Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Edinburgh is not only enough to confuse your average humanoid. It drives the GPS crazy. Why?
Because the city exists on two levels, one of which is about fifty feet (fifteen metres) above the other. It’s bizarre. We’d be driving along the street, following the directions from Google Earth on my iPhone, and it would tell us to turn right on some street. We’d look around … no such street visible. Then we come to a bridge, look over the edge, and there’s the street we’re supposed to turn left on, but it’s way, way down below us. How can that be, we’re on the ground level up here, and there’s a whole ‘nother world of shops and people far down underneath. Bizarre.
We started off our trip by visiting the Botanical Gardens, which were wonderful. Of course, the first sight that greeted us was a windmill, a Darrieus rotor. In this case, it could more accurately have been called a Darrieus stator, because despite rather high winds, it didn’t move during our whole time there. Shocking, I know.
The Botanical Gardens are quite lovely, a serene corner of a bustling city. In one section, I was surprised to see that there was a full-on meteorological station, which was not all that badly situated:
The placard in front said that it had been in operation since 1794 … note to self, check the records, should be interesting. Unfortunately, the plaque also said:
Previously located in the Demonstration Garden, in spring 2011 the weather station was removed to this more prominent location as the Met Office automated many of their recording devices to provide real-time readouts.
Since I doubt greatly whether they continued the old station to give an overlap so the two records could be combined, that means that the record effectively ends in 2011.
The Botanical Gardens has an exquisite old greenhouse, a lovely work of art…
And a butt-ugly new greenhouse.
Sigh …
Refreshed by the greenery, we parked downtown and started to walk. First we went on a most bizarre but quite lovely walkway over a street:
Note the rain on the roof … liquid sunshine. Then up past the St. Giles Cathedral and on to the National Museum of Scotland. Why? Well, it’s a museum of science … and it’s free. However, it’s also very, very strange. The selection and the location of the objects inside is quite bizarre. They will have say a space suit next to a suit of armor, and that’s just for starters. My daughter’s final conclusion as to the reason behind the strange exhibits and combinations was “Because Scotland” … which as it turned out seems to apply to lots of things in Edinburgh.
They did have a fantastic early steam engine, and the main exhibit hall was a light, airy work of joy:
To my eye, one of the loveliest works of Scottish engineering in the Museum, curiously, wasn’t an exhibit at all. It was the radiators that you can see at the lower left above which heated the building. Here’s a closeup:
Now that’s a pretty awesome way to heat a building.
In the evening, we had the great pleasure of meeting up with Lord Christopher Moncton, living proof that the species Homo eccentricus britannis is not threatened with extinction. We met in a pub that looks like this:
Gotta say … not many pubs look like that where I live … from there we went out to a restaurant. And there I learned that when the flow of the River Christopher is in full spate, all one can do is stand on the bank and marvel at the unending rush of ideas, humor, obscure references, side-splitting stories, explanations of history, and most interesting science, all delivered in his most impish manner which is totally irresistible. My great thanks to him for a most enjoyable evening.
We stayed quite near the St. Giles Cathedral, and the next day I was awakened to a very strange chorus. It went “BONG … ribbit … BONG … ribbit … BONG …” During the night the rain had come on in full force, and a most determined frog, who sounded like he was about six inches from my ear, had obviously set his mind that he was not going to be outcroaked by some giant bell.
We had lunch with another most interesting gentleman, Andrew Montford, the “Bishop” of the climate blog “Bishop Hill“. Like the other well-known climate bloggers that it’s been my pleasure to meet, he is self-employed, and a great conversationalist. We covered the gamut of topics over a fine meal, and sadly bid him goodbye. He also has my appreciation and thanks.
On the walk back to our flat, we passed the memorial to Sir Walter Scott. It is an arabesque fantasy in stone, looking like the fairy-tale castles in my childhood books where princesses awaited their knight in shining armor.
It has all the required accessories and accoutrements, flying buttresses, towers, statues hundreds of feet up in the air, even a gargoyle on each of the four corners. What’s not to like?
We saw the Edinburgh Castle, and Mary Queens close (which was not sealed up on account of the plague as I’d heard, but was built over to provide government offices). And then, sadly and far too soon, it was time to leave. Every place I’ve gone on this trip I end up saying, “But, but, do we have to leave already?” However, we did have to leave, so we rolled out down the A1, enjoying the lovely scenery and dodging windmills … but that’s a story for another day.
Regards to all,
w.
And no seaman should pass up on a visit to Whitby, where Captain Cook learned his trade. If you’re in that part of the world, also have a look at Robin Hood’s Bay.
As a Scot living near London, I know the Walter Scott monument reasonably well, even though I hail from the West of Scotland. (I am sure you will understand all these unstated comments by now).
I climbed to the top of the monument earlier this year and was absolutely amazed by the experience. It does get a bit narrow near the top if you can imagine a tight spiral staircase where both shoulders contact the walls. It was worth it, with great views of Princes Street and beyond.
You can just see the Forth bridge to the North and the cascade of old buildings on the slopes to the South below the majestic view of the castle against the skyline.
Great stuff, if the weather is kind.
Wonderful images. Reminded me of a three week trip in the Highlands north from Aviemore along the single malt highway to Macallan, Dalwhinney, Glenfiddich, et. al. The testing rooms were so inviting and collegial. The people of Scotland are so genuine. And I still enjoy haggis.
As others have complimented, a wonderful travelogue.
BTW – I humbly suggest you may have missed an opportunity. “Scots, Scott, Scottish, and Scotch”
Are we going to get an appreciation (if that’s the word) about the deep fried Mars bars?
Wonderful stories Willis, thank you – I particularly recall my delight at the discovery of “3-D” Edinburgh, as you describe here:
“Because the city exists on two levels, one of which is about fifty feet (fifteen metres) above the other. It’s bizarre. We’d be driving along the street, following the directions from Google Earth on my iPhone, and it would tell us to turn right on some street. We’d look around … no such street visible. Then we come to a bridge, look over the edge, and there’s the street we’re supposed to turn left on, but it’s way, way down below us. How can that be, we’re on the ground level up here, and there’s a whole ‘nother world of shops and people far down underneath. Bizarre.”
Edinburgh and Scotland have a remarkable history as a centre of intellectual achievement, particularly during the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th Century.
The Scottish Enlightenment is ably described in the book by American historian Arthur Herman, modestly entitled:
How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The true story of how western Europe’s poorest nation created our world & everything in it
(or The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots Invention of the Modern World)
Excerpts from wiki:
The Scottish Enlightenment was the period in 18th century Scotland characterised by an outpouring of intellectual and scientific accomplishments. By 1750, Scots were among the most literate citizens of Europe, with an estimated 75% level of literacy. The culture was orientated toward books, and intense discussions took place daily at such intellectual gathering places in Edinburgh as The Select Society and, later, The Poker Club as well as within Scotland’s ancient universities such as Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen.
Sharing the humanist and rationalist outlook of the European Enlightenment of the same time period, the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment asserted the fundamental importance of human reason combined with a rejection of any authority that could not be justified by reason. They held to an optimistic belief in the ability of humanity to effect changes for the better in society and nature, guided only by reason. This latter feature gave the Scottish Enlightenment its special flavour, distinguishing it from its continental European counterpart. In Scotland, the Enlightenment was characterised by a thoroughgoing empiricism and practicality where the chief virtues were improvement, virtue, and practical benefit for the individual and society as a whole.
Among the fields that rapidly advanced were philosophy, political economy, engineering, architecture, medicine, geology, archaeology, law, agriculture, chemistry and sociology. Among the Scottish thinkers and scientists of the period were Francis Hutcheson, Alexander Campbell, David Hume, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart, Thomas Reid, Robert Burns, Adam Ferguson, John Playfair, Joseph Black and James Hutton.
The Scottish Enlightenment had effects far beyond Scotland, not only because of the esteem in which Scottish achievements were held outwith Scotland, but also because its ideas and attitudes were carried across the Atlantic world as part of the Scottish diaspora, and by American students who studied in Scotland.
[end of excerpt]
Excerpted from above, this sentence has relevance today, specifically to the ongoing debate between (generally rational) climate skeptics and (generally irrational) global warming alarmists:
“…the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment asserted the fundamental importance of human reason combined with a rejection of any authority that could not be justified by reason.”
Bravo!
Best regards,
Allan MacRae of the Clan MacRae 🙂
You missed the Malt Whisky Society in Leith! Forget Scotch buy the real thing.
That’s wild, two levels – something few people would think of for active streets. (Cities like Seattle WA and IIRC Moose Jaw SK have a historic lower level people can walk around in.)
\
As for “full on”, is Willis picking up Brit lingo, or has it already permeated California? 😉
Travelling in England with my brilliant autistic son a few years ago I learned, due to his sharp observation skills, that fire hydrants are also buried in the pavement there. The covers are marked but they are not obtrusive. I have learned from him to notice things like that – what impressed during a recent visit to Munich is that they string street-lights up between buildings on opposite sides of the street in the downtown area: the lights dangle centrally from these wires, so there are no telephone or ‘hydro’ poles.
Burying electrical transmission lines makes a lot of sense. The Quebec Ice Storm of 1998 caused extensive damage due to trees falling on electrical lines, or towers buckling under the weight of ice. The economic damage was enormous due to loss of power for work refrigeration, heating etc in parts of Ontario and New York as well as Quebec. Some areas did not have electricity for at least two weeks. I am sure the price of burying lines is more than compensated by the reduction in repair and upkeep costs.
On the other hand, before our lines were buried, a storm took out two neighbour’s trees about a decade ago: it was the electrical lines that slowed their descent and kept their full weight from falling on our roof – hmmm. On the other hand again…our neighbors on both sides had to do without electricity for about 12 hours during a bitterly cold February day.
I traveled with a backpack by BritRail Pass in 1986, and spent a few nights in “Embra”. Knocking on the door of a B&B, the proprietor introduced himself as mister “Gallo, like Wayne.” Seeing the perplexity on my face, he said it again, “like Wayne.” Finally he used the hand signal for “bottoms up” to make me realize “Wayne” was how he pronounced “wine.” His name was “Gallo, like wine.” After that we got on splendidly, and and we finished up that evening watching Scotland play a World Cup match on the TV in his kitchen, but not drinking “wayne”, rather excellent ale and of course whisky.
My wife and I are just back from a nice two-weeks campervan roundtrip in Scotland (from the “Borders” to Durness and John O’Groat in the upper North) and final a few days in Edinburgh… If I had known your trip, I would have invited you for a strong Belgian beer – even available in Scotland – and more if wished…
Have looked around for some interesting histories, including the stories of the different clans, but the McIntyre clan book was just sold out and didn’t think of the MacRae’s at that moment.
Although there are some windparks in Scotland, it is far less polluted by that kind of “green” monsters than what I have seen in Spain near Gibraltar, straight into the corridor used by migrating birds to Africa… Or in the rest of Europe, including my own country…
And it was very fine to meet you and the family too Willis. We must do it again some time.
If you are rolling down the A1 you’ll come right past us, near Richmond in Yorkshire! We live within sight (of the tops of trucks) and sound (when the wind is anywhere between SE and W of us) of the A1.
I’ve really enjoyed your travelogue and will do a mental wave as you head South. Will you have time for the Dales or Richmond?
Reading about overground/underground power cables: overground ones are a considerable problem in a bushfire-prone country like Australia. Cost is a major factor where huge distances are involved but neither is it an insignificant one where bushfires have occured; in part because they provide an extra hazard and in part because of the expense of renewing them after a fire.
“Turn … left … on … Cowgate”
AHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhh …CRASH! (off the bridge)
LOL!
I love the classic Edwardian pubs in the “New Town” part of Edinburgh. Chasing a wee dram with a good pour of 90 Shilling.
I think I may have lifted a glass with a few of the blokes in that one photo.
thank you for the kind comments on my small but wonderful country willis . i am glad to hear you had a wonderful time. it gives me great pleasure to know a fair proportion of the most notable sceptics were gathered in the capital city and for a day scotland was sceptic central !
Let’s give the new greenhouse a chance.
It might look a lot better in the frost or with icicles hanging from the external suspension cables.
Or with the mist swirling turbulently around the false tunnels created by the cables and the building.
Or when rain splashes and sprays from the external supports with the lights inside forming (perhaps) mini-rainbows.
It might work. Give it time before finally condemning the design.
Met stations are a mess.
There was EDINBURGH: ROYAL BOTANIC GARDEN NO 2, would get slated by me, can’t even place the screen north-south..
Near enough 55.9666 -3.21205
Use Google Earth time function and see what happens 2012!
Bing will show the old site too, note the hedges.
Site people just can’t stop themselves, fiddle, fiddle, looks and wants matter over constancy of tech stuff.
Willis, you can confirm the new site location and have a photo. Generally I don’t do minor stations as part of UK surfacestations, far too many of them and location / site churn is going on all the time. (database is huge) Maybe if there is interest.
Data? No chance in the UK.
Got it, new location is 55.966340° -3.207291°
Records are claimed from 1926. Looks like the move took place sometime 2011 and is now an AWS. Was a logger (yuk) and before that manual.
Screen is still not north-south, but hey, looks neat, matches the shed, err, greenhouse.
Older records, marked 1861. That might be Blackford Hill (or highly dubious), actually the old observatory a mish mash of record kinds but there is a screen there, is north-south. Google have 1945 images and looks like the screen is same position!
This is now marked as synoptic but is not on the WMO list. WMO 03173 so some low res. data might be around. Not marked as AWS, looks like daily read.
55.923004° -3.188226°
The Met Office active station is
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/09/02/wmo03166-edinburgh-gogarbank-scotland/
Damn fine piece of chance Willis, good one.
I don’t suppose you will get a chance but a very important snippet I want to know about is the steam omibus service 1820s 1830s which predates railway. Was running somewhere around there.
TLM says: “…cables underground. However above ground cables are unsightly and more prone to”
destruction by wind, rain, leaping squirrels (even the scrawny variety here), falling tree limbs and vines, and big hawks.
“They also have very low ADSL signal on clear nights night (1.5 Mb/s)…”
I wish. Our DSL actual through-put usually runs at about 17KB/s (about 170Kb/s counting SECDED), 35KB/s on an exceptionally good day. (This after years of being spoiled by higher rates at the office.)
“FTTC (fibre to the cabinet)… The job was accomplished in a day as the cable was simply pulled through the pipe between “manholes” (inspection chambers).”
The rule of thumb here is that it costs about twice as much to initially install buried cable, so none of the developers want to do it. But the long-run maintenance labor costs are lower… Then again labor is cheaper here in North Sopchoppy than in much of the USA. For much the same reason they don’t use automatically resetting breakers on the power lines (as they do in St. Louis and Cincinnati), but send out crews to drive around in circles to locate and manually reset (long pole). We have 3-6 outages per summer and typically last 20 minutes to a couple hours. (Used to lose a lot of disk drives to spike-induced head-crashes in the old days even with the 400Hz motor-generator and fly-wheel to help smooth, and deployed add-on surge suppressors and UPSes as soon as we could for the micro-computers.)
I can see at least 3 fibre test points within a mile (near 2 schools, and at the university and NWS/meteorology/CS building which has had a series of experimental unusually high band-width nets for over 2 decades), maybe 3-4 miles to the state capitol building, and about 1.7 miles to the local telephony monopoly’s closest DSL point. Fiber to each block, let alone to each building, is a long long way off.
IMO, Arthur Herman got a bit carried away; seemed to have made nearly everyone on the planet “Scots”.
“The 39 Steps” (both book by Buchan, and 2 movie adaptations) give a fair to middling glimpse of Galloway… as do Scott’s “Bride of Lammermoor”, and “Waverley”; and the books by Liz Curtis Higgs.
There haven’t been any Scottish jokes yet (or is that “Scots” jokes?). Here is one, based on the fact that the Scots provided the personnel for much of the fur trade in Canada and they funded at least two universities there (McGill and McMaster). Anyway, the Scots also had a lot to do with building the Canadian railways (and maybe US ones, too?). As the story goes, one Scotsman, on seeing the open land of the prairies (the word for “plains” in Canada), observed that they couldn’t build railways there. “Why not?”, he was asked. “There’s no place to run your toonels through” was the answer.
Ian M (who is allowed to tell stories like this since the “M” stands for “McQueen”)
Ian L. McQueen says:
September 17, 2013 at 3:58 pm
Simon Fraser U, BC.
Willis,
When going from A to B stick to the ‘B’ roads.
Much more Interesting.
[Yes. Sliding off of A road is not good. Mod]
My brother and I drove around Great Britain for two weeks ten years ago. We mostly followed the 17-day route suggested by American travel writer Rick Steves in one of his books. We flew into London, then took a train to Bath. Spent two days in Bath to adjust to the jet lag, rented a Range Rover from Hertz — because they allowed us to drop it off in another city; Enterprise wanted it returned to Bath — then drove the route for the next twelve days, dropping the car off at a Hertz in Yorkshire, then taking the train into London (neither of us wanted to drive in London traffic). As we were there in the off season, the only hotel/B&B reservations I made before arriving in London was for the two nights in Bath. Thereafter, each morning we consulted Steves’ travel book to pick an inn in the next town to call to see if they had a two-bed en-suite room available for that evening. It was very enjoyable to travel that way, being able to decide day-to-day where to go next, oftentimes based on recommendations from the B&B owner. The Scotland portion of the trip was a night spent in Oban on the west coast, then a drive east to Edinburgh. Two little things are most memorable for me. The first is that almost every pine forest we passed on the drive east was obviously planted by humans as all the tree tops were in neat rows. The second was the abundance of memorial wooden benches in almost every public space all over Great Britain, including the public park in which the Scott memorial is located. I was especially tickled to find one bench with a plaque dedicated to John Lennon, on which I of course sat and had my picture taken. As someone who is always intrigued by grave stones when visiting cemeteries, it was great fun just taking time to peruse the dedications on many of those wooden benches. I couldn’t help but think what a nice way it is to memorialize a loved one. A third general impression was just the fact that almost every city/town/village had a cathedral or something similar that was at least 900 years old and still in daily use. Nothing in the states can come close to that. The architecture and grandeur of each one of them was awe-inspiring (even for this atheist).
Since your travel route is similar to what we took ten years ago, it has been fun reading your impressions about things we missed.
milodonharlani says:
September 17, 2013 at 9:57 am
Fixed, thanks.
w.