Walking without a donkey – travels in Edinburgh – Page 2

Walking without a donkey - travels in Edinburgh, Walking without a donkey - travels in Scotland

The In-Between

A First Friday Walk – March 2021. Wardie Bay, 5 minutes from home

“We lack – we need – a term for those places where one experiences a ‘transition’ from a known landscape … into ‘another world’: somewhere we feel and think significantly differently.” that exists “even in familiar landscapes: ….. Such moments are rites of passage that reconfigure local geographics, leaving known places outlandish or quickened,”
Robert MacFarlane

Can I help you find a term for those places? Shall we go somewhere where that happens and feel what it’s like, enquire into the difference between not-beach and beach, and see if we can come up with one?

My usual way onto Wardie Bay is up the wee slope and though the stoneledges. I leave the busy road that’s been there for nearly 200 years, and has known me for 12, and at the top I get a salty blast to the nose which dismisses the fumes. I spy a man, a long way off on the sand. He has a big rucksack and he stoops, probably looking at his phone. He’s almost a silhouette against the-place-where-the-tide-is-out. I see and inhale where I am going.

I begin the transition carefully. I turn my shoes sideways, peering down to avoid slipping. Not looking at the beach or the man, I only see my feet, one by one. I fit the long sides of my trainers into the angles where the earthed slope meets the uneven stone strips.

For a second I still. Half way. I feel the presence of the sea on my shoulders, the sky touching my hat and the wind on my ungloved hands which are stretched out at the sides of me for better balance. Something is already happening.

I run the last bit at the bottom which means that my heartbeat matches the pleasure I feel at being there. I am assailed by the wave-sound, the sea-odour and, finally, with the soles of my feet as I step from the large-rasping-pebbles onto the little-grainy-sand – I sink slightly, tilt, halt.

Now it all embraces me in one big hug, the noise, scent and feel of the beach’s surface that I like. I look out to sea and my lungs take a great deep, heaving breath.

Quite soon I lie facedown to photograph the smell of crab in the seaweed. I screw up the skin at the nape of my neck where the cold gets in, to try and stop it doing that. The bladder wrack under my elbows as I balance the camera, is dry and brittle. I am in another world and I try to capture all the wonder but I know from experience that can be tricky.

Yes, the sand. When I stand again it reminds me of velvet. Through my trainers and two pairs of socks it’s delicious. I swivel and furrow and it’s like when you sink your hands into the strands of a ball of merino wool and squeeze the softness.

I am on an expedition to find something out, so I rewind – I stare at the horizon and in my mind I start again from home. When we go somewhere we bring our anticipation of that place with us, the idea of what it will be like. I brought the way the beach was before – all the befores – layers of previous times when I had visited – with me today. And in my body when I got to the top of the steps, were the traces of everything else I had lived through up until that moment. And not only that. The beach, itself, had an imprint on it, of all the people (including me), and activities and weathers that had happened there, all accumulated in that second when I entered. I suspect that this previousness influences the way that we feel and think when an ordinary place becomes ‘quickened’.

I lie down on the sloping, freezing rock, blue-sky with white-cloud above. I shut my eyes and smell the fish. Under my closed lids I can see the shells and stones I had been looking at before.

Tobacco….drifts….merges….with perfume.

What IS that place called, not where-I-was, and not where-I-am-now ? We know about journey, about being in transition, skimming or flying across lands and high skies to get somewhere. What do we call that place we just missed, the one we whipped through unawares? My tummy flurries when I’m approaching, the ground underneath me is altered when I arrive, but in the blink of an eye I am here, not there.

Fingers fold over cold thumbs and how smooth my skin is. I nearly sleep but the chill interferes. I rest still, not wanting to get up but knowing I’m going to.

The name of the place where I make the ‘transition’ might depend on which direction I take to get here and how I arrived.

If I chose the flat way from the street, the stonewalls very tall at the sides of me and feeling very small going between them, I would be coming upslope. At the corner I would be on a level with everyone and their dogs, able to see diagonally across to the rocks. There, hovering, no-one would notice me. Then I would run off the cobble, do a hop, skip and turn cartwheel on the sand, and land in the middle of the ring with a flourish.

Propping myself up on my elbows to look, I think. It would not be the same if I approached from the air, if I was a gull flying down, folding my wings back and stretching my thin legs out, landing on both my webbed feet at the same time. Landing lightly, making hardly a mark, the wind at my back, I would run along and get on with my search until someone disturbed me. I can’t know if some places are more special for birds, but I do see when there are suddenly hundreds not three – something is exceptional or there wouldn’t be so many at one time, they wouldn’t be so excited.

If I were a wave from the north, I would turn over calmly, spreading, rolling, on to the strand. I would canoodle and stroke and she would offer up her treasures to me willingly. Or I might come faster, rising and rising then crashing. I would buffet and pummel and she would be covered with my offerings, and our meeting would be rousing.

Yes, I am sure that the direction we take and the way we enter, influences the magic when we get there. I launch up at last and stride towards the breakwater.

There are lots of stories about transitions into other worlds that might give us ideas for this place name we are seeking. They involve complex feelings which may help us focus: There is Mary’s secret garden, found through a door under some hanging plants; Lucy’s Narnia – she went through two rows of coats with her arms stretched out in front of her, so as not to bump her face into the back of the wardrobe; and Alice’s Wonderland which was of course accessed via a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.

Mary, “… took another long breath, because she could not help it, and she held back the swinging curtain of ivy and pushed back the door which opened slowly—slowly. Then she slipped through it, and shut it behind her, and stood with her back against it, looking about her and breathing quite fast with excitement, and wonder, and delight.” (The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.)

Lucy, “… felt a little frightened, but she felt very inquisitive and excited as well.” When she felt snow under her feet and on her face, that was when she realised she was somewhere else. (The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C.S.Lewis.)

Alice has a long, slow-motion fall down “what seemed to be a very deep well”, meaning that we readers get to see, think and feel her transition. She was “not a bit hurt”. Indeed, it seemed to heighten her ‘outlandish’ response – things got much more curious as a result. Later, she got tearful when she couldn’t get through the too-small door to the garden. Her feelings on the threshold, and during the shift from one place to another, were different depending on whether it was a matter of choice or if she was catapulted there. (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll).

It seems that we might hold or expel our breath, run or move slowly across the divide, feel very inquisitive, excited or upset as we go. Time may pass quickly, so that we gloss over the feelings we have there, or slow right down, giving us a hyper-real sense of it, even space to ruminate.

The birds wheel and cry, a dog races past me and splashes after the ball. I have reached the other side and have to turn back.

When we are at the portal we are half one thing, half the other; leaving and approaching at the same time. We are momentarily inserted, midway. We are about to ……… .

So, it’s decision time. What will we call it? I am back home now, balancing on the edge of the bed-base in the attic room so I can reach the sill and look over it at the beach below. I can see the place where not-there bleeds into there, and I have vertigo with the strain of it all.

‘Crossing’ or ‘passing over’ has too much redolence of death, though there is always a sort of loss associated with leaving, and, like a pilgrimage, it is really the journey that is important, not what you call it. No, I have a suggestion. The name of the place I went through, where something changed so that my familiar beach became something other, is the in-between. What do you think?

Other, Walking without a donkey - travels in Edinburgh, Walking without a donkey - travels in Scotland

Festival of Terminalia

23rd February 2021

Today I walk an imaginary line around my house. My feet don’t leave indentations to show I have done it, not since the recent snow, and when that melted the trace was gone. Home and back, I pace and pound my boundary line, a pathway that returns to itself, reconnects, reattaches, and brings me back to the garden gate.

Terminalia is a one day festival of walking, space, place and psychogeography on 23rd Feburary. Terminalia is the festival of Terminus, Roman god of boundaries and landmarks so if there was ever a god and festival for psychogeography this would be it!
https://terminaliafestival.org/

They say that people walking somewhere can change a place, that the land alters because of us. Of course, it’s clear if we wear down the mountainside or trample wildflowers underfoot, or if we make a desire path, flattening the grass just enough that the next person who comes by can see it and tread the same way afterwards. But I’m talking about the idea that the nature of a place adjusts as many people cross it for a specific reason (such as pilgrimage, religious or secular), that an ordinary location becomes imbued with a special significance after it has been walked upon by people with a shared aim or sensibility. If that’s true, do my streets, the streets which bear my weight daily, still feel me when I’m gone? Do I rub off on them somehow? Can I say I belong there?

Or is it the air above a path that is disturbed by my body moving through it, affected by my presence, retaining a whiff of me? Then, what happens when the wind blows and displaces it – have I been whisked away, or am I still there? How exactly does it work, this treading of Terminus, deity of the marking of our territory?

A crow breaks the quiet with a piercing caw on the turret, the wind finds crevices in my clothing, the odour of fish and chips invades my sense of propriety. Someone has etched into the tree’s bark and graffitied the bridge’s stone. A trickle finds a way through, waves breach the breakwater and ride roughshod over rocks. We must leave a gap or the wind will blow a solid fence over, or a river bring down a protective wall. In so many ways, boundaries seem to be there to be broken – at least that’s when we notice them.

A few of us meander along the ribboned edge of the bay, the constant interruption of land by sea. We talk to no-one, we stand and watch the water. I feel sad, and the waves sound melancholy too. Only the other day it was like satin, now the surface darkens and shifts as the wind messes it into mackerel patterns. Sand clouds rush past me in such a hurry, disintegrating as they haste towards Fife. Uncharacteristic ripples sweep out to Inchcolm island where the disappearing rainbow arcs overhead (between real and unreal). While I was there I had that golden luck and the rain never reached me, I who have hot sun on my calves. One by one, we stoop and pick what catches our eye. I chase dry seaweed as it billows across the beach.

Psychogeography describes the effect of a geographical location on the emotions and behaviour of individuals
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/psychogeography

I am concentrating on my own boundaries of time (too little for my own projects) – noticing how they get eroded, how I let them, allowing myself less. And on the amount of space I have (too much room in my house now that the children and lodgers have gone) – somehow ending up with more than I need. As I pace, the liminal wetness, what I might call the sea/m, I mourn the freedom I didn’t have (I was raised to think about others before myself and it has stayed with me) and the shells I am inadvertently crunching underfoot. The sea doesn’t stick to its limit. I see it constantly pushing them. I stand close by until it unexpectedly breaks the rule and surges at me. I have to stumble back out of the way or get wet.

There are fewer birds than usual on the strand, though later I see them swarming, their blanched bellies catching the sun as they swoop en masse. Over the blue they go, alighting on the pontoon quickly, one after the other, then taking off just as swiftly, an avian Mexican wave.

I muse on how everyday habits break down fear by reassuring us what will happen; then equally how they cause it, how we become nervous about being spontaneous and managing sudden change. I have been at home so long now, moving steadily around my immediate area – 5 miles in each direction – that I wonder how I’ll manage to go further afield. Will we all spread out across national borders again, back and forth over timelines and zones, or will we be more circumspect, stay closer to home, on our own territory? I have no plans.

Related blogs: Walking Between Worlds series

Terminalia – Festival of Psychogeography site

Incidentally, Terminalia is also a tree genus (upwards of 200 species) including the Terminalia catappa. Found in Madagascar, tropical and subtropical Asia and the Pacific (http://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/171034-1), the leaves are to be found at the very end – terminus – of the branches. Types of this tree (bark) are used in Ayurvedic medicine to treat heart conditions and diarrhoea.

Indian almond courtesy of https://www.britannica.com/plant/Terminalia-plant

Walking without a dog - travels in Scotland, Walking without a donkey - travels in Edinburgh

Edinburgh – New College and Calton Hill

Here are some winter photos to wet your appetite for making a windy climb down from the Royal Mile and up Calton Hill for the fabulous views of Salisbury Crags, Arthur’s Seat and more.

I took the Hidden Heroines Tour on International Women’s Day (8.3.2019) of places in the city centre where you can find out about famous Edinburgh women.

Carla Nebulosa was our tour guide and she and her team had researched and prepared the itinerary. Originally from Madrid, she delivered it in a personable, even exuberant manner. She has started to write a book of the same name and is looking for donations from the tours to cover her up-front costs.

IMG_20190308_161141 — Carla (with the hat on, pointing) on the steps of Lady Stair’s Close and the back of the Writers MuseumEdinburgh

St Margaret (1070 – 1093) was an English princess: devout Catholic; charitable; mother of eight; wife to and good influence on King Malcolm; and, most importantly, she established a ferry across to Fife so folk could walk pilgrimage to St Andrews. She is further remembered because the oldest surviving building in Edinburgh, part of the Castle, is in her name.

The roots of the summer pilgrimage dates back to June 1250 when the relics of Saint Margaret were translated to a new shrine in Dunfermline Abbey following her canonisation that year by Pope Innocent IV.

The Witches’ Well can be found at the entrance to the Castle Esplanade. It is a memorial to the women who died unnecessarily as a result of the 1563 Scottish Witchcraft Act

The Witches’ Well, a cast iron fountain and plaque, honors the Scottish women who were burned at the stake between the 15th and 18th centuries. It’s an easy site to miss for people only focusing on the castle that looms ahead. During the 16th century, more women were murdered at this site than anywhere else in Scotland. Each victim was denied a proper trial.
The Witches’ Well

IMG_20190308_155152 — The Witches’ Well, Atlas Obscura, Edinburgh

We visited sites associated with Catherine Sinclair (novelist 1800 – 1864), Susan Ferrier (novelist 1782 – 1854), and Elsie Inglis (doctor and suffragist 1864 – 1917). Inglis was one of the first women to be educated at the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, though later she transferred to Glasgow to complete. I always remember her name as I went to visit my friend Tracy in the Elsie Inglis Memorial Maternity Hospital (1925 – 1988), the day she gave birth to her first daughter, Gemma.

IMG_20190121_125419 — St Cuthbert’s from Princes Street Gardens where Susan Edmonstone Ferrier is buried, Edinburgh

IMG_20190308_165806 — Looking towards Abbeyhill, site of the former Elsie Inglis Memorial Maternity Hospital, Edinburgh

Mary Somerville, featured on the £10 note, was a Scottish scientist (1780 – 1872) and she gave her name to one of the houses at my secondary school in Tonbridge, Kent, so I was pleased to hear her mentioned.

IMG_20180806_201952 — Bank of Scotland, The Mound on the left with the green dome, Edinburgh

Lady Mary Shepherd was born to the Primrose family (1777 – 1847) just outside Edinburgh. A Scottish philosopher, she wrote two philosophical books (1824 criticising the views of David Hume, and 1827 on the perceptions of an external universe) which were influential in Edinburgh philosophical circles at the time. (thanks Wikipedia)

She finds them (the main tenets of the Scottish school) unable to sustain scientific inquiry, everyday practical reasoning, and belief in an almighty deity.

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

You can add your signature to a petition here to get a statue erected to her, if you like.

Detail from painting by Alexander Nasmyth, depicting the family of
Neil 3rd Earl of Rosebery in the grounds of Dalmeny House.
Courtesy of Dalmeny Estates

Bessie Watson was the youngest bagpipe playing suffragette! Born in Edinburgh in 1900, she was encouraged to play to strengthen her lungs as prevention against tuberculosis which ran in the family. Look at her little pale face! She joined the WSPU, the Women’s Social and Political Union, with her mother, marching down Prince’s Street in 1909 to celebrate ‘what women have done and can and will do’.

Jane Haining was ‘A farmer’s daughter from Galloway in south-west Scotland, Jane was a Church of Scotland missionary, and went to the Scottish Jewish Mission School in Budapest in 1932, where she worked as a boarding school matron in charge of around 50 orphan girls. The school had 400 pupils, most of them Jewish. Jane was back in the UK on holiday when war broke out in 1939, but she immediately went back to Hungary to do all she could to protect the children at the school. She refused to leave in 1940, and again ignored orders to flee the country in March 1944 when Hungary was invaded by the Nazis. She remained with her pupils, writing ‘if these children need me in days of sunshine, how much more do they need me in days of darkness’.” Her brave persistence led to her arrest in by the Gestapo in April 1944, for “offences” that included spying, working with Jews and listening to the BBC. She died in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz just a few months later, at the age of 47.’ There is a fitting memorial to her on Calton Hill. There is a book about her, Jane Haining, A Life of Love and Courage by Mary Miller published by Birlinn.

Jane Haining memorial, Calton Hill, Edinburgh

Williamina Paton Stevens Fleming (1851 – 1911) was a Scottish astronomer active in the United States. During her career, she helped develop a common designation system for stars and cataloged thousands of stars and other astronomical phenomena. ‘One of nine children of a Scottish craftsman and his wife, she already knew the cold reality of family survival. Her father had died when she was seven; at 14, she had become a student teacher to help support her mother and siblings. At 20, she had married a Dundee bank employee and widower, James Orr Fleming, 16 years her senior—who would abandon her and their unborn child shortly after her arrival in the United States. Despite it all, “Mina” Fleming would rise to a key position in Harvard’s astronomy program and be hailed as the nation’s preeminent woman astronomer..(classifying) by far the most extensive star compilation of the era.’

The Edinburgh Observatory, now the Collective Gallery, Calton Hill, Edinburgh (not my photo)

‘Edinburgh’s Acropolis’, Calton Hill, Edinburgh

The Hidden Heroines tour took in women of politics, literature, medicine, education, witches and business and I highly recommend it if it is ever held again.

Walking without a dog - travels in Scotland, Walking without a donkey - travels in Edinburgh

Dalry Cemetery

A photo essay – Dalry Cemetery, Edinburgh

It was Autumn, season of the falling away of summer foliage and the start of nature’s melancholy. On the day I happened upon this place, on a walk from Slateford to Tollcross, rays of sunlight lit up corners and features of the deserted graveyard.

There was sadness there, of course, but also a lightness and positivity. I find beauty in every season, and the shift from one to the other, the inevitable transformation, often calls for contemplation on what is passing, and what may be to come.

‘Death dismantled them’ (she was writing about Rumi, Christ, Yogananda). ‘It cannot be undone, it can only be carried’.
Megan Devine

‘I looked up darkness on the Web…. there is always death. We say death is darkness; and darkness is death’.
Because of the metaphorical dark, the death dark, we were constantly concerned to banish the natural dark’.
Kathleen Jamie pages 3 and 10 of ‘Findings’

There are times when we feel that death is closer than usual, and very often the news is full of it, as it is today. Some block it out because it is too hard to face, others have no choice but to deal with loss and the complicated practicalities it brings. Still others will realise that the proximity of unexpected demise can be a good thing in some ways.

“A close conversing with death … would scum off the gall from our tempers, remove the animosities among us …”
Daniel Dafoe

For five thousand years we have used darkness as the metaphor of our mortality. We are at the mercy of merciless death, which is darkness. When we died, they [neolithic people who built Maes Howe] sent a beam of midwinter light in among our bones. What a tender, potent gesture. In the Christian era, we were laid in our graves to face the rising sun. ‘
Kathleen Jamie, ‘Findings’ p 24

‘The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.’.
The Bible, Isaiah

This is not a religious blog, I am not a church goer, but I do notice that when we know sorrow, it means we will also recognise happiness as its opposite when it returns; when we experience grief, then, too, we will recognise love. Living through the death of someone throws the light on these inevitable aspects of life.

English poet and hymnodist, William Cowper, described grief itself as medicine. Grief cleanses the anguish from our souls and sets us back up on the path of life so we can dance.
Bible Study Tools

In these days of Covid-19 (we are still in lockdown in the UK as I write) there are a few more articles about death in the media than normal. The Guardian’s Yuval Noah Harari wrote, ‘Some might well argue that…the crisis should teach us humility. We shouldn’t be so sure of our ability to subdue the forces of nature…..While humanity as a whole becomes ever more powerful, individual people still need to face their fragility…We have to own up to our transience.”

My greatest fear is that my daughters will die, so you can imagine what I felt when I found this grave stone with the eldest’s name on. *Dalry Cemetery, Edinburgh* ©TG

‘the relentlessness of mortal lives. Even as we spoke the moments were passing.’
Circe, Madeline Miller P. 197

For me, the acknowledgement that I do not know when I will die is something I remind myself of every day. It helps me put things into perspective. I might not live to a ripe old age, so I ask myself, ‘What is the most important thing right now?’

Access to the Dalry Cemetery is on Dundee Street near its join with henderson terrace and it backs onto Dalry Road in Edinburgh. See Find A Grave dot com

You might also like this article about cemeteries outside Bradford and in Liverpool by Kenn Taylor

Community Walking Projects, Walking without a dog - travels in Scotland, Walking without a donkey - travels in Edinburgh

Walking Between Worlds – 3

The third and final part of a circular tour of Leith, starting at the North Leith Burial Ground.

One of a flock of goosander on the water of Leith close by Coburg Street, Leith

Old map showing St Ninian’s Chapel, Leith

Old St Ninian’s Chapel (1675) with a golden cockerel weather vane on the top of its Dutch-style steeple, Quayside Street, Leith, Scotland

Along the road and down to the right beside Coburg House artists studios (well worth a visit) is the gloriously orange, former St Ninian’s Chapel (you can see St Ninian himself (360 – 432 AD) carved onto the doors and representing the Picts, at St Andrew’s House (St Andrew’s Square) in the centre of Edinburgh.) St Ninian’s Chapel is a 15^th century bridge chapel, part of the complicated history of North Leith Parish Church which can be found on Wikipedia.

Back by the water, I spotted this little talisman when I did my rekkie, but it was gone when I visited there, later, with one of the groups. It reads, ‘1 in 4 children live in poverty’.

As we crossed Sandport Bridge, I drew attention to Broad Wynd on the left, where the Leith Dispensary and Humane Society hospital and clinic were first situated (of which, more later).

Queen Charlotte in Bloomsbury Square, London

Along Tolbooth Wynd we wandered, and on to Queen Charlotte Street, named after the Queen of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1744-1818). She is remembered in Queens Square, Bloomsbury, London with a statue (see above). The Leith stories were starting to fit into themes: Charlotte was an immigrant and did not support slavery. Also a botanist, she founded Kew Gardens, was married to King George III, had fifteen (that’s 15!) children and was, famously, painted by Allan Ramsey 1762 when she was aged 17 years. She was an anti-slavery campaigner and that portrait is owned by the Scottish National Galleries. Recent articles have posed the question, ‘Is she of African origin?’

St Mary’s Chapel (1483) at South Leith Parish Church, not to be confused with St Mary’s Star of the Sea further down the road. Looking blue at dusk

At the Hideout Cafe (where I had a delicious and expensive hot chocolate on a previous occasion), we turned onto Constitution Street which was shut to traffic on account of the endless and frustrating tram works when I walked with the groups (so blessedly quiet to walk along) but is now open in all its splendour. Listen out for the dining of those tram bells announcing their arrival! We continued on, past St Mary’s Star of the Sea Catholic church, to the South Leith Parish Church and its graveyard.

St Mary’s Star of the Sea is the home of the missionary oblates

Hail, Queen of Heav'n, the ocean Star, 
Guide of the wand'rer here below!
Thrown on life's surge we claim thy care,⁠ 
Save us from peril and from woe. 

Mother of Christ, Star of the sea,⁠ 
Pray for the wanderer, pray for me

Based on the anonymous Latin hymn, Ave Maris Stella

See how this woman is named a ‘relict’ of her husband, South Leith Parish Church, Scotland!

I spent some time researching the women in this kirkyard, trying to find out their stories, but to almost no avail. I focused on another Charlotte, Charlotte Lindesay (1780-1857, who died aged 77) and discovered that she was one of a brood of six from Feddinch in Fife, and that her parents were William Lindesay and Elizabeth Balfour. In 1805, she married her cousin, Patrick who was very active in the community. Amongst other things, he was the president of the Leith Dispensary and Humane Society (see above) which was formed in 1825 on Maritime Street, later to become Leith Hospital on Mill Lane, and brought healthcare (via a clinic and hospital both initially in Broad Wynd) to the poor. I like to imagine Charlotte accompanying him, or even visiting the needy with a basket over her arm as portrayed in countless Jane Austen films, but I am woefully ill informed about her particulars.

Some of my information was gleaned from ‘The Jacobite Grenadier’ by Gavin Wood.

*The South Leith Parish Church seen through a stone arch in its graveyard, Leith, Scotland*

Incidentally, the Leith King James Hospital was demolished in 1822, and part of the wall can still be seen today, forming the boundary between the Kirkgate and the South Leith Kirkyard.

These iron gates (often seen in Edinburgh kirkyards – they swing on a central axis) protect the corpses, and predate 1832. We know this because it was the year of the Anatomy Act which allowed medical schools to legally acquire subjects for dissection and so there was no need to rob graves after that! South Leith Parish Church, Scotland

Some other women associated with this church

Mary of Guise (also called Mary of Lorraine), ruled Scotland as regent from 1554 until her death in 1560. A noblewoman from the Lotharingian House of Guise, which played a prominent role in 16th-century French politics, Mary became queen consort upon her marriage to King James V of Scotland in 1538. (Wikipedia). She worshipped at this church in 1559 and her coat of arms is displayed in the entrance today. Mary had fortified the town and she was in Leith being guarded by the thousands of French troops stationed there at the time.

Saint Barbara, whose altar sits in South Leith Parish Church, Scotland

There is also an altar dedicated to St Barbara who, we are told, had a very sad and sorry life. She wanted to dedicate herself to Christ, instead of marrying the man her father wanted her to (Dioscorus, 7th century), and so she was tortured and her head was chopped off by said dad. He got his comeuppance, apparently, being struck by lightening and reduced to ashes. She is, therefore, invoked in thunderstorms, and is also the patroness of miners although I am not sure why. (From the Britannica and Archdiocese of St Andrews on facebook).

A beautiful clay memorial to those who were buried around the church, but in unmarked graves (2009), South Leith Parish Church, Scotland

When excavating for the trams, they found mass graves. There were 50 per cent more bodies of women than men, and everyone was smaller and showed signs of malnourishment compared to the national average. An exhibition and book were made and it was posited that their low weight had something to do with the plague and/or that they were from the workhouse.

The graves of Jane Eliza Mackie and Jane Smart (left), and graffiti (see Walking Between Worlds – 1 for more on this subject) on the side of the church (right), South Leith Parish, Scotland

As a way of paying respect to the women whose names I discovered here, I read out a list of them to those I was walking with, together with their relationships, but omitted the names of their male relatives. I was attempting to recognise how many there were and about whom we know so little, as well as the manner in which they were remembered.

I have used the original spelling from the graves. They are referred to by their maiden names.

Elizabeth P. K. Smith Known as Betty by her friends
Helen their daughter whose dust reposes in the Church-yard of Thurso in Caithness being there suddenly cut off in the flower of her age
Elizabeth Maxwell, Maiden Lady Daughter of…who liv’d much esteem’d and Died regrated by all who had the Pleasure of her Aquaintance
Mary Jackson his Spoufe who departed this Life…much and juftly regrated, being poffeffed of the moft amiable accomplifhments…also near this lyes three of her Children who all dyed before herfelf
Ann McRuear Relick of…
Barbara Adamson, Spouse of…
In memory of his grandmother Mrs Ann Kerr… aged 76 years, His aunt Jean Tait.. aged 40 years, His mother Robina Tait… aged 44 years, His niece Jane Briggs Dickson …aged 33 months
Here lyth Jeane Bartleman Spouse to…
Sacred to the memory of Jessie Blacke..Beloved Wife of…Also of her infant baby…aged one month
Juliana Walker Wife of …. Janet Scott their third daughter of…
Catherine Stewart Rennie (wee Kitty daughter…)
Mary Finlay or Best …. And of her Grandchild Margaret Dick who after a few days illness … aged 18 years Let the Young Reflect on the Uncertainty of Human Life…

Rosemary for remembrance, South Leith Parish Church, Scotland

After paying our respects to a further queen: Victoria (see previous post), who sits, most regally, up high on her plinth outside Lloyd’s Pharmacy, we made our way up Leith Walk to Robbies.

Once in Robbies bar on the corner of Iona Street and Leith Walk, more or less opposite the start, I summed up the walk: It had taken us approximately 2.5 hours and we mused and meditated on boundaries and borders. We talked of the contrasts between one community of people and another and how often this causes stress at the join between areas (we were sitting close to the boundary between Leith and Edinburgh), about how we felt different at dusk and at dawn as we cross over from dark to light and vice versa, and whether we notice how we are on the cusp of the new moon. We spoke of women’s stories – in the past and now – and how they are so often seen through the lens of their menfolk and consequently hard to celebrate in their own right. And, finally we discussed the hardship of life in centuries gone by, especially how close death was, and about its symbols and community rites.

I explained that I hoped to make a map which somehow denotes and represents this event, that will contain some of its psychogeography. Wikipedia quotes Guy Debord on this: psychogeography is “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” I think of it as a human map, not simply one containing measurements and precise locations, but including feelings, activities and conversational responses as well.

We walked together at the new moon, just over the border from one cycle to the next.

This was originally a series of guided walks, in-person ones (eg in celebration of the Terminalia Psychogeography Festival (23rd Feb, annually which happily coincided with the Women Who Walk Network and Audacious Women Festival (AWF)), and online during Covid. I would like to thank everyone who came along with me.

If you have information about the women who are featured in the walk, have made a similar walk, or would like to share anything about these subjects, please do so in the comments box below.

Walking Between Worlds – an introduction

Walking Between Worlds 1

Walking Between Worlds 2

For a lovely blog on Warriston Cemetery, see Edinburgh Drift

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Some other women associated with this church

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