Words on the streets

Published on Sunday 21 August 2005 00:29

EDINBURGH'S literary treasures have been surrounding us for the past 500 years.

Reading The Literary Traveller in Edinburgh, therefore, is a bit like shining a torch up a dark close. Thomas Carlyle's comment on Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson seems an apt turn of phrase to describe it: "It was as if the curtains of the past were drawn aside, and we looked into a country... which had seemed forever hidden from our eyes... given back to us, there once more it lay. There it still lies."

The Literary Traveller in Edinburgh is a first, and you don't need a degree in Scottish Literature to get your head round it. "Treat this book like a treasure map that tells ye whaur tae howk", states the introduction. "Sometimes yer shovel will turn up gold, occasionally a wee bit shite, but when looking for literati, who knows whaur yer finger-nebbs will alight... the journey of course never ends, but the treasure is there for the taking."

Having travelled the length and breadth of Edinburgh researching the sites featured in the book, I can assure you the pickings are rich, the locations diverse and stimulating, and with more than 500 years to choose from, all reading tastes are catered for - from Robert Burns to J K Rowling. Each chapter illuminates a different area of the city and includes facts on birthplaces, burial places, sites with a literary connection, restaurants and pubs, literary museum exhibits, etc.

Also included are Edinburgh's bookshop community, complete with characters such as Bert Barrott of West Port Books, who describes his shop as "a drop-in day centre for various ne'er-do-well intellectuals and layabouts". You'll also meet street-fighting man Bob Watt, who has done more to put literary Edinburgh on the map than a hundred committees ever did. The book was also incidental in creating The Edinburgh Book Lovers' Tour, a new guided walking tour around the Old Town which departs from the Writers' Museum twice daily, led by myself.

But tread carefully, literary pilgrims. Robert Louis Stevenson described Edinburgh as a place where "The delicate die early, and I, as a survivor, among bleak winds and plumping rain, have sometimes been tempted to envy them their fate". You have been warned.

WALKING WITH THW WORDSMITHS

1 ROBERT BURNS Lady Stairs Close (was Baxter's Close)

THE most celebrated of Scottish poets. Following the success of the first edition of his poems in July 1786, the Kilmarnock edition of Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Burns was eager to return to print as soon as possible. But the Kilmarnock printer insisted on full payment in advance. Unable to pay, he tried for a second edition in Edinburgh, living in Baxter's Close, off Lawnmarket. In his pocket Burns carried a sheaf of introductory letters from the Masonic brothers back in Ayrshire, and within a week, doors opened and his star began to rise.

2 DAVID HUME Riddle's Court (was Land), 322 High Street

SCOTTISH philosopher, historian and political thinker's first permanent Edinburgh home. It was in this house that Hume wrote his Political Discourses (1752) and started on his monumental History of England (5 volumes, 1754-62) and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). In 1753, he moved to Jack's Land, now renumbered 229 Canongate, where he lived for nine years, and where he completed his History. He lived out his life as a man of letters on the corner of St Andrew Square. He is buried in Old Calton Burial Ground, Waterloo Place.

3 DR JOHNSON Boyd's Inn (now Entry), Canongate

THE point at which Dr Johnson arrived in Edinburgh in 1773. On Saturday, August 14, 1773, James Boswell received a note at his house at 501 James Court, off the Lawnmarket, that Dr Samuel Johnson had arrived at Boyd's Inn at the head of the Canongate. Johnson had come to Edinburgh to begin his tour of Scotland and the Hebrides, a journey which would eventually produce two classic works: Johnson's A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) and Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785).

4 CANONGATE KIRKYARD Graves of Adam Smith, Robert Fergusson and Agnes McLehose

ADAM Smith (1723-90), Scottish philosopher and economist. Best known for his influential book The Wealth of Nations. Born Kirkcaldy, Fife, he is regarded as the world's first political economist.

Robert Fergusson wrote 33 poems in Scots and 50 in English, and is chiefly remembered for Auld Reekie (1773), which traces a day in the life of the city.

Agnes McLehose (1759-1841). Robert Burns first met Mrs Agnes (Nancy) McLehose after she engineered an invitation for him to her brother's flat, off Nicolson Street, on December 4, 1787. An impassioned correspondence between the two began, one which would eventually inspire Burns to write one of his greatest love songs - 'Ae Fond Kiss'.

5 THE ABBOTSFORD 3 Rose Street

DURING the 1950s and early '60s, Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978) was the centre of a group of Scottish Renaissance poets who met regularly in the city's pubs. Meeting initially in the Cafe Royal in West Register Street, they would move to the Abbotsford, then Milnes Bar and latterly the Oxford Bar in Young Street.

6 ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH Scotland Street

SETTING for Alexander McCall Smith's 'daily novel', 44 Scotland Street. Although he has written specialist academic titles, children's books and short-story collections, it was his 1998 detective novel, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, which introduced his heroine Mma Ramotswe, Botswana's finest - and only - female detective, and shot him to literary super-stardom.

7 COMPTON MACKENZIE 31 Drummond Place

HOME of Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972), novelist, biographer, essayist, poet, travel writer, journalist and secret agent. He based Whisky Galore on actual events of 1941 when the 4,000-ton cargo ship SS Politician ran aground in treacherous seas in the Sound of Eriskay, off the coast of Barra. A successful writer, he was praised by Henry James and acknowledged as a major influence on F Scott Fitzgerald.

8 IAN RANKIN Arden Street, Marchmont

FORMER home of Ian Rankin (1960- ) and home of the fictitious Inspector Rebus. Rankin was born in 1960 in the village of Cardenden in Fife. He now lives and works in Edinburgh, where most of his novels are set. Rankin weaves real places and events into his stories: Arthur's Seat in The Falls, the new Scottish Parliament building in Set in Darkness, the Mull of Kintyre helicopter crash in A Question of Blood, and Rebus's and Rankin's local pub, the Oxford Bar.

9 JOAN LINGARD St Stephen Street, Stockbridge

JOAN Lingard (1932- ), Scottish novelist. "When writing about Edinburgh, I place my characters in the parts of the city that I myself have lived in, or else know well, those being the Southside, Marchmont in particular, where I lived as a student, and the New Town/Stockbridge area where I live now and have done for the past 30 years. I find Edinburgh a stimulating place in which to live, with it being a city of contrasts, both architecturally and socially, and each district having a definite character."

10 SIEGFRIED SASSOON AND WILFRED OWEN Craiglockhart

NAPIER University Craiglockhart campus, formerly Craiglockhart War Hospital, Colinton Road.

It was at Craiglockhart that soldier poets Sassoon and Wilfred Owen (1893- 1918) met. Owen, who was suffering from trench fever, edited the hospital magazine The Hydra (a pun on Hydro) and nervously approached Sassoon to ask him to sign several copies of The Old Huntsman. Sassoon became a kind of mentor to Owen, regularly commenting on and criticising his poems. 'Anthem For Doomed Youth', written at Craiglockhart, especially interested Sassoon and his suggested amendments appear in his handwriting on the manuscript.

11 JK ROWLING 6a Nicolson Street (Formerly Nicolson's)

WHERE JK Rowling wrote parts of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Rowling first appeared at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 1997, an unknown writer promoting her first book about a boy wizard. Her audience totalled just 20 people.

A single mum, she lived in Leith, in a flat at South Lorne Place, for a few years (cashing her benefits from Leith Walk Post Office), before moving to Hazelbank Terrace in Shandon, off Slateford Road, in 1997. She enjoyed writing in cafes, particularly Nicolson's on the Southside. She still lives in Edinburgh and has a country retreat in Perthshire.

12 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON Rutherford's Howff, Drummond St

FAVOURITE drinking den of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94). In the late 1860s, the young velvet-jacketed engineering student Stevenson sauntered through the doors to down his first pint of the day after tedious hours of note taking on the stress factors of lighthouses.

Of all his haunts, Rutherford's seemed to hold a special place in his heart. "I was the companion," he said, "of seamen, chimney-sweeps and thieves; my circle was being changed continually by the action of the police magistrate."

13 IRVINE WELSH 2 Wellington Place, Leith

FORMER home of Trainspotting author. Born in Leith and brought up in Muirhouse, Irvine Welsh (1958- ) became a household name in 1993 when his novel Trainspotting, about a group of heroin addicts living in Leith, saw Welsh acknowledged as the voice of 1990s British youth culture.

Deacon Brodie's pub in the Royal Mile, visited by Renton and pals, and Begbie's regular boozer, the Central Bar at the foot of Leith Walk, are still going strong. Welsh's favourite Leith bar, the Boundary Bar on Leith Walk, is now called City Limits.

14 SIR WALTER SCOTT AND ROBERT BURNS Sciennes Hill House, Sciennes House Place

FIRST and only meeting of Walter Scott and Robert Burns. Scott met Burns only once in his life: when he was a lad of 15 in 1786-7, here, the residence of philosopher and historian Adam Ferguson. A plaque on the restored remains of the mid-18th-century Sciennes Hill House (aka Sciennes Hall) commemorates it. Partly demolished in 1868, it is the back of the original house that faces the street today, and the modified front faces the rear. Originally, it was the home of Robert Biggar, who lost his fortune after investing in the Darien Scheme.

15 OSCAR WILDE St Peter's Church, 77 Falcon Avenue, Morningside

CHURCH of Father John Gray (1866-1934), the original Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. The novel was condemned when it was first published in 1890 as an affront to polite society and contributed to Wilde's downfall, which ended in his imprisonment for homosexuality in 1895. A poet, critic and playwright, John Gray first met Wilde in the summer of 1889 at a supper party in a Soho restaurant and has been described by George Bernard Shaw as "one of the more abject of Wilde's disciples". Gray was rescued by an extremely wealthy Russian emigr Jew named Andr Raffalovich. Drawn towards Catholicism, Gray entered the Scots College in Rome in 1898 and was subsequently ordained as a priest. He served as curate initially at St Patrick's Church in the slum parish of Edinburgh's Cowgate. Gray and Raffalovich are both buried at Mount Vernon Cemetery in Edinburgh.

16 MURIEL SPARK 160 Bruntsfield Place

BIRTHPLACE of Scottish novelist, short-story writer, biographer and poet. Although Spark (1918- ) has written more than 20 novels, it is her sixth novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published in 1961 and adapted for stage and screen, which is her best known and most discussed work. In the late 1960s, she moved to Rome and in 1979 settled in Tuscany, where she lives and writes.

The Literary Traveller in Edinburgh by Allan Foster, Mainstream Publishing, 12.99. To order your copy at the discounted price of 11.99 p&p-free go to www.mainstreampublishing.com