Intersection of South Charlotte Street and Princes Street, Edinburgh EH2 4AH

Walk to the intersection with Princes Street at the end of the block and consider the words of two notable American writers as they expressed their feelings of deep affection for the city of Edinburgh.

The first is Washington Irving, best known for his short stories Rip van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Irving visited Edinburgh in 1817, and this is what he wrote: “I am enchanted with the general appearance of the place. It far surpasses all my expectations. Yesterday was a warm day, with now and then a very light shower, and an atmosphere loaded with rich clouds through which the sunshine fell in broad masses, giving an endless diversity of light and shadow to the grand romantic features of this town.  It seemed as if the rock and castle assumed a new aspect everytime I looked at them, and Arthur’s Seat was perfect witchcraft. I rambled about the Bridges and Calton Height yesterday, in a perfect intoxication of the mind.”

The other writer is the novelist Henry James, best known as author of The Turn of the Screw, who composed an equally romantic account of his impression of Edinburgh when he visited the city in 1878. “The night of my arrival here was a superb one; the full moon had the possession of a cloudless sky. There is no street in Europe more spectacular than Princes Street, where all the hotels stand in a row. Princes Street was absolutely operatic. The radiant moon hung right above the Castle and the ancient houses that keep it company on its rocky pedestal, and painted them over with a thousand silvery, gray touches.  They looked fantastic and ethereal, like the battlements of a magician’s palace.”

Sources:

• Tour in Scotland 1817 and Other Manuscript Notes by Washington Irving
• Travels with Henry James by Henry James

Edinburgh EH2 3AA

Glance up at Edinburgh Castle on its rocky perch and remember that this was where Mary Queen of Scots gave birth to a son in 1566. He was crowned King James VI of Scotland barely a year later, and in 1603 he became King of England as well. It was James who granted the charters for the new colonies in America, notably Jamestown in Virginia, which was established in 1607 (that is thirteen years before the Plymouth Colony was founded by the Pilgrim Fathers). James VI was therefore the first British monarch to rule over the new American territories.

Listen to the traffic on Princes Street; a goodly proportion driven along here in the past were Fords. This may not have been the case had it not been for a far-seeing Edinburgh-born industrialist and banker. John Gray, who had emigrated to America, was initially none too impressed by the new contraption about to be manufactured by Henry Ford, the ‘gasoline buggy’ as it was called, and had to be persuaded rather reluctantly to invest $10,000 in its development in 1903. He quickly changed his opinion, however, having been made the new company’s first president, and grossed $36 million!

Up on Lothian Road there are a couple of film complexes, and it is worth remembering that Edinburgh gave Hollywood two of its greatest stars. One was Ernest Torrence, who became one of the great villains of the silver screen in the 1920s. The other, slightly better known nowadays, was Sean Connery, an actor of supreme talent, who skillfully handled a multitude of roles, most notably as Secret Agent 007 in the early James Bond films of the 1960s.

Sources:

• Lost Edinburgh
• BBC In Pictures: Sir Sean Connery

The Mound, Edinburgh EH2 2EL

This is the largest painting in Scotland, and it is by an American artist.  The full title is ‘Alexander III of Scotland Rescued from the Fury of a Stag by the Intrepidity of Colin Fitzgerald.’ The artist was Benjamin West, who hailed from Pennsylvania, and five years after his arrival in London in 1768, he was elected as a founder-member of the Royal Academy of Arts, having become an established portraitist and painter of historical subjects. His painting of ‘Death of a Stag’ created a sensation when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1786. Quite apart from its huge size (it measures some 12 feet high by 17 feet wide), it proved to be a powerful piece of dynastic propaganda for Francis Humberston Mackenzie, the last hereditary chieftain of the Seaforth line of Clan Mackenzie.

The painting was produced on the scale of a royal or state commission, at a price equivalent to West’s annual stipend as official history painter to King George III. It shows an incident which supposedly took place during a royal hunt near Kincardine in the later 13th century, in which Colin Fitzgerald wrestled a furious stag to its knees before dispatching it with his spear. It may be seen as a skillfully stage-managed and politically-driven celebration of the preservation of the monarchy by the legendary ancestor of the Clan Mackenzie. 

Waterloo Place, Edinburgh EH1 3DE

The interactive statuary depicts Abraham Lincoln, a representative Slave, and the concept of Emancipation.  However, it also had a practical purpose − to act as a memorial and burial place for certain Scottish soldiers who fought in the American Civil War of 1861−65, “To preserve the Jewel of Liberty in the Framework of Freedom” in Lincoln’s own words, as they appear on the granite plinth upon which his effigy stands.

This plot of land was given by Edinburgh Corporation to Wallace Bruce, the splendidly-named US Consul in Edinburgh, for this purpose, and six of those soldiers are named on the monument, along with the regiments in which they served. On the main side of the monument a version of the Stars and Stripes appears in the form of a shield, with plants on either side, thistles for Scotland on the left, and cotton for the USA on the right. The monument was unveiled in 1893.

This complex monument is the work of three widely-separately makers. The sculptor and architect was George Bissell, who worked at his father’s marble polishing business at Poughkeepsie, New York. He studied sculpture in Europe, and was resident in Paris during the planning and execution of the ‘Emancipation’ statuary. This explains why he used a Parisienne bronze factory, that of E. Gruet junior, to produce the work.  The architectural setting was carried out by local man Stewart McGlashan, at his steam polishing granite, marble, and stone works, located at Canonmills Bridge, who ran one of the leading companies in this field in Victorian Edinburgh.