North Berwick: Tantallon Castle

Two weeks ago, Nana and I headed to North Berwick with the ISC. After a morning hike along the beach to Dirleton Castle (previous post), we caught a bus out to Tantallon Castle, at the mouth of the Firth of Forth, just opposite Bass Rock.

Tantallon Castle was home to a branch of the Douglas family called the "Red Douglases." Built in the 14th century, it is a pretty typical coastal castle, consisting of a large curtain wall (seen from the lip of the outer ditch to the south, below) across the inland side of a coastal promontory.

You can also see the castle's dovecote in the photo above, and Bass Rock in the background. (A dovecote is a pigeon coop. Pigeons were considered good eatin' back in the day.)

To get an idea of the layout of the castle, here's a rough plan, courtesy of Wikipedia (click to enlarge):

Tantallon is also typical of coastal castles in that it is situated to protect a natural harbor or haven--see also Lindisfarne Castle (previous post). The view below shows the small haven Tantallon was built to protect.

The castle isn't just remarkable for its location: Tantallon, like Dirleton, is also very well preserved. Most of the curtain wall and gatehouse are structurally sound, and views from the top of the wall like those below are well worth the six-story climb . . . though you'll notice that, by this point in the afternoon, the rain was starting to interfere with the photos!

This next shot of the gatehouse, taken from the top looking down, clearly shows where wooden floors would have separated the tower into six stories; note how the fireplaces are aligned to make use of the same chimney.

By the way--did you notice that Tantallon, like just about every other building on the eastern side of Scotland, is made of Old Red Sandstone?

A couple other oddities from our visit to Tantallon:

First, for reasons known only to him/herself and God, a biplane stunt pilot chose this rainy, blustery day to practice stalls over the castle. I couldn't get a shot of the plane against the clouds, but I could get a shot of Nana staring up into the sky, wondering what the heck that pilot was thinking.

 

Second, Bass Rock (shown below) deserves a bit of explanation--even though we weren't able to visit, as the island isn't open to tourists during the off-season.

Bass Rock, like Arthur's Seat and the Castle Rock in Edinburgh, as well as nearby North Berwick Law, is a remnant of an old volcano. Also, like Fidra, which I mentioned in our Dirleton post, Bass Rock has a Robert Louis Stevenson connection: it was here David Balfour was brought after being kidnapped for the second time.

Bass Rock is most famous today as a bird sanctuary, and bird watchers from all over Europe come to take a gander at its gannets (har har), as well as puffins, Eider ducks, cormorants, and various gulls.

Happy St. Andrew's Day! And, Flags!

Today is St. Andrew's Day, the national holiday of Scotland. St. Andrew's Day is celebrated on the Catholic feast day of St. Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland (and Greece, Romania, Russia, and Constantinople).

St. Andrew's Day in its current form is relatively new, dating back to 2007, when the Scottish Parliament declared St. Andrew's Day a non-mandatory bank holiday. The three-day weekend has quickly bloomed into the commercial kickoff of the Christmas season.

Of course Edinburgh wasn't about to let an opportunity for another festival pass. So now, all the Christmas hoopla launches with fireworks the Thursday before St. Andrew's Day weekend and keeps rolling right through Hogmanay, the Scottish New Year's festival. The festivities include a carnival with rides, a German Christmas market, a Highland Christmas market, and various concerts, mostly centered on Prince's Street Gardens.

St. Andrew's Day weekend has an added bonus: all Historical Scotland attractions are open to the public free of charge.

However, St. Andrew's Day is not without its controversy: the resolution that established St. Andrew's Day as a bank holiday also required that all public buildings fly the Saltire, aka the Cross of St. Andrew, aka the Scottish national flag.Buildings with more than one flagpole are required to fly the Union Jack as well.
Hey--did you notice? The Union Jack is a combination of St. Andrew's Cross (Scotland), St. George's Cross (England), and St. Patrick's Cross (Ireland). Here's a diagram from Wikipedia.
Clockwise from top-left: St. Andrew's Cross (Scotland), St. George's Cross (England), St. Patrick's Cross (Ireland), Flag of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and (Northern) Ireland (after 1801), English-version Flag of Great Britain (1707-1801), unofficial Scottish version of the Flag of Great Britatin (1707-1801).

(On a side note--what about Wales?)

Anyway, the St. Andrew's Day flag controversy comes from the fact that all government and military buildings in Scotland are required by law to fly the Union Jack at all times, and only fly the Saltire if they have a second flagpole. This includes Edinburgh Castle (which is both a royal residence and a regimental headquarters), seen as a quintessential symbol of Scottishness, but cursed with only one flagpole.

The tin-foil hat says that's by design, so that the Union Jack flies from the highest point in Edinburgh throughout the year--and also from Holyrood Palace, overlooking the Scottish Parliament. Some have tried to take matters into their own hands by raising the Saltire at the Castle--none have succeeded. Instead, the Scots have had to content themselves with celebrating St. Andrew's Day as they celebrate their other national holiday: with haggis, neeps, tatties, and ceilidh dancing.

We're going to a ceilidh tonight, in fact. Stay tuned for pictures!

North Berwick: Dirleton Castle

Last Saturday, Nana and I took a day trip to North Berwick, a small seaside town at the eastern edge of the Firth of Forth. North Berwick is most famous for its seabirds, which like to congregate on nearby crags such as Bass Rock, and for two nearby castles, Dirleton and Tantallon.

After arriving in North Berwick and getting the scoop from the tourist information center (British tourist information centers--or "centres"--seem to be uniformly fantastic), we spent the morning walking along the beach to Dirleton.

The walk was very pretty, but turned out to be a bit more than we bargained for in more ways than one.

First, the weather turned wet on us--though not as wet as it would turn later in the day! Then, we were nearly thwarted by a swollen stream running over the beach into the water.

 

 

Seriously, this little stream fanned out into a delta about the size of a football field, and it took us a good 10 minutes to hop our way across all the little streams . . .


. . . before reaching the other side and seeing that there was a bridge up in the dunes, about thirty yards upstream. Oh, well!

After a little more than an hour, we reached Fidra, a small island made famous by Robert Louis Stevenson, about whom I happen to be writing a paper this term.

Fidra is famous on two counts: first, the imaginary map which Stevenson drew as his starting point for Treasure Island was based on the outline of Fidra; second, in Stevenson's novel Catriona, this spot is where the fugitive Jacobite Alan Breck escapes from Scotland and where, minutes later, David Balfour is kidnapped (again). Stevenson had good reason to be familiar with the island: he frequently visited the nearby beach at Yellowcraigs, which is where we had to ford that raging river, and his father Thomas designed and built the lighthouse there.

(Yes, the Stevenson family business was lighthouse engineering, and many of the islands that feature in Stevenson's fiction have some connection to his father's or his grandfather's lighthouses.)

Anyway, the beach trail to Dirleton turns inland at Fidra, where it meets up with the John Muir Way--yes, that John Muir, the Scottish-American naturalist and early environmentalist. (Muir was born in nearby Dunbar.) The John Muir Way is not to be confused with the slightly-more-spectacular John Muir Trail in the US.

(Note: NOT Scotland.)

The John Muir Way also passes some highly creepy trees.

Dirleton itself is little more than a few dozen houses clustered around the castle, which sits on a crag in the center of a manicured park.

Dirleton Castle is the main draw, and it's definitely worth the visit. Three different architectural eras are represented in its various renovations and additions--which date from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries--and enough of the castle is still structurally sound that you get a much better sense of the place when it was in use, and there are a lot of different rooms and passages to explore.

Pictured below, for example, is the upper-class prison. Lower-class prisoners were (no joke) simply thrown down a hole in the floor at left.

This next shot shows the distinctly Anglo-Norman shape of the castle's facade--those enormous round turrets are the giveaway.

Here I am on top the same turrets shown above.

On a side note: the 14th-century occupants were the Haliburtons, presumably a branch of those Halliburtons. That's the thing--you start digging too deep into anything in the US or Canada, and you're bound to find a bunch of Scots.

Next up: Tantallon Castle and Bass Rock!

Robert Smail's Printing Works, Innerleithen

Wow, two posts in 24 hours! Don't get too used to it: we've got a bit of a backlog, so we're trying to catch up.

Anyway, last Wednesday Nana and I took a field trip with my book history program to Robert Smail's Printing Works, in Innerleithen, in the Borders.

Robert Smail's, a National Trust for Scotland property, is a working 19th-century print shop and stationery store that doubles as an industrial heritage museum. The property owns and operates an iron hand press and a variety of later-19th-century powered presses. They still do jobbing work--posters, tickets, brochures, etc--but most of their revenue these days comes from visitors like us.

Now, as a book history dork, I could go on for hours about all the details of how work got done in this kind of shop, but I'll spare you. (Though I'd be happy to elaborate if asked.)

The basic process is this:

1. Arrange all the bits of type you want to show up on the page in a big rack called a forme--this is called "compositing."
   
2. Stick the forme (or a copy of the forme called a stereotype) in the press.
3. Insert paper; ink the stuff on the form; impress; lather, rinse, repeat as needed.
4. Fold, cut, bind the finished product; clean and maintain the machine; put the type back where it belongs.
   
5. Profit.

At Smail's, you can watch just about every step of the process except the fourth (you get to watch step five in the gift shop!). But you actually get to do step one in the compositor's room, where visitors compose their names (upside-down and backwards) and have them printed on a little keepsake bookmark.

 

The highlight of the tour: I got to use a special "ff" for my name!

That little thing I'm holding is called a "compositor's stick," or just plan "stick." You put the type line-by-line into the stick first before putting it into the forme.

The second highlight, though, was the machine room, where the heavy-duty stuff is kept. The machines still in use included a wacky pedal-powered clamshell press, an enormous old cylindrical poster-printer, and a blisteringly fast German windmill auto-feeder. None of which terms made any sense to me until I saw them in action! Alas, I forgot my memory card, so I only have this picture to share, which shows the pedal-powered clamshell in the lower-left and one of the older auto-feeders in the upper-left.

The machine room also included a paper guillotine that can easily cut through a stack of paper as thick as your arm in one swipe. Yikes.

In any case, the day was full of fun facts. It turns out that several English idioms come from printer's jargon: out of sorts, for example, means that one or more of the boxes (aka, "sorts") in your typecase is empty. Upper case and lower case, of course, come from the fact that capital letters were kept in the top half of the typecase, and when you're taking type off the form and sorting it back into the case, it's important to mind your p's and q's, as those letters are almost identical in most fonts.

On the whole, the trip made for a very fun day, and I'd definitely recommend a trip to a print shop if there's one near you. It's fascinating how easy it is to ignore how what we read is put together!

Lindisfarne Causeway

This is the last in a series of short posts about our trip to Lindisfarne, just across the border in England. You can find the other posts here and here.

For almost half of every day, the road above is under water.

That's because Lindisfarne is a tidal island, meaning that when the tide is low, the island is actually connected to the mainland. The causeway floods twice a day, so visitors and residents need to plan around the tide tables so as not to get stuck on the wrong side overnight--or, worse, on the causeway itself with the tide coming in.

So the tide is a pretty big deal on Lindisfarne. The tide tables are posted all over the island beneath signs like the ones below.

 

 

When motorists are stranded on the causeway with the tide coming in, they have to ditch their cars and swim/wade to one of the refuge boxes along the road, which are basically just sheds on top of big poles. There they wait for a helicopter to airlift them out.

Many of the local shops also had bulletin boards covered with newspaper clippings about recent rescues, usually described in a tone of mild disgust ("Look at these silly tourists driving up our council taxes"). In recent years, the local authorities have begun billing folks who are careless enough to get themselves stranded.

Though sometimes, apparently, it's not carelessness, as there is a certain set that likes racing the tide for fun.

It's also possible to walk across the tidal flats on the Pilgrim's Way, a marked path from the mainland to the Priory.

In any case, driving back at dusk just after the tide had retreated was a nice treat.