Walking in Scotland

  I recently took a trip to Scotland with three other women and had a great time.  We drove, we ferried, we hiked, we looked at castles and it was all wonderful.  We walked miles everyday, altogether and in pairs, depending on our interests of that particular day.  The walks that I cherish most, however, are the two days that I was entirely alone walking around Stirling and around Edinburgh.  Those were the days that I truly got the Scottish experience and the excitement of being on my own in a foreign place.
A week ago I was in Edinburgh  and I walked all day by myself.  Two of my companions were on a birding expedition to North Berwick on the coast, and the other was exploring the city on her own.  We all had very different interests and ideas so we amicably parted and headed out on our own.

Edinburgh is the most walkable city I've ever visited.  From the New Town to the Old Town, from Holyroodhouse Palace to Edinburgh Castle, you can walk for hours and be vastly entertained.  I started from our hotel in New Town and walked up Calton Hill, a rather steep walk that paid off with gorgeous views out over the city in all directions.  To the north and east was the Firth of Forth and the North Sea stretching beyond the New Town full of regimented Georgian crescents.

To the south and west from Calton Hill I could look across the Old Town with its spires and castle looming on the horizon.  Each view seemed unique to two separate cities, which in fact is true.  Edinburgh is divided into the old and new, but the two sides live in splendid harmony.

I walked down Calton Hill and over to Old Town to the Royal Mile, a street teeming with shops and tourists.  The walk up the steep hill was almost like a pilgrimage as I passed traditional Scottish pubs and shops along with the kitschy tourist shops featuring 'Scottish' icons made in Malaysia or China.  I talked to one local shop owner who had been in the same location on the Royal Mile for 34 years.  She bemoaned the fact that local businesses were being run out of town by the less scrupulous sellers of foreign goods passing off as true Scottish merchandise.  It's the same in the U.S.  What we don't manufacture ourselves is outsourced and comes back as another example of a loss for our economy.  It appears to be a smaller world than I thought.




I finally trudged up the Royal Mile past St. Giles Cathedral, the statue of David Hume with his shiny big toe (it's supposed to be good luck to reach up and rub Sir David's toe - of course, I did that every time I passed him), and the Esplanade.  The street got tighter and narrower and I could envision the defensive measures that would be successful in such tight quarters just below the Castle.  The castle itself was immense and impressive on its volcanic crag.  The views were spectacular and I was fortunate to have a sunny day - a rarity on our trip - to enjoy those views.

I also got a lot of views of tourists, hopefully having as much fun as I was.  The crowds were unavoidable, but I chalked it up to the consequences of being in a big city and let the common attitude of enjoyment wash over and around me.  Nothing spoiled my day and I struck up conversations with anyone who stood next to me - a shared series of moments. 

After the castle I walked down to the Lawnmarket where I sat for a while and had tea and a fruity scone.  I loved ordering a 'fruity scone' and it was delicious.  I found a yarn shop just off the Lawnmarket and bought three skeins of Harris Tweed.  This will look great as a sweater vest.  The Old Town is rather hilly and has a lot of steep, narrow closes that are the old streets of the town.  When I say narrow - I mean narrow.  You could probably get a small cart and horse down one, but I don't know what altercation would have occurred if  TWO carts met on those tiny thoroughfares.  Bedlam and much shouting, I'm sure.

I went on a tour of these leftover underground closes - created when entrepreneurs and city fathers needed to build on street level with the Royal Mile.  How did they do this, you ask?  They chopped off the existing buildings and built on TOP of them.  This left tiny dark ex-streets underneath the newer part of Old Town.  What did the poor schmucks do who were living in the chopped-off buildings?  They got shoved into other tenements or relocated to the New Town down at the bottom of the hill.  Ah, Progress.

Oh, one other disgusting fact about the narrow streets of Old Town.  Before the age of plumbing, the city legislated a time of day when it was permissible to throw out the contents of your chamberpots.  These contents were thrown out the window ONTO THE STREET where the rain eventually washed it down to a loch at the bottom of the hill.  Well.  By the late 17th century, this loch was the town cesspool which the city fathers drained to create Prince's Street Gardens.  Beautiful gardens...and well fertilized.

After digesting all the fun facts of medieval life, I walked through said gardens and spent a couple of hours at the Scottish National Gallery.  Fabulous art, Old Masters and lots of Italian teenagers on what looked to be a painting scavenger hunt.  They shoved their way forward of more discerning art critics - ahem, I mean me - and frantically wrote down the details of the paintings on what looked like a class test.  I was getting a little tired by then, so I'm afraid I wasn't as tolerant of youthful studies as I should have been.  I wandered around New Town for a while searching for the Mecca of All Mysteries - The Oxford Bar made famous by mystery writer Ian Rankin as a favorite haunt of John Rebus, Detective Inspector.  I've read all of the Rebus novels and had to see what the Oxford Bar looked like in reality.  Well, it looks like a bar.  Not a traditional pub of imagination, but a neighborhood bar. 

I snagged a half-pint of Belhaven's Best from the young bartender as well as a bag of crisps (chips to you Yanks) and sat down to sink in the atmosphere - and to rest my swollen ankles.  Yeah, beer and chips are good for that.  There was one other patron - a businessman drinking his pint and looking through a newspaper.  I searched around for signs of Rankin or Rebus and did find a couple of framed newspaper articles.  Granted, it was 4:00 in the afternoon, so the place wasn't exactly jumping.  I did get a good rest and I caught up on my journal.

By the time I rested and was ready to go, it was raining a little, so I walked all the way down Prince's Street past the famous and not so famous shops inserted into Georgian houses.  I drank in the architecture and filed it away, hoping someday to return to Edinburgh to continue my walk.