Last October we took a week away in Elviria, near Marbella in Spain. I haven’t posted since returning, but there is work in the pipeline. I am penning a series on Andalusia, the region in Spain that includes a few places I have been, Malaga, Grenada, Marbella and Ronda, and a few places I haven’t; Seville and Cadiz, yet. Meanwhile, I am wintering at home, as usual. This particular work is set close to home. The original photo was taken by a backseat passenger and focusses on the receding view of Bray as we head north on the N11 towards the M50. Being a rearview, we can’t see where we’re going but have an ever-shrinking view of where we’ve been. A bit like life, I supose.
To which end I spend my days
within the poetry of motorways
In this acrylic it’s late Autumn and near the end of a rainy evening. You may just about make out a flyover in the distance and beyond that the Small Sugarloaf, or Giltspur, is consumed in the glare of the setting sun. The banner across the top of the rear window advertises Mooney’s car dealership on the Long Mile Road in Walkinstown. Shades of my youth lie there. My old school Drimnagh Castle was on the Long Mile and a whole vortex of memories is carried on the winds thereabouts.
Where ghost musicians haunt roads and lanes
with harps that once and old refrains,
I recall that I used to go on the hop some afternoons and head out along the Long Mile towards the Naas Road. One companion then was Gerry Ryan. There was one occasion where we got as far as the Red Cow Inn (a small bar then, in the early seventies) slaked our thirst with a pint and headed back home. Gerry was a nippy winger and went on to play soccer for Bohemians over in Phibsboro. He would graduate to the top division of English soccer with Brighton and Hove Albion and of course was capped as an Irish international. He stayed in Brighton after retirement and ran a pub, the Witch Inn in Sussex. Gerry suffered poor health in recent years and returned home to D12. He died in October at the age of 68.
There are other shades there also, and I’ve written of them in other ways. A poem of my old hometown might fit within some blues refrain for our theme song. I’ve included a few quotes here. It’s called the Girl from Fox and Geese.
From Cork Kent, the train to Limerick takes about an hour and twenty minutes. You change at Limerick Junction with a couple of minutes changeover to a feeder train. Limerick Colbert is on the south eastern rim of the city. It’s about a ten minute walk into the city centre along Parnell Street, or a block over via the more salubrious Catherine Street, as I did.
Limerick’s population is over ninety thousand, making it the third largest city in the country. The original settlement was on King’s Island, north of the present city centre. The Vikings settled here in the ninth century, marking the western extent of their Irish invasion. The Vikings were subjugated by the leading local Gaelic clan, the Dalcassians of County Clare, in 943. The Dalcassians would subsequently come under the leadership of Brian Boru, whose campaigns in the late tenth and early eleventh century signalled the waning of Danish power in Ireland. The Limerick Vikings were enlisted by Brian in his struggle against Leinster Gaels and Dublin Danes. After the Battle of Clontarf Danish power withered outside of Dublin before being completely obliterated by the Normans.
The Normans were keen to establish a power base here. King John’s Castle is one of the many established by that King in Ireland. Dublin was another, Trim and Carlingford also. Begun in 1200, it was completed a dozen years later and is today one of the best preserved Norman castles you’ll see. It is Limerick’s most renowned landmark. The modern reception area makes for an odd introduction to the traditional Norman style castle of a large courtyard surrounded by curtain walls. The massive gate house and three corner towers remain. The eastern wall is missing, occupied by the modernist visitor centre. This offers interactive exhibitions, while the courtyard is haunted by garrolous actors. Visitors can try their hand at ancient pursuits such as archery and fencing, but no, there’s no chance of actually killing anything. Weirdly, there was once a small modern housing estate within the walls until the end of the last century. What a strange address to have. Despite eight hundred years of often violent history, including the violence of unsympathetic urban planning, the castle is in a high state of repair.
Katy Daly’s is situated across from the Castle entrance, on the Parade, an ancient historic street. A tavern in the old style, it’s ideal for a refreshing pint, or a meal, after the exertions of a castle visit. With sunshine spread over its front of house terrace, I had a pleasant time, accosted in the most friendly fashion by a couple of locals. Daly’s lays claim to being the oldest pub in Limerick. A pub, the Red Lion is recorded here in 1600, while the license can be traced back to the Halpin family in 1789. It takes its name from Prohibition era moonshiner, Katie Daly, born in California of Tipperary immigrants in 1872. Her father Bill was killed in a shootout with Wyatt Earp and his recipe for Poitin would endure thanks to his enterprising daughter. By the Prohibition Era, Katie operated out of Chicago were she fell foul of Al Capone, but escaped to the relative safety of San Francisco. However her enterprise came to the attention of the FBI and ended with her incarceration in Alcatraz, the island prison in the Bay. The only female prisoner there, she died before her fifteen year stretch was out.
King’s Island is Limerick’s fortified core. It is formed by the branching of the River Shannon. The main river delineates its western shore. The eastern branch is referred to as the Abbey River; the two meeting again farther south near the city centre. The walled city of Limerick grew in the shadow of the castle. After the Norman invasion this was referred to as Englishtown. Irishtown grew across the Abbey River in what’s now called the Old Quarter. The medieval city axis was along Nicholas Street, and the area drew comparison with medieval European cities such as Rouen and was greatly renowned for its beauty and prosperity.
Limerick suffered badly in the wars of the 17th century. There were at least four Sieges of Limerick. In the Cromwellian invasion the city was eventually starved into surrender. Fifty years later In 1690 there were further sieges as Jacobites, retreating after the Battle of the Boyne, held out against the Williamites. The Jacobites inflicted a heavy defeat on William’s forces, but were forced to surrender the following year. Patrick Sarsfield, commander of Limerick’s defenders, signed the Treaty of Limerick in 1691. He lead his forces – nineteen thousand troops and about a thousand women and children, into exile in what has become known as the Flight of the Wild Geese. The Treaty Stone stands on the western side of Thomond Bridge, the ancient bridge connecting the Kings Island to the west bank and on to Thomond Park, Munster’s Rugby stadium.
St Mary’s Cathedral, just south of the castle, is the oldest building in Limerick. Dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, it was founded in 1168 by Donal Mor O’Brien, the last King of Munster, and built on the Viking Thingmote, or Parliament. Donal died in 1194 and his tomb lies within the cathedral. The Romanesque building has been much added to over the years with Gothic and Victorian embellishments but retains its stern and ancient air. Its distinctive square tower with turretted corners is from the fourteenth century and soars above the western entrance.
Vestiges of the Walls of Limerick, appear along busy Island Street, though Nicholas Street is more evocative of the ancient city. Left untouched by the modern development in the eighteenth century, the old city was gradually abandoned, and few buildings remain. Near the confluence of the Abbey and Shannon, just below the Cathedral gates, is the end of English Town. George’s Quay hugs the river bank, and here you’ll find the Locke Bar at the Bridge. The original pub site dates back three hundred years. There’s traditional music sessions and dancing every night. The lounge area is large, flooded with the late afternoon light. Outside, there’s a wide beer garden on the tree lined river banks. The garden often features summer barbecues, and good food fare is available throughout, including seafood, burgers and Irish Stew.
Across the river Irish Town, or the Old Quarter, occupies the south bank to your left. On the right is a pleasant riverside parkland, with the Hunt Museum prominent on the streetfront. The Hunt Museum was originally the Custom House, designed by Italian Davis Ducart. It’s a limestone Palladian building from 1765, three stories tall. The museum features the collection of John and Gertrude Hunt, housed in the current building since 1997. The Hunts collected collected art from neolithic Ireland to ancient Egypt, medieval Christian artefacts from Ireland and Europe. There’s also dresses by Sybil Connolly and work by Picasso, Renoir and Jack B Yeats. The Horse Outside art installation are fibreglass sculptures from 2010, painted by children and inspired by the Rubberbandits hit. They are the local comedy hip hop duo of Mr Chrome and Blindboy Boatclub.
A century after the Treaty, Limerick moved south. Landowner, Edmund Sexton Pery commissioned Irish engineer Christopher Colles to design a new town in 1769. Newtown Pery is an outstanding example of Georgian city planning. Being built on one owners lands allowed for a regular grid system making for an architecturally unified, elegant streetscapes which is very modern, and most unusual in Ireland.
Building came to an abrupt end after the Famine. The expanding city finally ebbed to the shores of Pery Square to the south. Originally intended as a Grand square in the mode of Dublin’s Merrion Square, you can judge the intent along the northern side. The People’s Park is a wonderful green oasis within its embrace. Limerick Art Gallery is at the northern corner quite near the train station. Wonderful landscapes of the nineteenth century comprise the bulk of the collection, with some contemporary work and visiting exhibits. Nearby, you will also find the urban oasis of Baker Place with St Saviour’s Dominican Church church and the picturesque Tait’s Clock Tower.
Back to the commercial city centre, William Street aligns with the major Shannon crossing. In 1835 a new bridge called Wellesley Bridge spanned the river. The five arched bridge incorporated an artificial island, home to a club house for the Rowing Club. It was renamed for Patrick Sarsfield in 1882. At right angles is O’Connell Street, originally George’s Street, which is the principal street of the modern city. Along William Street you’ll find a traditional table service fish and chipper, Enzo’s. Enzo Rocca arrived from Italy fifty years ago and set up shop in Newcastle West with his brother Franco in the Golden Grill chipper. The city restaurant he established in 1984 was a seafood restaurant to begin with. Enzo’s has become a much loved institution in Limerick, a time capsule for a halcyon age, with a battered cod and chips to adore. Sadly Enzo passed away on the first of September at the age of seventy seven
The grid of Newtown Pery merges into the narrow winding streets of the Old Quarter, where I am staying at the eponymous hotel. It’s an interesting warren of streets, merging with cafe society where the city centre shoppers spill over, spent from a hard day at the retail coalface. Nancy Blake’s on Denmark Street is an intimate old style pub with a beer terrace out the back. There’s a late bar and live music five nights a week. I spend some time here on my last night, in the balm of neon and cobblestones, with appropriately classic rock tracks seeping out of the sound system.
It’s a pity I haven’t given myself more time. A day is seldom enough for a city, and certainly not here. Thanks to Niamh Mulville for her itinerary which informed my visit. There are some visits that I did not make. A mecca for rock tourists, Dolan’s Pub in the docklands area is where the Cranberries started on their path to world domination. Their second album No Need to Argue (1994) was a huge iternational hit. The lead single off that , Zombie became a signature number. Writer Dolores O’Riordan was born in Ballybricken, about ten miles south of Limerick in 1971, and died in 2018. I have quoted the song before and recently it has been given a rousing rendition by the supporters of the Irish Rugby team at the World Cup. The Munster contingent are responsible for this and the reasons are obvious. Thomond Park, out past the Treaty Stone is their own particular Mecca and so local heroes the Cranberries might be expected to provide the occasional theme song. All provinces have joined in and of course all of us back home will be wishing the furious wind will fill their sails and bring victory to the men in green. Truly, they are fighting.
Dublin to Cork is two and a half hours by rail. There’s a train every hour on the hour leaving from Dublin Heuston. The train barrels through the south midlands to Limerick Junction before veering due south through Cork, Ireland’s largest county and on to the Republic’s second city, Cork. The train arrives at Cork Kent station to the north east of the city on the Glanmire Road. It’s a short walk from there to my accommodation at Isaacs Hotel on McCurtain Street.
McCurtain Street is being ripped up at the moment but there’s plenty of restaurants, cafes and bars on this busy thoroughfare. Following the main road takes you down to the River Lee, and the city centre lies on the low lying island formed by the division of the river. The division in the River Lee happens well west of the city, past the University campus. The northern branch is the major; wide and relatively straight. The southern branch is narrower and windier, giving a quirky, intimate and scenic aspect to the city.
Union Quay takes you past the City Hall and the College of Music. On the opposite bank there’s the Cork studios of national broadcaster, RTE. A few doors up the distinctive ornate Neo Gothic spire of the Holy Trinity Church soars above Father Mathew Quay. Begun in the 1830s, it was not completed until the 1890s, construction having been delayed by the Famine. The design was chosen by competition, the winner being English architect John Pain, who also designed Blackrock Castle and the Courthouse on Washington Street. The interior includes three windows by Harry Clarke, and the window behind the High Altar is dedicated to Daniel O’Connell,
The spire and facade were the last element completed, and were somewhat scaled down from Pain’s original plans. Still very impressive though, facade and spire combining in a unified statement, the entire structure tapering to its peak while the use of flying buttresses and cast iron supports give the building the lightness of lace, as an observer put it: more air than stone. The church belongs to the Capuchins, an order of Fransiscan friars, and is also dedicated to the memory of Father Matthew who commissioned the church, and otherwise devoted himself to helping the poor, becoming also a notorious campaigner against the demon drink.
South Parish occupies the steep river banks, and like Shandon on the north bank, was an early suburb of the ancient walled city. The streets hereabouts go back a long way, with many colourful names. Whether Father Matthew had anything to do with Sober Lane, I can’t say, but it boasts one of Cork’s best beer gardens and an ironically named bar on Sullivan’s Quay. Uphill, we passSt Finbarr’s South, which dates from 1766 and is the oldest Catholic Church in the city. Sculptor John Hogan contributed the sculpture of the Dead Christ on the High Altar in 1832, carved from the same white marble from the Carrara Quarry used by Michelangelo. Farther up, the Red Abbey is one of Cork’s oldest structures, an early fourteenth century Augustinian abbey. The friars persisted, even after the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1541, for another century until the Catholic Rebellion of 1641. Only the church tower remains,
Nano Nagle Place is situated further up on Douglas Street. Born in 1718 Honora Nagle was from a well to do Catholic family in Penal days. The Catholic population then was poor and uneducated, something which Nagle determined to address. Her Uncle Joseph mantained a Protestant front to safeguard the family’s fortune. This allowed for Honora’s education in in Paris. While there she noticed the contrast between her life of privelege and the misery endured by the city’s poor. This she compared to the plight of her own Catholic community back home. She returned to Ireland and established seven schools, for boys and girls, the first in the ghetto where she grew up on Cove Street. She also established a convent for the Ursuline Sisters, a French order of nuns. Being enclosed kept them remote from the community, so Nagle went on to found her own, outgoing order. The convent she founded in 1771 forms the nucleus for Nano Nagle Place, with a museum, bookshop, gardens and her tomb. The award winning museum gives a lively, animated tour through Nagle’s life and work and also illustrates the parallel development of Cork city in the eighteenth century.
Fionnbarra’s Bar farther down Douglas Street, is a good place to slake your thirst with an eccentric beer garden out back. Brightly painted statuary serves to further tilt the axis of reality off the vertical, although a few pints of the brew would contribute to such effects also.
I take the Nano Nagle footbridge across the river on to Grand Parade. Triskel Arts Centre is within the old walled city of Cork. A fragment of these walls remain in the Bishop Lucy Park next door, on the west side of Grand Parade. There’s a short but very useful account of ancient Cork and its early viking origins. Christchurch is a restored eighteenth century church once the main Church of Ireland place of worship in the city. It dates back to the eleventh century when a Hiberno Norse church was built on this site, this becoming a focal point for the developing city. You can view the ancient crypt beneath the current structure. Today the building is an intrinsic part of the Triskel and features regular music, arthouse cinema and literary events. There are regular exhibitions. My visit coincided with Then I Laid the Floor, featuring the work of three artists. The exhibition references a house built by relatives of Sao Paolo based Irish artist James Concagh, providing an interesting if vague visual narrative. Contributory work is provided by Brian Maguire whose art from all corners of the globe is consistently samey and shouldn’t detain you too long.
Farther along we reach the Cornmarket and the North branch of the river appears. The Shandon Footbridge takes us across the river and the climb up Widderling’s Lane leads to the heart of Shandon. This working class area has its own unique inner city feel. I had my eyes set on a Middle Eastern restaurant in the shadow of the bell tower of St Anne’s and sitting outside on a warm evening in the labyrinth of backstreets certainly had a Mediterranean feel to it. The restaurant even supplied a hookah pipe to an adjoining table to enhance the ambience. Unfortunately, my order resembled dessicated goat dipped in vinegar and I didn’t stay long. I resolved on a pint to wash away the lingering taste and hurried back to Son of a Bun, a good American Hamburger restaurant on McCurtain Street with which I’m familiar.
On the way I noticed one of Cork’s best loved bars. Sin É, Irish for that’s it. This is a busy spot with regular traditional and ballad music. The packed interior is a gem, and upstairs there’s a more reflective spot with candlelit tables where I grab a window seat. And thereby hangs a tale. The candles are not yet lit, and though on my ownio, I decide to light up for a little atmosphere. This attracted a tourist, German I think, who asked for a light for his own unlit candle. I obliged. Thus the light was spread troughout the world. I spent a happy half hour writing in my notebook and a few more moments reflection before heading off down the city centre. I got as far as the Oliver Plunkett, on the eponymous street, where outdoor seating allows for relaxed people watching. Looking for the notebook again, I find that it’s gone. It can only be back in Sin E, so I must return. The place is truly hopping, and I am none too optimistic approaching the upstairs table now occupied by a young woman. She has stowed my notebook on an adjacent shelf. It is a small thing of no great value, but I am delighted to be reunited with it again. Downstairs, I decide to celebrate with a pint. In an alcove, I take out a fistful of change and begin to count out the money required. Suddenly, the German tourist from before is at my shoulder. I will buy you a pint, he says, for earlier you gave me fire. Don’t you just love it. I had to laugh. I wasn’t sort of money, but had typically accumulated a lot of shrapnel and wanted to lighten the load. What goes around comes around. I see out the evening with pints and pleasant company. That’s Cork for ye; Sin É.
This has been a wet summer, even by Irish standards. It is a constant perspective here to view life through rain streaked glass; huddled in a cafe shopfront, looking out the kitchen window, scenery rushing through the windscreen of a car. I’ve painted Connemara driving through the rain and more recently, a sodden rush hour from the upstairs front seat of a bus on Amiens Street. The latter I took from a friend’s photo (thanks Paula Nolan!) but this one is all me own work. Taken through the windscreen of our car parked on Florence Road, Bray, looking up towards Main Street and the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer. We are dropping in to Florence Furniture and Antiques in the left foreground. A good antiques shop is a treasure chest of the past, and more. An alternative universe where it is possible to imagine each artefact a living thing, a receptacle for history and craft, and love, and much, much more; hopeful, awaiting its future in another setting. The stories they could tell. The building was previously an art shop, and a printworks before that.
Across the street is Hayes Butchers Shop, a long established family business and friendly with it. Stories and gossip are exchanged here in the old fashioned way. It’s where I get all the beef; if you catch my drift. The Church was established in 1843, funded by subscription including generous donations from Bray’s sizeable Protestant community. It was remodelled in the 1890s by WH Byrne who, around the same time, was supervising the reconstruction of Dublin City Markets on Sth Great George’s Street to the magnificent building we see today. The Holy Redeemer, however, looks very different now to the nineteenth century structure. The mid sixties saw the facade altered to a modernist gabled front with a new plain, soaring bell tower. Surprisingly, you will find the nineteenth century interior remains. The old within the new.
Most cities offer an open-top, hop-on hop-off bus tour. Mostly I can take or leave them. It does make for a particularly useful introduction to Belfast. Much of the city’s fame is steeped in the Troubles, interesting times to be sure. The suburbs featured even more than the city centre. The Falls and the Shankill were the capitals of the troublesome antagonists. There’s something slightly weird being a tourist on an open top bus, cruising through mundane working class residential areas, safe but with a frisson of danger. Perhaps weirder still to be a resident going about your business, yet at any time grabbed in the lens of visitors cameras. Though it could be worse, and once was. A loop through the docklands is also useful, stopping of course outside the Titanic exhibition.
The tour guides each have their own patter, a comedy routine in the making, a mixture of historical details and lurid anecdotes. The latter may be shaggy dog tales, but the history is convincing. We took a couple of jaunts, and so were treated to a variety of routines. Most were racy and jocular, and one who did a drearily hilarious comic turn.
The first stop was at St George’s Market on May Street, close to the Waterfront. This is an attractive redbrick Victorian Market from the end of the nineteenth century. Enter through the main archway into a hive of trading activity with hundreds of stalls selling books, clothes, art, antiques, hot food and snacks from friday through to sunday. The friday market dates back to the city’s formation in 1604, with fruit and veg, antiques, crafts, clothes and books. Saturday devotes itself to being specifically a food and craft fair, then sunday brings both elements together with live music thrown in. St George’s Market doubles as a music and arts venue with events ranging fron the World Irish Dance Championship to Deep Purple.
Next door is a pub that honours a singer of my own city, Ronnie Drew. It’s disconcerting to see his face around here, but consoling. Born in Dun Laoghaire in 1934, he founded his own group with Luke Kelly and others. The Dubliners first played in O’Donoghue’s in Dublin’s Merrion Row, a favourite haunt of mine. It’s good to see them commemorated in Ireland’s second city. Ronnie Drew’s is an ornate old style bar from the 1920s, with five large snugs along the huge arched windows at the front. Once called McGettigan’s, it was renamed for Drew following his death in 2008
The next bus takes us via City Hall and on to Great Victoria Street. From the city centre we head into the leafy suburbs of the University Quarter. This quarter includes the Ulster Museum, the Botanic Gerdens and of course Queens University, Belfast. The university was founded in 1845 as an associate college of the Queens University of Ireland, along with Cork and Galway. It was intended to be a learning centre for Catholics and Presbyterians as distinct from the Anglican Trinity College Dublin. Queens is enjoying its summer hiatus at the moment. I recall Freshers week, many moons ago, where the rag mag profiled a hopeful candidate in the student elections. He was running on the surprising platform of a Gay Paisleyite, with the ne’er to be forgotten slogan: Better Gay than Taig. Taig, from the common Gaelic name Tadhg, being the Loyalist slang term for their Nationalist foe.
The main building fronting onto University Road was designed by the English architect Charles Lanyon. It is an impressive gothic redbrick with a central tower inspired by Magdalen College in Oxford. Lanyon also designed the Campanile at Trinity College Dublin and many Belfast landmarks, including the Palm House at the Botanic Gardens nearby, Belfast Castle and Crumlin Road Courthouse and Gaol. Lanyon Place is named in his honour, though the modernist slab of a railway station seems somewhat ironic.
The tour heads west towards the Falls Road, a two mile long thoroughfare heading from the city centre to Andersonstown. The area is home to the Catholic community of West Belfast. We stop at the Bobby Sands mural, one of the most famous of Belfast’s many political murals. It dates from 1998, around the corner of the Falls at Sevastapol Street, on the gable end of the Sinn Fein hq. Sands was sentenced to fourteen years in the H-Block at Long Kesh for possession of a firearm in 1981. He went on hunger strike to campaign for political prisoner status and was elected MP for Fermanagh South Tyrone. After sixty six days he died at the age of twenty seven, in May. A further nine men died before the hunger strike was called off in October.
Further down the Falls we glimpse Divis Tower, a twenty storey residential block from the sixties. Standing 200 foot tall it was a significant landmark of the Troubles. The British army occupied the top two floors as an observation post, though they could only access it by helicopter. Residents moved back in fifteen years ago.
Turning left off the Falls, a row of murals occupies the Solidarity Wall along Northumberland Street. Alongside national and local heroes, other international revolutionaries favoured by Republicans are commemmorated. These include Palestinian, Basque and South African activists, with Nelson Mandela prominent amongst them.
Through a double gate, we leave the Falls and enter the Shankill area, a Loyalist enclave. Murals now switch to assertions of Britishness with the Union Jack and King Billy (William of Orange) signifying that you’ve crossed the divide. That divide is demarcated by the Peace Wall on Cupar Way. This was erected by the British Army in 1969 to prevent inter community strife between Nationalists and Loyalists.
There are thirty km of walls in total, in various areas throughout Belfast. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998, following the IRA ceasefire of four years earlier, effectively brought an end to hostilities. The Peace Wall could at last live up to its name. The barrier has evolved into an open page for the amateur graffitti artist. A litany of hopes and dreams scribbled by the great unwashed, and the great and the good. National and international leaders have made their mark. Bill Clinton, a significant force in the Peace Process was here. According to our guide he contributed the quote: I never slept with that woman! I doubt it. Ironically, the symbolic importance of the wall has itself become a barrier to taking the thing down. It’s longer now than at the end of the Troubles
Andre has a red flag, Chiang Ching’s is blue
They all have hills to fly them on except for Lin Tai Yu
Dressing up in costumes, playing silly games
Hiding out in treetops, shouting out rude names
Whistling tunes, we hide in the dunes by the seaside
Whistling tunes, we piss on the goons in the jungle
It’s a knockout
If looks could kill, they probably will
In games without frontiers
War without tears
(Games Without Frontiers is a Peter Gabriel song from his third solo album Peter Gabrel. The title is taken from a Trans European tv show of the sixties and beyond: Jeux Sans Frontiers. That line is sung by Kate Bush as an alternate chorus. British tv used the more combative title: It’s a Knockout.)
We stop along the Shankill Road where the atmosphere is muted and rather grim. I wonder if we should strike up a few verses of We’re on the One Road. But perhaps its message of togetherness might be misconstrued along here. Returning to the city centre, the bus deposits us at Donegall Square and the City Hall.
Our last night on the town brings us to Bittles Bar. Occupying a flatiron wedge at the junction of Victoria Street and Church Lane, it dates from 1868, when it was known as the Shakespeare. The literary theme continues inside the small triangular bar. A great selection of paintings are crammed into every available space with group portraits of Irish literary and sporting heroes enjoying a few pints. There’s a large canvas of Yeats, Behan, Beckett, Wilde and Joyce, while peace era iconography brings together erstwhile combatants of the Troubles, Adams and Paisley sharing a joke. The pub’s most popular poet seems to be Padraic Fiacc who gazes down, not quite benignly, at the bar. A spiky quote: Screeching gulls in a smoky bacon sky, hints at a spiky character. Christened Patrick O’Connor, he was born in Belfast, the son of a barman. His family lived in the Markets area nearby, having been burned out of their home in Lisburn. They moved to New York and Padraic grew up in the notorious Hell’s Kitchen area. A case of out of the frying pan and into the fire. He connected with his Belfast roots in the forties and returned to live here in 1956. A member of Aosdana, he died only recently, in 2019 at the grand age of 95.
Meanwhile, although the night is still young, last orders are called. I had just been extolling the benefits of Belfast in peacetime only to be made aware that we were caught in an unfree state, with antediluvian licensing hours. Ten o’clock on a Sunday night on a Bank Holiday weekend and we’re out on the street. So it looks like I’m going to wake up in the city that does sleep. However, a stiff, and anxious, walk back to the Titanic quarter, and the wonderful Premier Inn provides a pint of Harp, or two, to take us to the midnight hour.
We’re staying in the Titanic Quarter, practically next door to the eponymous attraction. The tall gleaming building is a landmark in itself, embodying in its design a suggestion of the famous liner built at the Harland and Wolff shipyard nearby. Edward James Harland was born in Yorkshire in 1831 and moved to Belfast in 1854 to manage Robert Hickson’s shipyard on Queens Island. In 1858 Harland bought the shipyard from Hickson. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff from Hamburg had worked as Harland’s assistant, and soon was made a partner. Harland and Wolff prosperred, forging a lucrative partnership with the White Star shipping line. White Star exemlified high quality service for the transatlantic passenger trade. The Belfast shipyard became exclusive builders for them, providing ships on an ever more grandiose scale, culminating in the Titanic in 1912.
The decline of Belfast shipbuilding saw Queens Island left derelict. A handful of structures were listed for preservation, including the Titanic slipway and the iconic Samson and Goliath gantry cranes. These were only built in 1969 and 74, and are still in use as part of the dry dock operations of the yard. The Titanic Quarter development was proposed in the mid nineties. The Odyssey Complex was an early development which opened in the new millennnium. The Arena hosts the Belfast Giants hockey team, and is also a venue for music gigs. The Premier Inn, our hosts, was the first hotel opened here in 2010.
The Titanic Belfast visitor attraction was proposed as a focus for the site. It was intended to emulate Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim museum in Bilbao as a prestige scheme which would inspire a regeneration of the area itself and the wider city. Overseeing the project, Dublin firm Harcourt Developments enlisted American architect Eric Kuhne and London firm Event Communications. The building echoes the outline of the huge White Star ships, standing as high as the Titanic hull on completion. Locals have given the nickname the Iceberg. The silver sheen of the building comes from its aluminium cladding, whose jagged finish also isuggest ice crystals. The visitor centre stands on the slipway where the Titanic was launched.
The Titanic Experience will take a few hours. It first immerses the visitor in the rapidly growing nineteenth century city of Belfast, then takes you from the ship’s conception, through gestation and birth, and on to that fateful voyage, and beyond. It is a story of dockland and street, nuts and bolts, the savage vastness and caprices of the sea, and of course people. The people who designed her, who toiled to make her, who were charged with sailing her, who paid to sail in her, who survived or perished, as the die would have it.
Titanic is the most famous ship ever, though it never completed its maiden voyage. Carrying 2,224 passengers and crew, she set off from Southampton to New York by way of Cherbourg and Cobh, then known as Queenstown. Hopes would have been high. Here was a voyage into a new world, upon the greatest ship afloat, proclaimed unsinkable with the best in modern safety technology. Allegedly. Third Class were better catered for by White Star than they would have been elsewhere, with cabins instead of open dormitories, their own dining rooms, a smoking room, reading room and an assembly hall. Facilities in first class were luxurious, based on the quality of the Ritz, with restaurants, gymnasium and turkish baths, A glorious Grand Staircase swept up through seven decks topped by a metal and glass dome.
She sank on 15th April 1912 off the coast of Newfoundland. Capt Edward Smith went down with the ship. One thousand five hundred people died. The names of all the dead are displayed on a huge wall as we begin our descent from the exhibition’s top floor. Stories abound, ranging from modest steerage to those of great wealth and fame. There was the unsinkable Molly Brown, who survived. Born Margaret Tobin in 1867 to Irish immigrants in Missouri. She moved to Leadville, Colorado, in her teens and married mining engineer James Brown who became wealthy through his work. A wealthy socialite, Margaret didn’t forget her poor background, and applied herself to philanthropy in the cause of women and workers. Her survival became the stuff of legend and led to her posthumous nickname
Fate smiled on others who either missed the boat or got off. Amongst those who disembarked at Cobh was Fr Francis Browne, an Irish Jesuit and photographer. He received a first class ticket from Southampton to Cobh as a gift from his uncle. On board he befriended a rich American couple who offered to pay his passage to New York. He telegraphed the bishop and the reply was swift, and negative: Get off that ship! Browne studied at Dublin’s University College with James Joyce who remembered him with a walk on part in Finnegans Wake. Even more unsinkable than his namesake Molly, he was a chaplain in the Great War and survived the Battle of the Somme, Passchandaele and many other fierce battles. Wounded five times, he was awarded the Military Cross and the Crois de Guerre. The survival of Browne’s photographs form an enduring legacy of life in the twentieth century. His photographs chronicle life in Ireland and abroad, while his record of the Titanic, its passengers and crew before their date with fate, is invaluable.
Nearing the end, with the weight of the dead above us, we descend to the depths. The Titanic rested undisturbed for more than seventy years. In 1985 Robert Ballard and Jean Luis Michel found the wreck. Celebration was spontaneous, though Ballard quickly saw the problem of joy in what was, is in effect a mass graveyard. A film by James Cameron in 1997 featured Leonardo de Caprio, a steerage passenger forging a love affair with Kate Winslet. Their celebration of life at the ship’s prow gives a photoshoot moment for visitors seeking to recreate the moment starring themselves. My companions oblige, though I must draw a veil over that.
After the full emotional experience of the Titanic spend some time on the Nomadic, parked adjacent to the visitor centre and included in the admission. The Nomadic is the Titanic in miniature. It was used as a ferry for passengers from the dockside to the Titanic anchored offshore. The interior is lovingly preserved, with some ghostly projections taking us back to the days.
After all of that, it was time to sink a few cold ones. There are few oases this side of the Lagan. It’s a ten minute hike across a selection of bridges to the city centre. We took the Lagan Weir Bridge which curves to the west bank where it is guarded by the Big Fish. This sculpture by John Kindness was commissioned at the end of the last century as part of the urban regeneration along the riverbank. The fish is clad in ceramic scales, many with texts and images illustrating the city’s history. Aptly, it stands at the confluence of the Farset and Lagan rivers.
The Farset is the river that gave Belfast its name: the mouth of the Farset, Beal Feirste in Gaelic. The original settlement was here, and a small dockland grew up. This was covered over in the eighteenth century and is now Queen’s Square. The buildings on the south side of the square would once have faced the quayside of the old town dock. The oldest building in Belfast survives here, and houses McHugh’s Bar. It was built as a private residence in 1711 and by the following decade a public house was in operation. McHugh’s serves food and drink and there are lively evening music sessions. Its large outdoor terrace facing the square was perfect for a perfectly sunny day. Our own trio was augmented by a trio of friendly locals and we fell into the heaven of lively conversation and chilled beer in the afternoon sun.
The Albert Memorial Clock dominates the square. Built to honour the Queen’s Consort who died in 1861, it is Belfast’s very own leaning tower. Being built on land reclaimed from the River it leans four feet off the vertical and stands, if precariously, over a hundred feet tall. It was once a haunt of prostitutes. Perhaps it was a form of sympathetic magic, or just that they, like the tower, had the time and the inclination.
The area has moved upmarket in recent times. The Cathedral Quarter is named for St Anne’s Cathedral nearby. Once a warehouse zone this warren of cobblestone lanes is the go to area for city nightlife. Such colourful names as the Thirsty Goat, the Cloth Ear, the Chubby Cherub and Bunsen Burgers clamour for your drinking and dining pleasure. We wander for a time in the summer haze of evening through a long narrow laneway beneath neon umbrellas with a caption saying there’s only seven types of rain in Belfast, all seven days a week. But not this weekend.
Belfast is Ireland’s second city, and the capital of Northern Ireland. It is a two hour train ride from Dublin Connolly on the Enterprise; all going well. I was last here just over ten years ago, taking another jaunt north with my younger son to see the Belfast Giants ice hockey team at the Odyssey Arena. Images of the frozen north were amplified within the confines of the ice rink, and in truth were not dispelled in the great outdoors; but this time Belfast was caught in the embrace of a big blue sky, and it was sweltering.
I went up with two friends and we booked into the Premier Inn for two nights. It’s just across the Lagan river in the Titanic Quarter, a new development growing around the dockside and the famous shipyards, and adjacent to the Odyssey Complex. Technically, we’re staying in County Down, and this will be the first time I’ve overnighted in that particular county. Most of Belfast is in County Antrim.
As it turned out, the Enterprise didn’t boldly go where it was supposed to, instead depositing us at Lisburn, nine miles short. The rail service put on a few busses to ferry us into the city. It was a cheerful, if cramped half hour, us southern sardines standing and swaying as the cheerful driver kept his foot to the floor and an entertaining patter going with those of us nearby. He delivered us to the terminal on Great Victoria Street on the west side of the city centre.
We first put into The Crown Liquor Saloon, it being on our hit list and also being the first pub we saw. Travelling on a hot day is thirsty work. Originally this was called the Railway Tavern for the principal Railway station across the road. The first station was built in 1848 in the first flowering of Irish railroads. Glory days are made to pass and it was closed in 1971, and demolished to make way for a modern block. A new station openend in 1995 adjoining the Great Northern Mall shopping centre. The name Great Northern here alludes to the Great Northern Railway which absorbed the original Ulster Railway of 1838.
Meanwhile, the pub was renovated and renamed the Crown in 1885. It was conceived as a Victorian gin palace, as the lavishly ornate bars of the era were known. Publican Patrick Flanagan employed Italian craftsmen who were engaged in the construction of Catholic churches, enjoying a boom in Belfast at that time. The Italians certainly stamped the Crown with their exuberance. The colourful tiled exterior is eye catching and the effect continues in the glowing interior, also decorated with tiles and illuminated by gas lamps. Stained glass partitions separate a total of ten snugs with original antique fittings. So it was that we three amigos collapsed into the Crown and took possession of a snug.
Belfast city centre is laid out in grid form indicating its relatively modern conception. Its population stands at 350,000 in the urban area, with 650,000 in the wider metropolitan area. Yet two hundred years ago the city population was barely a tenth of that. It may have had a castle in Norman times, but the largest castle of note in the vicinity was Carrickfergus, still is, ten miles north on the shores of the Lough. Carrickfergus was essentially the capital of Ulster since 1177 when John De Courcy established Norman power there shortly after Strongbow’s invasion and Henry II’s assertion of overlordship. English power was stalled by Edward de Bruce’s campaign in the fourteenth century. Edward was the brother of Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland, and was himself proclaimed King of Ireland in 1315. He captured Carrickfergus but three years later he was defeated and slain by Anglo Irish forces at the Battle of Faughart, near Dundalk. Edward’s reign was brief, and rarely extended past Ulster, but English rule remained stalled for a further three centuries.
It wasn’t until 1615 that Sir Arthur Chichester founded Belfast as a town. Belfast Castle was established, built on the ruling O’Neill’s tower house and becoming a focal point as the Plantation of Ulster took off. That castle burnt down a century later. The current Belfast Castle is physically remote from the ancient castle which fell into ruin and then oblivion. It was built in 1870 on the Donegall family’s deerpark on the outskirts of Belfast at Cave Hill. It is actually a grand Victorian residence, in the Scots Baronial style, though in the hands of Belfast City Council for the last century and is open to the public and may also be booked for events and weddings.
English, Manx and Huguentot settlers predominated in the early colonisation of Belfast. It was the Huguenots and Scottish Presbyterians who introduced the linen trade which fuelled the increasing growth of the town. Through the 19th century, Belfast establsihed itself as one of the major linen producers in the world and acquired the nickname Linenopolis. Try saying that after a few jars.
Our cross city navigation was easy enough. Great Victoria Street is a busy thoroughfare lined by tall buildings running north south and defining the western edge of the city centre. Next door to the station is the Europa Hotel, once dubbed the most bombed hotel in world, having suffered thirty six bomb attacks during the Troubles; being the conflict in Norrthern Ireland that lasted for thirty years until 1998. Yet the Europa endures. It was built on the site of the original railway station and was the popular haunt for journalists in those troubled times. Today the twelve stoey tower is a four star luxury hotel with two hundred and seventy bedrooms, and promises a quiet night’s sleep.
Adjacent is the Grand Opera House. This opened in 1895 with a thousand seater auditorium hosting variety shows and musicals. Over the years performers have included Sarah Bernhardt, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Orson Welles and Luciano Pavarotti. The onset of the Troubles saw a decline in fortunes and developers wanted to pull it down. Sense prevailed, and the building was bought by the Arts Council and listed in 1974. A recent refurbishment has restored the plush ambience of its glory days. Theatre tours can be booked and the upcoming programme includes a heady mix of musical entertsinment, with Oliver, the Rocky Horror Show and the Buddy Holly Story on the bill.
At right angles, the parallel avenues of Chichester Street and May Street head due east, reaching the Lagan River and Belfast Lough just beyond another Victoria Street, which must cause some confusion. Mind you, there is something of an obsession with that particular monarch hereabouts, so inextricably is the city linked to the Victorian age.
Either route takes us through the busy commercial centre of Belfast, and midway along we find City Hall. Belfast City Hall does what a city hall should, providing the centre point and pivotal landmark for the city it serves. It was conceived in 1888 when Belfast, at last, was granted city status by the Queen, Queen Victoria of course. From a population of only twenty thousand in 1800 it was the largest city in Ireland by then, passing the three hundred thousand mark, so it was not before time that it was recognised as a city.
The City Hall and grounds occupies Donegall Square, named in honour of the Chichester family, founders of the city. Arthur Chichester was made Earl of Donegall in 1647 and the family castle once stood nearby. The county itself is now spelt with one l: Donegal. The building was designed by Alfred Brumwell Thomas, an English architect. Completed in 1906 it is faced in white Portland stone, a shining palace in Neo Baroque style. There are echoes of the phanthom fortress long gone, with a tower in each corner and a soaring copper dome capping the centrepiece column. The grounds are strewn with monuments to Queen Victoria (again), Edward James Harland of shipyards fame and those who sailed on the Titanic. There is also the Garden of Remembrance and Cenotaph. The extensive lawns accomodate the public. They are out in force on this most glorious of days, but can relax here on any day, to take the sunsine and forget such cares that life, and history can bring.
At the end of Grassmarket the road divides. Straight on and you pass under the bridges that buttress the Old Town. Candlemaker Row slopes upward to join George IV Bridge with the wall of Greyfriars Churchyard along one side. The Grey Friars themselves were Franciscans whose monastery was dissolved in 1560 as Scotland was gripped by the Reformation. The cemetery was a replacement for the St Giles Cathedral churchyard up on the Royal Mile. It was a place of free assembly and The Covenanters signed the National Covenant here in 1638. This asserted the primacy of the Scottish Presbyterian Church but their revolt was soon defeated in the Battle of Bothwell Bridge. Following the battle, four hundred prisoners were held in a section of the churchyard, and it became known as the Covenanters Prison.
Most famous of the kirkyard’s former residents is a wee dog. Greyfriars Bobby. A Skye Terrier, he belonged to a nightwatchman with the city police, John Gray. When Gray died in 1858, it is said that Bobby, his watchdog, kept watch at the graveside until its own death fourteen years later. By this time he had become well known, to the extent that Edinburgh’s Lord Provost, William Chambers had the dog licensed and collared. A year after Bobby died, English philanthropist, Lady Angela Burdett-Coutts was so touched by the story that she had a statue erected in is memory. Outside the gates you’ll find the granite fountain surmounted by a lifesize bronze statue of Bobby.
The legend has grown. I saw the Disney film back in the early sixties. This was based on Eleanor Atkinson’s novel of 1912 and has a different version of events. Here, John Gray is a farmer who comes to Edinburgh and dies. A major character is Mr John Traill, of Trail’s Temperance Coffee House, who in real life claimed Jock and Bobby were regular visitors. As the coffee house was opened four years after Gray’s death, it may be something of a shaggy dog story. A more recent film in 2005 controversially starred a West Highland Terrier playing Bobby, an example of cultural appropriation. The Temperance Coffee House was located outside the gates, and is now, thankfully a bar. Greyfriars Bobby’s Bar is an old style pub, with outside tables to catch the midday sun
Around the corner on Forrest Road is Sandy Bell’s, another pub on the Rankin Rebus Pub Crawl. This is a folk bar with evening sessions featuring Irish and Scottish traditional music. It’s a century old and was first known as the Forrest Hill. Blossoming in the folk heyday of the sixties, Barbara Dickson, Billy Connolly and Gerry Rafferty are amongst its alumni. In the 80s a landlord installed a puggie or slot machine, bane of British pubs, but the regulars delivered an ultimatum, either it goes or we go, and it lasted all of a day. Sandy Bell’s became the official name in the nineties, as that’s what everyone called it, dating back to the twenties when the pub was owned by a Mrs Bell.
Across the street is the Scottish Museum. This is two buildings. The Royal Museum was built in the 1860s and houses displays of industry, science, technology and natural history. The modern building from 1998 is a formidable and concrete slab in the Le Corbusier style, which paradoxically concentrates on history and antiquities. Admission is free. The old building has that Great Exhibition air to it; the Grand Gallery of cast iron and light was inspired by the Crystal Palace.
The Discoveries Gallery features the world of adventure and invention.You can meet Dolly the Sheep. Born in 1996, she was the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, and kept at the Roslin Institute for animal research where she died in 2003 from lung cancer. Ian Wilmut leader of the research group derived the name from the fact that Dolly was cloned from a mammary gland cell and, sez he, “There’s no more impressive pair of mammary glands than Dolly Parton’s.”
There’s exhibitions on Ancient Egypt and East Asia, and the arguably more ancient Elton John’s suit is amongst the fashion artefacts on display. In the new building Scotland is investigated through the ages. This is rich in detail but challenging. Some years back I visited Stirling Castle, which had an excellent guided tour, along with permanent displays that clearly mapped the heritage of Scottish Kings and Queens. I didn’t really get that clear a narrative here, perhaps I was tiring. It’s a vast museum, and hard to take in everything in one day. Worth a visit, or two.
The statue guarding the entrance is of William Chambers, who asides from his love of dogs, had a notable career. Born in 1800, he opened his first bookshop at nineteen and established a publishing empire with his younger brother Robert. As Lord Provost of Edinburgh in the 1860s he initiated major street construction projects hereabouts.
Chambers Street connects to the North and South Bridges joining Old and New Towns and bisected by the Royal Mile. I’m searching for the Royal Oak, another stop on the Rebus Pub Crawl. Hidden down Infirmary Road, its modest entrance leads to a welcoming traditional bar. The pub is two centuries old and is long established as an informal folk music venue. It features in Rankin’s Set in Darkness, eleventh in the Rebus series set during the birth of Scottish devolution. A duo discusses politics at the upstairs bar while I am engaged by the young lady serving. She tells me tales of growing up on Scotland’s east coast and I can thread in vague experiences of my own including Inverness and the shores of Lough Ness. There be monsters and dragons, and bagpipe festivals, and ancient standing stones where you might catch a glimpse of Catriona Balfe flitting through timezones in a diaphanous shift. But I digress. The lady merges the two conversational groups and now we argue over the travails of Mister Trump and his chances of reelection. There’s a smoke break, and I’m left alone with the mirrors and memories, and haunting lines of musicians who have gone or yet to visit.
Last on Rankin’s list is Bennetts, another old style pub on the southern approaches. It’s on my route home to Morningside, retracing my steps back to Tollcross and onto Leven Street. Bennetts is next door to the King’s Theatre, currently closed for renovations. There’s been a pub here since 1839, its current incarnation dates to the start of the twentieth century, about the time the theatre first opened. It’s a beautiful Victorian bar with high windows, wood and brass fittings, an open fire and snug. Here I spy the bagpipe busker from outside the Academy, his weaponry laid out on the table on his LGBQT flag. The barman proposes a chocolate flavoured stout which hails, I think, from Skye. Meanwhile, beyond Bennett’s huge windows, the sky above has opened and the deluge pours upon all without. I should stay sheltered I suppose.
Further on, Bruntsfield Place rejoices in the high, neo-gothic architecture typical of the city. Bruntsfield is birthplace of Muriel Spark. Her novel the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was published in 1961. It was filmed in 1969 starring Maggie Smith. The film depicts Jean living in this area with the school based on nearby Morningside. On one of my all too many days off school I snuck into a Dublin cinema to catch this, becoming lost in a world of Scottish schoolgirls, bohemian art and some challenging social political theory. Maggie Smith won an Oscar. I’m in m’prime!
Bruntsfield Links provides a welcome slice of greenery on the city’s edge. It is, perhaps, the founding place for the ancient game of golf. The Golf Tavern boasts of dating back to 1456. Certainly, the Links were the playground of the Edinburgh Burgess Golfing Society, now known as the Royal, which claims to be the oldest golf society in the world, formed in 1735. They became a club and moved to their own course in 1890. There is still a pitch and putt course on the Links, but most is now a public park.
From the seats outside I have a view across the links to Arthur’s Seat. Arthur’s Seat is a remnant of the ancient volcano, along with Calton Hill, and the Castle Crag. It has featured frequently in the city’s literature, with many appearances in the Rebus series. One particularly evocative scene occurs in James Hogg’s fantastical novel the Confessions of a Justified Sinner of 1824. A broken spectre on the misty mountain makes for an eerie culmination in the struggle between the two sibling protagonists, George and Robert. Robert and his evil alter ego, Gil Martin is another inspiration for Jekyll and Hyde.
The Arthur in question is said to be the legendary king of the Britons who halted the AngloSaxon advance in the sixth century. Those events and their people are lost in the mists of time. Rather as Arthur’s Seat is now. A fog, or haar, has swept over the Old Town, so that as I turn to say farewell, the spires and peaks and castle of Auld Reikie float on its murky cushion, slipping off towards the horizon. And are gone.
The Edinburgh Writers’ Museum is a good place to get a grounding in the city’s literature. It features three writers who are prominent in the historical canon: Robert Burns, Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. The building itself is well hidden, being off one of those many narrow, windie ways that drop down from the spine of the Royal Mile to the city of the plains below. Having missed it the day before, I find myself back at the summit of the Old Town again, clearer of mind and vision, determined to reach my target. The Old Town is, of course, crowned with the Castle fronted by the famous Esplanade, conjuring visions of strapping Scotsmen in kilts blowing a multitude of bagpipes. From here descends the Royal Mile, main street Scotland and a mixed wonderland. After the sedate aura of the Camera Obscura, the street is again thronged and rings with the refrains of serial bagpipers busking in doorways.
Helpfully, there’s a tourist pointing down the laneway by a souvenir shop, which turns out to be Lady Stair’s Close connecting Lawnmarket and the Mound. A close is a gated enclosure, for the posher sort who didn’t want to rub soldiers with regular folk. A wynde, meanwhile, was open to all. The narrow lane widens to reveal a quaint, but grand, turretted house. Lady Stair’s House was built in 1622 for Sir William Gray, and was long known for his widow, Lady Gray, who continued to live there after his death. Their granddaughter Elizabeth Dundas, became Lady Stair and that name is now attached to the building. In fact, the original house was largely demolished in an extensive renewal of the Old Town in the late nineteenth century. The new house is a cunning medieval pastiche by Arts and Crafts architect Stewart Henbest Capper. Other than the inscribed lintel little above ground remains from the original. All was passed on to the Burgh in 1907 for use as a museum by then owner, Archibald Primrose, the Earl of Rosebery. The house overlooks Makars’ Court. Makar is the Sots term for a writer, or bard. It was appled here in 1997 when twelve writers were commemorated with quotes from their work engraved on pavement slabs. There are over forty there now. Amongst them, one from Walter Scott:Walter Scott: This is my own, my native land.
I mooch around for a while, as the preceeding tourist points at various parts of the building. Entrance is free and offers a series of nestled portals into a number of worlds. There’s Robert Burns, Scotland’s Bard, who epitomises the traditional national identity in the music of language. Born in Ayr in 1759, he wrote in English, and the Guid Scots Tongue, and indeed often somewhere in between. Scots is the old English of the Anglo Saxon settlement of Britian and is preserved in Burns’s poetry. His first collection Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, includes To a Mouse, a startling ode to empathy.
Meanwhile, Address to a Haggis is the focal ceremony of Burns Night, another Scottish National Holiday in Winter. Saint Andrew’s Day in November, and Hogmanay on New Year’s Eve being the others. The Haggis, served with tatties (Potatoes) and neaps (parsnips), is a rite of passage for anyone wishing to eat their way through Scotland. White pudding is our equivalent, humbler than the exalted haggis; Great Chieftain o’ the Pudding Race, as Rabbie puts it. Burns is also responsible for Auld Lang Syne, which he adapted from an ancient source. It is a song of farewell, but implicitly of unextinguishable friendship. It is the standard farewell to the old year, and a welcome to the new throughout the English speaking world. And then there’s Jools Holland. Burns himself bade farewell to this earth in 1796, at the age of thirty seven.
The best laid schemes o mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lae’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
The museum’s Walter Scott display includes the first edition of Waverley and the press on which the Waverley novels were printed, James Ballantyne’s handpress. There’s a lifesize tableau to bring you into that world.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 1894) completes the trio. An illustration for Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes 1879 is based on the quote:
I lay lazily smoking and studying the colour of the sky, as we call the void of space, from where it showed a reddish grey behind the pines to where it showed a glossy blue black beween the stars,
The line speaks to all travellers who have reflected on their travels. Writers should stensil it to their bedroom ceiling; make it the motto of their dreams, and their inspiration on waking. Consider also Treasure Island, Kidnapped, A Child’s Garden of Verses. There’s a ring Stevenson received as a present from a Samoan chief, engraved Tusitala, signifying the teller of tales. Stevenson was certainly a masterful weaver of tales, from the raw material of his travels, his imagination, and the humdrum of life. His wardrobe is here, made by the infamous Deacon Brodie. Brodie was a renowned cabinet maker and locksmith, skills he also harnessed when moonlighting as a burglar. His split life was a possible inspiration for the Strange Case of Doctor Jeckyll and Mister Hyde. Stevenson died in Samoa and is buried there beneath the epitaph: Home is the sailor home from the sea.
A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five pound note, is another quote to leave with; though you’d be hard put to get a pint out of the latter in modern Edinburgh. Drunk from the joys of literature, I feel an actual drink would be in order. I wind my way downhill past The Bow, and on to Grassmarket.
Grassmarket is a long plaza in the shadow of Casle Rock, with a concentration of eateries and drinking dens. Cobblestoned and tree lined, it’s perfect for an outdoor drink on a sunny day. The Black Bull, the Beehive, The White Hart and Biddy Mulligan’s are just some of the species of wild life you’ll find here. Dating back to the late fourteenth century, the area for centuries operaed as a horse and cattle market. Some of the hostelries are indeed ancient and ripe with story. William and his sister Dorothy Worsworth stayed at the White Hart, as did Robbie Burns, and more balefully, the murderers Burke and Hare. Though not all at the same time. The Wordsworth’s stay is recorded in Dorothy’s Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, 1803. The account features the six week sojourn of the Wordsworth’s through the Scottish Highlands with their friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Their journey by jaunting car was something of a Romantic epic, amd a homage to such Scottish literary and historic figures as Burns, Scott, Rob Roy and William Wallace.It was published posthumously in 1874. Up until the end of the twentieth century Grassmarket remained a rough area, but recent developments have brought it upmarket, with outdoor wining and dining to the fore. The views of the Castle rising above the marketplace have become emblems of the city, and a magnet for tourists along with the hostelries.
My route takes me towards Candlemaker Row, a street rising up past Greyfriars to the heights of the George IV Bridge. Perched on the corner of Merchants Street is the Oz Bar where I linger a while on outdoor seating perched on its sloping sidewalk. Greyfriars Churchyard and cemetary is across the road. At a nearby table, a young American lady is sketching a view of the Castle which hovers in the sky above the tall buildings. A varied group of Latinos occupies much of the rest of the seating, talking fluently in English, with sprinklings of Italian and Spanish (I think) thrown in. The Oz harks to the land down under, and is suitably sunkissed today. The building was gutted in the same fire that did for the Elephant House a couple of years back. Happily, it has risen again from the ashes. The sun sends a welcoming cone of light down from the heights of the Castle to include us all. I can float like a speck of spiralling dust for as long as it takes. Time truly stands still in this corner of the city.
Edinburgh’s Old Town rises south of Prince’s Street, an audacious signature across the sky. The Castle occupies the high, westernmost part of Castle Hill. This is a volcanic plug, formed when magma cooled in a massive volcano that stood here three hundred million years ago. The hill that remains stands four hundred and thirty feet above sea level, surrounded by cliffs on three sides. Rising two hundred and fifty feet above the surrounding plain, it made for an ideal defensive location in ancient times. Picts, Gaels and Anglo Saxons have taken advantage of that and abided here. Its Gaelic name is Dun Edin, the fortress of Edin, though who, or what, Edin was, nobody knows. It was established as a burgh by King David in 1124. David ruled from 1124 to 1153. He subsequently became a saint, the only avenue of promotion open to a king, and seldom granted. In the real world, he introduced Norman style administration to Scotland, superceding the Gaelic system that prevailed.
More coloquially, Edinburgh is also known as Auld Reekie, or old smoky as we would say. Being built on a rocky outcrop, and this being the north, the fires of the citizens smoke could be seen from twenty miles away. And country folk do refer to the big city as the Big Smoke
Beneath Castle Hill lies the New Town, with Prince’s Street marking its northern edge. Edinburgh’s principal street is lined with imposing commercial buildings, though a grumpy Dub might say it is like O’Connell Street with one side missing. That, of course, allows for the view, probably the best urban panorama you are likely to see. The serrated skyline of the Old Town topped by the Castle, viewed across a sylvan park dotted with choice statues and grand buildings.
The eastern end of the street is dominated by the Balmoral Hotel and Calton Hill with its monument strewn summit. Edinburgh is also known as the Athens of the North, eighteenth century travellers noting the similarity between the cities, particularly the Acropolis floating above the lower city and Castle Hill. Artist Hugh William Williams held an exhibition in 1822 with his sketches of Edinburgh and Athens displayed alongside each other for comparison. Calton Hill became the focus for this notion with the design of the National Monument of Scotland modelled on the Parthenon in Athens. Begun in 1826 as a monument to Scotish soldiers and sailors who had died in the Napoleonic Wars, lack of funds meant it was left incomplete in 1829. This might also recall one tourist’s comments on first seeing the Acropolis; hmmm, it will be nice when it’s finished
The view over the city from here is certainly iconic. The Balmoral Tower nearby is a dominant feature on the skyline. The building was designed by William Hamilton Beattie, and completed in 1901. It operated as the North British Hotel until the early nineties, when it became the Balmoral, just in time for my arrival in Edinburgh. At least, I dreamed of staying there, while lounging with M atop Calton Hill back in the day, furiously smoking into the mist, wondering which improbable tower we would most like to occupy for the night. One writer who made her dream real was JK Rowling. She was then just beginning her series on the exploits of tyro magician Harry Potter.
The Philosopher’s Stone began life in Porto, ultimately seeing the light of day in Edinburgh where she lived from 1995. Her haunt then was the Elephant House coffee shop, its magical views of Edinburgh Castle inspiring the fantastical setting of her work. She completed her series in a room at the Balmoral, something of a point of pilgrimage for the more fabulously well to do Harry Potter fan. It will cost you a grand a night. It would take me nearly a week to spend that amount on accommodation here. Which is plenty. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows brought the epic to an end in 2007.
The Elephant House is set further south on George IV Bridge, one of a number of bridges connecting the Old Town with its surrounding lowlands. The bridge is mostly lined with buildings, but there’s a gap at the Elephant House where you can gaze into the gloomy chasm of Cowgate. A terrace to the rear of the coffee house gives wonderful views of the castle, and here Rowling liked to sit and let her imagination run riot. Sadly, the building was giutted by fire last year, and there has been no movement since towards reconstruction.
Other than the Balmoral, the south side of Prince’s street is devoted to parkland and spectacle. The main rail station, Waverley, is next door, recessed in the hollow between North Bridge and Waverley Bridge. The Mound, leading up to the Old Town, was made from excavated ground, and the lower slope hosts The Scottish National Gallery and the Royal Scottish Academy. Prince’s Street Gardens makes a wonderful foreground for views of Castle Hill. All of this was originally a stagnant pool, the North Loch, filled in on the construction of the New Town.
The Scott Monument marks the eastern entrance to the gardens. It is two hundred feet tall, the largest monument to a writer in Europe and was designed by an amateur, George Kemp. He won the competition to design a fitting memorial to the recently deceased writer and work started in 1838. The dark, gothic masterpiece was completed in 1844, but Kemp never saw that, having drowned in the Union Canal some months earlier returning home from work.
Walter Scott was born in 1771. A writer, historian and public figure, he became a personification of Scottish literature and nationhood. He was amongst the first to use history as a basis for literary fiction with The Waverly Novels. These begun in 1814 with Waverley. Scott, then best known as a poet, published them anonymously, and subsequent novels had the byline: the author of Waverley. The narratives are frequently set in 17th or 18th century Scotland; such as Rob Roy, but also in Medieval England (Ivanhoe) and during the the Crusades in the Holy Land. They became hugely popular, defining narratives of the Romantic Age, establishing in our minds, or hearts, the exalted notions of romantic love, adventure, heroism and nationality. Something that Waverley Station, named for them, scarcely does. Walter Scott died in 1832.
The National Gallery of Scotland and the Royal Scottish Academy are at the base of the Mound. Both are in the neoclassical style and designed by William Henry Playfair. The Academy opened in 1826. Its annual exhibition, like our own RHA, features the work of contemporary Scottish artists. The National was built thirty years later and features leading traditional Scottish painters along with a good collection of international art; Peter Paul Rubens, Titian,Cezanne and Turner amongst them. The Impressionists are well represented, allegedly. However, as seems to be the case in most cities these days, half the gallery is closed for renovation, which put paid to the Impressionists. The gallery is rather small to begin with, but there is a fine display of Scottish masters.
Monarch of the Glen by Edward Landseer is the most famed. Landseer was an English painter, but frequently visited the Scottish Highlands for their wild landscapes. He also provided the Lions guarding Nelson’s Column in London. The Monarch was painted in 1851 having been commissioned by the House of Lords. Since they proved too stingy to pay for it, it went into private ownership. Frequently loaned out for exhibition, it became hugely popular with the public. Pears Soap acquired it in the twentieth century and used it in its advertising. Distillers Dewars and Glenfiddisch followed suit. McVitie’s use of on the packaging of Scottish Shortbread probably lead to the painting being deemed the ultimate biscuit tin image of Scotland. Eventually it came home in a way, Diageo selling it to the National for the knockdown price of four million.
From the National Gallery of Art I head uphill towards the Edinburgh Writers’ Museum. This should be easy to find, but wasn’t. Edinburgh is a windie city, and I am distracted by the rain, the bagpipes and the sheer joy of it all. I find myself in Bow Street and seek solace in Ian Rankin’s Rebus Pub Crawl, remembering that the Bow Bar is number four on the list. The West Bow is an ancient Edinburgh Street, rising in two levels to the giddy heights of the Castle. The Bow Bar is a determinedly traditional brown bar, dark and timbered, with floor to ceiling windows. In fact it was refitted in this style in the early 1990s. I order an IPA from the young one behind the bar, a Belma and Louise, to be precise. The bar is packed but I make for the one vacant table by the window where I pose in the shaft of honeyed light sweeping down from on high, and lose myself in the moment.
xxharrison 