Elvandale, Dunhead, Midlothian, Scotland

By the time we set off this morning toward the Park and Ride, the rain had abated although I did spend the greater part of the day in my rain jacket, even if only to shield me from the cold breeze. Still, I was glad the weather did not spoil the day, nor should it tomorrow as we spend our last official day in Edinburgh.

Alighting from the No 47 bus in the Old Town, we crossed to the New, and found our way further north to the grand National Portrait Gallery situated on Queens Street on the lower side of St Andrew Square. The Gallery is housed in a specially constructed red stone Gothic Revivalist building designed by Sir Robert Roward Anderson, contrasting to New Town’s surrounding buildings built in the neoclassic style. The exterior of the building is impressive as you would expect, but more impressive is the stunning two storey hall exhibiting William Hole’s tapestry-like frieze and mural.

We stood admiring this for some time before heading to the information desk and the facilities, then were distracted by a wonderful exhibition on the ground floor, titled “The Slave’s Lament”, an “artwork” created by Graham Fagan, a composite of a poem by Robert Burns, music composed by Sally Beamish and performed by the Scottish Ensemble with vocals by reggae singer Ghetto Priest; it is quite haunting and it was some time before I could drag myself away to view the art we had actually come for; the gallery’s collection of portraiture spread over the two top floors of the building.  

Both Chris and I agreed that the gallery was absolutely superb, brilliantly curated and better spent exploring over an entire day, or better still, a series of shorter days if one lived in the area. The history and biographical information about both the subjects and the artist were excellent, but I did feel that I rushed about the gallery, not really giving it my best attention.

Part way through our visit, we escaped back to St Andrew Square and sat upon a concrete wall eating our lunch, watching the tourists and locals make their way about. The buildings here are quite fine, and in the centre of the park is a tall fluted column, a monument to Lord Melville, Pitt the Younger’s Navy Treasurer. 

On the completion of our visit to the gallery, we walked back across to the Old Town and down the Royal Mile, pausing to check out The People’s Story Museum situated in what was once the Canongate Tolbooth, marked out from the rest of the quaint old buildings by its turreted steeple and odd external box clock. The property has previously served as the headquarters of the burgh’s administration and as a prison. Today it is a warren of rooms containing large display cases of static tableaux and excellent explanatory boards showing various facets of Edinburgh’s life and times of the last few centuries. The industry and social history of the city is well explained, and deserves longer than the half hour we were able to spare. But in that short time I did learn much including a rather startling statistic relating to historical unemployment levels in the city. In 1988 the average unemployment in Edinburgh was 12.6%, although in some areas of the city, it was as high as 25%, facts I found quite horrifying.

We had that 2.30 pm appointment down in the Parliament to meet so set off once more to the base of the Royal Mile. Here we joined eighteen others and were led about the new parliament by an excellent guide who was both knowledgeable and charming; I had initially been disappointed that it was not the guide who had given the introductory talk yesterday.

Scotland’s Parliament is the youngest in the world, having been only formed by British edict in 1999, although the earlier Scottish parliament operated from 1235 through to 1707 when it was merged with the English one. The new parliament is made up of 129 elected representatives, who are totally separate from those members of the Westminster Parliament who stand for Scottish electorates. It might be likened to the State governments of Australia although is not bicameral as most of those state parliaments are. 

The Scottish Parliament has power to make laws on a range of issues that are known as “devolved matters”, the “reserved matters” remaining the responsibility of the UK Parliament alone. The devolved matters include housing, health and social services, agriculture, forestry and fisheries, education and training, law and order, local government, sport and the arts and many aspects of transport. It seems a rather odd arrangement, especially given the ardent desire by many in the country to be given independence, however I am sure there would be aspects of our New Zealand parliament and electoral system that the Scots would find quite baffling; each to their own.

We also learned much about the architectural evolution, how the design was selected in a competition in the same way the Canberra Parliament was, the winner a Catalan architect Enric Miralles who did not live to see the end of the project, leaving some of the detail to be guessed at. There was a major blowout of the building budget and it is no wonder because so many of the features could have been done so much more economically, but then the spirit of the design may have been lost.

By the time we emerged, made our way back up into the Old Town and along the street to catch the bus, the hour was later than we normally like. But it had been another excellent day and the weather had stayed fine.