A Walk through Craiglochart and Colinton Dell

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If the literary walking group had enjoyed an eleventh literary outing, it would have been to walk up river from Slateford to Colinton through Craiglochart and Colinton Dell. Had they done so, they would have walked through a glorious wooded valley, one of Edinburgh’s “hidden gems”, and visited the newly unveiled statute of RLS, standing outside the gates of Colinton Kirk.

As a boy, Stevenson often visited Colinton where his mother’s father, the Rev Balfour, a man born in the 18^th century, was minister.  Mid nineteenth century Colinton was still, in some respects, a hill village, but the Water of Leith, which flowed through the Dell, was home to relentless industrial activity.  Historically, a succession of mills – flour mills, snuff mills – had been built along its banks, from Balerno to the sea.  In the 1840s, a chain of reservoirs had been constructed in the Pentland Hills to satisfy the drinking needs of a growing urban population, and “compensation reservoirs” were built at Bavelaw and Harlaw to ensure that the Water of Leith didn’t run dry.  From the garden of the manse, Stevenson’s favourite view of the river was through a water door embowered in shrubbery:

The river is there dammed back for the service of the flour mill just below, so that it dies lies deep and darkling, and the sand slopes into brown obscurity with a glint of gold; and it has but newly been recruited by the borrowings of the snuff mill just above, and these, tumbling merrily in, shake the pool to its black heart, fill it with drowsy eddies, and set the curded froth of many other mills solemnly steering to and from upon the surface.

The Manse: Memories and Portraits

Keepsake Mill

Over the borders, a sin without pardon,

Breaking the branches and crawling below,

Out through the breach in the wall of the garden,

Down by the banks of the river, we go.

Here is the mill with the humming of thunder,

Here is the weir with the wonder of foam,

Here is the sluice with the race running under –

Marvellous places, though handy to home!

Sounds of the village grown stiller and stiller,

Stiller the note of the birds on the hill;

Dusty and dim and are the eyes of the miller,

Deaf are his ears with the moil of the mill.

A Child’s Garden of Verses (XXIV)

Where go the Boats?

 

Dark Brown is the river,

Golden is the sand.

It flows along for ever,

With trees on either hand.

Green leaves a-floating,

Castles of the foam,

Boats of mine a-boating-

Where will all come home?

On goes the river

And out past the mill,

Away down the valley,

Away down the hill.

Away down the river,

A hundred miles or more,

Other little children

Shall bring my boats ashore.

A Child’s Garden of Verses (XIV)

Yesterday, I couldn’t help feeling – and the literary walking group, had they been with me, perhaps might have agreed – that the day had the feeling of the last Sunday of autumn, so I decided to catch a bus from the centre of the city and walk up river from Slateford  to Colinton Kirk.  I began my walk immediately opposite the Water of Leith information centre along the path that threads behind the Tickled Trout. On the opposite bank of the river, I had good views of the walled gardens at Redhall.  There was frost in the glen, otherwise golden. Up river, I noticed the remains of a mill race and a massive weir.   At Colinton, I encountered the statue of Stevenson at the kirkyard gate.  On the wall behind, an official notice told me of a Stevenson walk.  I couldn’t help wondering what RLS would have made of all this -the sickling child who dreamed from an invalid’s bed, the vagabond who loved the freedom of the open road, the  man who, above all, occupied the world of the imagination.  Would he, I wondered, be puzzled by a life explained, and a carefully delineated Stevenson route?

• Stevenson, RL, Memories and Portraits, 1887
• Adam Smith, Janet (Ed), Stevenson, Collected Poems, 1971

Edinburgh’s Northern New Town: Literary Walk 11th November 2013

Our seventh literary tour took us from the Scottish National Portrait Gallery via Drummond Place to Scotland Street  – we didn’t pass no 44  – and the northern entrance of the long blocked Scotland Street Tunnel.  We headed westwards along  Eyre Place to Henderson Row, and beginning our ascent in the lengthy shadows of St Stephens’s Church, climbed to  Heriot Row and Castle Street.  This horse shoe walk  took us almost as far as the Assembly Rooms,  where we shall meet next Monday.

From SNPG to Scotland Street:

In Picturesque  Notes (1878), Robert Louis Stevenson, expresses his views on the New Town of Edinburgh very plainly,  He was after all, a man, pre-eminently,  of the hills and sea.  By the time of Stevenson’s birth, in 1850, James Craig’s original New Town had mushroomed.  The construction of a northern new town,  planned by Reid and Sibbald, had begun in about 1813. with its first houses appearing  in Heriot Row.     By 1824, William Burn had  built a new classical academy on its northern perimeter, a school to  rival the High School, and a few years later William Playfair’s St Stephen’s Church opened at the foot of Howe Street.  For Stevenson, the New Town was inward looking.  He  couldn’t contain his displeasure at the expense of its “town bird” creator:

It cannot be denied that the original design was faulty and short sighted, and did not fully profit by the capabilities of the situation.  The architect was essentially a town bird. And he laid out the modern city with a view to street scenery, and to street scenery alone.  The country did not enter into his plan; he had never lifted his eyes unto the hills.  If he had so chosen, every street upon the northern slope might have been a noble terrace and commanded an extensive and beautiful view…

Drummond Place, at the eastern end of Great King Street, mirrored St Andrew Square and George Street to the south.  In more recent times, it was the home of Sir Compton Mackenzie and the poet and  “wit”  Sydney Goodsir- Smith.   Mackenzie lived at no 31 Drummond Place.  Before their marriage, his then sister in law, later his third wife, Lily, ran a hairdressing saloon from the basement of the house.

Although expressing  his dismay at the “draughty parallelograms” of the New Town, the young Stevenson, sought out its green places, its nooks and corners, with eagerness:

But the effect of not one of them will compare with the discoverer’s joy, and the sense of old Time and his slow changes on the face of this earth, with which I explored such corners as Canonmills or water Lane, or the nugget of cottages at Broughton Market.  They were far more rural than the open country, and gave a greater impression of antiquity than the oldest land upon the High Street…

Stevenson, RL:  Edinburgh Picturesque Notes, Chapter 6, “Town and Country”, 1878

Youngson, AJ:  The Making of Classical Edinburgh, Edinburgh, 1975

Scotland Street Tunnel:

As a sickly child, Stevenson was captivated by the excitement of rail travel.  The “subterranean  passage” of Scotland Street tunnel, emerging immediately beneath Drummond Place, was a place of profound excitement

The sight of the Scotland Street Station, the sight of the trains shooting out of its dark maw with the two guards upon the brake, the thought of its length and the many ponderous edifices and open thoroughfares above, were certainly things of paramount impressiveness to a young mind.  It was a subterranean passage, although of a larger bore than we were accustomed to in Ainsworth’s novels; and these two words, “subterranean passage”, were in themselves an irresistible attraction, and seemed to bring us nearer in spirit in to the heroes we loved and the black rascals we secretly aspired to imitate…

From a Railway Carriage Window

Faster than Fairies, faster than witches,

Bridges and Houses, hedges and ditches;

And charging along like troops in a battle,

All through the meadows the horses and the cattle:

All of the sights of the hill and the plain

Fly as thick as driving rain;

And ever again, in the wink of an eye,

Painted stations whistle by

Child’s Garden of Verses, XXXVII published 1885

In July 1865, at the instigation of businessman and philanthropist, John Cox, of Gorgie House,the former site of Canonmills Loch was transformed into the  Royal Patent Gymnasium.  Attractions included a giant see-saw with a leverage of 50 feet.

Henderson Row:

RLS attended the Edinburgh Academy from  1861-1863 where he was taught by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, the “master” referred to in “Poem for a Class Re-union”.  In a letter written in January 1875, he recalls attending an annual dinner of Academy schoolfellows and describes how he read verses to his old school friends:  It is great fun: I always read verses, and in the vinous moment they always propose to have then printed…

Poem for a Class Re-Union:

Whether we like it, or don’t,

There’s a sort of bond in the fact

That we all by one master were taught,

By one master were bullied and whach’t.

And now all the more, when we see

Our class in so shrunken a state

And we, who were seventy-two,

Diminished to seven or eight….

RLS also celebrated the Thompson class re-union in Their Laureate to an Academy Class Dinner Club, a poem which he wrote in the Scots tongue.

Heriot Row:

The Stevenson family home was at 17 Heriot Row.   There are echoes of Heriot Row, transferred to Randolph Crescent in Stevenson’s semi auto-autobiographical short story, the  Misadventures of John Nicholson.

Suggested poems:

Windy Nights, IX, Child’s Garden of Verses

The Lamplighter, XXX, Child’s Garden of Verses

The Land of Counterpane, XVI, Child’s Garden of Verses

The Land of Nod

From breakfast on through all the day

At home among my friends I stay;

But every night I go abroad

Afar into the land of Nod….

Child’s Garden of Verses, XXXVII

Collected Poems of RLS, A Child’s Garden of Verses, edited Janet Adam Smith, London 1971

For Stevenson’s more bohemian, rebellious view of Edinburgh, read

My brain swims empty and light:

,..I walk the streets smoking my pipe

And I love the dallying shop girl

That leans with rounded stern to look at the fashions;

And I hate the bustling citizen,

The eager and hurrying man of affairs I hate,

Because he bears his intolerance writ on his face

And every movement and word of him tells me how much he hate me.

I love the night in the city,

The lighted streets and the swinging gaits of harlots.

I love cool pale morning,

In the empty bye-streets,

With only here and there a female figure,

A slavey with lifted dress and the key in her hand,

A girl or two at play at a corner of waste land

Tumbling and showing their legs and crying out to me loosely.

Poems 1869-1879,XXIV,  Collected Poems of RLS, edited Janet Adam Smith, London 1971

North Castle Street:

Until his bankruptcy in 1826, Sir Walter Scott resided at 39 North Castle Street.  There was a sedan chair rank, further up the hill, at the junction with George Street.  In his novel, Waverley, expressing admiration at the strength of Fergus MacIvor’s Highland followers (as they lift and transport an injured Edward Waverley from the scene of a stag hunt), Scott remarks that it was not improbable that they may have been the ancestors of some of those sturdy Gael who now have the happiness to transport the belles of Edinburgh in their sedan chairs, to ten routes in one evening (Sir Walter Scott, Waverley, Vol.II, Chapter 1)

…

Regent Road, the New Calton Cemetery and Holyrood: Literary Walk 4th November 2013

Our sixth literary walk linked the Regent Road, Edinburgh’s early19^th century eastern approach road, with Holyrood and the Canongate . An image of afternoon light on New Calton Cemetery, much as we experienced, turned the  thoughts of Robert Louis Stevenson, in far off Samoa, to home:

There, on the sunny frontage of a hill,

Hard by the house of kings, repose the dead,

My dead, the ready and the strong of word,

         Their works, the salt encrusted, still survive;

         The sea bombards their founded towers; the night

        Thrills pierced with their strong lamps.  The artificers,

      One after one, here in this grated cell,

      Where the rain erases and the rust consumes,

     Fell upon lasting silence..

    

                                           Suggested Reading:  Regent Road to Abbey Hill:

• Stevenson, RLS:    “Edinburgh Picturesque Notes”:  RLS writes of the view southwards from the top of Calton Hill, from where he could pick out former city jail and the High School yards:  In the one you may perhaps see female prisoners taking exercise like a string of nuns; in the other, schoolboys running at play and their shadows keeping step with them..

Henry, Lord Cockburn:  Writing in “Memorials of His Time” Cockburn observes how by 1816 quarrying activities on the edge Salisbury Crags had considerably widened the footpath running along the bottom of the crags, since his first youthful scrabble up there in 1788.

Scott,  Sir Walter, Heart of Midlothian, contains a beautiful evocation of the view from the Crags.

WE Henley:  “From A Window in Princes Street”:  Above the Crags that fade and gloom/Starts the bare knee of Arthur’s Seat…

John Whitworth:  “The Big School”:  It grows from one of Edinburgh’s seven hills/ This pagan temple on its jutty shelf/ Extends its railway blackened-vertical? Severe and chaste as Pallas is herself…

Wordsworth,  Dorothy: “Recollection of a Tour Made in Scotland 1803″, contains a description of a climb up Arthur’s Seat:  …We sate down on a stone not far from (St Anthony’s) chapel overlooking pastoral hollow as wild and solitary as any in the Heart of the Highland Mountains…

Knox, Williiam:  Knox is buried close to the Stevenson mausoleum. His poem “Morality” was a favourite of Abraham Lincoln (whose memorial can be seen in the nearby Calton Old Cemetery:

O why should the spirit of mortal be proud!
Like a fast flitting meteor, a fast flying cloud,
A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave –
He passes from life to his rest in the grave.

The leaves of the oak and the willow shall fade,
Be scattered around and together be laid;
As the young and the old, and the low and the high,
Shall moulder to dust, and together shall lie.

More details on the life of Know and the full text of Mortality may be found on the Scottish Poetry Library website.

Holyrood:

For further details of the quotations of the Canongate Wall, part of the new Parliament Building visit:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/visitandlearn/21013.aspx

Edwin Morgan’s “Open Doors” specially commissioned poem for the opening of the parliament can be found on the Scottish Poetry Library’s online collection:

http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poems/opening-scottish-parliament-9-october-2004

Canongate, St John’s Street and St Mary’s Street:

• Scott,      Sir Walter: Waverley – how Jacobite Soldiers enjoyed the tavern in White Horse Close
• Smollet, Tobias:  Expedition of Humphry Clinker, 1771, many editions and Kindle download: an entertaining fictitious account of a visit to Edinburgh in the 1770s.  Smollet’s sister lived in St John’s Street where Burns also attended the Masonic Lodge.
• Johnson, Samuel:  Journal to the Western Isles – Dr J, whilst staying at Boyd’s Inn (just off what is now St Mary’s Street), was not at all happy, when a waiter “with greasy fingers” put a lump of sugar in his lemonade.  We are told that “the Doctor with indignation threw it out the window”

See also blog for 7th October for more on Robert Fergusson and 18th Century Edinburgh theatre.

Craiglochart and the War Poets: Literary Walk 21st October 2013

Craiglochart:

The former Craiglochart Hydropathic, was requisitioned as a hospital for shell shocked army officers during the First World War.  Now part of Edinburgh’s Napier University, Craiglochart holds an archive of First World War material and is home to a permanent exhibition known as the War Poets’ Collection.  Famously, it was at Craiglochart that Wilfred Owen met Siegfried Sassoon, an association which is commemorated in the Owen and Sassoon wings of the main university building.

For further information about the exhibition, the history of Craiglochart and for a number of interesting links, visit the excellent War Poets’ Collection website:

http://www2.napier.ac.uk/warpoets/

The website also contains details of opening hours and contact details for the collection’s curator, Catherine Walker.    It’s possible to visit the collection at any time during term time on a guided or self-guided basis.

For Sassoon’s memories of “Slateford War Hospital” – Sassoon associated Craiglochart with the nearest railway hospital –see the semi-autobiographical Memoirs of Geroge Sherston, and   in particular the third volume, Sherston’s Progress.

Sassoon, who had written a public letter of complaint about what he considered to be the unnecessary prolonging of the war, stayed at Craiglochart for political rather than medical reasons.  He was a patient of Dr W H R Rivers, whose leading role in the treatment of shell shock or neurasthenia, and whose friendship with Sassoon, is evoked in Pat Barker’s recent trilogy Regeneration.  Writing in Sherston’s Progress, Sassoon does not create a particularly favourable impression of Craiglochart. “The place”, he wrote, “had the melancholy atmospheres of a decayed hydro”. It was, though, redeemed by “its healthy situation and pleasant view of the Pentland Hills”. The doctors “did everything possible to counteract gloom”.  Sassoon enjoyed golfing and went on walking expeditions in the Pentlands with Dr Rivers.

Owen wrote some of his best known poetry at Craiglochart including Dulci et Decorum Est.  As part of his recuperation, he also taught at Tynecastle School:

“I think one of the most humanly useful things I am doing now” he wrote to his mother on 27^th September 1917, “is the teaching at Tynecastle School”.

After he left Craiglochart, Owen continued to take an interest in the Tynecastle School magazine.  He was also aware of RL Stevenson’s Edinburgh connections.  Whilst he was at Craiglochart he read Stevenson’s unfinished novel St Ives, its setting based on nearby Swanston village.

Suggested reading:

• Wilfred Owen Collected Letters, Ed. Harold Owen and John Bell, OUP 1967
• Sassoon, Siegfried, Memoirs of George Sherston, Faber, First Published 1937
• Barker , Pat, Regeneration, Penguin, 1991,  – also The Eye in the Door and the Ghost Road  forming the “Regeneration Trilogy”
• Stevenson, RL, St Ives, 1897, published posthumously, may be available in public libraries.

Another fascinating website, set up by Centre for the Study of Modern Conflict at the University of Edinburgh’s Department of Conflict in collaboration with Edinburgh City Libraries , is Edinburgh’s War 1914-1918.  The site includes a section devoted to Edinburgh War Hospitals.  Visit:

http://www.edinburghs-war.ed.ac.uk/newsandevents/war-hospitals

Dulci et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

The Canongate: Literary Walk 7th October 2013

Forthcoming event:

You may be interested in the Greyfriar’s Kirk Annual Lecture which is taking place this coming Wednesday, 9th October. Every year the Gaelic congregation of Greyfriar’s Tolbooth and Highland Kirk hosts a lecture which addresses an aspect of Gaelic Culture. This year’s lecture is entitled “Gaelic Education in Edinburgh”and will be jointly delivered
by Anne Macphail (Head Teacher of the new Bun-sgoil Taobh na Pairce),and Donald Macdonald (Head Teacher of James Gillespie’s High School).

Third Walk:

Our third literary walk, and our third in the Old Town, took us from Carruber’s Close to the Canongate. We considered the emergence of theatre in 18th Century Edinburgh and encountered Robert Fergusson (1750-1774), a young Edinburgh poet, much admired by two other Roberts: Burns and Stevenson.

The Scottish Book Trust:

The charity, based in Trunks Close, just behind the Scottish Story Telling Centre, was established to promote literature, reading and writing throughout Scotland. More details about the work of the Scottish Book Trust can be found at

http://scottishbooktrust.com.

Norman Maccaig’s Edinburgh Courtyard in July, makes us think of the intensity of summer light “smeared as thick as paint on these ramshackle tenements”

Canongate:

• Fergusson, Robert; Auld Reikie
• Garioch, Robert. At Robert Fergusson’s Grave October 1962
• Stevenson, RL, Picturesque Notes, Chapter 7, RLS dwells on the irony of Fergusson being overshadowed by Burns, his devoted follower.

On theatrical and general 18th century cultural background (eg the Edinburgh Burns saw), I recommend EF Catford:  Edinburgh, The Story of a City, London 1975, in particular, Chapters 11 and 13 (the book is out of print but should be available at public libraries).  Catford has an admirable topographical sense, and is a good companion.  The two anthologies which I mentioned last week, edited by  David Daiches and Ralph Lownie, contain vivid descriptions of the High Street and the Canongate  There are also some excellent photographs of the historic Canongate available on Capital Collections, the City’s online photographic collection:

http://www.capitalcollections.org.uk/index.php?a=SearchResults&key=SHsiRCI6IlN1YmplY3QgPSBcIkNhbm9uZ2F0ZVwiIiwiTiI6MCwiUCI6eyJzdWJqZWN0X2lkIjoiNjIxIiwiam9pbl9vcCI6Mn19&WINID=1381144973785

Scottish Poetry Library:

Quite apart from its sizeable collection of poetry, the Scottish Poetry Library hosts a number of events and workshops.   The SPL contains reference works but is also a lending library.  Signing up is straightforward and free.  You can find full information on the Library’s website:

www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk

The Library is  open five days a week:

• Tue: 10:00 – 17:00
• Wed:  10:00 -17.00
• Thu: 10:00 – 19:00
• Fri10:00 – 17:00
• Sat: 10:00 – 16:00.

NB It is not open to the public on Mondays.

St John’s Street and St Mary’s Street:

Smollet, Tobias:  Expedition of Humphry Clinker, 1771, many editions and Kindle download: an entertaining fictitious account of a visit to Edinburgh in the 1770s.

Johnson, Samuel:  Journal to the Western Isles – Dr J, whilst staying at Boyd’s Inn, was not at all happy, when a waiter “with greasy fingers” put a lump of sugar in his lemonade.  We are told that “the Doctor with indignation through it out the window”