It has provided a town house for the Queensberry family; a shelter for wounded officers of the Jacobite army that fought at Prestonpans; a military barracks in the early 19th century; an isolation hospital for the city and district of Edinburgh during outbreaks of cholera; the venue for the first annual show of the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland; a house of refuge and a soup kitchen for the destitute; and Scotland's largest independent geriatric hospital—not to mention a profusion of well-known and much-loved breweries.Your new buildings succeed all that and bring their own history with them, constructed as they are from metals hidden deep since the dawn of time, from rocks slow forming through countless ages and from trees spanning the centuries with strength and beauty.Human history is also already part of the buildings, for all sorts of people have been involved in the building of them—visionaries with the power to make their vision real; planners with the foresight to enable community to develop; artists with eyes and minds to see and fashion beauty; craftsmen with mastery over wood and iron and stone; and builders with perseverance that discounts even the vagaries of our weather.They have all played their part to bring us here today into this place of wonder as well as of work, to a complex of buildings that will neither pall nor bore, in a setting that joins the tangible with the intangible.