I often (by which I mean never) wonder, do Greeks call their capital the ‘Edinburgh of the South’? Climbing up Calton Hill though, you can see why Edinburghers Edinburgians Edinbr people from Edinburgh call their city the ‘Athens of the North’. There aren’t Greek restaurants everywhere. It does feel like Edinburgh’s forefathers did try to build a city on those hills that represented lofty ideals and thoughts, and if you go up this big hill you can see the city from a grander perspective. The castle hill is in the background there, built atop a practically impenetrable ancient volcano, you can see the grand sweep of Princes Street with the tall clocktower of the Balmoral Hotel and the gothic spire of the Walter Scott Monument, and in the foreground is that structure with the columns, the Dugald Stewart Monument, named for a philosopher who was one of the leading figures of the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’. Behind me there is an Observatory, as well as the very Parthenon-like National Monument of Scotland (sir-not-appearing-in-this-sketchbook). This is the Acropolis of Edinburgh (unless you consider that to be Castle Hill, I don’t know). It also overlooks the city as it spans down towards the Firth of Forth, and you can see among other things the Forth Rail Bridge, and Hibernian FC’s stadium Easter Road. I would come up here most days while I was in Edinburgh in 1999 to look out over the city, often at sunset. I was excited to come up here to attempt a drawing or two. The first time we came up, I sketched very quickly in paint, but the next day after we had explored New Town and then gone to do our own things for the afternoon, I climbed back up, and drew the scene above. I had time on my hands, so I just looked out and drew as many details as I could. It took over an hour and a half, and while I did consider painting the whole thing too, in the end I just caught the sky and those distant hills, and left the rest be. It took a while (I was either standing or leaning on a big rock the whole time) and many people came by to take photos as the view got more ‘golden’ – I didn’t want to stay until sunset (June in Scotland? Sunset is very late there) but as the afternoon moved into early evening the light was glowing. When I was done with this, I got a sketch of Arthurs’ Seat, below.

Arthur’s Seat is a huge rocky volcanic outcrop that dominates the Edinburgh landscape. People climb up it, though it wasn’t on my agenda for the trip, my feet were tired enough. I wanted to draw it in this amazing light though. In the foreground, the Nelson Monument on Calton Hill, put up to commemorate Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, and yes it does look like a naval telescope. Arthurs Seat conjurs up stories of King Arthur and the ancient Britons, and Merlin going mad in the Caledonian Forest. Also of Tim the Conjuror and deadly rabbit that could only be defeated by the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.

By the way, I have learned that people from Edinburgh are called ‘Dunediners’, though it’s not a patronym that you hear very often in Britain (unlike ‘Glaswegian’, ‘Liverpudlian’ or ‘Mancunian’ for example). It derives from Dun-Edin, the Gaelic name for the city, and also where the city in New Zealand, Dunedin, gets its name from. It does sound a bit like the ‘Dúnedain’ which were Aragorn’s people in the Lord of the Rings. Still you live and you learn. I didn’t really get to meet that many Dunediners, so I didn’t get a chance to embarrass myself with figuring out the pronunciation, since most people I met in Edinburgh were either English or from somewhere else like Spain or Italy. I would like to go back some day and explore a bit more of the city (maybe what Stewart Lee calls “the 90% of Edinburgh that they hide behind that big rock”) and speak to more Dunediners, because growing up most of the Scots I knew were Glaswegians, and they didn’t generally say nice things about Edinburgh. I very much enjoyed our few days here though, and got quite a few sketches in while I was there, and that top one in this post is definitely my favourite.