On the gentle east slope of Calton Hill, a picturesque lump of rock at the east end of Edinburgh’s Princes Street, there is a large, gherkin-shaped cairn topped by a metal brazier. The Democracy Cairn is still, remarkably, Scotland’s only monument to the movement for a Scottish parliament that triumphed in 1997’s referendum. Unlike the parliament building itself, the cairn is easy to miss, as if placed deliberately out of sight. It is overshadowed by the National Monument, a massive, incomplete replica of the Parthenon commemorating those who died in the Napoleonic Wars that squats further up the hill.
Few venture past the more imposing monument to the cairn, but those who do encounter a plaque that explains it was erected in 1992 as part of a pro-devolution vigil established after that year’s general election, when a Conservative majority government was elected despite an emphatic Labour win in Scotland. The vigil lasted 1,980 days, finally dissipating on 12 September 1997, the day after the “Yes/Yes” result in the devolution referendum (“Yes” to a parliament and “Yes” to tax-raising powers). At the bottom of the plaque, the campaigning organisation responsible for the vigil and the cairn – Democracy for Scotland – is credited. Sometime during the more recent referendum on independence, a small piece of half-hearted vandalism appeared, a single word scratched clumsily into a blank patch of the plaque: “C***s”.
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