2025-08-11
34 分钟This is The Guardian.
Today, the 400 year old University of Edinburgh confronts its dark past.
We're standing on Colton Hill in the east end of Edinburgh,
which is one of the most famous locations in the city.
And what we can see from here is Edinburgh's iconic skyline.
And right in front of us is a huge monument to Dougal Stewart,
one of Edinburgh's most famous moral philosophers.
A few weeks ago, the Guardian Scotland editor Severin Carroll took our producer,
Courtney Youssef, to see one of Edinburgh's most iconic monuments.
It almost looks like it's a shrine.
It's got Greek-style Corinthian columns.
It's got an urn in the centre of it.
And it's actually, funnily enough,
it's also displaying quite a handsome array of weeds growing through the cracks.
It's something which everybody in the city will recognise immediately
because it's so present and so dominant when you're in this part of the city.
Can you think of a better place to have a monument?
Probably not.
He was one of the fathers of the Scottish Enlightenment,
developing new theories around democracy and the rights of people.