David Bennett – Page 22

The National Monument of Scotland and The Nelson Monument on Calton Hill, Edinburgh

The Nelson Monument on Calton Hill

Climb to the top of the Nelson Monument on Calton Hill in Edinburgh and you get a certificate. It certifies that you have climbed the 143 steps of the winding staircase, up to the viewing platform.

If you think the monument looks like a telescope, you’d be right. It was designed to look like one and to commemorate Admiral Lord Nelson’s victory and death at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.

His fleet defeated the combined French and Spanish forces and was another of those ‘breathe again’ moments that Britain has had over the centuries, from the Spanish Armada, to the Battle Of Trafalgar, and on to the the Battle Of Britain.

The Battle of Britain was fought in 1940. It was an aerial battle fought for several months in the skies over England, and it has attained mythic proportions in the minds of those who lived at the time.

The Nelson Monument was completed in 1816, so the memory of the famous victory must have been as fresh in the minds of the citizens of the UK then as the Second World War was fresh and meaningful to those living in the 1950s.

That might go some way to explaining why anyone would design a building that looks like an upended telescope and place it on the hill that looks down on the centre of the city. Or to put it another way, a monument that is highly visible from Princes Street, one of the main avenues in the city.

This is a photo I took with my phone from the upper floor of the Apple store on Princes Street looking to Calton Hill bathed in sunlight.

The National Monument of Scotland

Just a few yards away from the Nelson Monument on Calton Hill there is Edinburgh’s Folly, as it is popularly known.

It is The National Monument of Scotland, and is a memorial to the Scots who died fighting in the Napoleonic Wars. It was designed to be inspirational and, as you can see, it is modelled on the Greek Parthenon in Athens. But the project ran out of funds and this is all that was built.

The Views From The Nelson Monument

Coming back to the Nelson Monument, here is the view from the viewing platform looking over Princes Street. On the left in the foreground is St. Andrew’s House. This is where the Government ministers and civil servants go about their business.

And on the left in the background you can see Edinburgh Castle.

Coming around the viewing platform and looking further to the east, the scene is dominated by the outcrop known as Arthur’s Seat. And at the foot of the hill is Holyrood Palace and the Scottish Parliament.

Arthur’s Seat may have got its name from King Arthur, but there are other competing stories for how it got its name.

Wherever the hills got their name from, Arthur’s Seat and Edinburgh Castle actually sit on the rim of an ancient volcano that reached, according to estimates, several hundred feet higher than the remnants that exist today.

One view that I didn’t photograph, is around to the north and the further bank of the Forth estuary and the Forth Rail Bridge. I’ll save that for another visit. Not that you have to climb the Monument to see them. You can also see them simply standing on Calton Hill.

The Sketch Of The Nelson Monument

I used the Astropad app to sketch the image of the Nelson Monument. The app communicates between my laptop and my phone so that I can sketch in Photoshop on my laptop using a stylus on my iPhone.

Then I added the curly bracket and the text on my laptop, also in Photoshop, to produce the final image.

The Land Of The Isle Of May

by David Bennett

The Isle of May and puffins go together like bread and butter, like toast and jam, like haggis and Scotland. And this low-lying jewel of an island in the Firth of Forth was home this year to 46,200 breeding pairs of puffins – the clowns of the sea.

Puffins steal the glory but there are also thousands upon thousands of breeding pairs of kittiwakes, guillemots, razorbills, and greater and lesser black-backed gulls.

The Island Itself

With all those birds it is easy to overlook the island itself, so here is a short photo essay on the ‘island’ of the Isle of May.

The first photo below is a shot looking down to the small harbour on the eastern side of the island. The tide rises five metres (about sixteen feet), and the rocks between the two tides are covered in bladder wrack.

At high tide boats use the second landing stage. That’s the one with the red gantry nearer the bottom right of the frame.

And way over on the north side of the island is Bishop’s Cove, where the rocks drop sheer to sea in a tumble of layers and columns, while further around towards the west, the rocks are covered in bright yellow lichen.

Of LightHouses and Lightships

There are buildings on the island – from Second World War radar installations all the way back to the first Lighthouse that was built in 1636.

In this shot you can see the original lighthouse – a tiny white square in the distance – and next to it is the lighthouse that replaced it. The story goes that Sir Walter Scott was instrumental in preserving the old lighthouse from demolition.

The ‘new’ lighthouse is no longer used. There is now a lightship moored just off the coast.

Gannets on Bass Rock

by David Bennett

Bass Rock in the Firth Of Forth sticks out of the water with sheer cliffs all around.

From a distance the top of the rock looks white. It’s white with the density of gannets that call it home during the breeding season.

At 150,000 birds, it’s the largest colony of Northern Gannets in the world. It has grown year on year but looking back to earlier in the 20th century there were no gannets.

The top of the rock was green – the green of meadows and planted fields. The produce from them helped to support a small population of lighthouse keepers and their families.

The lighthouse is still in use but since 1988 it has been run by remote control. The Commissioners of the Northern Lighthouse Board monitor it from their headquarters in Edinburgh.

With the human disturbance gone the gannets claimed the rock as their own. And once established, the breeding pairs return year after year.

Visiting in 2015

The Scottish Seabird Centre run trips to Bass Rock. Landings depend on the weather and you need to be fit.

I and eleven others were in an inflatable RIB, having just visited the Isle Of May.

On the way back to North Berwick we idled in the waters for a while. We didn’t land but we did see gannets. I was truly staggered with the sheer numbers overhead. It was amazing – one of those times when my head stops and I know I am enjoying something so deep that it clears the fog.

That’s when I took these shots.

See this article about puffins when we visited the Isle Of May in 2012.

Bass Rock From 2012

I never processed these photos in 2012, and they show the white top of the rock – so here they are. The second shot is the view of Bass Rock from North Berwick.