Our final full day in Scotland. We start our morning by walking up Princes Street to Calton Hill, where we stroll around the monuments and look westward on the city and the Salisbury Crags. We cross the North Bridge over Waverley Station, grabbing a cup of hazelnut gelato from Patisserie Valerie. Reaching the Royal Mile, we turn east down High Street, looking for the Carson Clark Gallery on St. Mary's Street. Unfortunately, we find the doorway boarded up and the store in the process of moving to a new location. We walk back up the Royal Mile toward Castle Rock, upon which Edinburgh Castle sits. I am on a mission to find an antique physical map of Scotland to complement the maps of Iceland and Maine hanging in our apartment, but the shops lining the Mile are mostly disappointing - cookie-cutter souvenir stores with identical postcards, sweaters, and tartan paraphernalia. We find an exception to this inside the Tron Kirk, a 17th century parish church turned local crafts market, where we browse jewelry booths, handmade prints, and vintage tees under stained glass windows. Continuing west along High Street, we stop inside St. Giles' Cathedral, the heart of the Church of Scotland, where we sit for awhile and listen to the pianist playing in the nave.
We head west to Victoria Street, a cobblestone street where we stop at the Old Town Bookshop, a narrow little shop filled with antique, secondhand books. The historian in me is filled with joy, as I flip through sections ranging from old textbooks of medicine to personal diaries and writings on the occult. There is a trunk of old prints, newpapers, and maps in protective sleeves - but nothing suitable for an apartment wall in Baltimore. We find a political map of 18th century Scotland, but it looks as old as its subject matter, and the asking price is several thousand dollars. We continue down Victoria Street, with its terrace suspended high above the shops and sidewalks. At the Grassmarket, we find an outdoor bazaar and a festival atmosphere. Jazz music is playing as we weave between stalls selling vinyl records, paintings by local artists, and seafood paella. We walk up the Vennel to get a lovely view of Edinburgh Castle on the hilltop, and find a picnic table to sit and eat our sandwiches and fruit.
After lunch, we climb the stone staircase up from the Grassmarket to the esplanade in front of Edinburgh Castle, where vendors are selling ice cream and cotton candy. We spend the rest of the afternoon wandering the gardens around the castle (free!) , visiting the Museum on the Mound (free!) where we learn about the Bank of Scotland and win two chocolate coins for answering trivia questions, and exploring the National Gallery (free!), where there is an impressive collection of Scottish landscape paintings by the likes of Horatio McCulloch and William MacTaggart. Admittedly, it is bittersweet to stroll past massive canvasses depicting pastoral scenes over Loch Katrine, Glen Coe, and the Trotternish Peninsula on Skye, knowing that it will be awhile before I see these places again. We leave the museum to find the city blanketed in a rainstorm. Walking briskly, we head back to the Old Town and down the narrow alley of Advocates Close, where we have a dinner reservation at The Devil's Advocate.
The next morning, we pack our bags and finish the last of our fruit and pastries. While Jane waits on the sidewalk with our luggage, I painfully extract the car from the 4th floor of the St. James parking structure. It is early on Sunday morning, and there is little vehicular or pedestrian traffic as we (eventually) find our way out of the city. We join the M9 headed towards Falkirk and the last stop of our trip - The Helix, an industrial park turned recreational parkland near the Forth and Clyde Canal and the River Carron. At the foot of the canal stands the Kelpies - two massive metal horseheads, over 100 feet tall, which were completed only recently in 2013. The kelpie, far from your average horse, is a mythological creature present throughout Scottish folklore. It is variously said to be a water demon haunting the rivers of the Lowlands, a mischievous shapeshifter inhabiting the lochs and pools of the Highlands, or a mythical, humanoid creature ("the blue men" or storm kelpie) that dwells in the Minch - the stretch of sea between the Isle of Skye and the Outer Hebrides. It is in this last context that I have heard most about the creature, through the maritime stories told by Adam Nicolson in Sea Room, and Robert MacFarlane in The Old Ways. Rain is coming down softly as we stand in front of these sculptures, a loving testament to the power of water and landscape in the Scottish imagination. For Jane and I (born in the same year, we share the Chinese zodiac sign of the horse), it is a fitting place to end our engagement trip through Scotland - before a pair of wild spirits, perilous incarnations of river, lake, and sea.
