Directionless in Edinburgh


Whenever I've traveled I am a planner. Not in every way, but I've never been one of those people who can just land in a city or town and not know where I will be laying my head for the night. I like to know where I'm going. However, once I know this, I am fairly free rein with where I end up going while there - seeking the path less traveled. Just wandering about. Thus, when I was in Florence, Italy I never went to the Uffizi or any of the other galleries. The weather was too beautiful and the city called for a photo safari in its own right. I've only been to the Louvre once, wandering the rest of Paris called me more. This has become my way of discovering a place in my own way.

When I was setting up my arrival in Edinburgh I didn't realize the endeavor it was be to actually find the flat that we had rented. My boyfriend was meeting me after Orkney in Edinburgh and I arranged the schedule to arrive the night before so I could have everything set up. My plan was to pick him up at the airport the next morning... that was until I actually drove INTO Edinburgh. Now had I paid attention to the first night I arrived from the states into Edinburgh and stayed out by the airport, I would have known that this city was literally a mystery wrapped in a cartographers enigma. Columbus would have given up on the new world if he'd had to go through Edinburgh first.

I had driven in UK "wrong side of the road" lands before. The stick shift on the left was a bit confusing, not to mention the penchant for roundabouts (traffic circles) that they seem to have - going the wrong direction. There have been many "Look kids, Big Ben and Parliament" Clark Griswold moments. God knows they can't find a simple left or right turn off a highway with both hands and compass. But getting to the Novotel "by" the airport was ridiculous. I somehow ended up on a private road -- with a gate that I could get into but couldn't get out of... huh? And the hotel was just over there. I could see it but damned if I could actually get there. I tried to sneak through the gate behind another car but the parking guillotine of Scotland was too fast and I nearly started the trip with a nice big dent in my hood. So after backing up a mile and finding a nice Scottish couple (the first of many kind and helpful Scottish people) to give me directions, I finally pulled into the hotel with jetlag and bleary eyes. At the time I attributed my unusual issues with direction to this... I was wrong, it's Edinburgh itself.

Fast forward to arriving in Edinburgh proper. By this time I had successfully navigated to and from Orkney with six hours of drive time each way through the northernmost reaches of Scotland on sometimes the narrowest of roads. City driving... no problemo. So I thought. I missed the first turn into the city and ended up back by the dreaded airport, but since I'd been there before I kinda/sorta knew my way around. But as I drove deeper into the city things got more and more confusing and by the time I hit the center I was stuck in the maze. The signs were in ENGLISH how difficult could it be? VERY! Finally it was a French student at the university that got me to the main section of town. Once I got there I found out, after many shaken fists and a firm berating by a bus driver, that this was an area where only buses and taxis were allowed to drive. So THAT'S what that sign means. Note to self. But once I was there what was I supposed to do, abandon the car on the side of the road? So I kept driving.


When I finally got to the right section of the city and found High Street I still couldn't find the road that the flat was on. I was practical I pulled over again and asked a postman. His answer was, "I don't know, possibly on the other side of the cathedral, but you have to go back and around three blocks to get there." Ok, backtracked and still couldn't get to it. I asked a policeman and he didn't know how to get there. He pointed out a possible way and then said, "Good Luck, Lass." You've got to be kidding me. I was texting Kevin back in the U.S. to help with directions and vent quite a bit of cursing when 1.5 hours after entering the city I finally found the street and the flat. The street ran UNDER the other streets in the area. That's what happens when you
visit a city that's 1,000 years old or so.


Even the winding staircase up to our 4th floor flat couldn't diminish the relief I felt when I finally dragged the last suitcase through the door. No way in hell I was driving out to pick up Kev at the airport... I could end up in Glasgow. I was parking the car and not moving it for three days. That's why God invited taxis.

And I give full credit to the taxi driver for giving us an experience we would never have had if I had managed to find the airport again. On the way over he told me how modern Edinburgh is made up of what used to be very distinct towns with their own personalities. He advised getting out of the center and heading out specifically to one called Dean.

Now my brother's name is Dean and I thought it was be fun to take a picture of a town and bridge with the same name. Once Kev was settled we headed out to see it and what a lovely discovery it was.

The village of Dean, within Edinburgh proper, winds along the "Water of Leith" with a walkway running alongside the river. A former milling town, the houses cling to the sides of the river with soft gardens and stone buildings with small leaded windows. Go around one bend and there's waterfalls. Go around another and you reach the town center looking very much like it fell out of a Harry Potter novel. It is tranquility itself in the center of a very busy city... one you couldn't hear over the babble of the river. The path led us by picturesque homes, and flats with fantastic gardens and eventually to an overpass leading us to the Dean Museum and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.


I have been collecting t-shirts from modern art museums for a while and of course had to stop in. The museums in Edinburgh are free so you can visit as many or little as you want. After passing the iron man half submerged in the sidewalk and seeing the "Everything's Going to Be Alright" message in neon over the entrance, I had a good feeling about it.

The thing I love about modern art is it has the tendency to bring out my worst cases of the giggles. Such as being doubled over at the MOMA in NYC after viewing the exquisite piece which appeared in every sense to be a canvas painted white. I know it's low-brow to snigger and not even try to understand the emptiness of life that the artist was trying to convey... at least I think that's what he meant. It could have been a portrait of his mother for all I know. Frankly I just always felt slightly annoyed that I didn't think of it before he did so I'd have a piece in MOMA and could call myself an "artist."


Going into Edinburgh's version of MOMA we weren't disappointed. Our favorite by far was the clear shower curtains that had been melted together and hung from the ceiling and painted with what looked like pepto bismol and toothpaste with candy and bathroom materials stuck to the bottom... this piece filled a 30 foot long room and gave us hours of laughter. Art can truly move people. Maybe not in the way the artist intended, but any reaction is a good one, right? Ok, so the staff of the museum was not amused with our reaction but hey I can't believe we were the first to fall out over that one.

Though we visited the areas more "on the beaten path" like Edinburgh Castle and the Royal Mile, our time spent wandering Dean gave us the chance to see the other side of Edinburgh. I will have to blame those confused city streets for making it impossible for me to drive and possible to meet our lovely taxi driver with his great suggestion.

Stoned on Orkney

When I told people on mainland Scotland that I had visited Orkney, they acted like I 'd gone to the moon. "Why in the world would you go there?" they'd say over their pints. There's a well evolved Scottish belief that the farther North of Edinburgh and Glasgow you go the more into the wilds you've landed... just around the corner from the end of the world. And all the way to the Orkneys? Well, you've just gone round the bend to full looney to go there.

So what brought me to this far off the beaten path location? Scotland was weird enough. No one went there except to play golf and then to go further North, what was the point?

It was a book. Or rather a series of books called the Outlander series that brought me to Orkney. Over 10 years ago one of my best friends recommended a series of books by an author named Diana Gabaldon about a woman who visits Scotland with her husband following WWII and time travels from 1945 back 200 years to 1745 by walking through a split stone in a stone circle. Not a big science fiction fan I decided to give one a try and was hooked on Gabaldon's telling of the history of the Scottish highland and fantastic characters she created. After reading them you can't help but think that every Scottish man is going to be a 6'+ something with long fiery red hair. I know that she has single-handedly increased Scottish tourism in the "women who want romance" column -- all in the mad pursuit of their own "Jamie." NOTE: I had already found mine by the time of the trip, and a good thing too, dudes of that description are light on the ground in Scotland. As bodice ripping as the novels are, the history she recounts paints such a vivid landscape that I had to see it for myself. I was interested in Scotland before but after that I had to see if there were standing stones with magical powers. Enter the Ornkeys. In my pre-vacation research whenever I searched for standing stones the Orkneys kept coming up. Ok, I'll go there! 6 hour dirve from Edinburgh and a ferry ride later, I was there.

On Orkney stone circles dot the landscape. Just like Stonehenge, we don't know what exactly they were used for - rituals, sacrifices, or just meeting spots. We just don't know. Turn a corner and you see the Standing Stones of Stromness and go a 1/2 mile down and you see the Ring of Brodgar on the left. Both are basically in the middle of a cow pasture. At Stromness you even share the space with a couple of sheep who get a regular show watching the tourists stare in awe at the 20 foot stones. So much on farmland, in fact, once people started going there regularly the farmer who owned the land where the Stromness stones are, a very religious fellow I'm told, thought he should blow them up to keep the pagans away. Luckily he didn't complete his destruction.

The morning after I arrived I found myself standing among the ancient stones holding my breath. I listened intently for the buzzing of the passage mentioned in the books. However, over the gale it was hard to hear myself think much less the buzzing of a time portal. I stepped through a split stone within the circle. When I got to the other side it was 200 years ago and I was surrounded by sheep... OR it was 2011 and I was still surrounded by sheep, eating their way steadily across the grassy field, barely giving me a glance. Oh well, I guess I didn't have the power.

I went back later that afternoon, closer to sunset and just after a storm had come through. I was rewarded with a perfect rainbow landing right smack in the middle of the circle!! And I even had my camera for it! For a photography nut like me, it would have been a particular taste of hell for that to happen without my trusty Nikon with me. It was truly a miracle moment among the ancients. I could almost feel them moving around me, smiling at this grown woman hooting and running around like a 5 year-old, snapping photo after photo, wind knotting my curly hair and trying to knock me over, with golden sunshine lighting the hills around me. THIS was ancient Scotland and it was blowing my mind... and everything else it seems!

Blown Away on Orkney

I remembered the Irish saying, "May the wind always be at your back" as I was nearly blown off the cliffs in Orkney, Scotland. I guess it just depends on the view you want on the way down into the drink. Calling it "windy" in Orkney doesn't come close. All the locals kept saying, "Oh you should be here in the winter. This isn't bad." Hmmmph (Scottish sound)! Isn't bad? It was a consistent 70 mph wind with higher gusts that really made you feel like you were going to be knocked over. Where walking progress was in spurts -- literally one step up and three back, or six steps up and one back, depending on the wind direction. You could literally jump up and catch wind. For those that don't know, that's on the same level as a Cat1 hurricane/F1 tornado... on a sustained basis (I looked it up).

I pulled into one parking lot where the owner of the store ran out and shouted at me over the wind to park my car the other direction so my door wouldn't fly off when I opened it. Huh? Took a second for that one to sink in. This was the stuff of legend on the island. As the story goes, a guy took his rental car out for a day of sightseeing and came back with not one, but BOTH doors gone. Went out with a coupe and came back with a Jeep. Good luck 'splaining that one to Hertz. And after trying to get my door open, even the other direction, I can see that there was truth to this legend. The only thing missing was a witch on a bicycle going by with a dog in its basket.

Orkney is one of a set of islands off the northern coast of Scotland that includes the Shetlands -- which everyone knows because of the "ponies." Billy Connolly, one of Scotland's great comedians once said of performing on the Shetlands that the people attach bits of string to their little kids, not to keep them from running away, but from blowing away. So you'll see them floating their kids down the street like balloons at the Macy's Day parade. He also said there's no trees in Shetland (or Orkney). "All Shetland's trees are in Norway." I so get it all now.

I've had friends comment on my holiday photos saying they were surprised I got a tan there when they had always heard about the rain and not the sun. It's not a suntan, it's windburn. The locals call it a Scottish tan.

The wind affects everything... the horses on these islands are not ponies. They are full-sized horses but the wind has made 'em short. The cows are short. The sheep are short. And depending on the strain of heritage you have, you're either tall and Nordic or short and square Orkadian. At 5' tall I felt I was amongst my people.

The "wee bit o'breeze" even affected the housing... for millenia. There are have been settlements, yes many of them, found on the Orkneys that date back 5,000+ years. As Americans, with a short history, we can't even fathom what 5,000 years is. If you're a creationist that's only 1,000 after God made the Earth... I guess just after those pesky dinosaurs died out.

All over Orkney archaeological digs are unearthing entire settlements on various parts of the island. And we're not just talking about a couple of walls here and there. We are talking about full housing developments and cairns (structures made of rock and covered with turf - the true use of which is still a mystery). In Skara Brae a storm in 1850 eroded the beachline and uncovered an entire village 5,000 years old that had been covered for thousands of years They built thick house walls and hearths and beds of rock that wouldn't blow down and gave them some buffet zone from the relentless winds.

I took an ecotour with Malcolm Handoll, of All Five Senses on Orkney for a local's perspective on the area. Our first stop was Rennister. It's on a farm, or more precisely, under it. As with most ancient places it was found when a large piece of farm equipment suddenly broke through the ground, the underlying structure entrance giving way. Malcom and I walked up to a fenced area about 10 feet around that had a manhole cover in it. So here I am looking around for a mound of earth that shows a cairn, like I've seen in other locations, and he point down... to the manhole cover.

Me: "Yea, what's that about?"

Malcolm: "That's where we're going."

Me: "Right!"

Malcolm: "Really, that's where we are going."

And he proceeds to life the grate and tell me to climb down. Ok, I'm game and feeling very Alice in Wonderland, down the chute I go... trying not to think of the MANY Law & Order SVU and CSI episodes I've seen where they've found women in such remote "tourist sites (only after they had started to smell). Once I got down the ladder and turned around I found that I was in a room. An actual room about 4 feet tall and 8 feet wide with pillars to hold up the roof, storage spaces for supplies and gain a break from that wind. Easy to see someone living here, if not permanently at least to use for storage. Hmmm, down the rabbit hole see what you find from several thousand years ago! I was stunned. But the surprises weren't over.

We pulled ourselves out of there and went to Cuween Cairn where the heads of 24 dogs and 3 humans were found in 1901 when it was opened. Obviously the dog people - there are eagle people on other parts of the island. This time there was a mound and we climbed a steep hill to get to it, braced hard against the wind. We got to the top and Malcolm told me to take everything out of my back pockets and then proceeded to Nestea plunge backward into the surrounding heather. I tried it and was shocked to find how soft and springy it was, not to mention a perfect windbreak. Hmmm, again, all about the wind. We laid there on the hillside watching the clouds zip over and could hear nothing.

When we finally dusted the heather flowers off our clothes and approached the cairn again, he said, "You go first. You'll get dirty on this one because you have to crawl through." Rain trousers in place, no problemo mate. I crawled into the pitch black and kept asking, "Am I getting closer?" Ok, I was squeamish that I was going to put my hand on a large varmint or squirming spider on each placement. And have I mentioned that I have a bit of claustrophobia? Never mind that.

After ducking through the entryway he told me to stand up. Thinking I was going to crack my noggin on that previous four foot roof at Rennister I stood up slowly and kept going. In the pitch black I could hear him but couldn't see a thing. So imagine my surprise when I took a picture of 6' tall Malcom and saw several feet of available space between him and the rock ceiling. It was tall, with three ante-rooms that were just as tall once you got through the openings. I was able to see these after he let me use the torch (flashlight). They don't know what these cairns were for. They are sound proof but have good acoustics for chanting and drumming. They're also a whole lot of fun when you turn off the torch when you hear people about to come in who don't know you're there... get it? Hours of fun there.

The stone work is so precise it's lasted thousands of years and will likely last as long going forward barring overuse by the current crop of humans. One of the best things I found was that these areas were open to anyone to come into and there wasn't one bit of damage, or graffiti, or trash left behind. And no restrictions because of insurance worries. It was refreshing. The new visitors had much respect for the ancient owners. And maybe because of that they will let us discover a new ruin that gives a further glimpse into their world. They have much to tell us if we will let our ears open to their stories.