Out of the City (1)

by - 11:16 on 01 November 2007

I suppose it’s time to confess to regular readers of this blog – both of you, in fact – that we really, really want to embrace the Scottish city experience. Elsewhere, you’ll find us dining while overlooking the River Ness in Inverness (yes, it’s a city) (see the Kitchen Restaurant extra mile comment) or feasting upon spoots in Dalry Road, Edinburgh. (See Edinburgh Service Snapshots blog.) Stirling we enjoy for the vista from the ramparts of its castle. Perth (Scotland) we like for its shoppies, though not necessarily including Tesco. Dundee we admire for re-inventing itself.

Aberdeen we, well, pat on its little granite head for its insistence that it’s still, somehow, 1957. At least, that’s around the time of my very earliest babyhood memory of the place and I can’t see that much has changed – certainly not its ring road. I mean, where else in 21st century Britain does a fast dual carriageway end at a late mediaeval narrow bridge, the Bridge of Dee – 1520? I ask you, what did they do with all that oil money? Frankly, Donald Trump’s golfers are definitely going to have to arrive by helicopter.

Yet in spite of the earthly delights of Scotland’s cities, we still find the hinterland calling. No sooner have we arrived in the conurbation, than we wonder where the best place would be to get some fresh air. In Edinburgh’s case we’ve been out to the Pentlands – I blame the dogs – and the East Lothian coastline also calls.

What’s going on? I publish grim looking beach pictures with lowering grey clouds in July (see Of course the Sun will Shine Again blog) then along comes October, and there are happy people sipping their coffees under a soft blue sky at the Scottish Seabird Centre http://www.seabird.org/home.asp at North Berwick, east of Edinburgh. Yes, I know it doesn’t conform to the Scottish weather stereotype of months of snowfall. Maybe it’s global warming, all these people sitting outside on a mellow autumn day, and enjoying the views of the Bass Rock, which is a volcanic plug, though it hardly needs the publicity. 

The clever folk at the Scottish Seabird Centre have cameras that zoom in to the domestic arrangements of the gannet in spring and summer, when it breeds on the Bass Rock. There are apparently, 140,000 of them, all squabbling at once. (Im referring to gannets here, rather than the staff at the Seabird Centre, obviously.)  This makes the Bass the single largest gannet colony in the world. Later in the year, cameras intrude upon the private moments of the North Atlantic grey seal, as it flollops ashore on the islands of the Firth of Forth to have its babies. Via the Seabird Centre you can even subscribe to a sightings newsletter, a kind of seal births and marriages column. All you have to remember is that where the newsletter says ‘cows’ it means female grey seals and where it mentions ‘pups’ it means baby grey seals, otherwise the whole birthing process becomes too bizarre to contemplate. 

Go a little way beyond North Berwick and you’ll find yourself at the John Muir Country Park, east of Dunbar. Like Andrew Carnegie and Billy Connolly, John Muir was a famous Scottish export, as he was born in Dunbar in 1838 and emigrated to the USA when he was only 11 years old. Muir went on to found the American National Park system, a fact acknowledged many years later here in Scotland by the designation of this fine chunk of coastline near his birthplace as a Country Park. (I think that means that East Lothian Council holds sway over a couple of barbecue sites.)

It's popular, but you can still find a space to yourself. The part near Tynninghame, east of the little town of Dunbar, always brings Erskine Childers’ novel ‘The Riddle of the Sands’ to mind when the tide goes out – all those sand-flats and forlorn wailing birds - but you’ll just have to indulge me here with this one. And if the sea winds and big horizons get too much, then the nearby main road, the A1, will whizz you back to the city centre in a short space of time.

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