Edinburgh is rich in licentious literary landmarks, but its heritage is hostage to mere image makers, observes Ian Bell (Part 1)

All culture is entertainment, but not all entertainment is culture, especially when it is "heritage". Heritage is culture made painless, culture for our entertainment and, perhaps, delight. Take a walk around the streets of Edinburgh, and it is hard, especially during the Festival, to avoid the heritage "experience", that packaging of an entire city as a tourist artefact, part history, part-culture, part-entertainment, and all in living, breathing, photogenic colour.

Actually, you do not have to walk alone, or even to walk at all. The guides on the multitudes of open-topped tour buses ploughing the clogged streets will not pot the more agreeable parts of the capital's history on your behalf, without even requiring you o leave your seat. Equally, if you are old-fashioned enough to still to want to ambulate, there are scores of guides to lead you around, for a small consideration, and present you with your very own, invariably unforgettable, Edinburgh experience.

Tastes vary. How about the "Bloody Mile" tour? The "Ultimate Ghost and Torture" guided ramble? "The Ghosthunter Trail"? "Bravehearts and Broadswords"? The "Ghosts and Ghouls" tour? "The Royal Mile Tour"? True there is a certain obvious monotony about the fare on offer.

In the minds of the tour organisers, if not the tourists, Edinburgh's tourists, Edinburgh's history seems to amount to little more than those clichÈs - bravehearts and broadswords, no less - which might already be a shade familiar from the movies.

Edinburgh is rich in licentious literary landmarks, but its heritage is hostage to mere image makers, observes Ian Bell (Part 2)

Presumably this is called giving people what they want, but it illustrates a paradox neatly: history is adapted by the cinema before being fed back into the heritage industry, almost to the exclusion of all else, as a kind of real fiction: the braveheart effect. The tourists see only what the film-makers, casual with the truth, have seen before them. The guides them the clichÈs they want, and the clichÈs are confirmed.

But there is more to Edinburgh than that, and more, just about, to the intelligent tourist's experience of it. This year, for example, Edinburgh Literary Pub Tours has tried something new by combining two things of which the city can boast a distinguished tradition: public houses and writers.

Using actors and suitable howffs, the two and half hour tours cover the old town and the new, recreating the words and conviviality of writers such as Burns, Stevenson and MacDiarmid in settings which are, more or less, appropriate to the subjects.

It is a clever idea. Too little has been written about the importance of Edinburgh's drinking dens to the literary history of the city, perhaps because no-one could ever remember enough of what had gone on after the Saturday night to write it down. RLS, for one, spent most of his student days in pubs; reading for the bar, he preferred the bars.

Edinburgh is rich in licentious literary landmarks, but its heritage is hostage to mere image makers, observes Ian Bell (Part 3)

Before Stevenson, one of his heroes, Robert Fergusson, had been born in Cap and Feather Close (demolished for the construction of North Bridge) eaten oysters and guzzled and gin at Mann's Tavern in Craig's Close, and written precocious verse in Scots before expiring, probably of delirium tremens, in the asylum at the age of 24.

Burns, too, often found Edinburgh's meaner pubs preferable to its salons, favouring Dawney Douglas's Tavern in Anchor Close, just off High Street. There, during his first visit to the city, he fell in with a wild and eccentric drinking club called the Crochallan Fencibles, and circulated among them the bawdy verse which, in part, became the collection The Merry Muses of Caledonia, published after his death.

Later still, MacDiarmid (though not resident in Edinburgh) and other figures of the Scottish renaissance convened at Milne's, The Abbotsford, and other of the Rose Street pubs to polish their legend, more lustrous now than it ever was in the years when they were doing their drinking. Pubs, if nothing else, were part of the poetry of MacDiarmid, Garioch, MacCaig and Goodsir-Smith, and Milne's bar for one - the self styled Poet's Pub - still commemorates them.

All this is part of the experience - a stroll rather than a crawl - offered Edinburgh Literary Pub Tours. Sadly for the company, however, too few among modern tourists seem prepared to imbibe their history by the pint, perhaps because drink is not included in the price of the walk.

Edinburgh is rich in licentious literary landmarks, but its heritage is hostage to mere image makers, observes Ian Bell (Part 4)

Morning tours, first advertised for 11am, have been abandoned, and within the past week, even with the festival opening, the organisers have been obliged to cancel at least two twice-daily evening tours because of a lack of interest.

It may be that this is simply because the company (still very much in business) has tried to offer a glimpse of historical reality rather than the usual tartan tat. It may be that the demon drink has yet to be declared an acceptable sort of heritage for innocents visiting from abroad (though whisky distilleries long ago discovered otherwise). It may simply be that is too much competition in Edinburgh from all the other guides for whom the living city is a cheap, ready-made product.

But there is something pernicious, nonetheless, about the manufacture and marketing of heritage, so called. It isn't hard to guess that Burns, Scott, Stevenson and MacDiarmid would have sunk in disgust into their claret and their gin, their pints and their drams, at the thought of the capital's Disneyfication, and what that says to visitors.

Burns had a line, it will be remembered, about seeing ourselves as others see us. To see Edinburgh as many tourists are induced to see it, as a gift shop with some pavements, a movie set with extras, is not a thrilling - to use the favoured word - experience for a native.

The complaint is not new, but the process is accelerating. Will future generations define their heritage as a long tradition of selling souvenirs, busking and rewriting history? If even a modest effort such as the pub tours cannot achieve success at the height of the tourist season, it might just be a small clue that the heritage industry isn't worthwhile inheriting in after all.