Scottish flashes

-
Holyrood Dawn
The Edinburgh we love:

This is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks your heart again and again.
       -- Alexander McCall Smith

The view above is Holyrood Park in the early morning, but we have seen a thousand vistas just as beautiful.

We have commented before on travelling through the countryside and sweeping around a bend to be astonished and delighted by profusions of green and blue and yellow. The last was a surprise to us, we didn't realize how much bright yellow there was, especially in the Spring.

The yellows come from huge fields of rapeseed, braes covered in gorse, fields of daffodils, and verges bright with an honour guard of dandelions.
Daffodils

Dandelions

Gorse

Rapeseed

These expanses of yellow are offset by a profusion of tiny flowers in the grass in a multitude of colours. But there is lots of green, and of course, trees in abundance.
Dalkeith Chapel's private wood
Dalkeith Chapel has its own private wood behind the parking lot--well, more of a copse--but it links with a green belt running though that part of the countryside.

More of the Edinburgh we love is the Scottish enlightenment, a period in the nineteenth century when there was a profusion of Scottish philosophers and writers, expounding great ideas. The part-built parthenon on Calton Hill is a reminder of that age, along with memorials to various great people all over the hilltop.

Not to mention the Scots language. (Translation: let's talk about the local language) Yes, "outwith" is a real Scots word


Talking of wealthy people and their vanity projects, here's another: William Wallace, the Scots war hero, was famous for winning the battle of Stirling in 1297. This particular monument in the Borders area looks out nobly over a farmer's fields, and to reach it you travel on a B road for a while and then walk quarter of a mile through the woods.
The inscription below the statue reads

Erected by David Stuart

Erskine, Earl of Buchan

WALLACE

GREAT PATRIOT HERO!
ILL REQUITED CHIEF!
MDCCCXIV


There are so many other things, strange, wonderful and beautiful, to add to an endless list of things that have charmed us, but we'd rather get this brief entry published than delay it endlessly, so let's finish with one last quote about Edinburgh.

"This profusion of eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock is not a drop scene in a theatre, but a city in the world of reality." R. L. Stevenson


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tragic history but with a happy-ish ending

-
Image
Today I climbed the Radical road. Radical Road, climbing Salisbury Crag, Holyrood You could easily be pardoned for assuming the name comes from the radical steepness of its slopes but that would not be correct. The road, and its name, is the semi-good ending to a quite tragic piece of Scottish history. After the Napoleonic wars things were rough in Scotland--and in much of the British Empire. War is always expensive and after the euphoria of winning wears off the munitions and damages must be paid for. So wages were dropping while the wealthy were looking for ways to recoup and increase their wealth. Many traditional shepherds and other agricultural workers were moved off their lands and skilled artisans, notably weavers, found that their semi-independent lifestyle was converted into working for a boss for declining wages. By the early 1800's weavers wages were half what they had been just a few years before and trouble came in the form of strikes, and uprisings. The Scotti
Read more

Just the same, although better - some ruminations on food

-
We have been in Scotland for a year and a bit. It is cold and dark and damp, just as when we arrived, and last week we attended the delightful Robbie Burns' birthday celebration at the Livingston Ward. It is, we are told, the most attended activity the ward has all year. Attendance was somewhat down from last year, but this was to be expected, as the night was bitterly cold, and many older more frail folk would have preferred to stay safely at home.  The tables were laid out in the gym, just the same as last year. The music was the same or similar. The men wore the same kilts and jackets, the program was almost the same, with the Selkirk Grace, the Ode to the Haggis, one other poem which was a repeat from the last year, and an additional/different poem or two. The menu was the same - we started with a choice between Scotch broth and butternut soup, with little rounds of French bread. This was followed by haggis and neeps and tatties, just the same as last year, only - the food tast
Read more

A brief pre-conference scurry, and Easter is not what you think

-
Image
On Saturday we receive Conference live. The first Saturday Morning session arrives in our time zone at five in the afternoon. We had a sort-of lazy Saturday. We both seemed to be recovering from something; a bug, exhaustion, lack of sleep, or simply laziness. Whatever it was or wasn't we spent a chunk of our P-day napping--not typical for us. In the afternoon we remembered responsibilities. We wanted to deliver scripture-marking crayons to a sister in our ward. Clarissa had brought them all the way from the USA, but we had missed the opportunity of having her pass them on, now it needed to happen. We dashed down there, spent a few happy minutes with her--she was delighted by the crayons, since she had recently switched back to using paper scriptures. Then we discovered she had no effective way to enjoy conference live. Ten minutes later we had her set up to watch on either her smartphone or tablet. This brought to mind one of the other sisters in the ward that we visit, so we d
Read more