Week 30: Edinburgh to the Highland Boundary Fault
Happy weekend, friends. I hope February is off to a good start for you.
As I run through the pandemic, sticking to my neighborhood trails now that I’m not traveling for work, one highlight has been watching a coyote family at Pineridge Natural Area, the designated open space a couple blocks from our house. I’d seen coyotes at Pineridge before, but now that I’m there almost every day, I’ve gained a new understanding of this particular quartet’s routine, and observed them throughout the seasons.
They stand out well against the snow, so I’m able to watch as they stroll, chase each other, sniff at the prairie dogs, and jog gently along the valley floor. With all the terrible ways the pandemic has changed our lives, the coyotes have been a real bright spot for me… and also a reminder that I can find a lot of joy right here at home, if I’m paying attention.
Cindy Goeddel captured this wonderful photo of four coyotes at Yellowstone (not my four local friends), but the scene, including these beasts’ four distinct personalities, reminds me of my Pineridge friends. Photo by pro wildlife photographer Cindy Goeddel.
Certified guide in Scotland, Kirsten Griew
So… back to our virtual trek of Great Britain!
As with last week’s post, we again have certified Blue Badge guide Kirsten Griew helping us learn more about Scotland as we continue making our way north. Kirsten too is participating in our journey from Land’s End to John O’Groats, moving virtually over terrain she’s seen in real life.
What follows today comes from mainly from Kirsten, with just a few notes thrown in from me. Thanks, Kirsten… and enjoy, friends!
Leaving Edinburgh, heading north entails crossing over the Firth of Forth. This is a huge river estuary — the Scottish word “firth” simply means “where the river is merging with the sea” — in this case the North Sea. So this is the estuary of the River Forth.
This Firth is sometimes referred to as the gaping mouth of Scotland (look at a map to see why!) and throughout most of human history was the main entryway to the country. Travelling north from Edinburgh, however, it needed to be traversed. The first formal ferry service crossing the Firth was set up at the same point we cross at today, by Queen Margaret in the late 1000s. We heard of Margaret before as the chapel in Edinburgh Castle was named for her when her son built it in her memory when he was King David I.
Margaret was an English princess who married King Malcolm III of Scotland, in what was unusually for the time (especially in the royal family) a love marriage. She brought with her the religion that was prevalent in England at the time: Catholicism. Scotland was more of a Celtic Christian country, and Margaret started the process of converting everyone. 250 years after her death she was canonized for her work, so she is both Queen Margaret and St. Margaret: Scotland's only royal saint.
Margaret is responsible for establishing the pilgrimage route to the town of St. Andrews, whose cathedral had been host to relics of St. Andrew since 732. Until the Cathedral’s destruction in 1559, the pilgrimage route to St. Andrews was one of the most popular in Europe. Margaret started the ferry service in order for pilgrims to make their way north across the Firth of Forth. The names of the villages on either side of this span of the Firth are still called North and South Queensferry.
Three bridges across the Firth of Forth (Photo by Wikimedia user Thomas Nugent)
The Forth Railway Bridge (photo by Duncan Peet)
Today there are 3 bridges that span the 1.5 mile stretch of water. The first remains the most iconic: the Railway Bridge completed in 1890 and thought of as a marvel of the engineering age. It is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site today. In Scotland, if a task is never-ending, one might say it is “like painting the Forth Bridge.” This refers to the fact that the painters on the bridge always used to have a job for life, as they would take a few years to paint the whole thing, then have to go back to the beginning and start again! However, a few years ago, local firm invented a new type of paint that should last about 20-25 years, so we no longer have the constant scaffolding on the bridge.
The 1964 Forth Road Bridge (photo by Stuart Halliday)
The first road bridge — creatively named the Forth Road Bridge — opened in 1964, ending the ferry service that had continued since Queen Margaret's day. At the time it opened, it was the longest suspension bridge outside of the USA. Each of the two main cables is made up of 11,618 individual high tensile steel wires, compacted into a bundle approximately 60 centimetres thick. The total length of wire in the main cables would reach around the world one and a quarter times!
Finally, in 2017 our newest bridge opened. There was concern that the suspension bridge would not be able to hold the weight of commuter traffic from Fife into Edinburgh every day for much longer. The new bridge is the longest 3 tower, cable-stay bridge in the world. They asked local people to put forward their suggestions for its name, and in the end chose Queensferry Crossing (nice and historic). I think they missed out on some better ideas, though: for example, being the third bridge to cross over the River Forth, one idea was The Third Forth Bridge!
Just across the bridge we are in the peninsula called Fife (yes, we have crossed over the Firth of Forth to Fife - try saying that a few times in a row!). The area that was historically known for fishing - especially herring, which were so important to the local economy that they were known as the Silver Darlings. However, now there is very little fishing and Fife is far more focussed on farming. The east side of Scotland here is particularly noted for soft fruits, such as strawberries, raspberries, brambles, and currants. The strawberries are so good, they are often sent to big events down south such as Wimbledon and Royal Ascot.
Almost immediately after arriving in Fife we pass right by the area's largest town: Dunfermline.
Dunfermline Palace and Abbey was the burial place of Scottish kings for hundreds of years, starting with Malcolm and Margaret in c1100. In the 14th century King Robert I of Scotland - aka Robert the Bruce - was buried here… that is, all except for his heart!
A later depiction of “Good Sir James” throwing the heart of Robert the Bruce at his enemies.
Robert the Bruce had requested, on his deathbed, that his good friend, Sir James Douglas, take his heart on a pilgrimage/crusade to the Holy Lands, as it was the one thing in his life he had wanted but never achieved. Douglas did so, setting off south with a large group of pilgrims and the embalmed heart in a wooden casket hanging from his neck.
However, when they got to the border of France and Spain, they met some hostile enemies and realised they could not continue. Legend has it that Douglas then took the casket and threw it in the direction they were going with the words 'Onward, brave heart!' (gifting Mel Gibson, 750 years later, with the title to his film about... er William Wallace!).
The heart was lost for a long time, but was found fairly recently (it is fairly certain it is the right one) in an archeological dig at Melrose Abbey in the Borders. It was not reunited with the rest of his body, here, but kept where it was discovered.
Melrose Abbey, final resting place of the heart of Robert the Bruce.
Dunfermline is also associated with industrialist Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie was born in the town and lived his earliest years here, before emigrating with his family - whilst still a child - to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he, of course, went on to make his fortune in the steel industry with the advent of the railroad in America.
Carnegie never forgot his Scottish roots. As a small child there was a park in the town that was privately owned, that he and his friends loved to play in, but the owner always threw them out. He went back and bought the park and gave it to the people of Dunfermline, with the condition that no child should ever be thrown out of it again. Later in the challenge - when we are in the far north of Scotland, we will pass close to the castle that he and his wife bought and lived in in later years... (more stories there!)
A little further north we pass right beside Loch Leven - a beautiful lake with a wooded island in the middle, on which you can see from the road the remains of the medieval Lochleven Castle. The castle is most famous as the place where Mary Queen of Scots was held captive by her own subjects for about a year and a half.
The story of Mary's life is a tragic one. Born in 1542, she was brought up Catholic but during her reign the country went through the Reformation and became officially Protestant. She wasn't like Mary Tudor in England (known as Bloody Mary, who forced her subjects on pain of execution to be Catholic, like her). Instead, Mary Queen of Scots didn't stop her subjects from being Protestant. In fact, the Scottish parliament said that legally everyone, except their Queen, MUST be Protestant!
Not surprisingly there were many people who did not like the fact that she was Catholic and wanted to be rid of her. They found a good excuse when Mary's husband Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley (father of her son, James, future King of Scotland and later England too) was murdered and she was a prime suspect. Actually, we can be fairly certain that she was not involved in the murder (despite her marrying again very quickly after the death, to a man who almost certainly was involved in the murder!), but here was an excuse to get rid of this Catholic queen in their Protestant country.
A fanciful reimagining of Mary, Queen of Scots by contemporary painter Michael Garland
The nobles took Mary prisoner and she was held at Lochleven Castle, forced to hand her crown to her son (he was about 18 months old at the time, which was older than the 6 days at which she had become monarch!). She tried to escape unsuccessfully a few times, including once when she dressed up as a washer woman and got on the ferry to the mainland. However, as she went to get out of the boat, the ferryman took her hand to help her and noticed that it was not the calloused hand of a working woman, quickly realised who this really was, and sent her back.
Eventually she did escape, at which point she fled across the border to England to seek sanctuary from her cousin Queen Elizabeth. However, Elizabeth saw her as a threat and instead of looking after her, threw her in prison.
Mary remained a prisoner of Elizabeth for 19 years in a number of sites across England, including Tutbury Castle, Sheffield Castle, Sheffield Manor Lodge, Wingfield Manor, and Chatsworth House before Elizabeth decided she was too much of a danger to her own safety. Elizabeth was worried about a Catholic coup against her, of which Mary would be a figurehead and expected to replace her on the English throne, so she ordered Mary's execution.
Chatsworth House, one of the imprisonment sites of Mary, Queen of Scots
Mary was only 44 when she died, having spent almost half that time imprisoned. However, her success was that when Queen Elizabeth died without children in 1603, it was Mary's son James (already king of Scotland) who became king of England - the first to rule both countries.
St. Andrews Abbey (photo by wikimedia user KPapageorgiou)
Out to the east from here is the town of St Andrews - famous, of course, for golf. It was also a hugely important religious site for many centuries (in fact, monks at the abbey here were the first to play a game on the sandy/grassy links area by the beach, hitting small balls into holes in the ground with sticks!). The bishop here also set up the first university in Scotland between 1410 and 1413 - the third in the English speaking world - which remains an extremely prestigious institution today. Probably most famous now as the place where Wills and Kate met...
On the campus of the University of St. Andrews
Scone Palace and surrounding gardens
A little further north, we pass through the city of Perth. The authorities here like to call Perth 'Scotland's ancient capital'. In fact, it was an area that is now almost a suburb of Perth, called Scone, that was the legislative capital. Scone was the coronation site of Scottish kings from the first of those - Kenneth McAlpine in 842 - to the 17th century. There is a palace there now that is 18th/19th century in construction, and still the home of the Earls of Mansfield, and nothing much remains of the abbey where the coronations took place except a small grassy mound, known as Moot Hill or Boot Hill.
The story goes that every time a king was crowned, the head of every Scottish family was expected to swear an oath of loyalty to the king. The oaths meant more if they were taken on the individual's own lands. However, it was too much of a journey for the king to travel all over the country for this purpose, so these men would all travel here, but when they arrived they would kick mud from their boots that came from their own home, so they would technically be standing on their own turf as they took the oath! Over the years this mud, apparently, grew to form the hill that remains.
The Stone of Destiny… or is it a replica?
From 842 the kings would sit on a lump of rock known as the Stone of Destiny, or Stone of Scone for the coronations. This is an extremely controversial object, very precious to the Scots, but stolen by the English King Edward I in 1296 in an attempt to bring Scotland under English rule. Amazingly this important Scottish symbol remained in England, under the throne in Westminster Abbey, until 1996: 700 years! At that time the stone was taken to Edinburgh Castle to go on show alongside the Scottish Crown Jewels. However, there has been a decision in just the last few months that it will return here to Scone.
Kay Matheson, one of the students who in 1950, took the stone back to Scotland. Pictured here in 1996.
Any time we have a new king or queen crowned, however, the stone is to go back to Westminster, under the throne, so that the monarch will be crowned sitting on top of it. There are rumours, however that it is not the original stone - that perhaps the monks at Scone who had charge of it, gave a substitute to Edward I when he came for it back in 1296.
Also, in 1950 a group of Scottish Nationalist students at Glasgow University broke into Westminster Abbey overnight on Christmas Eve and took the stone back to Scotland. They were never apprehended, despite the huge search for them, but gave the stone back 6 months later of their own accord. Some thought they gave back an exact replica so they could keep the original in Scotland. Will we ever know the truth?!
As we carry on north from Perth we soon reach the Highland Boundary Fault, which divides the Scottish lowlands and the Highlands. As the team at Cateran’s Common Wealth describe it, “The Boundary Fault’s heyday was around 400 million years ago, during collisions of ancient continents. This was a time when both the mountains in much of the Highlands rose and the Central Lowlands sank, forming a huge valley across the middle of the Scottish mainland.”
The fault is a geological phenomenon, but had important social and political consequences, too. As the Cateran’s Common Wealth team describes: “The hard rocks north of the fault line made it difficult to grow crops, whereas the softer sandstone south of fault line created some of the most fertile soils in Scotland supporting a wide range of agricultural activities. The different way the land was able to be used meant that people structured their society differently too. What is called a feudal system of land ownership was more common south of the faultline where you could grow lots of food. Here, land was granted to people for service. It started at the top with the king granting his land to a baron for soldiers all the way down to a peasant getting land to grow crops. North of the faultline, where it was harder to grow crops, the clan system was more dominant. This more warrior-like social structure helped people to survive in a harsh environment. For a large part of Scotland’s history it also marked a distinct change linguistically from English to Gaelic.”
Sgurr Fiona and Corrag Bhuidhe in the Scottish Highlands. Good luck growing crops here! (Photo by Colin Park)
One additional note from Ashley:
Thomas Sutherland (Associated Press photo)
As we've been making our way through Scotland, one man has often been on my mind: Thomas Sutherland, a Scottish-born professor at Colorado State University, in my hometown.
Born in Falkirk in 1931, Dr. Sutherland was one of my aunt's favorite professors, and he was truly a larger-than-life figure on campus. Each year around Burns Night, he would arrive in class wearing a kilt and other traditional attire, reciting Robert Burns' poems as he entered the room...and enthralling the whole lecture hall. Though agriculture was his specialty, he was passionate about poetry, theatre, history and the arts. He was a true renaissance man.
In 1983, he took a leave of absence from CSU to serve as Dean of Agriculture at the American University of Beirut. On June 9, 1985 he was kidnapped by Islamic Jihad members, who had mistaken him for the university's president. He was held captive in Lebanon for more than six years, much of which was spent in solitary confinement, and during which he endured terrible abuse, including being hit with fists, sticks and rifle butts. Sometimes he was held along with other Western hostages; he spent the most time with the Associated Press’s chief Middle East correspondent Terry Anderson, who had been abducted four months before Sutherland.
Both have credited the other with helping them stay sane in captivity. They passed the time by teaching each other everything they knew. Sutherland taught Anderson French, and shared poems - including those of Robert Burns - that he knew by heart. Anderson taught Sutherland to play chess, using pieces improvised from tin foil.
Sutherland (with daughter Kit at right) arriving in Colorado after his captivity (photo by Jeff Robbins/the Associated Press)
Miraculously, Sutherland survived the ordeal and was released in a United Nations-brokered agreement in 1991. Ten years later, he was awarded more than $35 million as part of a federal lawsuit against Iran's government, because of evidence that Iran had directed terrorists to kidnap Americans in Lebanon. He used the windfall to engage actively as a philanthropist, supporting numerous local arts institutions, public radio and Colorado State University.
Despite all he'd been through, Sutherland chose to be empathetic toward his captors, not bitter. As he said in a 2010 interview: "I think if you become bitter, it ruins your life. And I decided that when I got out of captivity I wasn't going to be angry and bitter. I actually felt sorry for these guards, because you know, none of them had even gone through school except more than second or third grade at the most. And I had been through school, through college, through graduate school, had been a dean and had a good family and the whole business. And I just had all kinds of reasons to be happy and content."
After Sutherland died in 2016 at age 85, another local philanthropist, Pat Stryker, recalled: "I have tremendous respect for Tom. After being robbed of more than six years of his life as a hostage, he still chose to love and value the good in people. He inspired me to look for the positive in people and to not dwell on the bad stuff. His spirit and generosity continue to benefit countless organizations and individuals in our community."
Thankfully, very few of us will ever be held hostage, but I've always found a lesson in his experience: There is immense intrinsic value in learning for learning's sake, following one's curiosity wherever it leads. Memorize the poems you love. Read up on a topic you're curious about, even if it'll never land you a job or help you pass a test. Our minds were made to be used, and to be filled. And even in the worst possible circumstances, the things you learn can still bring you - and possibly others - joy.
Fancy a pint?
Unlike the Naylor brothers, who pledged to “abstain from all intoxicating drink” during their 1871 walk on this route, I’m not at all opposed to popping into interesting-looking pubs along the way. Here are a few along this stretch of the journey… this time, curated by actual Edinburgh resident Kirsten Griew!
In St. Andrews, where better to enjoy a pint than the St. Andrews Brewing Company? The brewery, which opened in 2012, takes as its governing principles: We will source the best possible ingredients as locally as possible for our beers and for our food; We will work with independent companies and partners as much as possible and do so on a fair and respectful basis; We will treat our staff with respect and place as much trust in them as practicable and reward them as much as we can; We will be champions for our local communities in all our endeavours; and our venues will be places that we will be happy to take our kids, our partners and our parents. And most of all we will respect you, our customers.
The bars run by the brewery also boast of their numerous vegan options and the fact that they’re dog friendly too. What’s not to love?!
The Dreel Tavern in Anstruther
In Anstruther, one of the old fishing villages on the North Sea coast, the 18th-century stone walls of the Dreel Tavern house a cozy, welcoming place to enjoy a pint with friends.
In fair weather, the beautiful beer garden overlooking the Dreel Burn (“burn” means “stream”) is a good place to soak up some summer sun. And in the wintertime, the fire adds to the coziness and conviviality.
The Trades House
In the heart of Dundee, the Trades House Bar serves beer, wine and cocktails in a building that was once a bank. Stained-glass windows and carved architectural details add to the atmosphere.
Sustenance for the Hungry Vegan
Koku Shi started as a small family restaurant, which was launched to bring the best of Japanese cuisine to Scotland. Today, it has branches in Dunfermline, Kirkcaldy, Perth and Glasgow.
The restaurant has a huge menu, with its numerous vegan options clearly labeled.
Just a few of the many vegan options at Koku Shi.
A pie from the Bakers Field Cafe in Kirkcaldy. Yum!
The Baker's Field in Kirkcaldy is regularly listed as one of the finest vegetarian cafes in the U.K. In addition to serving meals, it offers lots of vegan cakes, pies, rolls and other baked goods.
Additionally, the cafe partners with nonprofit organizations like The Alzheimers Society, the Kirkcaldy Food Banks, Childrens Hospices Across Scotland, the Fife Cat Shelter, and The Oasis Centre, which helps young people in crisis.
Perth’s 269 Vegan; proprietor Judit Bartok at right with team member Natalie Livingstone when the cafe opened in 2018.
269 Vegan, in Perth, serves plant-based cuisine ethically sourced from local ingredients, supporting as many local businesses as possible. The menu changes with the seasons, and with an eye toward helping people understand that far from being restrictive, a plant-based diet offers as much flavor and adventure as any other way of eating.
Menu options include waffles and a tofu florentine; soups and rice/noodle bowls also look delicious.
Marwick’s Vegan Kitchen… perhaps to reopen one day?
Finally, it’s worth mentioning Marwick's Vegan Kitchen in Dundee. Many businesses around the world have been forced to close due to all the restrictions related to the Covid-19 pandemic, and Marwick’s seems to be a victim of this phenomenon. But in the hope that the proprietors might be able to reopen one day, we’ll mention it here.
Breakfast, lunch, dessert… Marwick’s had a large selection for every meal. Here’s hoping one day it will once again be nourishing locals with plant-forward fare.
Cheers, everyone, and see you on the trail!
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