An Adventure in 'Auld Reekie'

Tonight was going to be Grooved Ware night, but I'm just too exhausted. 

Once again, it was a day of transport chaos.  Not because of the weather this time, but because of a fatality on the Edinburgh-Glasgow railway line which threw the trains completely out of kilter and meant that I didn't get home until 7 pm or thereabouts...

My husband's very fond of Edinburgh, but I'm not the World's Biggest Fan of the 'Athens of the North'.  Having worked there previously, there's something particularly unappetising about falling off the train at the crack of dawn and staggering up Fleshmarket Close (even the name sounds horrible), past the streams of urine and the odd pile of vomit left over from the previous night's carousing.

Edinburgh's a city, and like all cities, it has its problems.  And once you forge past its seamy underbelly, leaving a world reminiscent of the one inhabited by Burke & Hare (and reinvented for our time by Ian Rankin), it transforms into something rather splendid. There are layers and layers of history, all waiting to be unpicked and uncovered by the curious and observant.   Once again, I missed loads of fabulous photo opportunities.  The weather was glorious, and the architecture of Edinburgh looked particularly lovely.  But I was lugging two heavy copies of my thesis and I really couldn't justify adding any extra weight by adding a camera to my burden.

Edinburgh is home to a number of Very August Institutions, and today I visited two of them.   First port of all was the National Museum of Scotland, to catch up with Bronze Age matters.  Then it was on to the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland.

It turned out to be a hard day, but a rewarding one.  They've changed things at RCAHMS, and I'm not convinced the changes are for the better.  Once upon a time, it took three weeks to get an appointment, and you'd get all your appropriate photographs ready and waiting on your arrival.  Now you get an appointment within a couple of days, but have to do everything yourself.  You have to find your location, check what sorties have been flown over it in the past 60 years, then complete an order form to request your photos.  It now takes three times as long to do the same job...

I love looking at the vertical aerial photographs.  It's a tricky thing to get the photos positioned exactly, but when you do, the image goes 3-d, and it's just like looking down on a Hornby train-set.  The results can be almost magical.  Even a spoil-heap or railway cutting looks impressive.

Once the AP's were dealt with, I started reading up on Heavy Anti-Aircraft Batteries, Gun Emplacements, Radar and GL mats and all sorts of things.  It's a complex subject and something I'm not very familiar with as yet.  
 
It wasn't all work, of course.  At lunchtime, I went to my usual haunt - Juice Monkey - and found it had closed down.  I'm quite sad about that.  Juice Monkey did fresh fruit smoothies to die for.  Sadly, the Punky Peach and the Polar Pear smoothies are no more...  But the chocolate shop that sits just around the corner from the Commission is alive and well, and full of decadent, wonderful things.

Naturally, I paid it a visit, and came back laden with goodies...

And tomorrow, I'm going to Kirkcudbright to look at some Bronze Age metalwork.  And some prehistoric monuments...  And some serious castles...  And some abbeys, too, if all goes according to plan...

An Adventure in 'Auld Reekie'

Tonight was going to be Grooved Ware night, but I'm just too exhausted. 

Once again, it was a day of transport chaos.  Not because of the weather this time, but because of a fatality on the Edinburgh-Glasgow railway line which threw the trains completely out of kilter and meant that I didn't get home until 7 pm or thereabouts...

My husband's very fond of Edinburgh, but I'm not the World's Biggest Fan of the 'Athens of the North'.  Having worked there previously, there's something particularly unappetising about falling off the train at the crack of dawn and staggering up Fleshmarket Close (even the name sounds horrible), past the streams of urine and the odd pile of vomit left over from the previous night's carousing.

Edinburgh's a city, and like all cities, it has its problems.  And once you forge past its seamy underbelly, leaving a world reminiscent of the one inhabited by Burke & Hare (and reinvented for our time by Ian Rankin), it transforms into something rather splendid. There are layers and layers of history, all waiting to be unpicked and uncovered by the curious and observant.   Once again, I missed loads of fabulous photo opportunities.  The weather was glorious, and the architecture of Edinburgh looked particularly lovely.  But I was lugging two heavy copies of my thesis and I really couldn't justify adding any extra weight by adding a camera to my burden.

Edinburgh is home to a number of Very August Institutions, and today I visited two of them.   First port of all was the National Museum of Scotland, to catch up with Bronze Age matters.  Then it was on to the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland.

It turned out to be a hard day, but a rewarding one.  They've changed things at RCAHMS, and I'm not convinced the changes are for the better.  Once upon a time, it took three weeks to get an appointment, and you'd get all your appropriate photographs ready and waiting on your arrival.  Now you get an appointment within a couple of days, but have to do everything yourself.  You have to find your location, check what sorties have been flown over it in the past 60 years, then complete an order form to request your photos.  It now takes three times as long to do the same job...

I love looking at the vertical aerial photographs.  It's a tricky thing to get the photos positioned exactly, but when you do, the image goes 3-d, and it's just like looking down on a Hornby train-set.  The results can be almost magical.  Even a spoil-heap or railway cutting looks impressive.

Once the AP's were dealt with, I started reading up on Heavy Anti-Aircraft Batteries, Gun Emplacements, Radar and GL mats and all sorts of things.  It's a complex subject and something I'm not very familiar with as yet.  
 
It wasn't all work, of course.  At lunchtime, I went to my usual haunt - Juice Monkey - and found it had closed down.  I'm quite sad about that.  Juice Monkey did fresh fruit smoothies to die for.  Sadly, the Punky Peach and the Polar Pear smoothies are no more...  But the chocolate shop that sits just around the corner from the Commission is alive and well, and full of decadent, wonderful things.

Naturally, I paid it a visit, and came back laden with goodies...

And tomorrow, I'm going to Kirkcudbright to look at some Bronze Age metalwork.  And some prehistoric monuments...  And some serious castles...  And some abbeys, too, if all goes according to plan...