The Cannonball House

High up the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, you'll reach Castlehill, an ancient part the fair city with a varied and truly horrific history (previously a site of many a witch burning). One of the still existing attractions of the hill is The Cannonball House. This 17. century building has been dismantled and re-erected at least once through the ages. It is called The Cannonball House due to the fact that an old cannonball is protruding from its gable facing the castle. There are a number of theories regarding the question as to how the cannonball got itself into the wall. Some say, it was a loose cannon from the castle that fired a stray shot during the Jacobite siege of 1745. This theory has alas a very narrow evidential base and has been rejected by people who know their ballistics. Others maintain, the ball was never shot into the wall in the first place, but instead inserted into it by engineers, to mark the height of the water reservoir on the other side of the street. This could well have been the case. However, against this seemingly better substantiated theory stands the fact that another, smaller cannonball used to be tucked into the wall as well, as if to illustrate to passersby how the moon encircles the earth. No one seems to have felt the need to explain what could be likened to a stellar constellation on that particular spot. Perhaps due to the fact that the smaller cannonball is no longer in lieu. It was probably forgotten under a restoration or nicked away by a boy who kept it as the crown jewel of his marble collection. It is no small temptation to furnish further conjectures pertaining to the cannonball in the wall of The Cannonball House. To name just a few, it could arguably have been the case, that the cannonball is the self same ball that Baron Münchhausen sat on, before getting off at his destination of choice. Indeed, why not? The law of inertia would see to it, surely. Another bold conjecture entertained by certain gossip mags, suggests, the cannonball is in fact, no cannonball, but an aul' curling stone, the movement of which The Primus of the Scottish Episcopal  Church, elected from the diocese of Edinburgh, failed to curtail, when he contested the Edinburgh Makar on a frozen and uneven lake. A still hotly contested proposition that. At this stage, it is perhaps becoming apparent, that the cannonball in the wall is no longer merely a physical object. It has long since passed into the realm of metaphysics, where anything, as in anything, goes. The children of Edinburgh are actually encouraged by their elders to engender novel speculations about the cannonball as an exercise in creativity, and a yearly champion is chosen by a committee headed by J.K. Rowling. So much better than burning witches and more environmental to boot.