Collecting Scottish data: hares, real ale and veggie haggis

The route from my house here was pretty straight. It consisted of a train from Peckham Rye to Kings Cross, a train from kings Cross to Edinburgh Waverley followed by a train from Waverley to bridge of Allan. Either side of the trains was an extra mile or so: by bus from my house to Peckham, and a walk through country like this (right).

From Bridge of Allan’s station to Keir Cottage, where my friend Andrew rents an annex of the farm house. He has no sink, just a washbasin to wash dishes in, and he must also wash clothes this way. But he has the tranquillity and the country surrounding that he sought, and he has sheep, highland cattle, hares, buzzards and a donkey for neighbours. He also has a his landlady’s hot tub in the garden with fields and Stirling Castle’s mount in the distance as a backdrop.

He has a particular affinity with the hares and has read up on their significance in folklore. So that I can see them, we walk deliberately into a baled field towards one. It waits until it can chance it no more and bolts, bounding with its distinctive hop-sprint, rousing two more. ‘That’s unusual to see three hares,’ Andrew tells me. ‘That must be for you.’

The next afternoon we were enjoying a pavement glass of wine and Lomond Gold blonde ale under the Clive Ramsay delicatessen’s restaurant awning, sheltered from the threatening rain. We noticed the brewery next door offered ‘free tours and free tasting’ and we needed no further encouragement. We entered its small cavern of a tavern and were given the ‘tour’ to view its two barrels round the corner from the bar. Our friendly young barman and his friend, a self-confessed Viking (‘I’m the same height as a Viking, I have the right hair colour and eye colour for a Viking’) ran through the list of 20-odd ales they’d brewed there. These included ‘Aleoween’ pumpkin beer, chilli beer and chocolate beer with chocolate shavings, none of which we could try because they no longer had any. However, we could taste their more standard beers on tap of varying strengths, and raspberry ale. A very merry afternoon was spent.

The next day I bid farewell to Andrew and Bridge of Allan and set off home via a stop in Edinburgh. The city was heating up for the festival with groupings of samba schools gathering in the streets and the various venues being assembled. After a ‘vegetarian Burns breakfast’ at the Crag and Tail restaurant on the Royal Mile I walked up to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. It was celebrating its 50^th birthday with an injection of new works. I found it refreshing and stimulating in its presentation of groupings of inspiring artists, such as a display by the Boyle family, a family of four who create art together by going to randomly selected (by darts thrown at a world map) destinations and collected data exhaustively: counts and studies of flora and fauna, photographs, sketches; they agree that ‘art should not exclude anything as a potential subject.’ With that, I gathered my bits of data from my Scottish expedition and headed back to the train.