Madeira Mondays: Climbing Arthur’s Seat (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Arthur’s Seat is an iconic local landmark in my city. If you’ve ever been to Edinburgh, you’ve definitely seen it. Rising above Holyrood Park, this ancient extinct volcano – with its craggy cliffs and verdant green slopes – is a memorable sight and it definitely adds to the city’s unique majestic, almost magical, feel. (Though the fact that we’ve also got a castle here, and a palace, and some of the most beautiful historic buildings in the world doesn’t hurt either!)

Once described by Edinburgh local and famed author Robert Louis Stevenson as “a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold design”, Arthur’s Seat has been featured in books, movies and TV series past and present. Off the top of my head, I recall scenes in the recent Netflix adaptation of Dave Nicholl’s iconic love story One Day where the couple hikes up there for a graduation picnic. There’s also a very memorable and spooky scene in James Hogg’s wonderfully weird and compelling 19th century novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

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Madeira Mondays: Sights from Edinburgh’s Past and Present

I have seen a ghost.

Well, not literally – but I’ve come pretty close!

Recently I’ve been teaching a creative writing course I designed at the University of Glasgow which is all about ‘time travel’. We looked at a few straightforwardly sci-fi books about characters actually traveling backwards and forwards in time, as well as poetry, memoir, and historical fiction books that invited us to think about memory and imagination as forms of time travel too.

Teaching this class made me think of a walk I took a few months ago with a dear friend of mine, Alan, who I met while volunteering at The Georgian House. We walked around the Canongate area of Edinburgh (near Holyrood Palace) and he showed me some photographs of how the streets looked in times past. It was almost spooky to see the black and white images of the chaotic shop fronts, the women in their wide-brimmed hats full of flowers, and then look up at the very same street today.

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