Cornflower

On castle walls

      "The splendour falls on castle walls And snowy summits old in story...."

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Princess.

The building is the former ordnance storehouse of our magnificent Edinburgh Castle (seldom seen in snow!).

Edinburgh fog

    With dense fog here in Edinburgh on Friday and visibility in this part of town reduced to about fifty yards, a journey across the city was quite eerie as statues and buildings loomed out of the gloom. Above is George IV, next is the dome of the Bank of Scotland,

 

and also on The Mound, the Black Watch Memorial:

 

But Edinburgh fog is not just a meteorological condition pertaining to the Athens of the North, it is also a pudding!

Henry wos here

     Not quite the Tudor symbol on the cover of Wolf Hall,

 but these plaster roses which adorn several of the doorframes in our (1824) house are quite similar!

(I loved the book, as you'll see).

Breakfast table

 

    Having been to look round the new John Hope Gateway building at the RBGE we planned to try the restaurant at the first opportunity, and as their breakfast menu looked particularly tempting, scarcely had the doors opened yesterday when we were there.

   The table at which we sat was inscribed 'Elm (ulmus glabra)', the Wych elm or Scots elm; a neighbouring one was Ash, another Sycamore, and so on, the timber for the furniture all coming from trees felled in the four gardens (Edinburgh, Logan, Dawyck and Benmore) which make up the RBG

That was the table, but what was on it?

 

Scotch pancakes, Ayshire bacon, maple syrup, and good coffee.

A. A. Gill says in Breakfast at The Wolseley, "Breakfast is a meal apart...It doesn't have courses or an order; it isn't prescriptively sweet or savoury; there is no generally accepted sense of its length or constituent parts. It's bespoke, tailor-made to you: a private meal or habit. Breakfast is the most personal and idiosyncratic construction .... It is the most intimate of meals, a euphemism, a glance and a sly smile."

Doesn't that make you view it in a whole new light?

(For The Wolseley itself, click here).

At the garden gate

     We are regular visitors to Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Gardens, and have watched with interest as their John Hope Gateway building has been constructed over the last two years or so. It is now open and we've been to take a look.

The building houses exhibition areas (the Wych Elm exhibition is full of beautiful things), audio-visual displays, a shop with outdoor plant sales area, and we're looking forward to trying the restaurant, reached by a rather striking spiral staircase:

 

The exterior includes a large terrace, and I love the use of stone and wood:

 
While in time there will be a biodiversity garden next to the building, for now there is a wild flower meadow featuring ....

Kellie once more

     One more look at Kellie Castle - though I could mention the wonderful plaster ceilings, the Phoebe Anna Traquair panel (follow that link and scroll down a bit), the blue bedroom whose two alcoves house only blue-bound books, the charming tower room nursery, Hew Lorimer's studio in the former stables, a room whose atmosphere was markedly different from the rest of the house....

     But no; go there if you can, otherwise enlarge this picture and the ones in the previous posts and you'll get a bit of a feel for this unusual and beautiful place.

Stone and glass

To Dalmeny, and St. Cuthbert's Parish Kirk, "the best preserved Norman parish church in Scotland", and fine it is, both in scale and stonework.

While the building is 12th. century, its stained glass is of a much later date, the gift of a Polish officer stationed near here during the war. He fell in love with the church and gave the windows in memory of his mother.

They depict the Madonna and Child, St. Theresa of Poland and St. Margaret (above) with her chapel at Edinburgh Castle.

I love visiting churches but am quite ignorant as to their architectural history - however, I've had my eye on this book for a while now, my only reason for not having bought it yet being geographical relevance!

Doors open

Thanks to The Persephone Post for the link to this house - quite extraordinary!

Looking up

   We haven't had a "looking up" post for a while, so here is the St. Stephen Centre (formerly St. Stephen's Church) in Edinburgh's St. Vincent Street.

Designed by William Playfair and built in 1827-8, it is described here as being "... of vast scale, Baroque power and Grecian severity".

It's now cheek by jowl with contemporary buildings.

And look - blue skies! Told you!

Her dark materials

     As it's midsummer, the Royal Botanic Gardens here in Edinburgh stayed open until 11pm last night. The weather was overcast and rainy which may account for the lack of people wanting to walk round what is a beautiful and magical place at an unusual hour - we had it almost completely to ourselves in the late evening.
   The photographs are on the dark side as the light was fading fast, so I ought to get some similar shots in full sun, just to show what it's really like. However, these do give something of the atmosphere. That's the Pool of Peace above.

  
 A suitably 'midnight' blue iris!

  

The Palm House.

The Castle from the lawn in front of Inverleith House - the rooftops of the New Town in the middle distance.

   
     The way home!

We'll have something lighter and brighter tomorrow, I hope.

Plasterwork

Detail of the ceiling at Edinburgh's Queen's Hall.
The music there on Saturday was pretty good, too!

Looking at lunch

     Yes, I did take a great deal of notice of what I was eating - because it was delicious - and I did pay attention to what my companions were saying - they were my family, after all - but who could fail to look at the architecture in a place like this?

It used to be a bank. There's a message there somewhere....

Houses - 2

     I've just added a new link to the "Places to visit" list in the sidebar. If you click on Ardgrain you will find all sorts of things from barn owls to Virgil to local history, but it's the house itself that is of particular interest to me. The Discover Ardgrain pages will tell you more about the 17th. century building, "one of the crispest, sparest and most truly Scots houses in the north-east", which happens to be where my great, great, great grandparents lived.
      In the way that one thing leads to another, when I was reading this book (which I can thoroughly recommend, by the way) I was looking up its main location on the map and realised that it was set just a short distance away from the area of Aberdeenshire which I knew my forebears came from. I checked the notes I'd made when we researched that part of the family tree a few years ago and, just for fun, googled the name of their farm to see if anything would come up. I was thrilled when the Ardgrain site appeared, and thanks to Rae who lives there now, I have confirmation that it is the very house the family lived in in the latter part of the 19th. and early 20th. century.

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Later: nothing to do with the above but I've just realised that this is Cornflower's 1000th. post!

Houses

You remember this house? It turns out I had 'the real thing' here in a book all along.
The House Book (which is a fascinating mini architectural digest) lists this fisherman's "penty" as a typical Breton style: "The word penty today means cottage, but it used to refer to a labourer's or fisherman's one-roomed dwelling, often attached to a larger property.

"This penty's pleasing cubed proportions are typical, the steep roof-slope suggesting an earlier tradition of thatch. Slates, not used until the nineteenth century, though available locally, usually came from neighbouring Anjou. The loft, lit here by two dormer windows, was used for storage of crops or tackle; the floor, by tradition, would be beaten earth. Breton granite is usually grey, but here it is a rosy pink peculiar to Brittany's north coast."
So now we know!

        

Remembrance : stone

     The 1931 book Hood's Pictorial Edinburgh. Camera studies of a great and historic city includes an extensive section on the Scottish National War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle (more here), but Hood's pictures are as nothing compared to the story he tells of his visit there:
"One enters with the reverent crowd, curious at first....but as one slowly passes the long, beautiful aisle of memorials...one is subdued by an anguished emotion not easy to define.
Later, and when almost alone, I was privileged to see an old Scotswoman asking the keeper to show her the record [in the books of remembrance] of her son; then she moved across to see the book containing the names of two other sons; then, after some little difficulty, son after son, until I learnt from the keper that he was able to disclose to [the lady] the recorded names of the whole of her seven sons whom the war had claimed."