Edinburgh, From the Floor
On a stressful journey, a magical weekend, and what a change of scenery can do for a stuck mind.
The first three hours of any trip to Edinburgh from where I live are meant to involve a seat. Mine did not. A booking error I will not bore you with meant I spent the first stretch of the journey sitting on the floor of a train carriage near the doors, bag wedged behind me, watching England flatten and rise and turn finally into Scotland. By the time I had a proper seat I had decided the whole weekend was going to be a write-off.
It was, instead, one of the most quietly magical trips I have taken.
Edinburgh hits you in layers. The architecture first — blackened stone, spires, the way the Old Town piles up on itself like a city that has been adding floors for eight hundred years and has not yet stopped. Then the bridges that cross other streets, then the closes — narrow alleys cut between buildings — that pull you into pockets of the city most visitors never see. I spent the first afternoon walking without a plan, with very cold hands, and feeling steadily better about the whole thing.
We did the castle tour the next morning. I went in expecting the usual heritage-site rhythm — facts, dates, polished display cases — and got something stranger and more affecting. Edinburgh Castle does not let you forget that it sits on a volcanic rock that has held a fortress for over a thousand years. The Braveheart story we half-remember from the film — William Wallace, the Wars of Scottish Independence, a country fighting to remain itself across three hundred years of attempts to make it stop — is told there with the weight of a place that genuinely lived through it. The room holding the Honours of Scotland — the crown, sceptre, and sword, hidden inside a chest at Dunnottar Castle to keep them from Cromwell, walled up for years, eventually rediscovered by Walter Scott — is one of those small, quiet rooms that holds more history than rooms ten times its size. I stood for a long time.
That afternoon we ducked into Dovecot Studios, the tapestry workshop and gallery just off the Royal Mile. Two exhibitions were on: Magic Patterns from the IKEA Museum, a surprisingly moving journey through Swedish textile design across decades, and Picking up the Thread: The Past, Present and Future of Tapestry. The second one held me. I had not thought seriously about tapestry as a contemporary practice before — and there is something humbling about standing in front of woven work made by hand at a scale that takes months, sometimes years, to complete.
The National Galleries of Scotland, our next stop, was its own kind of immersion. The collection turned out to be more serious than I had any right to expect — Monet and Van Gogh, Cézanne, Raphael, Rembrandt, a small Botticelli — alongside the great Scottish painters Raeburn, Ramsay, and Wilkie. I had not expected to find the frames as interesting as the paintings, but the Gallery's nineteenth-century frames are works in themselves, ornate gilded objects holding the work. The painters caught my eye first; the frames held it longer. I thought, on the way out, about how much of how we receive a painting depends on what is wrapped around it.
In between the heavyweight stops there was Edinburgh's softer texture: the artisan shops along Victoria Street and the Grassmarket, the secondhand bookshops, the tiny tearooms, the smell of woollen things in places where the wind makes wool make sense. The find I came home most pleased with was the Scottish Design Exchange — a shop where every piece is made by a Scottish maker and one hundred percent of the price goes back to the artist. Most of the central tourist shops sell tartan and shortbread that was designed in Edinburgh but manufactured somewhere very far from it. Scottish Design Exchange does not. I bought a small handmade something and felt, for once, that the money was landing where the work actually had.
We ate well too. At Howies, off the Royal Mile, we had cullen skink, slow-cooked beef cheek, and the catch of the day — salmon in my case — and finished with fig and hazelnut bellinis that I am still thinking about. The next evening, at Commons Club, the bartenders made us drinks I could not have invented if I had tried. There is, I learned, such a thing as basil bergamot cordial, and asking for the recipe is reasonable. We tried whisky neat somewhere in between and pulled appropriate faces.
The National Museum of Scotland — free, sprawling, gloriously varied — was its own day. Somewhere among the Bronze Age jewellery and the suspended aircraft and the model whales, in a quiet glass case, stood Dolly the sheep. The first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell. Stuffed, mounted, looking entirely calm. I stood in front of her and felt slightly silly being moved by a sheep. I was moved anyway.
That evening we went on a ghost tour, because of course we did. An hour and a half of underground vaults, plague stories, public executions, witch trials, and the particular kind of cold that lives in stone rooms below sea level. By the end I had decided that whatever else Edinburgh is, it is unembarrassed about its own darkness. There is something about a city willing to walk you through its hauntings that makes its loveliness feel earned rather than performed.
On the last day, with two hours before the train, I ducked into a Cass Art shop near the city centre and bought a small set of materials I did not strictly need — a new sketchpad, a fineliner, two pans of watercolour I had been meaning to try. On the train back, with a proper seat this time, I made a quick sketch of the Edinburgh skyline from memory: the castle on its rock, the spires of the Old Town, the soft pile of stone behind it. It is not a good drawing. I have it on the wall of my studio anyway.
The reminder I took home, more than any of the specific things we saw, was simpler than I expected. A change of scenery is sometimes all it takes to get a stuck mind moving again. I had been struggling in the studio for weeks before the trip. I came back with sketches, with a fuller palette of references in my head, with the memory of paintings held in frames I want to study more carefully, with the strangeness of standing in front of Dolly, with the cold of the castle stones, with a city's worth of texture pressed into my mind.
The seven hours on the train floor cost me something. The weekend gave me back considerably more.
Edinburgh, I will be back. With a proper seat next time, I promise.
Where was the last place that surprised you into making something new? I would love to hear.
Where I went
Scottish Design Exchange (@scottishdesignexchange) — local artisan shop where 100% of the price goes to the maker. The right place to do your souvenir shopping; most of the central shops sell things only designed in Scotland, not made there.
Dovecot Studios (@dovecotstudios) — tapestry studio and gallery. Catch Magic Patterns (IKEA Museum) and Picking up the Thread: The Past, Present and Future of Tapestry.
National Galleries of Scotland (@nationalgalleriesscot) — Monet, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Raphael, Rembrandt, Botticelli, and the great Scottish painters, all in one building on the Mound.
National Museum of Scotland (@nationalmuseumsscotland) — free, vast, beautifully interactive. Where Dolly the sheep lives.
Howies Restaurant (@howiesrestaurant) — order the cullen skink, the beef cheek, the catch of the day, and absolutely the fig and hazelnut bellini.
Commons Club (@commonsclubedi) — master mixologists. Ask for the basil bergamot cordial recipe.
