Colinton is a village outside Edinburgh. It can be reached by bus (#16 from the town centre) and then it’s a short walk to the parish church.

As a child, the author and poet Robert Louis Stevenson stayed in Colinton, where his grandfather was the Minister of the parish church.

The river known as The Water of Leith runs below the church, and Stevenson wrote a poem about the games he played near the water mill as a child. He reflects on how, when he and his friends are adults and return home, the mill wheel will still be turning.

Keepsake Mill

Over the borders, a sin without pardon,
Breaking the branches and crawling below,
Out through the breach in the wall of the garden,
Down by the banks of the river, we go.

Here is the mill with the humming of thunder,
Here is the weir with the wonder of foam,
Here is the sluice with the race running under
Marvellous places, though handy to home!

Sounds of the village grow stiller and stiller,
Stiller the note of the birds on the hill,
Dusty and dim are the eyes of the miller,
Deaf are his ears with the moil of the mill.

Years may go by, and the wheel in the river
Wheel as it wheels for us, children, to-day,
Wheel and keep roaring and foaming for ever
Long after all of the boys are away.

Home from the Indies and home from the ocean,
Heroes and soldiers we all shall come home;
Still we shall find the old mill wheel in motion,
Turning and churning that river to foam.

You with the bean that I gave when we quarrelled,
I with your marble of Saturday last,
Honoured and old and all gaily apparelled,
Here we shall meet and remember the past.

It’s a poem about growing up and returning to things and seeing them in a new way – appreciating that in its earthly wisdom, the mill has kept on turning.

Of course, in the 21st century the Earth is shifting under our feet with the prospect of environmental worries on a scale beyond that which we can rescue or redeem.

The Church

The photo at the top of this article is a view from the churchyard looking onto the narrow road and the houses that front the church.

Here below is a photo of the inside of the church, designed by the architect Sidney Mitchell, an Edinburgh architect. The church was built in 1908 and replaced an earlier church that itself replaced a yet earlier one.

The man who gave me the information about the church told me that the design is neo-Byzantine.

Having spent some time in Finland, I was struck by the Nordic feel to the design – light and airy and down to earth rather than stratified and authoritarian. Well, egalitarian with perhaps the exception of the pulpit which is raised above the congregation.

There is a path that leads from the church to Collinton Dell, where I took this photo. It is a lovely feeling to be able to take a bus away from the city and reach the countryside so easily.

I saw a nuthatch and several long-tailed tits in the trees – and it’s nice to look forward to taking a walk here when the weather is warmer in the Spring.

This is a bust of Sir Walter Scott in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh.

I think it bears a passing resemblance to Alex Salmond, the current first minister of the ruling party in the Scottish Parliament.

So Who Was Sir Walter Scott

Sir Walter Scott was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet who popularised Scottish cultural identity in the nineteenth century.

In his own lifetime, Scott’s historical novels were read and admired throughout Europe and the USA. Many of his novels dealt with Scottish themes and even to this day they influence how Scots see their own past and on how Scotland is viewed from abroad.

Scott was born in 1771. To put that into context historically, the Second Jacobite Rebellion – a rebellion that attempted to regain the British throne for the Scottish house of Stuart – was in 1745.

Or to put it another way, Scott was born at a time when Scotland was riven down the middle over its loyalties.

With the referendum on Scotland splitting from the United Kingdom so fresh in people’s minds, Scottish people have again been asking that question.

And this is the huge, imposing, and perhaps overblown monument to Scott in the heart of Edinburgh on Princes Street.

My First Acquaintance with Scott – The Children’s Classics

When I was a boy I read at least three of Scott’s books – Rob Roy, Quentin Durward, and Ivanhoe. They were the kind of books that were bundled in what were called ‘children’s classics’.

I remember them as highly complex stories, and Ivanhoe drove me to distraction because it was so dense. But then I didn’t know the history of Scotland except in the vaguest of ways.

When I look back, what I did learn about Scotland in my school in northern England?

I learned that Scots had been among the world’s foremost inventors.

I learned that many Scots were forced to emigrate because of hard times at home, and that they had been pioneers in new developments far more than their numbers alone would have suggested.

And I learned about the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 when something happened, but it was far from clear what that something was.

Scott was born in the heart of Edinburgh, just off Chambers Street where the Scottish National Museum is.

He was one of nine children, but five of them had died before he was born and his sister died while still young.

How precious the children and how terrible it must have been for couples to lose their children.

I remember reading once that in the days when many children died in infancy, parents learned to be more stoical about the loss.

But I am not so sure I can believe that.

Scott’s parents had this house built in George Square in Edinburgh when Walter was three and he lived there for a short while before he contracted polio.

He recovered (many did not) but he walked with a limp throughout his life.

To recuperate, he was sent to the Scottish Borders to live with his grandfather. And it was from his grandfather and his aunt that he learned about Scottish history and heard Scottish folk tales.

Scott’s father was a lawyer, and on his return to Edinburgh as a young adult, Scott became clerk to the court and deputy sherif in Edinburgh.

And all the while he wrote romantic novels about Scotland and Scottish life.

He was internationally famous during his lifetime.

Then it all came crashing down when a venture in which he had invested failed.

Scott could have declared himself bankrupt, but instead he spent the last years of his life writing novel after novel to discharge the debts. The continuing sales of his books cleared the debts shortly after his death.

Scott died in 1832 in Abbotsford in the Scottish Borders where he had spent much of his childhood.

Scott’s legacy is in the way Scots see themselves. The fact that he discharged the debts that he could have avoided is often mentioned even in short biographies.

We went to Stirling yesterday, and this is a photo of Stirling Castle seen from below in the valley.

We decided at the last moment to detour to Stirling instead of driving straight back from Glasgow to Edinburgh.

Stirling is 20 miles from Glasgow and 33 miles from Edinburgh, so it’s an easy ride from either city. It’s on the north bank of the Firth of Forth, so when we left the town we crossed the bridge over what is just a normal river’s width at that point.

Further down the firth at Edinburgh the river estuary has widened out to a much wider expanse of water.

When we visited the Isle of May to see puffins a couple of years ago, we rode out in a dingy from North Berwick and it was over ten miles.

This is one of the photos of puffins from our trip to the Isle of May – couldn’t resist 🙂

Meanwhile, back to Stirling and our visit yesterday. We arrived late in the day and drove straight to the castle high on the hill.

As we drove up to the castle we saw part of the medieval old-town that winds up the hill. We could see the stepped roofs of the painted buildings and I want to go back to see more of the winding lanes and interesting architecture.

The castle itself is magnificent. It has a commanding view for miles all around, being built on the plug of an ancient volcano.

We saw a statue of Robert The Bruce in front of the castle, and the William Wallace monument is about a mile away on another hill that is formed from part of the same volcanic plug on which the castle sits. In fact, there is a long intrusion of volcanic material that forms a backdrop of surrounding hills.

And here are photos of the churchyard beyond the castle and a little church beyond.

I don’t know how to explain the feeling of being there except to say that there was a very strong sense of place that made it very satisfying to be there.

We’ll put two of these photos into the Ecard catalogue in the next day or two, so if you are a member you can enjoy using them in your ecards.