Invasion

Inveresk village with its 17^th and 18^th century houses and beautiful gardens is one of the finest conservation areas in Scotland.

Gardens to delight the senses are stocked with plants from every part of the world.

The stones that made the garden walls and the old houses are from still older buildings as far back as the Roman town.  There are no ruined stones only ruined buildings and good stone will always find a home... or make one

It has not always been the place for tranquil contemplation. Situated on a ridge commanding views of the Forth and above the point where the Esk river meets the Firth of Forth – Inbhir Easg , the confluence of the river Esk, with the Forth, in Gaelic – it was of strategic importance on the coastal plain.

It was occupied by the Brythonic tribe, the Goddodin who, no doubt, had displaced the earlier inhabitants. When the Romans invaded and marched north, its significance was obvious to them and they established a large fort and, later, a vicus or township. The Goddodin, latinised toVotadini became a client state of the empire at its northern frontier, at the eastern end of the Antonine Wall.

Diagonal chisel marks of Roman stonemasons

 on the walls of the church

When the legions left, the land was disputed by Northumbrian Angles and Southern Picts. By the time the country had melded into the nation of Scotland, the invading English armies took the same route north.

The land around St Michael's Kirk had great mounds to take artillery batteries guarding the old bridge and port.

The Rough Wooing of 1547 when Henry VIII tried to force a marriage between, the infant Mary, Queen of Scots and his son Edward, had the English armies devastating the area and defeating the Scots at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh.

Pinkie Cleugh  Battle Site

The seventeenth century saw Cromwell's Roundheads take possession and the eighteenth saw the arrival of Charles Stuart's Jacobites

Invaders and invasions have come and gone, none have possessed the land but fleetingly. All have retreated and left. But now there are more persistent interlopers.

The plant invaders – Japanese knotweed, Himalayan balsam., Giant hogweed.   More demanding and more dogged than any Roman, Anglo-Saxon or Englishman, they have colonised great tracts of the country, subduing and displacing the natives. These invaders are here to stay it would seem.

Himalayan Balsam

Japanese Knotweed

Napoleon called us a nation of shopkeepers – he didn't manage to invade either – but it is because we are a nation of gardeners that we suffer under the alien intrusions. Plants brought back to Victorian gardens have commandeered great swathes of riverbank overpowering all in their path.

It looks like these invaders have succeeded  where all others have failed. They are the possessors of the land now.

Feeding the gulls in Dublin

June 16^th - Bloomsday – the day that is forever associated with James Joyce's Ulysses. The day he met,  in Nassau Street, Nora Barnacle, chambermaid at Finns Hotel who was to become his lover, wife, life-long companion and muse.

 Ulysses, the novel - though that is scarcely what it is - takes place over that one day in Dublin in 1904.

Joyce's Dublin is still there despite the changes and you can follow the paths taken by his two protagonists as they make their way from opposite sides of the city and eventually, by chance, meet in the Holles Materrnity Hospital.

 The solicitous Leopold Bloom is enquiring of a woman he knows who has been three days in labour while the impetuous Stephen Dedalus is getting drunk with the medical students.  Having met Stephen's father at the funeral of Paddy Dignam, Bloom's concern for young Dedalus is such that he later rescues him from a beating by two soldiers in Bella Cohen's bordello.

Last year, we made our way in from Dalkey where Joyce / Dedalus taught at school and lived in a Martello tower, following him on his  day off  into the city to the National Library.

(Blog 6th April 2013)

Eccles Street

This year we came from the north of the city from Eccles Street.  No.7, the home of Bloom and his unfaithful, but loving. wife Molly, no longer exists but the rest of the Georgian frontage with the fanlights over the doors, is still there.

49 Lower O'Connel Street - Lemon's shop sign is still there

In O'Connel Street, you can still see Graham Lemon's sweet shop - “a sugar-sticky girl shovelling scoops of creams for a  christian brother. Some school treat.”, where Bloom is given a free newspaper – a throwaway - which gives rise to much misunderstanding and malice.
 A twenty-to-one outsider called Throwaway did win the Gold Cup in 1904.

The racing mad populace of the Dublin pubs think he has backed the horse and resent him for it but Bloom is quite unaware of it all.
We followed his meanderings around the city centre before and after the funeral - the shops, pubs, meeting places, offices and public places of Joyce's remembered city.

 Joyce left in 1904, ran off with Nora, and only returned briefly on four occasions, the last in 1912.
Although the Dublin of 1904 is the setting, the themes, thoughts, connections, literary and mythological links, symbolism, and archetypes found in Ulysses are universal and timeless.  It could be set in any city in any country yet because James Joyce wrote it, it had to be and still has to be, Dublin in 1904.

Davy Byrne's pub is still as popular as it was in Joyce's day.
Bloom muses...
"Moral pub. He doesn't chat. Stands a drink now and then . But in a leapyear once in four. Cashed a cheque for me once".
 After a glass of wine there, he continues his perambulations around the Dublin streets.
 He feeds the gulls with a couple of Banbury cakes bought from an old woman's stall for a penny.

We couldn't get Banbury cakes so had to make do with croisants – three for 2 Euros!

 Further down Bachelors Walk, the Ormond Hotel, where he had a late lunch in the back room to avoid meeting his wife's lover, Blazes Boylan, is sadly dilapidated.

Ormond Hotel

Mabbot Street, the entrance to “Night-town”, the red light area where Bloom and Dedalus end up is still there if now thoroughly respectable.  The site of Bella Cohen's house of ill repute seems to have become the glass fronted tower of an asset management company, but then Bella was just managing her assets in 1904.

Mabbot Lane

Joyce's Dublin cannot survive for ever but with careful planning and preservation, we should be able to follow Bloom, Molly, Blazes Boylan, Stephen Dedalus, Buck Mulligan about their city for years to come......and feed the seagulls at O'Connel Bridge.

A day of enlightenment and a question

 LotH was battling with the soft furnishing departments of the Edinburgh stores so I withdrew and  took the opportunity to visit a place I had always meant to go but, because it is so easy to  reach, had never done so.

Hailes Castle in East Lothian

Hailes Castle was the home of the Dalrymple family so, when David Dalrymple purchased the Palladian mansion near Musselburgh from its architect, James Smith, it became New Hailes and, eventually, Newhailes.

It typified the move of the Scottish aristocracy from the tough defenders of embattled strongholds against both local and cross-border attackers in various combinations and alliances, to cultivated men of educated tastes and interests. 

Newhailes

 The Union of the Parliaments and the creation of Great Britain in 1707 created a peaceful environment for learning to flourish and led on to the phenomenon of the Scottish Enlightenment

In Scotland, the wide base of literacy, and a collaborative spirit among the key thinkers of the day, meant that when world class philosophers emerged, their ideas were taken on board, developed, and - most importantly - applied by others whose interests ranged from economics through medicine, engineering, geology, law, archeology, physics, chemistry, biology, history and more. The result was astonishing and has since been described as the greatest outpouring of intellectual and scientific accomplishment seen in any nation at any time in history.

New Hailes and David Dalrymple, the 3^rd Baronet were part of this great interaction of enquiring minds. The library with its huge collection of books was described by Samuel Johson as “the most learned drawing room in Europe”

The Library now denuded of books

The gardens and grounds were designed to stimulate the senses with outstanding views and specific features added such as the grotto which was associated with thought and contemplation. The poet and satirist, Alexander Pope, had a grotto dug at his Palladian villa in Twickenham.

The Shell Grotto

A more mundane tunnel was excavated at Newhailes to allow servants access to the house from their separate quarters without the upper classes having their contemplation spoiled by the coming and going of the lower orders!

The walkways and viewpoints are still there but the hoi polloi now have the freedom to roam the paths and the views have been somewhat marred by the march of progress.

The chimneys of Cockenzie power station providing a different sort of enlightenment for the masses

The spread of ideas from the philosophic to the practical with the work of Hutton in geology: Black in chemistry and physics: Cullen in medicine, chemistry and agriculture: Watt in steam engineering: Murdoch in gas lighting; Walker in natural history, resulted in changes in society that those who inspired them could never have foreseen.

The windows of the great library, and many others in the house are now blind, mainly as a result of internal alterations. Somehow they seem symbolic of the intellectual blindness that followed that most glorious time when the Enlightenment finally succumbed to religiosity and romanticism.

Blind windows

 Would that eighteenth century outpouring of  philosophic and scientific thought that came to be known as the Scottish Enlightenment and that influenced western society to this day, have happened without the Act of Union?       We will never know.

Beinn Bragar and beyond

 

Beinn Bragar

Beinn Bragar isn't much of a hill, less than a thousand feet, but on the flat Lewis moorland it, and its two companions, Beinn Rahacleit and Beinn Choinnich, stand out as a mini-massif on the peat bogs. The ramparts of ancient stone promised some energetic scrambling with the prospect of some decent views of the coastline to the north and west.

A good scramble!

The path in from Shawbost took me over abandoned peat hags and squelchy mosses to the base of the ben then a stiff but relatively quick, even for an old guy, climb to the upper stony redoubt.

The entire climb was accompanied by the call of cuckoos, perhaps voicing an opinion of the sensibility of the blogger, and the warbling wheep of curlew. The approach slopes were steep enough to keep my face parallel to the ground and gave me a passing inventory of the flora and fauna of the hill - the insectiverous butterworts, spotted hebridean orchids, busy burying beetles, marsh violets and delicate sedges.

The scramble to the top was quite exhilarating and the views, as expected, were beautiful.

To the north, I saw a good track which looked a lot easier than the peat moor that I tramped across and seemed the best way out but, as I discovered, everything has its price.  The descent was not as easy on the northern slopes. 

No easy way down

 Somewhat bruised but intact, I made my way back to have look at the remains of an Iron age fort – a dun,on   the edge of the appropriately named Loch an Duna, in the village of Bragar.

Dun Bragar

Built in the first millenium B.C., it was occupied up until the middle ages when defensive sructures were still essential in the habitual clan battles between Morrisons, Macalays, and Macleods.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/jun/21/scotland-windpower-lewis-morrisons-macaulays

Now, the only occupants of the loch are grey lags and mallards, raising their broods in peace.

  Down by the sea, I came across the somewhat grandly named Port Mhor Bragar,  translating as the big port of Bragar which only consists of a slipway but, like so many of the spots on the Hebrides, has an a view round every corner.

Another relic of the middle ages is the pre-reformation chapel, Teampull Eoin, at Port Mhor Bragar.  Like so many of these charming little early churches along the coastline of Lewis, it has been allowed to fall into ruin, despoiled by modern graves dug in its interior.
 Strange that islanders so famed for their religiosity should treat the places of worship of their forefathers in such a cavalier fashion.

Teampull Eoin - St John's chapel

   Despite the bruises, a good day out.

In search of the bird with the longest name

Well, not quite the longest – the red breasted merganser beats it by two letters, but the saw-bill is encountered much more frequently than the Arctic visitor, the red necked phalarope, a summer migrant returning to breed in a very few select locations in the northern and western isles.

Loch na Muilne

 Loch na Muilne – the Loch of the Mill- in the north of the Isle of Lewis is just such a spot and my timing for once was spot on.
 The last week in May is when they return to this wee lochan to breed. Unusually for birds, it is the males who are dowdy and the females who sport the bright colours. The Gaelic name is Deargan-allt which translates appropriately as "a red mark on the stream".

Why they choose this stretch of water from the dozens, scores, possibly hundreds of lochans scattered all over the Lewis moors, is a mystery to me. Maybe the combination of vegetation, marsh and shallows, insect species – the micro-environment - suits them. Every other loch seemed to be taken up by greylags and their offspring. Perhaps their absence was the key to the phalaropes choice.

Greylags protecting their goslings

On my first visit, I was just turning to leave when two came flying in and disappeared into the long grass. Not sure, I returned the next morning with no success but, after a day spent scrambling up Ben Bragar, I returned to catch sight of the pair paddling around the margins of the lochan in their curious circling fashion.

Tormentil

Feeling pleased with myself, I traipsed back under the song of skylarks and the incessant piping of oystercatchers, across the moorland studded with wild flowers – marsh lousewort, milkwort, tormentil, the ever present bog cotton and the Hebridean orchid. pausing to admire the drystone building with massive boulders in the ruined black houses and field walls on the way.

Marsh lousewort

Hebridean orchid

Near Loch na Muilne is the Arnol Black House, the Tigh Dubh that was the dwelling of Hebrideans for centuries and had probably not changed much since Neolithic times.
 Perfectly adapted to the climate of the Western Isles and using the local materials to hand, these houses were initially “improved” which actually made living conditions in them worse, then abandoned all together for modern “white” houses.

The black house with its thick double skinned walls, rounded corners to deflect the gales and replaceable thatched roof, housed the family at one end and their cow at the other. A handy arrangement in the long, cold, dark Hebridean winter.

Arnol Tigh Dubh

Steps were built into the drystone walls allowing access to the roof for repairs, the rain running off the thatch drained through the rubble filled walls, leaving the interior dry and the smoke from the central peat fire kept the thatch dry as it found its way out. Primitive but effective.

Interior with peat fire

An effective gateway for bipeds but not quadrupeds!

People were most likely living in similar houses when they erected Clach an Trushal, the Trushal stone as part of a lost stone circle, 5000 years ago.

Were the rednecked phalaropes flying in to breed on Loch na Muilne then?

P.S.  A special thanks to the people at the cottage near the Trushal stone who found and looked after the camera that the dopey blogger left behind.