EPT offers walks on Edinburgh’s dramatic and historic Royal Mile, led by poet Ken Cockburn
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Edinburgh is a UNESCO City of Literature, and has the only purpose-built poetry library in the world. Poetry has been its heartbeat for centuries – the ‘makars’ of the old Scottish kings, Robert Burns in the 18th century and Robert Louis Stevenson 100 years later, 20th century writers like Norman MacCaig and Muriel Spark, plus the many poets of the city today. Weaving through narrow closes into op
en squares and gardens, you’ll find out how Edinburgh has inspired writers over the centuries. Whether you love poetry, are interested in Scotland’s history and literature, or just want to discover some secrets of the Royal Mile, this tour is for you. Ken Cockburn is poet, translator and writing tutor based in Edinburgh. Formerly Fieldworker and Assistant Director at the Scottish Poetry Library (just off the Canongate, in Crichton’s Close), he has run poetry tours in Edinburgh’s Old Town since 2007, for organisations and projects including The Old Town Festival, Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh City of Literature, Artlink, the Scottish Storytelling Centre and the Scottish Storytelling Festival. He has also worked in many other sites across the city, presenting poetry in libraries, galleries, pubs and the Scottish Parliament. Tours are available for private bookings, and can be run for between 1 and 20 people.
As the upper part of the Royal Mile is so busy during the Festival, this month's walks start outside the Canongate Kirk by the Robert Fergusson statue. He missed last year's Festival – a leg needed mending – but he's back in place this year and still striding purposefully, book in hand.
Next poetry walks later this month on Friday 16th and Saturday 17th August – Friday afternoon at 2.30pm, and Saturday morning at 11.00. This month we'll start by the Robert Fergusson statue outside the Canongate Kirk. Full details and bookings on Eventbrite. And the weather looks pretty good for both days at the moment!
Let's take a stroll through the historic streets of Edinburgh's Old Town and soak in the beauty of poetry together this summer!
Walks today (Friday) at 2.30pm and tomorrow (Saturday) at 11.00am. You can book via Eventbrite, or come along and pay cash. Meet at Parliament Square, outside the main entrance of St Giles. Weather forecast is good!
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/come-down-the-mile-poetry-walks-in-edinburghs-old-town-junejuly-2024-tickets-887648870667?aff=odcleoeventsincollection&keep_tld=1
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I’m running more poetry walks in Edinburgh over the next few months, from 21 June to 12 October. The June, July, September and October walks start outside St Giles Cathedral; the August walks by the Robert Fergusson statue outside the Canongate Kirk. Full details here. Column 1: St Anthony's Chapel, Holyrood Park; The Scottish parliament building (staves and shadows); the old Royal High School, Calton Hill…...
I’m running more poetry walks in Edinburgh over the next few months, from 21 June to 12 October. The June, July, September and October walks start outside St Giles Cathedral; the August walks by th…
Memorials to forgotten writers and their unread works.
Mary Balfour (1778-1818), author (or authoress, if you prefer) of Self Control, a novel, first published in 1811; the version available on Google Books dates from 1849, which gives some measure of its popularity. Her stone is in the Canongate Kirkyard.
Franz Hedrich (1823-1895), whose best known work claimed he was true author of a series of popular novels published by his friend and compatriot Alfred Meissner (1822-1885) in the 1850s and 1860s; they were reprinted in the early 1870s, but not again since. (I've just about finished writing a novel about Hedrich, which delves into why he made such an outrageous claim, and why he's buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard.)
Thomas Reid (1746-1831) wrote a Treatise on Clock and Watch Making (1826) which ran to six editions. His stone is in the Old Calton Burial Ground.
William Knox (1889-1825), who I've posted about before, wrote the poem 'Mortality', a favourite of Abraham Lincoln. Walter Scott praised his work, and an edition of his Collected Poems appeared in London in 1847. His memorial is in the New Calton Burial Ground.
Some ghosts evoked by plaques in closemouths just of the High Street.
Anchor Close, home of the men's drinking club the 'Crochallan Fencibles', founded by printer William Smellie (who edited the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica) and visited by Robert Burns.
Old Stamp Office Close, associated with the Countess of Eglinton and, like something out of a folk tale, her seven beautiful daughters, as well as Flora MacDonald. As Robert Chambers wrote in Traditions of Edinburgh (1842), "It was a goodly sight, a century ago, to see the long procession of sedans, containing Lady Eglintoune and her daughters, devolve from the close and proceed to the Assembly Rooms, where there was sure to be a crowd of plebeian admirers congregated to behold their lofty and graceful figures step from the chairs on the pavement. It could not fail to be a remarkable sight — eight beautiful women, conspicuous for their stature and carriage, all dressed in the splendid though formal fashions of that period, and inspired at once with dignity of birth and consciousness of beauty! Alas! such visions no longer illuminate the dark tortuosities of Auld Reekie!"
Old Assembly Close, where the 'dancing assemblies' attended by the Eglinton ladies took place. They were, as described by Oliver Goldsmith, rather sombre affairs. "When a stranger enters the dancing-hall, he sees one end of the room taken up by the ladies, who sit dismally in a group by themselves; in the other end stand their pensive partners that are to be; but no more in*******se between the sexes than there is between two countries at war. (…) At length, to interrupt hostilities, the lady directress, or intendant, or what you will, pitches upon a lady and gentleman to walk a minuet; which they perform with a formality that approaches to despondence. After five or six couple have thus walked the gantlet, all stand up to country dances; each gentleman furnished with a partner from the aforesaid lady directress; so they dance much, say nothing, and thus concludes our assembly."
Words vying for (and catching) my attention one day last autumn.
TREAD LOUDLY, Princes St; QUIET NO MORE, Picardy Place; DON'T SLEEP, Cowgate.
Words of Walter Scott in Waverley Station, named after the indecisive hero of his first novel.
Just the one word today, appearing from behind the clouds in three languages to Moses (atop a sundial). On the side of John Knox House on the High Street.
Some Edinburgh colours: white, grey, blue, black, green.
Until 1856 Edinburgh and Canongate were two separate burghs. The Canongate's coat-of-arms – a stag with a cross between its antlers – together with its motto, 'sic itur ad astra', is still present at various sites, including on the Mercat Cross by St Giles (in Edinburgh proper – golden stag on a red ground), and on a small plaque on the blue tiles of the Scottish Poetry Library (in the Canongate), aptly enough as the words of the motto are taken from a poem – Virgil’s Aeneid.
The words 'sic itur ad astra', meaning, more of less, ‘this way to the stars’, are found in an episode in which the god Apollo descends to praise the valour in battle of Aeneas’s son Iulus.
The first complete translation of the Aeneid into a northern European language was made in Edinburgh by the churchman Gavin Douglas in 1512-13. Below is the Latin original, his version of this passage and an English gloss I've made of Douglas's text (any unfamiliarity comes more in his spelling than his vocabulary).
“Macte nova virtute, puer: sic itur ad astra,
dis genite et geniture deos."
"Eik and continew thy new vailʒeand deidis,
Thou ʒong child ; for that is the way the ledis
Vp to the sternis and the hevynnis hie,
Thou verray Goddis ofspring, quod he,
That sal engendir Goddis of thy seyd."
(Even continue thy new valiant deeds,
Thou young child, for that is the way that leads
Up to the stars and the heavens high,
Thou very God's offspring, said he,
That shall engender gods of thy seed.)
"Gin I speak wi the tungs o men an angels, but hae nae luve i my hairt, I am no nane better nor dunnerin bress or a rínging cymbal."
1 Corinthians 13, Scots version by William Lorimer (1885-1967)
Outside Queensberry House, integrated into the Scottish Parliament building, is this translation from St Paul by William Lorimer, who taught Ancient Greek at various universities, and in retirement translated the New Testament from Greek into Scots.
The text might have been placed here to remind parliamentarians of truths more profound than passing political concerns, but its placement behind a large barred gate literally constrains it. I've never seen the gate opened, and those using this entrance go in through two smaller side-gates, neatly side-stepping Paul's admonition.
(The King James Bible version of the verse above is: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.")
"Open the doors! Light of the day, shine in, light of the mind, shine out!"
The opening of Edwin Morgan's poem 'For the Opening of the Scottish Parliament', as presented on the front door of the Scottish Poetry Library, with photos of windows taken from inside the parliament building.
I posted recently about a new booklet, Wale. The cover features an image of the pool surround outside the Scottish parliament building – these are from a series of photos I took last summer.
Robert Fergusson was the poet of 'Auld Reikie', but during his lifetime Edinburgh's transformation to the 'Athens of the North' was beginning, as the New Town started taking shape.
One of its main instigators was George Drummond (1688-1766), who is remembered by a stone is in the south-west corner of the Canongate Kirkyard. He was Lord Provost of Edinburgh on six separate occasions from the 1720s to the 1760s, and his two great achievements were the building of a new hospital in what is now Infirmary Street just off South Bridge (Drummond Street is the next street up); and the initial planning of the New Town. He saw James Craig's 1765 designs, though it was a project realised only after his death.
In ‘Auld Reikie’ Fergusson paid tribute to Drummond’s achievements in creating both the infirmary and the New Town, while also ribbing upstart Glasgow's architectural pretensions.
Peace to thy shade, thou wale o' men,
Drummond! relief to poortith's pain:
To thee the greatest bliss we owe,
And tribute's tear shall grateful flow:
The sick are cur'd, the hungry fed,
And dreams o' comfort tend their bed.
As lang as Forth weets Lothian's shore,
As lang's on Fife her billows roar,
Sae lang shall ilk whase country's dear,
To thy remembrance gie a tear.
By thee Auld Reikie thrave and grew
Delightfu' to her childer's view:
Nae mair shall Glasgow striplins threep
Their city's beauty and its shape,
While our new city spreads around
Her bonny wings on fairy ground.
poortith, poverty
threep, argue
Staying with Robert Fergusson, this is his gravestone in the Canongate Kirkyard, commissioned by Robert Burns, who provided the epitaph (though he borrowed a line, and a rhyme, from a stanza in Thomas Gray's ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’):
Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Honour's voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death?
Somewhat confusingly, Burns' quatrain also appears on a memorial to a poet who died a year before Burns was born. Allan Ramsay (1685-1758) was buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard (also in Edinburgh), but by the 19th century the site of his grave had been lost. To remember him, a "simple stone" was commissioned and placed on the south exterior wall of Greyfriars Kirk, Burns' lines repurposed for a later monument to an earlier poet.
I sent a selection of quotes about Edinburgh, and he made them into this book I decided to call Wale.
The word comes from Robert Fergusson's 1773 poem 'Auld Reikie', which begins 'Auld Reikie, wale o ilka toun / That Scotland kens beneath the moon', 'wale' meaning choicest or best.
Those lines are inscribed at the foot of David Annan's Fergusson sculpture outside the Canongate Kirk, where I went the other night to hear James Robertson and Rhona Brown talk about the poet, 250 years dead this year. Blossom obscured the text, but in case anyone thinks it was idyllic a haar hung over Salisbury Crags, and balmy it was not.
Sales pitch – Copies of Wale are available for £5, contact me if you'd like a copy.
I've scheduled another set of walks for the summer and early autumn, Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings.
June 21 & 22
July 19 & 20
August 16 & 17
September 13 & 14
October 11 & 12
Full details and how to book on Eventbrite.
Discover Edinburgh's historic Royal Mile and its gardens, closes and graveyards with poet and guide Ken Cockburn. He reads from poets who have written about the city over the centuries, from Burns & Stevenson to Victor Hugo & 'The Silent Traveller'.
Thanks to Billy Mills for reviewing my pamphlets Edinburgh: poems & translations and Christmas Poems in his latest round-up. "Two delightful tiny packages".
Lilith Walks, Susan M. Schultz, BlazevVOX, 2022, SKU: 978-1-60964-420-8, $22.00 Meditations: December 2019 – December 2020, lyrical prose, Susan M. Schultz, Wet Cement Press, 2023, ISBN: 979-…
Thanks to Billy Mills for reviewing Edinburgh: poems & translations and Christmas Poems.
Thanks to Billy Mills for reviewing Edinburgh: poems & translations and Christmas Poems.
I’ve been posting regularly on instagram this year, with a different theme each month. January was objects from my parents’ house, cleared and sold last year; above, Cadbury’s tin…
I've been posting regularly on instagram this year, with a different theme each month. January was objects from my parents' house, cleared and sold last year; above, Cadbury's tin, folding ruler, THOR mallet, stud box, small bowl, Polish-English Dictionary. February was small books; the first one is Burns, and the rest are self-explanatory. March is postcards of places; above, Copenhagen, Berlin (Ost), Lübeck, Rome, Kirkcaldy, Florida....
I’ve been posting regularly on instagram this year, with a different theme each month. January was objects from my parents’ house, cleared and sold last year; above, Cadbury’s tin…
New prints & books from The Caseroom Press. With thanks to Barrie Tullett.
Some new publications from The Caseroom Press, designed and printed by Barrie Tullett. There are two prints of individual poems, both published but uncollected. I wrote ‘Hands’ in 2014,…
Starting to think about poetry walks for the coming year, though I'll wait till it's a bit warmer before hitting the streets. I've also been working on an anthology of poems from the walks, in an unusual format… more details once we've developed the idea further. In the meantime, here are some images taken a few Januarys ago at the Japanese Garden at Lauriston Castle, in north-west Edinburgh.
Spotted on Woodlands Road, Glasgow last night. The first two lines (ripped) read
not to be complicit
not to accept everyone else is silent it must be alright
The QR code links with the Wikipedia page for Modechai Vanunu, to whom the poem is dedicated.
Always good to be reminded of Tom's poetry, no less relevant now the man himself is gone.
Thanks to all who came on the poetry walks this summer. I did the last ones at the weekend – rain on Friday afternoon, but clear on Saturday. Plenty folk still out on the streets both days, though there were fewer buskers and performers to navigate while the rain fell.
It's good to see that Robert Fergusson is back outside the Canongate Kirk, now this gammy leg has been repaired. And one of the walkers drew my attention to the fact that the plaque there beside him about his life and influence on later poets is also present as a braille version – more exceptional than it should be.
As September progresses and the tints of autumn become more prominent, here is a short extract from Fergusson's 'Auld Reikie', about looking forward to the season for the warmth and social pleasures of life indoors.
Coleridge, writing from Edinburgh, to Southey in Cumbria, 13 September 1803, overhelmed by sound & vision.
As summer comes to an end, I'll be leading the last two public poetry walks of the year on Friday 15 (2.30pm) and Saturday 16 September (11.00am). We'll start at St Giles, and meander downhill to the palace and parliament, and along the way I'll read pieces by Burns, Fergusson, the great Anon, Dorothy Wordsworth and RL Stevenson, among others. The RLS text in the photo, with Holyrood Palace in the background, reads "Wars have been plotted, dancing has lasted deep into the night – murder has been done in its chambers." https://www.eventbrite.com/e/638618323597
A walk on and around Edinburgh's Royal Mile, with readings of poems written over the centuries.
The poet Robert Fergusson was born on 5 September 1750 in Edinburgh, where he died tragically young twenty-four years later after a firework of a life – the flash of his poems and then darkness. The poem below is from Peter McCarey's vast opus The Syllabary, a work of a completely different order, worked away at steadily over decades.
Fergusson
In leagues of stricken
Gents he leers at bloodshot
Lees and crystals in the glass.
Auld Reekie leads him
A grim jig. The wind leans
Into him, leaves him cold.
Edinburgh
EH11SR
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