bloodborne’s setting. Sharp architecture that oozes the gothic; a time where death and plague was a constant motif.

Furthermore, the city itself is built upon streets long buried. When one steps out of the Waverley train station, take a left and look beyond the gardens below, one will see a cityline that looks two-dimensional; a vertical city built so tightly atop another that it becomes almost incomprehensible to determine which building is attached to the other. It is a gorgeously impressive sight and I cannot fathom its beauty.

Not also to forget the Greyfriars Kirkyard, a gorgeously macabre place of dense architecture and ornate headstones. It is the epitome of the Victorian’s obsession with death, and the epidemic of bodysnatchers that took over the Edinburgh underworld at the boom of medicine.

A SHORT READING LIST FOR A BLOODBORNIAN DECAY

The King In Yellow, Robert W. Chambers
The Shadow Over Innsmouth, H.P Lovecraft
The Bodysnatcher, Robert Louis Stevenson
In Hospital, Robert Ernest Henley
The Willows, Algernon Blackwood

I will leave you with this poem, named Operation, from William Ernest Henley’s In Hospital, a collection of poems dedicated to the nightmare of Victorian medicine and the experience of a patient who frequented the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh.

You are carried in a basket,
Like a carcase from the shambles,
To the theatre, a cockpit
Where they stretch you on a table.
Then they bid you close your eyelids,
And they mask you with a napkin,
And the anæsthetic reaches
Hot and subtle through your being.
And you gasp and reel and shudder
In a rushing, swaying rapture,
While the voices at your elbow
Fade — receding — fainter — farther.
Lights about you shower and tumble,
And your blood seems crystallising —
Edged and vibrant, yet within you
Racked and hurried back and forward.
Then the lights grow fast and furious,
And you hear a noise of waters,
And you wrestle, blind and dizzy,
In an agony of effort,
Till a sudden lull accepts you,
And you sound an utter darkness . . .
And awaken . . . with a struggle . . .
On a hushed, attentive audience.

The Greyfriars Kirkyard and other places

Allow us to all appreciate the Greyfriars Bobby as a send off for this post… look how cute the best boy is!? He thanks you for reading!

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