By Arthur’s Seat, Or, Craggenmarf

I

By Arthur’s Seat

Something about summer changes the remit of a gaze. In winter when we step outdoors we are huddled inwards, eyes squinting against the wind, looking only to the next place of shelter. When we seek the big winter skies of Portobello, Queensferry or the Pentlands it is self-conscious, our time there carefully bounded, encountered under hood and scarf; afterwards it is home for tea and cake, and we know it will be a warm home, or at least, beneath roof, stone, brick. But in summer, as we fly down cycle paths, ride the tram to Summer Sessions, or lie dreaming on the Meadows, our eyes are drawn up and out: the looming hills, the spires of churches, and seagulls wheeling high. It is a lugubrious act, in summer, to allow one’s vision to drift like a kite beyond what we can touch.

I thought of these orientations of gaze when I spoke, this week, with artist Brigid Collins and poet Christine De Luca at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. I’ve written before of Brigid’s and Christine’s work, meditating on and in Dr Neil’s Garden – known as ‘Edinburgh’s Secret Garden’ – in Duddingston since 2021, when Brigid was Artist in Residence. Her artwork from that time is tangly, mutual: silver birch and flowering elm in layers of interlocking pastel, or rose-branch shadows skirting gingko in watercolour. Her vista is inward, in this hidden place, sheltered by three walls, nestling by Duddingston Kirk at the foot of Arthur’s Seat. But this week, Brigid drew our attention to the work she’d painted in ink over a year later: it is, she said, the first time she had portrayed the view from Dr Neil’s Garden, rather than the view inside it.

It is a view in winter, reeds and grasses delicately sharp in ink, bare birch. We are very much inside the garden, but we are also looking out, and this is what we see: loch lost to the mist, trees on the other side, faint whispers of hills. Brigid spoke of how her shift from pastel to inkwork was inspired by a trip to Japan, weeks drawing in Zen gardens with particular aesthetic histories. When I think of my own travels in Japan I think of both lofty mountains and the intricacies of gravel, quiet meditation in bamboo-shrouded temples, and the expanse of Tokyo from the bullet train; times of looking in, and times of looking out. In Brigid’s pastels beside her inky Dr Neil’s Garden, I see a gaze that goes deeply into a particular place in a time of lockdown and loss, and then emerges from that place, forever steeped in it, and open to what lies beyond.

Sometimes we call these shifts in space, time, and perspective healing, or growing, or learning. I am inclined to call them living, for to heal and grow and learn is at the heart of all living things. To follow your curiosity in the depth of loss, to love deeply in the midst of sorrow, is to lift your gaze; to remember that beyond this pain there is a garden, and beyond that, the loch and the hills.

II

Craggenmarf

What do we see, when we look up? In Edinburgh I set my compass by the craggy mass of Arthur’s Seat. There’s not a day that goes by, when I swoop down on my bike from campus into Queen’s Drive, that I don’t marvel at the expanse of rock that ascends like a giant’s wall before me. It seems awesome in the true sense of the word that it is right here, that I can see it from Bristo Square, Portobello, Canongate, Longniddry. I glance up from the bus or across from the top floor of Dugald Stewart, in any kind of mood or mind, and there it sits in geological immensity. It is the fairy godmother of landmarks, the Camelot of the north, or, for the girls at Ingliston with flowers in their hair, the moment when Florence Welch touches your hand.

In twelfth century charters found at Holyrood Abbey and Duddingston, Craggenmarf was the name given to this place. Believed to come from the Gaelic Crag nan Marbh, it means dead man’s crag, but trace the etymology back far enough and you hit upon the proto-Indo-European root kar, meaning stone or hard. You can’t get more earthbound than that, and yet Arthur’s Seat (so dubbed only in the sixteenth century, recent enough to shake a rosebay willowherb at) rises to the heavens as if it were the way of the dead themselves, the path whereby they might ascend.

What actually is a landmark, I wonder, and upon browsing I must laugh, delighted: for it’s the Old English mearc, meaning boundary limit, paired with a word for land, ground. For millenia Craggenmarf has marked the land between east and west Lothians, heralding the south of the Forth. But I think it is another kind of landmark, too: one between ground and sky, the quotidian and deep time, the living and the dead. In certain light, or in particular music, we earth-dwellers catch a glimpse of the place beyond.

Warm wishes,

Kitty