A Grand Tour of Arthur’s Seat!
Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot — Alan Jay Lerner
Edinburgh, like Rio De Janeiro is overlooked by an iconic mountain but Arthur’s seat has no huge, venerated monument situated upon it. In a newly secular country, perhaps the ‘Big Yin’ should be our ‘Christ the Redeemer’?
When you visit Edinburgh on holiday as a young kid, visiting family you don’t really notice the ancient, now extinct circa 350 million year old volcano that lies just to the south of the city centre and all of the famous attractions that make the Auld Reekie one of the busiest, ‘Disneyfied’ tourist traps in the world.
But when you live here you can’t fail to notice every day that it casts its huge shadow over just about every famous view there is and no matter where you stand. Whether that is walking down Calton Terrace Brae towards Meadowbank where you get the best sighting, looking out from the castle ramparts, shopping on Princes Street, strolling along the Royal Mile, dooking* on Portobello beach, coastal walking from Aberdour to Kinghorn on the other side of the Forth, or on the train to Waverley station when it is still many miles away en route from Glasgow in the west.
From high up on Queens Drive, the road that encircles Holyrood Park and Arthur’s seat look east and you can also make out Berwick Law, a remnant of another extinct volcano and Bass Rock, a volcanic plug, two other very visible big rocks on the east Lothian coast by North Berwick and when on the bus back to Edinburgh from nearby Dunbar, the seat comes quickly into view, an impossible to miss sign that you are approaching home. From every perspective, it looks very different with Salisbury crag, the rocky edge of a mountainous saddle, worn by ancient ice nearest to the city.
When I say ‘Disneyfied’, I mean that the millions of tourists and visitors fly in and largely stay within the golden triangle and the confines of Princes Street and its gardens, the Royal Mile, the Palace of Holyrood House, the castle, Waverley station, and Arthur’s seat. Even at the busiest of times such as during the festival in August, you can simply stay away from this area which in all reality has become Edinburgh’s Disneyland and the city seems quiet. If you fenced off this area or like Donald Trump suggested and built a wall with secure gates whereby you had to pay a daily fee to get in, the locals wouldn’t worry too much!
The rough track and most direct route up and down to Arthurs seat from Holyrood Park close to the car park and parliament building is now a little like the one up to the peak of Mount Everest where people face day long queues simply to get down from the summit once they have ridden rough shod over others to get there.
However, as I write, MSPs have agreed to implement a tourist tax or levy in 2026 so that this money can be spent on up-keep and local residents, whereby up to £30m annually will be raised. The council’s leader said ‘We’ve long campaigned to gain these powers for Edinburgh, helping us to reap the rewards of being one of the world’s most popular visitor decisions and generating huge benefits to the city and our residents so, it’s a momentous day to finally see the Bill pass through Parliament’. You can read more here:
In the winter, this route up to the peak is very muddy, slippery and dangerous and so many don’t make it back down in one piece and require a helicopter and ambulance. The locals simply walk around the elegant Queens Drive, allowing around 75 minutes to complete the road circuit, that doesn’t go to the top but whereby the views over the city and the Firth of Forth are still stunning but the route quiet and on many days shut off from any traffic whatsoever bar cyclists.
Oddly, it seems that no one really knows how and why Arthur’s seat acquired its eponymous name, but imagine the fall out for the city if Camelot just happened to be discovered to have been located here, its busy enough thank you!
Camelot is well known as a legendary castle and court (and probably mythical too) associated with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. The concept of Camelot first appeared in 12th-century French romances and eventually came to be described as the capital of Arthur’s seemingly ‘virtuous’ realm!
However, King Arthur is very likely to be one of the few people who hasn’t visited his own seat. The name is really thought to be the corruption of a Gaelic saying ‘Ard-na-Said’, meaning the ‘height of the arrows’ that might well be directly connected to an Iron Age fort that once sat on the top and whose remnants remain today. Another popular theory put forward by historians is that it really was the site of the legendary Camelot as suggested above but I guess we’ll never know the truth.
Arthur’s seat is part of a volcanic range made up by the aforementioned rocks, the Pentland hills and Blackford hill on which sits an observatory. It well worth catching the No 9 Lothian bus to the end of the route at Kings Buildings to walk here, once again the views of the city and the seat are amazing but it’s very quiet!
Calton hill in the east-end of the city and the castle rock on which the castle sits are all part of the same volcano. The ‘Nor loch’ that used to sit under the castle and was situated where Waverley Station, the railway lines and Princes Street gardens are now located was drained to facilitate the design and construction of the New Town of Edinburgh.
Robert Louis Stevenson, the son of the Thomas Stevenson the lighthouse builder lived, studied and died in the city and called it a ‘hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold design’. Its height is just over 250 meters.
He was an iconic Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer, best known for works such as Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Kidnapped. His grandfather Robert Stevenson was another famous engineer and so lighthouses were very much part of the family. Perhaps a huge lighthouse, shining a beacon onto the city would be a suitable monument for the top of Arthur’s seat? Let’s explore that.
What would be a suitable monument especially as we live in a largely secular Scotland?
After the recent census in Scotland, it was acknowledged that 51.5% of the responding populous have no religious beliefs when compared to the previous count that was just 37%. That means that for the first time, Scotland really is formally a secular society.
In Rio de Janiero, the largest art deco statue in the world sits on the huge Corcovado mountain that overlooks the city and is named ‘Christ the Redeemer’. This is part of the stunning Tijuca National Park. It was created by French-Polish sculptor Paul Landowski and constructed between 1922 and 1931 and is a stunning 38 metres high, including the base. The arms reach over 28 metres and the whole thing is made of reinforced concrete and soapstone.
It’s an overt symbol of Christianity and has become a cultural icon for Rio and Brazil and was recently voted one of the contemporary seven wonders of the world.
In England we have our own similar statue namely the ‘Angel of the North’, designed by Antony Gormley and located on the M1 in Gateshead. Completed in 1998, it is believed to be the largest sculpture of an angel in the world! It’s 20 metres tall with a wingspan of 54 metres that is close to the width of the latest Boeing Dreamliner aircraft. The vertical ribs on the wings act as an exoskeleton which allows it to virtually ‘fly’ at wind speeds of up to 100 miles per hour. Initially, the rusting steel effect wasn’t much liked but it’s part and parcel of the landscape now. It has no religious overtones and so who should design a similar statue for Arthur, his seat and of whom?
Apropos of nothing, bar being famous and Scottish I give you a list of a few options:
Robert Burns, Andy Murray, Robert The Bruce, William Wallace, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Sean Connery, Jackie Stewart, Mary Queen of Scots, JK Rowling, Alexander Fleming, David Hume, Kenny Dalglish and finally Nicola Sturgeon.
Sturgeon would likely have been many peoples favourite had we had a national vote or yet another independence referendum. But recently her fall from grace has been pretty dramatic, her other half faces charges of embezzlement and her online fights with JK Rowling whereby she sees herself as a feminist but acts as outlier for radical gender ideology and reform mean her halo has slipped and her dubious legacy is now essentially contained in an empty vessel. When she stated the other day that she didn’t believe that passing laws allowing for gay marriage would be possible in today’s Scotland, meaning one that didn’t involve her being in power was a low blow and a patently wrong, attention seeking statement.
However, I give you the ‘Big Yin’ as my ‘Scottish Christ or Angel’ a ‘boy done good’, extremely popular Scottish working class hero and whose iconic statue would I hope be based on this painting below hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh and painted by his long-standing friend John Byrne, who has sadly just died. I am sure this would be a hugely popular move especially if Andy Scott who created the ‘Kelpies’ was commissioned and where the dedication plaque would have to be the infamous joke that Billy told on the Parkinson show in 1975 and a performance that really announced him to the world! His dead wife joke was introduced by him saying: ‘I hope I can get away with this …it’s a beauty’.
The dead wife joke: ‘I said how’s the wife he said ‘aw she’s deed’. Whit? ‘Dead, out the game. Deed. I murdered her, I’ll show you if you want.’ I says aye show me. So we went away up to his tenement building out the close — that’s the entrance to the tenement — and sure enough there’s a big mound of earth but there’s a bum sticking out of it. I says ‘is that her’ and he says ‘aye’. I says what did you leave her bum sticking out for? He says ‘I need somewhere to park my bike’!
It’s all down to geology
As part of the Scottish Enlightenment movement based in the city, Arthur’s seat and the Salisbury crag is where geologist James Hutton observed that because of the ‘angular unconformities’ of the laying down of sedimentary rocks and the formation of the igneous rocks, these phenomena must have occurred at vastly different geological times, meaning that the earth was far older than the few thousand years that religious beliefs at the time allowed for and an important precursor to Darwin’s theory of evolution. He called this his ‘Theory of Earth’.
He famously said that the earth had ‘no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end ‘while I wrote a previous blog about James Hutton that you can read here, while it’s well worth visiting the national portrait gallery to see his image painted by Edinburgh’s iconic painter Sir Henry Raeburn in 1776.
It’s still possible to see a particular area known as the ‘Hutton’s Section’ in the aforementioned Salisbury crag where the volcanic magma forced its way through the sedimentary rocks above it to form what are called dolerite sills. It’s also well worth a visit to the gallery to see this painting and more of Raeburn’s amazing work. I’ll come back to the famed Edinburgh portraitist Raeburn later.
In 1836 five boys famously found a set of seventeen small coffins containing wooden figures in a cave on the seat. Why these were located there and for what reason is still unknown but you can see them at the Museum of Scotland in the city, if you wish. Perhaps they had a role in witchcraft or as some now suggest, they might in some way be connected with the murders committed by Burke and Hare in Edinburgh 1828. The murders were a series of sixteen committed over a period of about ten months by the pair and so the number might be significant. These crimes were a safer way to make money than grave robbing that they were wrongly infamous for, and so they sold the bodies to anatomists and surgeons to practise on until caught.
The overt nature of Arthur’s seat with respect to the geology surrounding Edinburgh has attracted various religious groups too and has a particular significance to Mormons and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints whereby their inaugural Scottish missionary climbed to the top, prayed and dedicated Scotland for the preaching of their Book of Mormon gospel. He wanted to find 200 souls who would accept his message and it seems allegedly that his prayers worked and so the church established itself up here.
Arthur’s seat, aside from being one of the possible locations for Camelot is very popular in both old and contemporary literature.
The area around the seat, the crags and the lakes on it play a leading role in some of Sir Walter Scott’s works such as his renowned Waverley series and specifically ‘The heart of Midlothian’ is where Effie and Jeanie Deans lived at the time of the Porteous riots. My blog on this book combining football in London and Edinburgh is well worth a read (I believe) and can be found here!
From Waverley to White Hart Lane:
https://medium.com/@DuncanHynd/from-waverley-to-white-hart-lane-d083327faa2b
Arthur’s seat has a passing mention as one of the places of interest in Edinburgh in the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, in Jules Verne’s novel The Underground City and is featured in some of local writer Ian Rankin’s books. In Stephen Baxter’s novel Moonseed, the volcano suddenly erupts again, wiping out the city as the planet is eventually destroyed! Unlike Tiede in Tenerife, this is highly unlikely to impact tourism here any day soon.
In the recent T2 Trainspotting film by Danny Boyle and based on the epic Irvine Welsh book, Renton and Spud run up the seat to begin Spud’s detox program when Renton returns to Edinburgh after 20 years away to reunite with his old and infamous friends.
Medieval manuscripts do locate Camelot physically somewhere in Great Britain and occasionally associate it with real cities such as Edinburgh. Since the 15th century, it being a reality have been recorded in popular narratives and probably for tourism purposes this is still suggested by some people today.
Adam Bruce Thomson — The Quiet Path
Adam Bruce Thomson is probably the one of the best contemporary artists when it comes to painting Edinburgh but is not that well known even though he is considered as one of the ‘Edinburgh School’ of artists.
Thomson was born in the city and studied at the Royal Institution School of Art, the RSA Life School and the Edinburgh College of Art.
During World War I Thomson served in the Royal Engineers as a Second Lieutenant, painting and recording many moving war scenes that can be seen at his new exhibition — The Quiet Path, at the Civic Art Centre on right now.
His works have been notably compared to Scottish Colourist Samuel Peploe, Francis Cadell and oil painters Sir William George Gillies and Sir William MacTaggart.
The early 1930s saw him paint a series of monumental paintings of his home town including North Bridge and Salisbury crag from the North West, now permanently located in the Edinburgh City Art Centre. He specialised in other paintings of Arthur’s Seat, even some recorded it at night!
The Innocent Railway
If you know where to look when visiting Arthur’s seat you can find one of Edinburgh’s little known gems and yes there is a tunnel and a railway just under the edge of the Salisbury crag and the volcano. It’s now a footpath but was once a busy, horse drawn (hence its name innocent ie no steam locomotives and safer) railway that brought coal to the Auld Reekie from the nearby Midlothian coal mines to feed Edinburgh’s burgeoning need for heat, power and steam. The line made transport of coal easier than existing roads or ports.
The tunnel at the end of the line at St Leonards is bored through the bedrock and is about half a kilometre long but with a big incline to the end and well worth a look if you can find it, the entrance is hidden away in a car park by some modern flats just to the right as you exit Holyrood Park at the end of Queens Drive via the old concrete park gate posts and by a red GR post box. Good luck!
The slope required a fixed steam engine to pull the coal trucks up to the end. You can walk from here to Duddingston Loch where Raeburn did or didn’t paint the Reverent Walker skating on the ice, the infamous painting which resides in the National Gallery on the Mound. I’ll come to that soon.
Between 1800 and 1830 consumption of coal in the capital increased from 200,000 tonnes a year to an amazing 350,000 tonnes a year and so work began in 1826 on what was then called the Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway. It was finished in 1831 and eventually ran to Newtongrange, that is now on the brand new Borders Railway that uses old lines to connect to Galashiels and Tweedbank (by Melrose) where you can visit Abbotsford, the home of Sir Walter Scott and that is also well worth a day out and discussed in my aforementioned blog.
Eventually, some passengers were allowed to use the service too and the line connected to Lieth and Dalkeith after some time. It closed in 1968 (after horses were withdrawn and both steam and then diesel locomotives plied their trade) with the shut-down of the last coal yard and Edinburgh’s innocent line became a redundant line and was closed down.
The Reverend Robert Walker was famously painted skating on Duddingston Loch
When you get three quarters of the way around Queens Drive, assuming you go clockwise you get amazing views over South Edinburgh, Blackford hill and the Pentlands. Look down and you will see Duddingston Loch. This used to freeze over and skating was once an extremely popular pastime here.
The painting in question is called ‘The Skating Minister’, but who painted it? Credited to Sir Henry Raeburn and painted around 1795, it is often claimed to be by Henri-Pierre Danloux, a Frenchman who lived in Edinburgh in the 1790s and who painted in the style of the skater. Raeburn certainly didn’t paint in this way and was extremely famous for his archetypal, big, bold portraits, a quality that even I can detect having lived in Edinburgh for a few years now. One of his typical portraits is of James Hutton shown above.
The National Galleries of Scotland, really don’t want their iconic painting attributed to an unknown itinerant artist and have fought hard for it to keep its Scottish provenance! After all it sells lots of tea towels, mugs, postcards and other merch.
Now the distinctive painting of the formally dressed in black priest skating across a frozen loch has inspired a novel called ‘The Edinburgh Skating Club’. The author, Michelle Sloan found out about the club, who practised on the loch in the 18th Century when researching the painting.
Reverend Robert Walker was the minister of Edinburgh’s famous Canongate Kirk and a member of the ‘men only’ skating club. He learned to skate in Holland and the painting is certainly presented in a Dutch style.
In 1949 it was bought for a pittance by the National Gallery for circa £500 and even after a BBC documentary that linked the minister directly to Raeburn added to the fact that in 1896, a portrait of Walker, by Raeburn, was sold in Edinburgh, doubt still lingers today.
In the book, Alison Cockburn, who was friends with the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, colludes with his sister, Katherine Hume to live as a man so as to become a member of the club. In a coincidental nod to the toxicity of gender reform politics in Scotland these days whereby it was stated that you could self-certify as a woman after a few months of simply deciding to be one, this makes for a remarkably contemporary novel but one full of local historic Edinburgh landmarks, characters and times past. The background story is set in modern times and catalogues an art historian’s efforts to attribute the work to Danloux and ‘out’ the outlandish fact that Rev Walker might just have been a woman about to win a very big, life changing bet! It’s a great read and a good whodunnit.
Finally, if you walk along the innocent railway and divert off at the historic village of Duddingston, you can visit the brilliant old church and Dr Neil’s loch side gardens which are not that well known but amazing, view the water, wildlife and then either take the road located just above you back to Holyrood Park or visit what is thought to be Scotland’s oldest pub, located in the village.
Is there a volcanic cancer risk?
Are there health risks living close to volcanoes? The inhabitants of Pompei would probably have said yes!
With more than 1,000 volcanoes worldwide currently active and especially where people inhabit areas close by them, there is a risk from the toxic gases as well as the pyroclastic blast and larva flow but do people living in these volcanic areas have a higher risk of a cancer diagnosis?
A research group recently looked at the cancer rates of people living close by one and those who didn’t and saw a rise in the incidence of cancer in children predominantly in the volcanic areas with thyroid cancer rates especially high. In what was quite a generalisation, cancer incidence in volcanic areas was slightly higher than non-volcanic areas and caused by a large number of environmental conditions.
In addition to thyroid cancer, two other studies found that there were other higher incidence rates of cancer found in residents of volcanic areas, which were cervical, liver, skin, leukaemia, Hodgkin’s disease and oral tumours among others in addition to increases in the more commonly seen breast and prostate disease.
Another study in the Azores looked at two areas, one active and one inactive for over 3 million years. Overall incidence rates were higher in the volcanically active area when observing all cancers and both sexes combined probably due to chronic exposure to environmental factors resulting from volcanic activity, such as hazardous gases and aerosols, much of them associated to trace metals.
In Iceland, a country renowned for its volcanoes especially the recent Eyjafjallajökull eruption that had serious effects on aviation around the globe and on respiratory health in those exposed to the volcanic ash. It was suggested in some studies that the acute and chronic health effects of volcanic ash depend on particle size, composition especially crystalline silica content and the chemical properties of the surfaces of the ash particles.
These phenomena vary between volcanoes and between eruptions, making comparison almost impossible and so while acute respiratory symptoms such as asthma and bronchitis have been seen most often, problems from pre-existing lung and heart disease are increased after inhalation of volcanic ash. The conclusion was that while acute respiratory symptoms after exposure to volcanic ash are often well documented, no outlying long-term effects have been found as yet, unless of course you happened to have lived in Pompei!
*Note: For those still with me at the end of my grand tour and are wondering what dooking means, it’s Scots for taking a dip in the cold sea!
July 2024 Blog — A Grand Tour of Arthur’s Seat — Duncan Hynd
