I did a semester abroad at the University of Edinburgh in the 1990s, and though I’ve been back a couple of times since, I haven’t had the chance to hang out in the city again the way I did as a student. I got that chance last week when I flew to see my friends Tobie & Ian for 4 days, and we walked and shopped and ate and gawked and reveled in patches of sunshine in what is arguably the greatest city in the world.
If you haven’t been to Edinburgh, you should of course go as soon as possible. It has been settled since the Bronze Age at least, and it has scores of nicknames that reflect its many eras since then: Athens of the North, Rome of the North (for its seven hills), Auld Reekie (for the coal smoke that used to billow out of chimneys and fog the view of Arthur’s Seat)…. The city revolves around Castle Mount, a basalt bluff, from which the Old Town tumbles down into the Meadows on one side and New Town on the other and sprawls out into neighborhoods and suburbs from there. By walking from the castle down either side of the Mount, you pass through at least 400 years of history, from 17th century churches down to medieval caves where they still put on plays during the Fringe festival in August. This time of year, it’s mostly wide-eyed Harry Potter fans (J.K. Rowling famously drafted the first book in a local café, and many of the story’s chief tropes, like the Night Bus, are taken directly from Edinburgh institutions), troops of girls stumbling around the Grassmarket in their matching glittery outfits for Hen Nights (bachelorette parties), and French people (there must have been a bank holiday on that side of the channel).
We walked an average of 7 miles a day according to Ian’s iPhone; that’s pretty par for the course in Edinburgh. There’s an excellent bus system (grab those front seats on the top deck if you can!), but many sights in the Old Town in particular are accessible only by foot or bike. And as my favorite bits of the city—its tearooms, odd little museums, and bookshops—are found in secret closes or at the end of tortuous flights of steps, I highly recommend a sturdy pair of shoes, an umbrella, and an unhurried frame of mind when touring Edinburgh.
On Thursday I was particularly grateful for all the walking because I had landed at 8 in the morning, I don’t really sleep on planes, and I like to stay up until nightfall to get on the local clock. So, lots of tea and perambulation were just what the doctor ordered. I visited the National Museum with Tobie, Ian, and Polly because Polly had a science project on monkeys to do for the remote schooling she’s doing this semester while her family’s overseas. I’d never been and enjoyed poring over the Scottish treasures—like a beautiful harp gifted by Mary Queen of Scots to one of her court musicians and the winsome Isle of Lewis chessmen carved from walrus tusks—and visiting the Science & Industry pavilion with its steam presses and gorgeous lighthouse lens assemblies (for lighthouses built by the family of Robert Louis Stevenson, no less). We had a fantastic lunch at Ting Thai (though they very strangely, for any restaurant in Britain, serve no hot drinks, so no tea for me). Then, I peeled off from the family for an afternoon of sightseeing in the Old Town while they headed back to get some work done. I went straight down the Royal Mile to visit some of my favorite touristy shops from my college days, including Ragamuffin of Skye and the Scottish Experience, where I was delighted to find a replacement set of the Scottish Picture playing cards that I had worn out over the last 30 years playing cribbage (which I learned from a friend at Uni there). My feet were pretty tired from wobbling over cobbles at this point, so I sat down for a restorative cream tea at Clarinda’s Tea Room. Then, I worked my way back to Tobie & Ian’s flat—in the jaw-dropping Davidson School building, which was a deaf school designed by William Playfair, then a hospital during WWII, and now houses a suite of luxury condos. I went back out with them to look at a flat in Calton Hill (they like to look at real estate since their eventual goal is to have a place in Scotland), and then we set out in search of a pub dinner. One after another was packed or otherwise unsuitable, so we ended up walking all the way down to Leith and having a delightful seafood dinner at Dulse.
On Friday Tobie gave Ian and me our marching orders: shopping for dinner. Naturally, we used it as an excuse to travel the whole city in search of the best ingredients. We hopped a bus out to Portobello, and after standing ourselves up with a cortado from Tanifiki, we popped into Aemilia for a porchetta foccaccia for breakfast (which we ate on the Portobello Walk overlooking the Firth of Forth, watching dogs gambol on the beach) and a selection of their immaculately folded fresh filled pastas for dinner (pumpkin cappellacci with crushed amaretti and spinach-ricotta ravioli), along with some sage butter and house-made beef ragu. We stopped by Root Down to see what seasonal veg they had in stock and came away with a lovely fractal romanesco cauliflower plus some fennel and radicchio for a salad. Then we hopped back on the bus and rode it over to Stockbridge where we ducked out of the rain in a friendly little wine shop; we picked up a bottle of red for dinner and a bottle of Scottish gin to restock Tobie’s bar (a lot of the traditional whisky distilleries have been adding gins to their roster to appeal to younger palates). When it let up, we popped across the street to J. Mellis cheesemonger for a nice selection of Scottish cheeses (Mull cheddar and some nice sheep’s and goat’s cheeses I’ve forgotten the names of, plus a taleggio-like cow’s milk cheese that I think was called Dor Linn). At this point we were hungry again, so we sat down at Hector’s for a pint of hand-pumped cask ale and a truly delightful chicken and leek pie. After picking up a selection of pastries at Archipelago for dessert, we ambled back home along the Water Leith through charming Dean Village, blinking alternately at the gorgeous fall colors and at all the tourists snapping pictures of themselves in front of the fall colors for the ‘gram. Dinner was spectacular: Tobie made us some elderflower French 75’s with the Caorunn gin we had picked up; then, we had the pastas we had bought with the sage butter and ragu, the romanesco roasted with lemon, Parmesan, and bread crumbs, a fennel, orange, and radicchio salad as a palate cleanser, and our pastries for dessert. Ian and I played a bit of Highland Song on his Switch afterward, and then we turned in.
For Saturday Tobie had booked us an outdoor escape room/scavenger hunt experience in the Old Town, so we had a leisurely breakfast at home and then headed over to the Cowgate to start our Burke & Hare-themed hunt—perfectly spooky for Halloween weekend. A proper rain shower caught us out partway through our investigations, but it proffered the perfect excuse to sit down at Lovecrumbs for the best grilled-cheese sandwich I’ve ever had (made with Mull cheddar) and a bowl of minty pea-and-courgette soup. We managed to survive/solve our murderous puzzle and get a nice tour of the Old Town to boot, plus a reminder that living in Edinburgh anytime before the 20th century was not super safe…. On the way home, we stopped for a pint at the Pear Tree, where I used to warm up by the fire before heading home across the Meadows from campus after class. Then, we jostled our way back to the flat through the crowd of spectators headed for the Scotland v. USA rugby game at Murray Field (I won’t even tell you the final score as it was just too embarrassing for our side). After a quick change out of our walking clothes, we made our 6 pm reservation in the Canongate at White Horse Oyster & Seafood Bar, which lived up to its reputation as one of Edinburgh’s best new upscale pubs: I think our favorite of the Spanish-inspired treatments of local seafood had to be the hake ceviche. After stuffing ourselves properly, we walked across the street to the Waverley for a post-dinner cocktail in their cozy upstairs lounge with its theater posters and tiny copper bar tables. Then, we walked down the hill to Prince’s Street and caught a night bus home.
On Sunday the weather seemed promising for our planned run up Arthur’s Seat, the volcanic crag in the middle of the city where King Arthur supposedly held court in the mythic past; as a student, it was one of my favorite escapes. We took the long way round so we could queue up (for 1.5 hours!) for the delicious croissants at Lannan Bakery in Stockbridge, which we ate in the sunshine at George V park. We stopped for coffees at Santu coffee, which renovated an old washery into a very cool and surprisingly comfortable oasis, complete with Sunday morning vinyl spinning. Then, we did a bit of shopping in Lifestory, a Scandinavian lifestyle store where, as Tobie pointed out, we could have happily bought everything given funds enough and time. But we had hiking to do, and the clouds were starting to loom, so we headed on up along Prince’s Street to Holyrood Park and then up onto Salisbury Crags. At this point, Polly was fading, so we decided to cut the hike short and take in the stunning overview from the Crags, a reroute I had performed myself many a time as a student. Then, we caught the bus home in the nick of time to avoid the rain. After another quick turnaround, we headed to dinner at Scran & Scallie, a joyful upscale local on the Comely Bank of the Water Leith, where everyone seemed to be celebrating something. Then, it was back home to get packed and ready for my flight out the following morning from Edinburgh’s small, efficient airport.
It’s hard to describe just how great it was being back in Edinburgh. As I sat up on Salisbury Crags looking over the city, spying the Grange where I had lived, the Meadows I had traversed every day on the way to class, Appleton Tower on campus where I wrote all my papers in the computer lab (and got my first-ever email address! In 1993!), Victoria Street where I used to shop for tea and wooden brushes, and so on and so on—it felt like things were stabilizing for me, or coming into sharp focus. It was like I was zooming or driving an anchor back through time into the young woman I had been: and not only then, but the next time I visited Edinburgh with my best friend, Malena, and the next time, when she got married in Borthwick Castle. For the first time in quite a while, I had the distinct and happy impression of recognizing myself: Hey, I know you….
It was a wonderful feeling. Scotland has always done that for me. I don’t believe in genetic memory: that being said, it is one of the very few places in the world where I feel like what’s around me and what’s inside me line up perfectly. I already can’t wait to go back.
The Rookery 