Best of Scotland by Robert Ritchie

Published on Tuesday 18 November 2008 18:35

GO ON, enlighten yourself

SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT: It's impossible to overstate the impact of this efflorescence of creativity – speculative, scientific, artistic – in our small nation. David Hume ( the greatest Scot?) is widely considered the best philosopher to have written in English. The sceptical ideas he developed – that most things we take for granted are things we do not in fact know – are still being argued about. In the developing field of consciousness studies, bundle theorists believe we have no continuing self or ego, only, as Hume put it, "a bundle of sensations". Adam Smith, through the continuing influence of his free-market economics – though distorted – surely deserves more credit than the Iron Lady for the lifting of the Iron Curtain. Then there's James Boswell, the greatest biographer; James Hutton, father of modern geology; Henry Raeburn and Robert Adam, the finest portraitist and architect in Europe of their time.

ABERDEEN: I spent holidays in Aberdeen when the beach was sardined with deck chairs, and the fishing industry occupied half the port and sprawled around the Dee. Returning after many years, the summer visitors had been packaged off, trawlers scarce and "offshore" engraved prodigiously on business nameplates. Within Aberdeen there's the most feature-full coastal walk you'll find anywhere and the glittering granite of buildings, from the architecturally grand to the domestically modest. The Maritime Museum, Art Gallery, and Duthie Park Winter Gardens are outstanding. There's the floral carpets and Donside walk at Seaton Park. And roses, roses all around.

LITERARY CONNECTIONS: Writers and places: knowing the connections can enhance the experience both of reading the literature and visiting the place. There's Dracula's Transylvanian castle inspired by Slains Castle at Cruden Bay, where Bram Stoker holidayed. Edgar Allen Poe copied kirkyard epitaphs while attending school in Irvine, aged six. Jane Austen, aged 14, in a novel of letters, sent her characters to Scotland, including Stirling, in search of picturesque scenery. But back to Bram: Stoker also wrote a tragic tale of love and smuggling, The Watter's Mou, and an adventure novel of ancient codes, strange prophecies and lost treasures, The Mystery of the Sea, both set in Cruden Bay and other real locations around the north-east coast (free downloads at www.scribd.com). On a more contemporary note there's the Edinburghs, as refracted through the minds of Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith.

COASTAL WALKING: It's the eternal rhythm of the tides, invigorating air, wide spaces, boats, the flora and fauna, harbours, rock-pools, cliffs and clefts, castle ruins, cities by the sea, dune miles, deserted sands. Up the east coast of Scotland, from Berwick to Buckie, much of the coastline is walkable along accessible paths, beaches and roads. There's the Berwickshire Coastal Path from Berwick to St Abbs; and all the way from Dunbar to beyond Dundee including the John Muir Way, Edinburgh's Coastline and the Fife Coastal Path. You can walk from Aberdeen to Peterhead (how Stoker discovered Cruden Bay), and from Portsoy to Buckie. North of Arbroath there's sandstone cliffs, stacks and arches and on to the pebble-heaven of Auchmithie, birthplace of the smokie. The East Neuk of Fife has its picture postcard villages; old fishertouns are strung along the Moray coast. The West coast is great too but not so good for paths.

PUBLIC ART: Statues abound to the bygone great and good, to forgotten once-worthies. But now more relevant, less elitist and stuffy artwork proliferates. It inspires delight, amusement, thought and sometimes it baffles and infuriates. Who could fail to be pleased by Edinburgh's scrap-metal giraffes; or the M8 menagerie – Hamish the giant red stag, the flock of red sheep, and Heavy Horse? In Peterhead, Fisher Jessie shouldering her wicker creel of fish marks the town's association with the sea. At Buckie it's a triangular stack of ten herring barrels. In Perth there's Nae Day Sae Dark by David Annand.

WILDLIFE: For most people, encountering their first puffin is a revelation: they're surprisingly small, but just as appealing as you've imagined. A huge population can be seen during breeding season on the Isle of May, off Anstruther. Scotland's seabird spectacular must be the gannet colony on the Bass Rock. A trip from North Berwick on the Sula II is an unrivalled wildlife experience, and if you read Bryan Nelson's book on these birds, even more so. You can watch dolphins tumbling in Greyhope Bay, Aberdeen; seal cubs scuttling to the sea on the approach around Rattray Head.

TRAVELS: There's a host of 18th/19th-century travellers whose descriptions and reactions provide an invaluable store of information about Scotland's past. There's comic tours, verse tours, imaginary tours, children's tours. There's high-flown prose and responses to landscapes that, reading them, might enhance and heighten our own. Many tours, long out of print but well worth reading, are now available as free downloads: Google Books is the best site. Daniel Defoe's tour is the classic. There's American writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, journalist N P Willis, Nathaniel Hawthorne (one of the best) and Jacob Abbott. Who? He was a prolific author of children's educational literature who sends his series character here in Rollo in Scotland.

PAINTING: A small, select gallery, this one. Horatio McCulloch's romantic (and why not?) Highland landscapes – Glencoe, Loch Katrine. Gavin Hamilton's full-length of Elizabeth Gunning, Duchess of Hamilton, 18th-century teenage actress and celebrity beauty. Allan Ramsay, female portraitist par excellence, and his iconic pastelly, shimmering image of Margaret Lindsay, the Artist's Wife; and my favourite painted lady, Miss Janet Shairp. Then there are the seascapers: Joan Eardley – what a revelation seeing all those Catterline views brought together last year in Edinburgh; William McTaggart, infatuated by the sea in all its moods and aspects and John Bellany who has, through his career, drawn on the fishing harbours and communities he knew while growing up in Port Seton and Eyemouth, sombre in his early work, brighter in recent times.

FISHING: I woke up to the fishing industry about ten years ago on my first visit to Fraserburgh. The harbour had a fleet of pelagic trawlers – big, older models and some of the smaller number of bigger (up to 70 metres) boats replacing them. Fishing ports are colourful, photogenic and in scenic locations – Oban, Mallaig, Ullapool, Pittenweem. There's the heritage – in museums, memoirs, evocative photographs, paintings, and embodied in the architecture of all the old fishing villages. The herring boom is particularly well documented and, despite periodic bouts of gloom, there's hope for the future.

WILLIAM MCGONAGALL: 'Twas in the year of 1877, the 52-year-old weaver and amateur Shakespearean tragic lead "heard a voice crying in my ears – WRITE! WRITE!" And he did. He celebrated sights "most magnificent to be seen"; lamented the deaths of notables, including Lady Dalhousie, "dead and buried at last, / Which caused many people to feel a little downcast"; and versified on the accidents that "will happen by land and the sea". He recited against the "the foul fiend, Drink," in the pubs of Dundee, and commemorated battles: "Ye Sons of Great Britain! come join with me / And sing in praise of the gallant British Armie." But through abuse, neglect and poverty, he never lost faith in his poetic genius and that has indeed immortalised his name. What a Scot he was!