Scotland 2023

An Arrival!

Guess who I found at the airport!

After walking the luggage to the hotel, Rachel and I grabbed the key that Andrew left behind and went in search of snacks. (I find that the best first thing to do in any city is locate snacks.)

We spent the rest of the day walking around the city, admiring the layers of civilization. And there are many layers, in a place continuously occupied for as long as Edinburgh…

I particularly enjoyed the stairs in Warriston’s Close:

Along with layers of stone and steel, we also found layers of signage.

And layers of graffiti as well, each with their own weird cultural story to add.

The deep natural valleys around the castle have made the city grow as a series of galleries that look up, down, and across to each other. You can see more than you’d expect from any one place, but it’s always different.

One of Rachel’s favorites was another stairway: The Scotsman Steps.

Relatively new construction (built a mere 125 years ago), and now a UNESCO-listed site.

We bought ice cream and kept wandering until our feet complained.

Far too much to see in one day. Good thing we had the next one!

Edinburgh Gardens

For Rachel’s first day in Edinburgh, we decided to visit the Royal Botanic Garden!

It was a relatively short walk, so we left the bicycles aside. Walking was complicated though by Rachel’s shoes: The ones she’d had shipped to the hotel turned out to be too small. She tried to wear them anyway, hoping they might expand a bit, but they didn’t, and the walking rendered them un-returnable. Drat!

The weather was typically Scottish. Middle of summer but there was rain, mixed with the constant threat of rain, switching hour-by-hour. Nevertheless we enjoyed the walk.

The garden was founded in 1670 at St. Anne’s Yard, near Holyrood Palace, making it the second oldest botanic garden in the UK after Oxford’s. It moved around a bit, and about 150 years later it came to its present location, and about 50 years later the “Temperate Palm House” building was constructed, which is that building you see in most of the advertisements and search results of the place.

That building was closed when Rachel and I visited, but there was still a whole lot to enjoy, starting with the rock garden:

The garden has a massive “herbarium”: A collection of preserved plant specimens, somewhere above 3 million, the vast majority accumulated this century. It’s in the process of taking hi-res digital photos of all of them, so students and scientists can get access without putting on nine layers of clothing and hearing bagpipe music.

The grounds cover 70 acres, but we moved at a slow walking pace most of the time. How else you gonna enjoy a garden? We saw a few things we knew from back home – including a Giant Sequoia – and a lot of plants that looked similar to stuff back in California but were actually collected from some distant part of the planet.

Between this garden and its satellite “regional” gardens, there are over 13 thousand species of plants currently being grown. That’s a lot of horticulture.

A structure known as Inverleith House serves as a museum on the grounds, and there was a cool walk-through exhibit on textiles and dyes, assembled from the work of multiple artists.

The exhibit was also about how these things – dyes and textiles – are inextricable from the history of colonialism, and how its perpetrators ransacked local ecologies and violently stamped out local cultures in the name of enrichment back home.

It’s a sobering thought, that evils that helped build and stock the original gardens and much of the current collection, remain threaded – literally – into our food, clothing, labor, and environmental systems. The choices we make – the ways we source things – even as humble individuals, can make a difference.

Just outside the building we found a charming little fountain as well, with Bonus Fowl:

There was a garden that looked more production-oriented than the others, with flowers and little sour apples. In our ramblings we weren’t sure if it was the Queen Mother Memorial Garden, or the Scottish Heath Garden. The weather brightened up just while we were there.

I’ve been through working gardens that were part of an exhibition before, in different places, and one of the things I find most charming about them is there are (almost) never any actual gardeners there doing the hard work of maintaining them. So you get to wander through and love the plants and the neat rows and irrigation without thinking about how labor-intensive it is.

Contrast this with your own garden back home, if you’re lucky enough to have the space for one: Everything you look at is a reminder of some task you’re ignoring. Weeding, pest control, erosion control, fertilizing…

There was one laborer we were happy to see though. A local pest control specialist:

Later in the day we wandered through some more indoor exhibits, and the cafeteria. It was neat to see some of the preserved specimens hauled out for display. I could almost picture the scientists in waistcoats and monocles squinting at them 150 years ago and declaring “Oh I say!” or whatnot.

In the late afternoon we moseyed back the way we’d come, taking a slightly different route to see more of the quaint lived-in city detail.

Then in the evening, it was time for Scottish cuisine!

Still so much exploring to do. We agreed that at some point in our visit, we should hang out here, because, well, dykes!

Arthur’s Seat

First thing we had to do today – well, after a nice breakfast – was look for a replacement pair of shoes for Rachel. Walking around for days in too-small shoes was no way to spend a vacation!

We were still getting used to the astonishing press of tourists on the main roads. It was an outdoor festival atmosphere all the time, especially with the ambient noise of bagpipes…

The shops were in full effect with their tourist-catering signage!

We descended into the Princes Street Gardens, and saw the floral clock, allegedly the first of its kind, built in 1903:

Rachel found some animals. First the Wojtek the Soldier Bear Memorial, and then Andy Scott’s sculpture:

The gardens were lovely in general. Relatively quiet and a little bit cooler, perhaps because of their position in a small canyon next to the castle.

Next we meandered south to the Hight St and I met a fine companion:

From there we zig-zagged and got ice cream from a shop picked at random, and strolled through the Canongate Kirkyard.

Many intriguing banners hung over the street. How far back did these symbols go? Hundreds of years? Or only a few?

Soon we located the trailhead for Arthur’s Seat, the only activity that was officially on the list for today.

We took our time with the ascent, admiring the flowers and vistas. Our friends had suggested we bring a baked potato to the top and eat it there, but we were too full of ice cream.

Like other tourist places that have a bit of romance, there was a tradition of sticking locks on a thing to communicate — something. Commitment? Whatever you decide, really…

The panorama at the top was magnificent.

We made it! Time to celebrate with goofy faces.

Humans weren’t the only ones hanging out up here, of course.

We lingered for a while, eating more snacks, taking photos, and hopping around on the rocks. While we were there nearly all the humans were replaced with other humans, but the number of them remained constant.

Eventually we made our way back down, and then back into the center of the city to find something more substantial for dinner.

We found a restaurant in an indoor mall. The elevator up to the third floor had a strange wrap-around video display.

Back at the hotel we got busy with gear, re-packing things for the ride. We’d worked pretty hard to reduce our kit but it still looked overwhelming spread around the room.