On the Trail of the Apostle

Market Street, Ruins of St. Andrews Cathedral, St. Andrews Castle

It’s not difficult to picture Kate and Wills strolling the leafy quads at the University of St. Andrews. The campus and the town are bathed in an air of privilege, affluence, and tradition. As the third oldest English-speaking university in the world (founded in 1411), St. Andrews is known as the “Cambridge of Scotland.” The university museum pays tribute to its long history with displays such as the silver medallions (usually sporting a student’s family coat of arms) that winners of the annual archery competition were required to commission and receipts in Latin for gifts given by freshmen to their upperclassmen mentors (traditionally raisins but today more likely wine for males and lingerie for females). The most impressive sight by far (for those not awed by the course that gave birth to golf) is the ruins of the enormous 12th century cathedral that served as Scotland’s ecclesiastical center and the resting place of the country’s patron saint, set high above the dramatic coastline.

Dundee - City of Design

Nobody told the seagulls to show some respect for Dundee as a 2015 UNESCO City of Design. Their mark is omnipresent on the cobbled streets and old granite buildings of this sea-faring city that’s hoping to attract attention with ambitious development plans (including a northern branch of the Victoria & Albert Museum that’s slated to open in 2017). Rudy got the inside scoop on the city’s rebranding from the head of the city-supported Creative Dundee. We admired the grand public buildings, visited the impressive contemporary arts center, and paid homage to the city’s past glory as the jute capital of the world. In the mid-1800s, a million bales of jute a year came to Dundee from India to be processed into everything from rope for whaling ships to canvas for American pioneers’ wagon trains to burlap bags for South American coffee beans and sugar to backing for carpets and linoleum. In a few decades though someone figured out it was far cheaper to teach the Indians to manufacture those products themselves rather than transport the raw materials halfway around the world. Yet another great Scottish industry vanished, leaving derelict brick warehouses, empty wharves, and unemployed workers in its wake. Former industrial detritus now houses design firms, artists and digital start-ups (think made-in-Dundee Minecraft)....and no wild dundee marmalades were sighted!

Tea v. Coffee

According to a recent report, the average British resident sips 884 cups of tea each year. That’s enough to fill two bathtubs, though we’re not sure who is actually soaking in Earl Grey. While tea consumption goes up the older one gets, it’s obvious that coffee may be gaining ground (or grounds), particularly if all the young hip people filling coffee houses cling to that habit in their later years. We’ve had our share of lattes, macchiatos, Americanos, and flat whites at independent cafes that would do Portland proud— bragging about their artisan blends and house-roasted beans. Oh, and by the way, there's no shortage of pastries either.
 

Creative City Book Is Published

Research and teaching on cultural case studies of  Glasgow and Portland has resulted in the publication of The Creative City. Connecting People, Place and Identity by the Glasgow School of Art. Led by Mackintosh Professor Brian Evans and Fulbright Professor Rudy Barton, the students analyzed characteristics that define creative cities worldwide and how they drive economic development and quality of life. The class also compared and contrasted urban attributes of Glasgow and Portland, including public space, café culture, street food, and riverfront amenities.

Stones of Scotland

Top, Rosslyn Chapel, Bottom R, Glasgow Cathedral, Bottom L, Medieval Chapel, Isle of Benbecula

Buildings should be made by human hands, so that the joy of masons and stonecarvers is associated with the expressive freedom given them.
John Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture

The GSA Degree Show

Around the UK, June marks a high-stakes rite of passage for architecture and art students: the end-of-year degree show. It’s an opportunity to showcase your best work and possibly snag a job or commissions. The Glasgow School of Arts exhibition is an eagerly anticipated event with 20,000 people turning out for the week-long show, which travels to London and Singapore after its Glasgow run. Everything from jewelry to textiles, product design, painting and printmaking, interiors, graphic and communication arts, fashion, and architecture is on display in various venues, including the GSA, an old glue factory and a downtown warehouse. Rudy’s students hawked their “Creative Cities” book while fashion grads held a New York-style runway show with sullen models, booming music, unwearable but fascinating clothing, and paparazzi galore.

The Largely Forgotten Forth & Clyde Canal

The Forth and Clyde Canal snakes its way across Glasgow in the midst of a mostly forgotten, post-industrial landscape. Opened in 1790, the canal was an engineering marvel as it connected with the Union Canal to provide a sea-to-sea link across central Scotland from Glasgow to Edinburgh. Providing an early route for seagoing vessels it suffered as larger ships were the norm and rail became a faster way to move goods. Since the canal was generally closed in the 1960s, obsolete industrial buildings that once lined the canal—very few remain now—-have largely been replaced with a motley mixture of warehouses, apartments and unused green spaces. Although the canal has been the target of numerous city plans, it has yet to reach its fantastic potential as a green corridor and urban front yard for residential, recreational, and commercial use. In any city with fewer remnants of industrial history, canal improvements would be front and center.

The Signs They Are A'Changing

A Scottish Mardi Gras???

During the entire month of June, the West End—our neighborhood—throws a party to which the whole city is invited. The festival, now in its second decade, features concerts, exhibitions, lectures, walking tours, and family activities in venues big and small. It all kicks off with a  “Carnival Parade” that has a home-grown flavor—from the dancing thistles to the comically clad pipers to middle-aged belly dancers and cultural groups of every persuasion. 

Glasgow Made the Clyde and the Clyde Made Glasgow

Shipbuilding on the River Clyde

Local mythology holds that by World War I, half of the world’s ships were being built in Glasgow. Names like the Lusitania and the Queen Elizabeth II still haunt the city’s psyche. Glasgow’s River Clyde has been a center for shipbuilding for hundreds of years, possibly stretching back as early as the 15th century. It was during the 19th century, however, that shipbuilding became a substantial source of commerce for the city. The Industrial Revolution, the use of steel, and the advent of the  steam engine (especially the compound steam engine invented in Glasgow) drove the expansion of shipbuilding here. At its peak, the industry employed 70,000 workers at the Govan and the Fairfield Shipyards that lined the Clydebank. After World War II, which saw the Clyde heavily bombed by the Luftwaffe, the shipping industry went into decline. By the 1960s, Fairfield had collapsed and with it the surrounding area. Govan, with a population of 98,000 prior to the war, has only 25,000 residents today. The city hopes to breathe new life into the banks of the Clyde with massive apartment towers, the Norman Foster-designed auditorium (nicknamed The Armadillo), a 12,000-seat performance hall, and the new BBC Scotland headquarters. However, getting to the river is problematic. Highways and rail lines inhibit connections back into the city’s neighborhoods. Glasgow could learn lessons from Portland on how to revitalize its waterfront and make it a magnet for public activity.

The Armadillo, the Hydro, Finnieston Crane and Squinty Bridge

 

Say Cheese

What can you say about those great cheeses...whether purchased at the grocery store or our local cheesemonger, we prefer the "mature ones," just like us.

Fishing Season

            On the River Kelvin                                                                          Salmon Farm in the Western Isles

It must be the start of fishing season. For the first time, we’ve spotted fishermen knee deep in the River Kelvin, casting for salmon and trout. The fishery is all catch and release, except on the rivers and streams where fishing rights are held by private owners who charge sportsmen up to five figures for the privilege of dipping their lines. From what we understand, the rest of the wild salmon are reserved for breeding stock for the aquaculture industry that “grows” fish in the lochs throughout Scotland. The only wild salmon we’ve been able to buy at our local supermarket has come from Alaska!

Dun Charlabhaigh Bloch

One of our discoveries in the Outer Hebrides was a building type called a “broch.” These hollow, Iron Age structures are found only in Scotland and are thought to have served a defensive military purpose, a kind of forerunner to medieval castles and towers. Most surviving brochs are only a couple of meters tall but Dun Carloway Broch on the Isle of Lewis reaches 9 meters in some places. Bending low to climb inside, we could see the unique double wall construction, with the two walls converging as they reach the top in an Escher-like twist.

Black Houses

The skeletal remains of “black houses” dot the Outer Hebrides. The white stone foundations and crumbling walls are what’s left of crofters’ homes built in the 1800s and inhabited until the 1940s and 50s when the government built mortared “white houses” to replace them. Some of the picturesque, thatch-roofed cottages have been reconstructed next to their more modern offspring and serve as outbuildings. Others have been restored as museum pieces like Gearannan, a settlement we visited on our tour. The houses, with few windows and insulated with double stone walls packed with dirt (sometimes 5 feet thick), were heated by a central, peat-burning fire pit. A hole in the roof allowed the smoke to escape - a chimney was a luxury. The family’s livestock—typically two cows, a half-dozen sheep, and a couple dozen chickens—were sheltered in one end of the cottage while a kitchen/living room and a separate, communal bedroom made up the other part. It’s the kind of dwelling where an early Northwest pioneer would have felt at home.

5,000 Year-Old Standing Stones

On the Isle of Lewis, atop a hill overlooking a western sea loch, is one of Britain’s best-preserved Neolithic sites. Older than Stonehenge, the Standing Stones of Callanish comprises 47 stones arranged in a cruciform with a circle where four avenues or rows meet. Most of the stones are 1 to 2 meters high but the center stone stands 5 meters high with its long sides oriented almost perfectly north-south. Within view a kilometer away are a dozen other stone circles, stone arcs, and standing stones.  Who created Callanish and why here?  How are the multiple stones connected? Theories, legends, and mysteries abound. Was this a communal temple or lunar calendar device? Are the stones petrified men who refused to convert to the local religion? Mysteries are good and the stones still give a tingle when touched. This was definitely the highlight of our five-night trip to the Outers.

For Peat's Sake - Black Lines Across the Landscape

Dried Peat Blocks

Knife-sharp cuts stand out in the peat bogs where the island people have harvested this year’s fuel supply. Many Hebridians still heat their homes with peat and use it in cooking. From March to mid-June, slicing into the bogs and removing square chunks is a family affair. We saw rows of bricks laid out to dry in the peatbogs and herringbone-stacked piles in the backyards of most houses. When dried, the blocks are hard as coal. At the Hebridian Smokehouse—one of North Uist’s biggest employers with 14 full-time employees—the manager told us that the peat used in smoking the salmon is gathered by the workers as they collect their own personal supply. Peat “grows” at only one millimeter per year, but the bogs stretch for miles and seem to hold the promise of fuel for years and years to come.

Peat Bog, Peat Cutting and Peat Blocks Left to Dry

Hebridean Textures & Colors

Grasses, Heather and Rocks - imagery and colors for those island woolens/Harris tweeds.

The Outer Hebrides - The Far, Far Northwest

Isle of Lewis

Sunbreaks lit up the gorse-covered hills sheltering Loch Seaforth as we boarded the 4 hour evening ferry in Ullapool, headed for the Outer Hebrides. This is the farthest north and west we’ve traveled: a desolate but beautiful string of 50 islands in the North Atlantic, of which only 15 are populated (and sparsely at that, with about 26,000 people). Not only do the Western Isles share the same latitude as Alaska: they also have an unforgiving landscape and climate and hardy, resourceful residents who speak a native language and practice a subsistence lifestyle like their Norse and Gaelic ancestors who started arriving here in the 3­rd through 12th centuries. 

Isle of Harris (of Harris Tweed fame, and this is a color image)

Isle of Benbecula

Visitors' Impressions

Martha & John; Jonah & Deidre; Ric, JoAnn, Jenay & David; Randy & Karen

The “Barton Inn” has been busy in May, hosting guests from Portland. We’ve enjoyed showing off our temporary home and seeing Glasgow through our friends’ eyes. Here are some of our visitors’ impressions:

The Towers: Ric & I were struck by the distinctiveness of the city's old & new architecture, with not much in between. I thought the more I looked up, the more interesting things there were to see. We loved the eclectic collection of the physician (William Hunter) from the early 20th century (in the Hunterarian Museum), and the energy of the city on Saturday when walking downtown. Marvelous.

Jonah and Deirdre: As far as surprises about Glasgow, the big one is what a substantial and wealthy place it was on the world scene between 1850 and 1900—the “Second City of the Empire”—and how that manifested itself in so much proud civic architecture that is still in place today (“Victorian piles,” I believe you called them). We also did not know about Glasgow's intense commercial ties to both the Union and Confederacy during the Civil War. The shipbuilding legacy was also impressive and very cool. Then, there were all the wonderful bridges over the meandering river walkways. (Those Scots do know bridges!)

Martha and John: Glasgow has long had a reputation as a gritty industrial city, but we found it to be an attractive destination. The areas we saw, the West End and the City Centre, seemed to be thriving with a vitality belying any hardships caused by the loss of industry in recent decades. We were impressed with the museums and restaurants we visited as well as the green spaces and gardens linking parts of the West End.  Throughout Scotland we were impressed by the friendliness of all the people we encountered as well as their lilting accent. It's true that we were occasionally unable to understand everything that was said to us, but it sounded lovely. We always felt safe, never worrying about thieves and pickpockets as in some European destinations. One thing that surprised us, aside from how cold it was in late April/early May, was how little the Scots seem to identify with the British. Scottish flags were everywhere, with nary a Union Jack to be seen until we reached Edinburgh. We were there during the U.K. national election, and saw only yellow and blue signs for the Scottish National Party. We were also there when the royal baby was born; however no one but a lone young receptionist at our hotel seemed to give a hoot. Scotland feels like its own nation, leading us to conclude the voters' decision to remain in the U.K. last fall must have been a gut-wrenching one. Our last great surprise was to learn that today fewer than 500 people own over half of the land of Scotland. There's definitely a connection between the historic land ownership system of Scotland and the waves of 18th and 19th century impoverished Scottish immigrants to the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Karen and Randy: Glasgow’s graceful, blunt, red and tan sandstone buildings, tinged with black from its coal era; green walks along the River Kelvin; the marble staircase off the City Council building fit for an emperor’s palace; the Kelvingrove Museum’s enigmatic crucifixion by Dali, plus the skeleton of a giant Irish deer; fish ’n chips and grilled sardines and monkfish cheeks; the friendly people--cabbies, waiters, clerks; drams of Jura and Oban whisky; the Madrigirls' clarion songs; British trivial pursuit 1950-1970 over cafe lattes; the angels’ share (and more) of warm and tireless hospitality by cousins Rudy and Rhonda who made it all easy for us, and delightful.