Edinburgh Poetry Tours

22/08/2025

I smiled when I came across these photos from 2008 in the Facebook vault.

The original FB post read:

”An Angus Reid-conceived reconstruction of Edinburgh's Royal Mile, showing the Scottish Parliament building as a hand emerging from Arthur's Seat.
”My daughter Alice is playing Arthur's Seat and the parliament.”

The box beside her hand is Holyrood Palace; the books are the Royal Mile; the little white box with something on top of it (I can't make out what) is St Giles; and the castle is the two boxes one on top of each other at the far end.

The whole was meant to convey how Miralles, the architect of the parliament building, combined landscape forms on a human scale (an idea borrowed from Le Corbusier) in his design.

We took the photographs in Pilrig Park.

20/08/2025

Thanks to everyone who's joined me so far on EMBRO, the poetry walks for this year's

These are some of the places we stop along the way: the , the Canongate Kirkyard, the Canongate Wall at the Scottish parliament building, Holyrood Abbey and St Margaret's Well.

The last two walks take place on Friday 22nd and Sunday 24th… do come and join me and the other walkers!

11.00 outside the Scottish Poetry Library – for more details see link in bio.

18/08/2025

Good to see that Graham Fagen's neon work A Drama in Time is lit again, on Calton Road at the foot of New Street.

It was off for a while… then the neons were removed… then replaced, but not switched on… then back on to illuminate the penumbra beneath the railway bridge.

(Saying that, when I passed them yesterday morning they were off again…)

16/08/2025

'What are Edinburgh's seven hills?'

Thanks to for choosing this as the Poem of the Week for today's issue of .scotsman

As for the elevation of the poetry walks to 'legendary' status, I'll take that …

Below the poem is a photo of one of the 'barkbooks'

15/08/2025

I came across this photo recently which I'd titled MOSAIC HAND but had no idea where I'd taken it.

Then I climbed Jacob's Ladder from Calton Road up to Regent Road, and discovered it at the top. Still don't know anything of its background though.

13/08/2025

The last post featured the lines from the Aeneid spoken by Apollo which include the words SIC ITUR AD ASTRA this way to the stars.

I thought I'd post some signs of the sun-god spotted around Edinburgh recently. He seems to have a penchant for the penumbra beneath railway bridges.

10/08/2025

SIC ITUR AD ASTRA – this way to the stars

A line from the Aeneid adopted by the Canongate as the burgh motto, and still seen around Edinburgh.

Thanks to for making this A3 print featuring Gavin Douglas's translation of the passage from which those words come. Douglas, writing in 1512/13, was at the time Provost of St Giles.

DM me if you'd like a copy – happy to send you one for the cost of P&P.

07/08/2025

Holyrood! Holyrood! Within your abbey
The harsh and bitter laws of destiny
Are written all around.
Cloister – Palace – Tomb! your walls austere
Hold kings, and death, and God; three mysteries,
Three majesties profound!

in 1829 the young Victor Hugo met the then king of France, Charles X, at the Palais de Saint Cloud just outside Paris, to complain about the banning of his play Marion de Lorme.

Within a year Charles had been overthrown. Exiled, he lived for two years at Holyrood Palace, then somewhat run down.

In a later poem Hugo contrasts the grand surroundings of St Cloud with the former king's more modest apartments at Holyrood.

(The lines above are my own translation.)

06/08/2025

"This tour has it all. I was able to see an Edinburgh I had not imagined I would see and was enraptured from the beginning."

Many thanks to Katie L. (who came on Tuesday's walk) for her kind review in Broadway Baby of Embro at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Listing info for ​Embro on Broadway Baby

04/08/2025

A view of classical Edinburgh, the 'Athens of the North', in the shape of the old Royal High School, seen from the grave of Hugh 'Grecian' Williams (1773-1829).

His memorial declares that 'his beautiful illustrations of the scenery and architecture of Greece &c have shed an honour on his country.'

He considered the connection between Edinburgh and Athens to run deeper than a vogue for classical architecture. Looking at Edinburgh from Torphin, about five miles south-west of the city centre, he wrote,

‘the landscape is exactly that of the vicinity of Athens as viewed from the bottom of Mount Anchesmus. Close upon the right, Brilessus is represented by the Mound of Braid; before, in the abrupt and dark mass of the Castle, rises the Acropolis; the hill Lycabettus, joined to that of the Areopagus, appears in the Calton; in the Firth of Forth we behold the Ægean Sea; in Inchkeith, Ægina; and the hills of Peloponnesus are precisely those of the opposite coast of Fife.’

02/08/2025

"The gard'ner's year is a circle as their labour, never at and end. Nevertheless their terme is."

Symmetry in Dunbar's Close Garden, just off the Canongate, and a reflection by John Reid, whose The Scots Gard'ner of 1683 was the first book about gardening in Scotland.

31/07/2025

St Margaret's Well, Holyrood Park, and an extract from my poem 'Intercession'.

One of the sites, and an extract from one of the poems, I'll be presenting as part of Embro on this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

The first walk is tomorrow, Friday 1st August, at 11.00. Then Sunday, Tuesday, Friday, and so on until the 24th.

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