A Pilgrimage, of Sorts

It takes a bit of effort to reach Rosslyn Chapel, though our journey wasn’t quite the ordeal Tom Hanks and Audrey Tatou faced in the Da Vinci Code. Situated outside Edinburgh in the village of Roslin, the chapel has been in the hands of the St. Clair family since 1446 when William “The Seemly” St. Clair decided he needed a ticket to heaven, imported the best of Europe’s stone masons to create the ornately embellished chapel, and hired resident priests to pray for his soul. Throughout the centuries Rosslyn has seen its ups and downs. In the late 1500s, during the Reformation, the family was ordered to destroy the altars and it ceased to be used as a place of worship. Oliver Cromwell spared the building (one theory is because he, like William, was a freemason), but stabled his troops’ horses there. It wasn’t until Queen Victoria visited the ruins of the chapel that restoration began and tourists, including William Wordsworth, started making their way here. The site attracted about 40,000 visitors a year until Dan Brown’s book and the subsequent film created a frenzy. Now, up to 30,000 people a month make the pilgrimage to wonder at the amazing carvings and ponder whether the Holy Grail and other sacred treasures lie hidden beneath their feet.

No photos are allowed inside, so these are pulled off the web.

There are Words, and Then There are Words

There are so many undiscovered books and authors to unearth in a UK bookstore (and the newspapers give extensive coverage to books, of course). One writer that I have come across is Robert Macfarlane, a Cambridge naturalist, whose books explore the British landscape. His most recent is Landmarks, in which he gathers scores of almost-forgotten words that precisely describe features of landscape and weather. From his walks and conversations with locals, Macfarlane has created a lexicon that defines a unique sense of place. This includes such words and terms as moored, for “smothered in snow,” and ammil, a Devon term for the thin film of ice that lacquers all leaves, twigs, and blades of grass when a freeze follows a partial thaw. Eit refers to “the practice of placing quartz stones in streams so that they sparkle in moonlight and thereby attract salmon to them in the late summer and autumn.” One of my favorites is smeuse, an English dialect noun for “the gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal.” Such precision in description makes the words we typically use in the Northwest to describe our landscape (a hill, creek, etc.) simplistic and impoverished. Who’s up for collecting and refining our own words about the natural environment, both those lost over time and newly invented?

Les Vacances Printemps

Glasgow is a good jumping off spot for cheap flights to continental Europe. For Rudy’s spring break, we’ve headed to Arles, France for a home exchange. We’re staying in a converted barn on the outskirts of the city, owned by the family that’s currently staying in our Portland condo. A lazy week of café au laits on squares that Van Gogh painted, a trip to the amazing Pont du Gard aqueduct, art and archeology museums aplenty, and hikes through the Camargue nature preserve where tens of thousands of flamingoes make their home.

We Saw the Loch Ness Monster!

The only Nessies we spotted on our visit to the famed loch.

Food for Thought

Glasgow (like Scotland as a whole and England) gets a bad rap when it comes to food. And, statistics support the fact that Glaswegians’ diet is fairly unhealthy (in fact, locals refer to a bowl of French fries as a “Glasgow salad”). But, more people are focusing on buying organic and locally sourced products and we’ve been impressed by the fresh, inventive dishes we’ve sampled at local restaurants. There are lots of traditional British dishes on menus: ploughman’s lunch, of cheese, chutneys, and ham; the “full Monty” breakfast with grilled tomatoes, baked beans, and all kinds of meat; fish and chips with (or without) mushy peas; and scones. There are microbreweries that wouldn’t look out of place in Portland and a lovely little lane near our flat where we like to go for everything from Indian food (at the Wee Curry Shop) to gastropub grub (at the Ubiquitous Chip).

Some of the weirder menu terms we’ve come across:

Arbroath Smokies—tiny smoked haddocks

Bannoch—flat bread made on a griddle and then cut into wedges (called farls)

Baps—breakfast rolls

Cranachon—a dessert of toasted oatmeal and sweet whipped cream

Rumbledthumps—cooked cabbage and potatoes, topped with cheese and baked

9-hole beef stokies—meat pies made from shredded rib meat

Round and Round via the Clockwork Orange

Not having a car hasn’t been a problem for us. Almost daily, we hop aboard the Clockwork Orange, Glasgow’s tiny, 117-year-old subway system, the world's third oldest. It’s so named because of the tangerine-colored cars and station graphics and the simple circular route. Making the 15-station entire circuit (either via the inner route, which travels clockwise, or the outer ring, which goes anticlockwise) takes 24 minutes. It works for us and for about 13 million other people a year. Our favorite part is how the operator sticks his head out the window at each stop to make sure everyone is on board before shutting the doors; he/she will even wait for commuters hurrying down the stairs to the platform. The Lilliputian system makes London's tube system spacious in comparison.

They're Not Cows, They're Coos!

It’s not uncommon to find fox in our West End neighborhood and we’ve also spotted pheasants, deer, hares, and feral goats in our travels around Scotland. But, nothing’s more fun than encountering Highland cows (pronounced “coos” by the Scots). Not surprisingly, these shaggy bovines are more common up north, but it turns out that the city of Glasgow has its own herd, which lives in a suburban park. The Highland cows are not shorn like sheep but instead are raised for their meat, and they also produce milk that’s supposed to taste like buttermilk.

Spring Is Right Around the Corner (?)

Trees are still bare and the shadows are long, but Glasgow is showing signs of awakening. We can't wait to leave our gloves at home when we venture out.

From Prehistory Through the Centuries

The final leg of our three-day tour took us to Inverness, the capital of the Highlands, and then down to Culloden, where Scottish Highlanders led by Bonnie Prince Charlie were routed by the British in 1746. A beautiful new visitors’ center overlooks the hallowed battlefield, the jutting stones of the façade representing the 2,000 fallen soldiers on both sides, killed in a bloody one-hour battle. Tucked away just a few miles from Culloden is a remarkable, Neolithic burial site that’s 3,000–4,000 years old that looks very much like a contemporary Andy Goldsworthy sculpture. As impressive as these sights were, our fellow passengers (a group of five IT workers from India who were just completing a training course in London) were most entranced by the snow in a ski-area carpark. It was their first encounter with snow and they took no time in pelting each other with handfuls of the stuff.   

Isle of Skye, a Land Formed by Fire & Ice

Skye, the largest of the Inner Hebrides islands, covers 650 square miles with 12,000 residents and probably 10 times that many sheep (who cross the road whenever they feel compelled to check out whether the grass is really greener on the other side). David Campbell, our friendly, tartan-clad guide, covered 200 miles in one day, taking us up twisting, one-lane mountain roads to breathtaking viewpoints. Victorian farmhouses—almost uniformly white—are sprinkled like beach rocks among the vibrant emerald pastures. Occasionally we’d see a traditional stone croft with thatched roof weighted down by rocks, along with tall-steepled churches and weather-worn graveyards looking out to the sea.

On the Road, to the Highlands

An inauspicious start to our first foray into the Highlands: torrential rains, flooded roads, and gale-force winds that sent our 15-passenger minibus swaying from side to side. First stop: Luss, a tiny village on the (water-logged) shores of Loch Lomond. It’s apparently a very polite place (according to parking signs), where garden gnomes are quite comfortable. Then, it was on to a brief stop at the Drover Inn, voted “Scottish pub of the Year: 1707.” We didn’t spot the ghost who reportedly inhabits room 6, but we got an eyeful of the taxidermy collection of beasts that’s accumulated over the centuries.

Up through Glencoe and over to the Isle of Skye we passed dramatic landscapes of fog-shrouded mountains, gushing waterfalls, and a substantial number of Scotland’s 32,000 lochs (or lakes). Castles like Eilean Donan appeared like mirages in the mist on our way to Kyleakin on the Isle of Skye where we stayed at a cozy bed and breakfast on the water. 

And They Come Tumbling Down

Many agree that no European city embraced social housing towers more than Glasgow did after the Second World War. As the Corbusian and Brutalist towers went up, the tenements came down. Today the skyline is changing, as these towers are regularly declared unfit for habitation and demolished. Once there were more than 230 housing towers, but today’s count of approximately 170 will be reduced to 120 within the next decade. Demolition of many of the city’s towers is seen as both ideologically and socially driven. Some possibly could be reimagined, but most are undeniably horrendous and breeding grounds for alienation from the day-to-day life of any community.

Sunrise on the Isle of Skye

All The News

Print journalism is still alive and well in the UK, unlike across the pond. We tend to favor The Guardian and The Times, but we also pick up a variety of other papers (including the salacious Sun) just to see how the same stories are spun for different audiences. We’re constantly amazed at how erudite most of the reporting is, with vocabulary that you wouldn’t run across in the US dailies. Also, journalists feel free to bandy about words pertaining to sex and body parts that would make the most liberal American reader blush. Some of our favorite stories to date include man slits open mum to see if there’s a reptile inside; health officials ask grocery stores not to display daffodil bulbs in produce sections so consumers don’t mistake them for Chinese vegetables; Cambridge professor assembles glossary of hundreds of obscure nature terms in danger of disappearing (see “zwer,” the whirring sound of a covey of partridge taking flight, or “didder,” a patch of bog); and conservationists call for a ban on tiny “fairy doors” screwed into trees in Somerset woods as the numbers reach into the hundreds. And yes, as with the New York Times, Portland seems to merit a disproportionate amount of attention from the Guardian.

And they love quirky PDX

Glasgwegian Tenements, Glaswegian Streetscapes

              Red Sandstone                                                    From Our Bay Window                                                   Cream Sandstone                          

Glasgow is a compact and dense city—it has twice as many people per square mile as Portland. Outside the central core, a carpet of four-story stone buildings rolls over the hilly topography, sometimes punctuated with church steeples. Called tenements, these structures were the most popular form of housing in 19th and 20th century Glasgow and remain the most common, and desirable, form of dwelling today (single-family homes are extremely rare). Block-long structures contain a series of flats, two or more per floor separated by a common stairway (no elevators). Some blocks feature alleyways, but most have some shared yard space. While tenements are desirable housing now, they were the slums of the early 20th century when workers flocked to work in Glasgow’s factories. Families of four, six, or eight were crowded into a single room with 30 people sharing a lavatory and 40 to a water tap. A hundred years ago, Glasgow’s population was twice what it is now: what a difference a century makes.

            Rear Elevation                                        Fronting Onto a Private Park                                 Two-Story Townhouses

Irn-Bru, A National Drink

IRN-BRU (the Scottish fond abbreviation for Iron Brew) is the second national drink of Scotland after whisky. The beloved beverage is bright orange, slightly ginger-flavored, and very, very sweet—kind of like liquid bubble gum. Quirky and oftentimes risqué marketing helps keep it the best-selling carbonated soft drink not only in Scotland, but also in the whole UK. In one recent news article about Scottish commandments, #2 was drink an IRN-BRU to cure a hangover and #3 was to turn a supermarket upside down to find the IRN-BRU with your own tartan (57 different tartans are printed on various labels). Definitely an acquired taste - Nae for us.

Local Pubs...It's Cultural Research...Honest!

Wee Chip                                       Oran Mor                                                      Belle                                                      Pot Still                         

    

Pubs…..central to community life in the UK.  Our English friends tell us that Scottish pubs are different from those down south. In England, pubs are for everyone but older pubs in Glasgow primarily attract men, standing and drinking with their mates. Newer pubs are a bit different with men and women hunkering down at tables for a few hours. We’ve managed to explore a few, each with a different character, though we imagine we’ll need to continue to do “research”! In our explorations, we’ve generally encountered warm wood interiors, usually with mismatched furniture and wall(s) of whiskys. Our neighborhood pubs include large ones like Oran Mor, a former church, and tiny places like the Wee Pub at the Chip (longest name for the smallest pub in Scotland).  The Pot Still is older than Portland and is legendary for its collection of whiskys. Wandered into the crowded Ben Nevis one Friday evening searching for some Celtic music (too early) but wound up sharing a table with Colin and Ray, two pensioners who are regulars. Friendly conversation ensued, even to the point of friendly arguments. I kidded Colin about the differences between Glasgow and Edinburgh and when I told him Portland had more breweries than Glasgow he countered with, “You bastards!”

Ben Nevis