As Lisa told you in our last post, we were recently(-ish) in Edinburgh. This was, in fact, no less than our fourth time in Edinburgh, but we had never before really seen the place. Dating all the way back to our honeymoon trip to the UK, we’ve passed through Edinburgh without ever really getting a chance to stop and see it. On our honeymoon the weather was so filthy we went to the movies; another time we just landed at the airport late at night, stayed in a hotel for a quick rest, then met friends, rented a car and made for the countryside. It was like that – we wanted to see Edinburgh, we’d get our noses up against the window, and that’d be it. So, heck with that, we carved out a few days to finally see the city.

Two other motivations called us towards Edinburgh. One was the previously-mentioned Andy Goldsworthy exhibition, which was as magnificent as last week’s post showcased. The second was a serendipitous chance to catch up with a new friend from America who was stretching her wings with some solo travel in the UK. She was going to be in the city while the exhibition was going on, and that was the final straw; we had to go. (Oh, darn.) We had a predictably annoying flight over on Ryanair -maybe someday we will shrug off the potential savings in favor of a more civilized flying experience, but that day has not yet arrived. We did arrange to stay at Eden Locke again, a place we discovered back in 2023 that suits as to a “t”. We were in the UK in late October, so the weather was garbage but we knew that going in and packed mostly appropriately.

On our one full day with our friend that wasn’t dedicated to the gallery exhibition, we made like tourists and went up into “Old Town.” Edinburgh spreads out and around from an oblong hill which, being a high point in the terrain, somebody put a castle on way back in the day. Thus the hilltop became the earliest kernel of the city and to this day has a certain cachet; an address in Old Town signaled prestige back in the day, although now it has a healthy dose of “also tourists out the ying-yang.” We wandered the “Royal Mile” for a bit, which is a stretch of road that terminates at the castle on one end and runs the whole length of the hill. Eventually we made it to an actual bit of classic tourism, a guided visit into “Mary King’s Close.”

Ok, so that name needs some unpacking. First, a “close” was what they called these streets that basically exist as alleys but between two rows of buildings rather than along the back of ’em. Closes were essentially the streets that poor folk lived on, in tenements going up into the sky. They provided a bit of shelter and stability, but all manner of industry took place in and round the closes so they were often smelly, dirty places. “Mary King” was a woman of some reputation and stature in her time, and since the closes formed naturally and without any central planning, they didn’t have official names to them. So, people settled on them by acclimation so to speak. Mrs. Close was a notable enough figure that her Close referred to her even long after her death. A company has taken over the close and several adjacent buildings and put on a tour with period costumes and a bit of narrative flair; they don’t take it too seriously but your guide does assume the role of a citizen of the time. It’s a good time, and you do learn a lot about life in the closes, including how they dealt with plague (badly), close quarters (as politely as you could stand), and their general lot in life (more acceptance than rebellion from what we could figure).

We had dinner that evening at The Witchery, which seemed particularly appropriate since we were visiting around Samhain. Alas, while it certainly lived up to its advertised ambiance, it seemed about 20% too much theme park vibe rather than genuine gothic decor and design. Nor was the food up to promised. It was a cozy enough experience, but certainly for the price we don’t feel compelled to make a repeat visit when we’re next in Edinburgh. Still and all, it was a lovely time that day in which we finally, finally got a taste of life in this city.

As we have said from time to time, one reason we retired and moved to Europe was to be able to take advantage of last minute events and exhibitions.

Back in June a little notice floated across our ‘feed’ and we immediately took notice. Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years, July 26 through November 2 at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. As a bonus, it coincided with a week when a new friend from the States was going to visit Edinburgh. After 30 seconds of making sure we had time on our calendar, we bought tickets (we didn’t even ask her if she wanted to come, we just got her a ticket). After seeing one of the best exhibits of our lives, we are so glad.

Hailed as a genius, Goldsworthy’s art is ephemeral, site-specific, and transient. He works with leaves, reeds, trees, stones, flowers, and water both flowing and frozen. He is internationally renowned for building, weaving, floating and folding natural materials from leaf to fern, snow to sand and then walking away, letting the installations dissolve back into the land they were built from. He documents his creations in vivid photographs, mapping, inspecting, and recording the everyday wonders of nature.

The Royal Scottish Academy building is an unusual venue for an artist like Goldsworthy. Built in 1826 it has Greek columns and is thoroughly neo-classical in its design. yet, when talking about setting up the exhibition, Goldsworthy simply noted that nature exists everywhere, not just in rural spaces, it doesn’t stop at the city boundary.

For him, the land is raw and he enjoys the hard manual labor of his creations. “The land may look pastoral and picturesque, but it’s a brutal place, the farm a tough place. Sheep make the Scottish landscape.” Thus, the carpet of raw fleece going up the long stairs from the entry and ending at a pair of marble columns wrapped in barbed wire. The fleece is softly inviting, yet closer inspection reveals the dirt and vegetation trapped within the fleece, dotted by the paint used by farmers to note age and final disposition of the sheep. “That wire fence is about the difficulties and obstructions which every artist has to face, especially one that works in the land. But it is also about finding a way through.”

Atop the polished fine oak of the flooring, Goldsworthy piled fallen oak branches, windfall salvaged from Dumfriesshire fields (where he lives), arranged in a dramatic passage you must walk through. “We are bound up in the land. Look at your dining room table. There is a disconnect nowadays between us and the land.”

His most spectacular room installation is of 10,000 reeds or bullrushes suspended from its skylights. Pictures do not convey the sheer grandeur of this installation, provoking a cathedral-like sense of sacred. Using only natural light, reed mace (bullrushes) from Scottish lochs was used to create this curtained chamber that you can step into and feel the light change.

A simple room of stones speaks eloquently of our deepest connection to the earth. The stones are dug out, not under a hedge or around a cow barn, but from grave sites, including that of his wife. “My former wife Judith died in 2008 and when I was visiting her grave, I noticed there was a pile of stones by the cemetery wall. And I discovered they’re found in every cemetery, displaced from digging graves,” he says. “So when a body goes into the earth, there are always some stones left over. There’s an exchange between the body and the land and I thought that was very powerful.” He collected the stones from hundreds of gravesites across the region over nearly three years.

Judith Gregson, a ceramicist from the Potteries, and her father also inspired the wall of cracked red mud in the exhibition, which took 20 people to make and ten days to dry. Like much of his work, it looks effortless, but it is far from it. The catalogues notes that red earth is used by local farmers to mark the sheep and its distinctive color comes from the high iron content of the earth, which we share in our blood. On the wall next to Red Wall are three monitors playing a video of the artist cleaning a rock with the red clay literally bleeding into the stream. A visceral connection of blood, iron, water, and earth. Stunning.

In another room, a video of him “washing” his hands with blackberries links to this imagery.

Nearby, a video of his “Hedge walk” plays. In an interview for The Guardian, he talks about how his performance pieces are uncomfortable because he is not a performer. “They are very personal acts done in an often public place.” Hedge walking is “pretty brutal”, he admits. “I came out of one or two of those feeling pretty beaten up. But what a beautiful thing to do. Swimming through a hedge.” He’s probably retired from hedge walking, however. “You only do them while they are giving you something. The intention of my work has always been to understand my relationship with the land. I don’t go out to improve what is there. But I do feel this need to be a participant, working with it, learning about it. Art has an amazing ability to open your eyes to what’s around you – such as the hedge. Maybe that’s what art is. It just takes you somewhere you’ve never thought of going, whether it’s in the mind or the world.”

I particularly enjoyed the lower gallery area which had many images from his early works, going back to the late 1970s.

All images copyright Lisa McSherry, 2025, except where noted.

A .pdf of the Exhibition Guide is here.

More photos are here, including many taken during the installation, which offer a fascinating glimpse into the process of creation.

Ah, Glen Albyn. Not the kind of famous that you instantly recognize the name, but once pointed out to you, you’ll never forget and may feel a little silly that you didn’t know already. Like those character actors who are in a hundred things but you never knew their name until maybe, one day, you learned; a Stephen Tobolowsky type. That said, Glen Albyn is bigger than that. MUCH bigger. Like 66 miles bigger. Har-dee-har-har, but forgive a guy some fun, please? Glen Albyn is also known as “the Great Glen” and is a gorgeous region where two tectonic plates are colliding, forming a tremendous valley largely composed of lakes. One of our friends had called it out as a must-see and they were absolutely right.

Back in 2012, when we plotted out our honeymoon (largely) in Ireland, we set ourselves up with a problem that we’ve tried to avoid ever since: we drove a lot. Like, a lot a lot. Each day would have us drive to a new town, seeing some sights along the way, then settling in to our lodging and finding a meal before bedding down so we could do it all again the next day. We certainly had a lot of good times, but we’ve got a strong preference for not spending all day in a car when we can avoid it. That said, this was a day for road tripping and since we don’t do it that much it wasn’t a hard pill to swallow. The itinerary was to pop up in the morning, scoot to the base of the Great Glen at Fort William and then drive along the north side of the lochs all the way up Inverness, where we’d find a nibble before heading back along the southern edge. Lisa had not slept amazingly well for a couple days so she begged off the drive to kick her heels up, read and relax, and (oh yeah) go to high tea in the Dunalastair (aka our digs). She is a sucker for a good high tea.

The region is just beautiful to meander through. It’s miles and miles of green, wide lakes connected by brief rivers like this one (or maybe it’s still consider part of a lake? Somebody feel free to chime in).

We even managed to find the Loch Ness Monster, although s/he wasn’t quite what I had been expecting.

Fort Augustus, located at the bottom of Loch Ness, was both over- and underwhelming. On the one hand, given the bucolic nature of much of non-Edinburgh Scotland, being anywhere focused on the tourist trade was a sudden and sharp change; it felt like there were tons of people and nowhere quiet. On the other hand, that “tons of people” were probably, maybe, a thousand people tops. There was one modest-size carpark that wasn’t even all full. And yeah, there was “Monster Fish & Chips Co.” and a sandwich joint called “DelightfulNESS”, and you could buy as many stuffed dinomonsters as you could possibly ever want, it was still no more than a city block or two of developed businesses, then back to normal. So, we stopped for sandwiches and ice cream and then got the heck out of dodge.

Inverness, while the landmark for turning ourselves around, did not have a lot to recommend it, if only because it’s a working town and for non-vacationers it was a weekday afternoon with all that entails. So commute traffic, plus the fact that the most promising opportunities to get out and look around were enveloped and scaffolding, works scurrying around like ants. We found ourselves a nice spot on a side street for a quiet if average dinner, then made for home. Does that seem odd, that we’d feed ourselves with no thought given for Lisa’s plans? Well.

Lisa is one of those people who likes taking tea. Not just a cuppa and a cookie, nope. She likes a full on, multi-level offering, TEA. Which the place we were staying offered. So she bid us farewell in the morning, puttered around a bit, and then happily took herself down to the main floor to enjoy.

And enjoy she did.

This was easily a tea enough for two who like to share as there were two different three-tiered stands, one savory, the other sweet. The savory tiers were made up of haggis “bon bons”, a trio of finger sandwiches (Scottish salmon and cream cheese, Isle of Mull Cheddar with red onion jam, and Roasted Ayrshire ham with chutney), and a miniature portion of a creamy vegetable soup. The sweet tiers were a scone with clotted cream and strawberry jam, cinnamon swirl cake, a lemon posset, and chocolate macarons. A pot of black tea rounded out the afternoon and everything was consumed over several hours of edible indulgence.

Once we reconvened as a group, there wasn’t much left to the day but to swap stories and settle in to the familiar pattern of quiet and recharging ourselves for the next day out.