Edinburgh Poetry Tours

05/09/2026

The last part of this year's Edinburgh Alphabet, which I've been posting letter by letter over the past few weeks on Facebook and instagram.

Back in 2017 I posted an A-Z of Edinburgh poetry. This summer I thought I’d do another, so in the run-up to this year’s Fringe poetry walks I started posting on instagram and Facebook. This post su…

04/09/2026

The Edinburgh Alphabet concludes with Z is for unseiZable.

Z is another tricky one. The Index of Mary Cosh's Edinburgh: The Golden Age stretches to 60 pages (small type, double columns) but ends with 'Yule and Abernethy, Cloth Merchants'. There's always the Zoo, but it's in Corstorphine, and I've never done a poetry walk in the vicinity.

So I've picked out the Z in a MacDiarmid poem inscribed – minus its title and opening lines – on the Canongate Wall at the Scottish parliament building. Written in 1921, the whole poem reads:

Edinburgh

Midnight

Glasgow is null,
Its suburbs shadows
And the Clyde a cloud.

Dundee is dust
And Aberdeen a shell.

But Edinburgh is a mad god’s dream,
Fitful and dark,
Unseizable in Leith
And wildered by the forth,
But irresistibly at last
Cleaving to sombre heights
Of passionate imagining
Till stonily,
From soaring battlements,
Earth eyes Eternity.

A is for the Adam Dome
B is for Bookshelf
C is for Connolly, & Cowgate
D is for Deacon Brodie
E is for Edinburgh etc
F is for Fringe
G is for Gododdin
H is for Hedrich
I is for Iain Crichton Smith
J is for Jacob's Ladder
K is for Kirk, Thomas
L is for Lepel, Benhard von
M is for Maps
N is for Newhaven
O is for Outlander, Otway & Orphan
P is for Paolozzi
Q is for Quincey, Thomas De
R is for Ransford
S is for Snow
T is for To / two / Time
U is for Underwoods
V is for Views and Vistas
W is for Water of Leith
X is for a crisscross shadow
Y is for Yet
Z is for unseiZable

03/09/2026

The Edinburgh Alphabet reaches Y is for YET.

A graffiti tag, and some lines from poems relating to the Old Town which happen to contain the word:

An epitaph from Holyrood Abbey
Anonymous, Marie Hamilton
Robert Burns (1759-1796), Lines Written Under the Portrait of Robert Fergusson, the Poet, in a Copy of That Author's Works Presented to a Young Lady in Edinburgh, March 19th, 1787
Ken Cockburn (1960-), The Ballad of William Knox
G.K. Chesteron (1874–1936), Daily News, 5 December 1905
Robert Fergusson (1750-1774), Auld Reikie
William Hamilton of Bangour (1704–1754), Horace, Book I, Ode VII, imitated
James Hogg (1770–1835), from The Queen’s Wake, ‘Night the Second’
Edwin Morgan (1920–2010), For the Opening of the Scottish Parliament, 9 October 2004
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), Embro Hie Kirk
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), The Daisy
Chiang Yee (1903–77), The Silent Traveller in Edinburgh

A is for the Adam Dome
B is for Bookshelf
C is for Connolly, & Cowgate
D is for Deacon Brodie
E is for Edinburgh etc
F is for Fringe
G is for Gododdin
H is for Hedrich
I is for Iain Crichton Smith
J is for Jacob's Ladder
K is for Kirk, Thomas
L is for Lepel, Benhard von
M is for Maps
N is for Newhaven
O is for Outlander, Otway & Orphan
P is for Paolozzi
Q is for Quincey, Thomas De
R is for Ransford
S is for Snow
T is for To / two / Time
U is for Underwoods
V is for Views and Vistas
W is for Water of Leith
X is for a crisscross shadow
Y is for Yet
Z is for …

02/09/2026

The Edinburgh Alphabet is nearly complete… X is always a tricky one, but sitting outside the Scottish parliament building yesterday, there it was, multiplied, shadowed on the ground: a monochrome Saltire, a vote, a marking of the spot, a Muskless redemption.

A is for the Adam Dome
B is for Bookshelf
C is for Connolly, & Cowgate
D is for Deacon Brodie
E is for Edinburgh etc
F is for Fringe
G is for Gododdin
H is for Hedrich
I is for Iain Crichton Smith
J is for Jacob's Ladder
K is for Kirk, Thomas
L is for Lepel, Benhard von
M is for Maps
N is for Newhaven
O is for Outlander, Otway & Orphan
P is for Paolozzi
Q is for Quincey, Thomas De
R is for Ransford
S is for Snow
T is for To / two / Time
U is for Underwoods
V is for Views and Vistas
W is for Water of Leith
X is for a crisscross shadow
Y is for …

23/08/2026

The Edinburgh Alphabet comes to W is for Water of Leith, the city's modest river which skirts the centre. These images show it passing through Leith, not far from its mouth, a few winters ago.

Goosander – Buddleia – looking downriver – one of several wading Anthony Gormley figures.

A is for the Adam Dome
B is for Bookshelf
C is for Connolly, & Cowgate
D is for Deacon Brodie
E is for Edinburgh etc
F is for Fringe
G is for Gododdin
H is for Hedrich
I is for Iain Crichton Smith
J is for Jacob's Ladder
K is for Kirk, Thomas
L is for Lepel, Benhard von
M is for Maps
N is for Newhaven
O is for Outlander, Otway & Orphan
P is for Paolozzi
Q is for Quincey, Thomas De
R is for Ransford
S is for Snow
T is for To / two / Time
U is for Underwoods
V is for Views and Vistas
W is for Water of Leith
X is for …

21/08/2026

The Edinburgh Alphabet moves to V for Views or Vistas.

1. Arthur's Seat from Regent Road Park
2. Salisbury Crags from Reid's Close
3. Panmure House and the Burns Monument from the Canongate
4. David Hume's grave monument from the 'orphan' section of the Old Calton Burial Ground
5. The Balmoral Hotel from the Scott Monument.

A is for the Adam Dome
B is for Bookshelf
C is for Connolly, & Cowgate
D is for Deacon Brodie
E is for Edinburgh etc
F is for Fringe
G is for Gododdin
H is for Hedrich
I is for Iain Crichton Smith
J is for Jacob's Ladder
K is for Kirk, Thomas
L is for Lepel, Benhard von
M is for Maps
N is for Newhaven
O is for Outlander, Otway & Orphan
P is for Paolozzi
Q is for Quincey, Thomas De
R is for Ransford
S is for Snow
T is for To / two / Time
U is for Underwoods
V is for Views and Vistas
W is for …

20/08/2026

Many thanks to Gill and Laura for their kind reviews of Embro on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe website.

3 more walks to go, on Sunday 23rd, Monday 24th and Wednesday 26th, starting at 11.00 outside the Scottish Poetry Library.

"If you have even an ounce of the literary in your soul and 90 minutes to spare I’d highly recommend it."

https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/embro

18/08/2026

The Edinburgh Alphabet reaches U is for Underwoods, a book of poems by Robert Louis Stevenson published in 1887.

The title is from Ben Johnson, who own work 'Underwoods' gathered 'lesser poems of later growth', which, according to the critic (and RLS's friend) Edmond Gosse, had sprung up 'between the more massive timber of his plays'.

RLS's Underwoods is divided into two 'books', the second comprising poems in Scots. One of these, 'Embro Hie Kirk', is a satire on iconclastic Presbyterians riled by the installation of an organ in the Kirk of St Giles, and with a mind violently to silence it.

1. Title page of a 1900 US edition
2. The epigraph
3. An extract from 'Embro Hie Kirk' in Parliament Square
4. The last two stanzas of 'Embro Hie Kirk'.

A is for the Adam Dome
B is for Bookshelf
C is for Connolly, & Cowgate
D is for Deacon Brodie
E is for Edinburgh etc
F is for Fringe
G is for Gododdin
H is for Hedrich
I is for Iain Crichton Smith
J is for Jacob's Ladder
K is for Kirk, Thomas
L is for Lepel, Benhard von
M is for Maps
N is for Newhaven
O is for Outlander, Otway & Orphan
P is for Paolozzi
Q is for Quincey, Thomas De
R is for Ransford
S is for Snow
T is for To / two / Time
U is for Underwoods
V is for …
W
X
Y
Z

16/08/2026

The Edinburgh Alphabet reaches T for To / Two / time.

These images are from Canongate Stars & Stories (2016), 'a trail which shines a light on the books that have shaped Scotland from the heart of Auld Reekie, organised by Edinburgh City of Literature

'To the stars': The Canongate’s historic motto is sic itur ad astra from Virgil’s Aeneid. In his Chronicles of the Canongate, Sir Walter Scott translated the motto as ‘this is the path to heaven’ and it is elsewhere rendered as ‘thereby shall we go to the stars.’

'Man is not truly one, but truly two': from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).

'Nothing but time': from Theory of the Earth (1785) by James Hutton (1726 –1797). Hutton's research into local rock formations, including Salisbury Crags, led him to formulate a new theory of the origins of the earth, much older than previously believed.

A is for the Adam Dome
B is for Bookshelf
C is for Connolly, & Cowgate
D is for Deacon Brodie
E is for Edinburgh etc
F is for Fringe
G is for Gododdin
H is for Hedrich
I is for Iain Crichton Smith
J is for Jacob's Ladder
K is for Kirk, Thomas
L is for Lepel, Benhard von
M is for Maps
N is for Newhaven
O is for Outlander, Otway & Orphan
P is for Paolozzi
Q is for Quincey, Thomas De
R is for Ransford
S is for Snow
T is for To / two / Time
U is for …

14/08/2026

The Edinburgh Alphabet: unseasonally, but perhaps not unwelcome as we swelter, S is for Snow.

The photos are from the chill winter of 2010-11.

1) The Fruitmarket Gallery & Waverley Station
2) Holyrood Park
3) Holyrood Park, St Anthony's Chapel
4) Holyrood Park, St Margaret's Well
5) Inside the bus
6) Garden icicles

A is for the Adam Dome
B is for Bookshelf
C is for Connolly, & Cowgate
D is for Deacon Brodie
E is for Edinburgh etc
F is for Fringe
G is for Gododdin
H is for Hedrich
I is for Iain Crichton Smith
J is for Jacob's Ladder
K is for Kirk, Thomas
L is for Lepel, Benhard von
M is for Maps
N is for Newhaven
O is for Outlander, Otway & Orphan
P is for Paolozzi
Q is for Quincey, Thomas De
R is for Ransford
S is for Snow
T is for …