BOOKPATHS

Edinburgh, Scotland

Visit Ian Rankin’s website for a tour of Rebus’s Edinburgh.

Edinburgh plays an important role throughout the Rebus novels; a character itself, as brooding and as volatile as Rebus.  The Edinburgh depicted in the novels is far short of the beautiful city which tourists in their thousands flood to visit.  Hidden behind the historic buildings and elegant facades is the world that Rebus inhabits. – from Ian Rankin Website

Scotland

Brian Pedley follows “the trail of Robert Burns in Scotland.”

The man who collected 'Auld Lang Syne' and who wrote 'A Red, Red Rose', 'Ae Fond Kiss' and Ode to a Mouse' may well belong to the world. But the only true ‘Burns country’ is the Scottish Borders and Lowlands. – from “On the Trail of Robert Burns in Scotland,” by Brian Pedley, The Times

The Writers' Museum, Lady Stair’s Close, Royal Mile, Edinburgh, Scotland

Built in 1622, Lady Stair’s House now serves as The Writers’ Museum, “dedicated to the lives and work of Scotland’s great literary figures, in particular Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Robert Burns.”  Letters, manuscripts, portraits, and personal items are on display.  The museum is open year round, Monday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., and on Sundays, 12:00 noon-5:00 p.m., during August’s Edinburgh Festival.  For additional information, visit the City of Edinburgh Museums and Galleries website.

Isle of Jura, Scotland

Poet John Burnside describes his “writer’s retreat” on the Isle of Jura.

“I am on the Isle of Jura. I came here to write poems and stories, beneficiary of one of those invaluable retreats that contemporary writers, like the monks and mystics of old, can hardly do without. The process is called “buying time” - a happy notion, and an appealing reversal of that old saw: time is money. For most writers - well, for me, at least - money is neither here nor there, once the bills are paid and the family are clothed and fed, but time is everything. Time is thought and image and a space where the rhythm of style can happen. On Jura, where the people work carefully and surely at whatever they do, allowing it to happen properly, I have a month to walk around and sit up late, to feel my way into the handful of notions with which I came and, when the rhythm and the feel and the sound are all right, to set them down as well as I can.” – from “John Burnside on a Writer’s Retreat,” The Times

Little Sparta, Pentland Hills, Scotland

Poet, short story writer, and publisher, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s “greatest work of art” can be found at Little Sparta, his five-acre garden in Scotland’s Pentland Hills.  Here, he combined “poetic and sculptural elements with those of the natural landscape.”  Finlay began work on the garden in 1966, developing it “corner by corner, poem by poem, vista by vista,” until his death in 2006.  Visitors are invited to walk the garden paths on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday afternoons, 2:30-5 p.m., from mid-June to late September.   Turn to the The Little Sparta Trust website for additional information.

Related Website

Ian Hamilton Finlay/Wild Hawthorn Press Website

Scotland

James Buchan, “grandson of The Thirty-nine Steps author John Buchon,” writes about Scotland’s “thrall” with evil spirits."

“For my grandfather John Buchan, the supernatural was his link to the Upper Tweed shepherds among whom he spent his childhood summers. My own novel takes up a favourite theme of Buchan, Stevenson and Scott: the survival in a particular location, amid the debris of modern life, of some antique power capable of influencing the mind and the conduct.” – from “Ghost Stories That Still Haunt Us,” by James Buchan, The Times

Smailholm Tower, Scottish Borders, Scotland

Inspiration to Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), 15th-century, starkly beautiful, Smailholm Tower is open to the public.  For information, visit their website.

“Smailholm’s story takes us from the 15th century to just beyond the Union between Scotland and England in 1707. The lonely tower is associated with two notable Border families – first the Pringles (Hoppringles) up to 1645; thereafter the Scotts of Harden, ancestors of Sir Walter Scott.” – from Smailholm Tower Website

Glasgow, Scotland

Denise Mina talks about Glasgow’s Easterhouse, "one of the roughest ghettos in Europe," as the setting for her novel, The Dead Hour.

"This is Mina's turf. Her vivid, fast-paced crime novels are peopled by its small-time criminals, its battered women and the shifty journalists who toil at its failing papers. They're characters that Mina — a former criminologist and long-time Glasgow resident — knows well." – from “Probing the Psyche of Glasgow’s Mean Streets,” by Vicki Barker, NPR’s Morning Edition

Scotland

Findings: Essays on the Natural and Unnatural World, by Kathleen Jamie (Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2007)

Set in her native Scotland, Kathleen Jamie’s essays range wide, touching on subjects as various as her husband’s illness, sheep-herding, and returning salmon; and places as near as her kitchen window, to Edinburgh’s skylines, to remote islands. Jamie moves between past and present, wondering about “worlds past,” while also paying attention to the present moment, noticing the “details” in the life and landscape of Scotland.

Fish, following a smell, slipping past the sleeping seals, up past our town, past the house where I’d watched the martins last September, invisibly passing the windows where, even now, the two new mothers might be standing with their newborns in their arms. There were no martins; they were yet to arrive. A heron cronked overhead. Maybe those salmon making for the Braan could even small in the river here a hint of plastic – the tanks they had been born into, two or three years before. Ach! Good for them, I thought, as I stood to go.

Water was slipping in, muddy tonnages of water. The seals ignored it but the geese were becoming restless, and in parties of six or ten they began to take off, strung out like lines of washing, till they cleared the reed-beds and gained enough height to turn off into the fields. I could hear them making their housewifely wa-wa-wa. Soon they’d be away, too, to their own breeding grounds far in the north. – from “The Braan Salmon,” in Findings: Essays on the Natural and Unnatural World, by Kathleen Jamie

Scotland

Andrew O’Hagan “ponders why we still raise a dram” to Robert Burns.

“There are now two classes of people who recognise the name Robert Burns: those who think he has lovely things to say about daisies, and those who seek to bring out the troubled wisdom of his work, to rescue it, and let it do its damage in these damaged times. These two groups are often at odds over Burns, but they share a powerful set of sentiments about this ghost of a national poet, in that ghost of a nation.” – from “The Lingering Ghost of Robert Burns,” by Andrew O’Hagan, The Times