Walking the Granton boundary. Starting, appropriately, on the Festival of Terminalia 23 Feb 2023
Before
Granton is changing a lot, very quickly. Today I plan to make the first of a series of walks using different maps of Granton to document the area, to make an extended snapshot in time. I am interested to see where this place begins and ends and how it borders on its neighbours.
Today I will set off in a clockwise direction, following the map I photographed at the National Galleries presentation of their new project, Art Works, at the Edinburgh College in June 2022.
- from Granton View via Lufra Bank
- up Granton Rd and right onto the cycle path
- off at Pilton Drive, and westwards along Ferry Road
- down Crewe Rd North back towards the sea
- turning at the ‘new’ gas building by Caroline Park
- along Waterfront Ave to the harbour (I will wait to see how I manage that because access to the boundary is cut off here and the Western and Eastern Breakwaters are not connected by land but by the Firth of Forth rushing between them)
- Wardie Bay beach
- up Wardie Steps
- to the post box
- completing the circle
I have been on these roads and trails many times, however, as a long-time Zen practitioner I am trying to start without expectations of what I may find. I am ready to encounter and notice what arises. As a psychogeographer, I will resist straying if my interest is piqued, but will take care to look into corners and pay as much attention to the urban as the rural, the so-called banal as the beautiful. As a secular pilgrim, this is known territory, very different from walking a new path as a pilgrimage usually is for me, nevertheless, this short journey is a pilgrimage. I will leave home, skirt a venerated place, and return. There is no triumphant arrival, but the return. It will inevitably be some sort of transformation, for me, for the landscape through which I will travel, and for those (human and more-than-human) I meet along the way.
“Such journeys served a variety of functions: a pilgrim might set out to fulfill a vow, to expiate a crime, to seek a miraculous cure, or simply to deepen his or her faith.”
Jean Sorabella
Other boundaries and borders projects:
Walking without a donkey 