Scotland! (a literary tour)

"Twas there that we parted in yon shady glen/on the steep, steep sides of Ben Lomond" --"Loch Lomond"

“I of course took the opportunity to interpose wi’ pig-headed Wallace pride, ‘I am not English, you ignorant Jerry b******, I am a SCOT.'” --Code Name Verity

Hello, dear peoples! When this post publishes, I'll actually have been to Ireland (and of course, there'll be a post about that, too) and be back in Sheffield, but I wanted to do a quick post about my time in Scotland before I cover all of that! It was very bookish (as well as very musical), so I thought I'd theme my post around the books each place I went made me think of, or which authors lived in certain places. :) 

The Enigma Game by Elizabeth Wein
I read The Enigma Game while in Scotland, and I did not regret it one whit. In fact, it was one of my favourite things about the trip. It's mostly set in Aberdeen, which is quite a bit north of where I ended up going (and honestly, reading it, I wish I'd gone further north, but you can't have everything). In any case, though, it really helped me get into the mood of 'Scottishness', which I can't say I got a perfect handle on (it's my opinion that one can't really understand a country without seeing large parts of it outside its main cities, but that might just be the landscape architect speaking, lol) but which I did enjoy. Scotland, though it's just north of England, somehow manages to feel slightly like the end of the world--remote, mountainous, cold, mysterious. It helps, too, that (at least for most of its history) it was a fiercely territorial country, with its Highland clans resisting English incursion for hundreds of years. It feels like the memory of that fierce independence still lingers, even though the Highlands are mostly deserted now. But it's also, in some ways a melancholy country--after all, despite its fierce resistance, it was conquered and subjugated, like many of the places England got its grubby little paws on. (To be clear: I love England. But it did have a way of breaking peoples' spirits when it invaded their countries, which it did on a regular basis.) It's just...a very interesting, lonely, beautiful, standoffish, proud, sad place. Slightly less so in its cities, but even there. 

By These Ten Bones by Clare B. Dunkle
My first two days in Scotland were spent in Glasgow, not because I particularly wanted to see Glasgow, but because I wanted to see Loch Lomond, which is about an hour from Glasgow by train (reasonable daytrip distance). What I ended up doing, instead of going to the tourist-ridden bottom point of the lake, was taking the train up to Arrochar & Tarbet, a pair of tiny villages which lie on a tiny isthmus between Loch Lomond (a freshwater loch) and Loch Long (a saltwater loch, connected to the Firth of Clyde). There's a trail between the two towns that's a few kilometres long--very doable as a daytrip to see both lakes and both towns. I first went to Loch Lomond, which was ravishingly beautiful. The hills around it looked like they were coated in velvet, with a fringe of oak forest around their bottom edges, and Ben Lomond (which I learned means Lantern Mountain) looms up above the lake, a high, spiky peak. The water itself is dark, almost black, because the lake is almost 600 meters deep, apparently. The water is clear, but the bottom is so far away it looks black. I got to go on a brief cruise around the lake, and really enjoyed being out on the water again--it's been a while since I've been on a boat, which for this PNW girl is unusual. 
When I started to feel peckish, I headed in the Loch Long direction--there's a pub on the shores of it. The trail took me up the side of a crag called Cruach something-or-other (which made me think of The Secret of Kells) and through a little forest, full of bluebells and rhododendrons, before allowing me a view down Loch Long (which lives up to its name). It's a very long, narrow lake with high hills and crags on each side, some forested, and some covered in moor. The path let me out right on the main street, next to the tiny (and locked) Catholic Church, and very near the pub, which I got to right before it started raining. 
I had just reread By These Ten Bones, and being in the wild highlands reminded me of the legends that informed it. :) (For those of you who haven't heard of it: it's a Middle Grade story set in the Highlands about a werewolf and has one of the most accurate depictions of a Catholic priest I have ever seen from a non-Catholic.) 

Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling
I had no idea, when I went to Edinburgh, that J. K. Rowling lived in Edinburgh for, I believe, the entire time she was writing the Harry Potter books? It's funny that a series that's so intrinsically connected with England in most people's minds was actually written in Scotland. Just goes to show...? 
Through the middle of the Old Town of Edinburgh runs this huge ridge that leads up to Edinburgh Castle, far above the rest of the town, and off of that ridge are a whole bunch of cute streets and 'closes' (passageways that lead to internal squares and other streets), and one of the streets is Victoria Street, which claims to be the inspiration for Diagon Alley. (Fight York for that, Edinburgh, I guess?) It certainly has enough brightly coloured shops for it. And on Victoria Street is the current branch of the shop that J. K. Rowling originally wrote a lot of HP1 in, aka The Elephant House Cafe. (The branch where she actually wrote it was damaged by fire and still hasn't reopened.) It has a delightful vibe, although it is, as you might expect, massively overpriced. 

Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
My plan all along had been to go to St. Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh for Sunday Mass, and imagine my delight when I came out of Mass and found a) a life-sized statue of Sherlock Holmes, indicating where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had been born, and b) a pub called the Conan Doyle. While Sherlock isn't my favourite fictional detective (that prize goes, without a doubt, to Lord Peter), I have enjoyed some Sherlock stories, and couldn't pass up the opportunity to go to The Conan Doyle. Which ended up being fortuitous, because they had haggis on the menu, and I couldn't pass that up either.
Let me tell you, y'all, haggis is delicious, and don't let anyone tell you different. It's basically a mix of organ meat and Scottish oats (which remind me of my childhood) and it just tastes rather meaty, with an interesting texture. I had it served with turnips, potatoes, and gravy, and would 10/10 recommend. 
(Honestly, I don't get what people's big deal with haggis is? Like, people eat organ meat all the time, and while, yes, in the US we don't tend to eat lung, it's just another organ. And sheep's stomach (which it's cooked in) is basically like sausage casing (which is usually made of sheep intestine. You're welcome for that little tidbit of knowledge).)

Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Burns, & Sir Walter Scott 
I went to both Glasgow and Edinburgh, but of the two, Edinburgh was definitely my favourite. (What can I say? I love a good Old Town. Castles are a plus.) And while walking the Royal Mile between the working royal palace and the medieval castle, I popped into the Writer's Museum, which was for sure one of the highlights of the trip. (Although the National Museum was also Very Cool and had lots of Scottish history stuff that I eminently enjoyed. Art museum was also fabulous.) The Writer's Museum is in this old four- or five-story house, and highlights the life & stories of RLS, Robert Burns, and Sir Walter Scott. (There's also a massive limestone monument to Sir Walter Scott, because apparently Edinburgh Has No Chill, but what would you expect from a city that's built on a dead volcano?) And while it wasn't like they have a ton of mind-blowing things about any of those three authors, it was a) a really sweet tribute to them to have a museum dedicated to them (and it made me want to read more of their work), b) full of simple things that belonged to/were used by them (including the desks that they used!), c) located in such a cool building that even if the exhibits had been incredibly boring (which they weren't), it would still have been worth visiting. Two words. Spiral. Staircase. 

So yeah! Hopefully there was something coherent and interesting in there, lol. Scotland was super fun, and I wish I could've stayed longer! (And spent more time in remote places. Maybe another time.)