The Ned Wood Archive

When you climb to the top of the mountain
look out over the sea

It’s a wonderful day. Clear, bright, cold. I’m up early to make the most of it. Out of the flat, I turn up Warrender Park Road, past the Co-op and on down past the back of the Sick Kids. I’m headed east because there’s only one thing to do on a morning like this morning.

Maybe it’s a boy thing. If there is a hill, you’ve got to climb it. If there’s a trig point, you’ve got to stand on it. If there’s a tree, you gotta get to the top. Going up a hill always makes you feel good. Always clears your mind. Someone once said that you can’t step in the same river twice. That’s because it’s not the same river and you’re not the same person. Well, you can’t climb the same hill twice. Regardless of whether the hill stays the same, you never come down the same person as you were when you went up. (And let’s not even start to argue from a geological perspective about whether the hill is the same hill as it was when you started.)

And, in Edinburgh, we’ve got our fair share of hills. Not just the obvious tourist ones, viz the Castle and Calton. Also Blackford Hill where the observatory is and the Braids, over both of which me and Big Jim sometimes go for our runs, even though up on the Braids you have to dodge the golf balls. Also Craiglockhart and Corstorphine which are a little bit further if you want to trek up them, but worth it. (But also, more golf courses.)

However, if you’re only gonna climb one hill, then there’s only one you’re gonna climb. Arthur’s Seat. The biggest and best. Of course.

So it’s along Preston Street to the Commie. I can see the sleeping beast and the crags now. Through the gate posts, past the lodge and into the park. From here it’s more or less straight up, at least as straight as you can go. Pick out the best paths. The sky is a clear, uniform Wedgwood Blue. The grass is crisp and frosty where the sun hasn’t had enough time to warm it through. When it does first reach the grass, it picks out bright crystals of frosted dew that sparkle like wee lights in a town when you see it from an aeroplane. Slowly, very slowly, the sun burns them off, extinguishing the last few sparks as it wearily climbs the sky, keeping pace with the one bright soul climbing the hill. Clumps of gorse, here and there, always fierce and bright yellow, outshine the sun. Well-worn paths wait, littered with boulders to snag you and slow you down. Finally, the fantastic view laid out like a feast, rewards you when you get to the top. Way high above the radical road so that the ugly blocks of Appleton and Hume are diminished to their rightful insignificant sizes, you get up to the barren rock, solid and sharp, where the air is clear and almost painful as it flushes out the rubbish in your lungs.

The city spread out all around you. The Meadows and the tidy tenements of the Palace of Marchmont. Bruntsfield Towers. Warrender Castle. And, closer, the mansions of Preston Street and Bernard Terrace. The spires and pinnacles. The Pentlands to the southwest. The tourist attractions to the west and northwest. The Forth and Fife beyond. And, peeking over the hills to the west of the town, you can just about make out the bridge. If you’re up here before the rest of humanity, like I am this morning, you own it all. The whole of the city and the whole of the country.

I’d go up about once a month. No, maybe once every other month. Five or six times a year. Some days straight up, the quickest way I can find; some days the long way round. Different routes, trying to get to know the Park in all its glory. Getting to know the bumps and traps on the tracks. Sometimes along the path in front of the crags, getting a good look at the massive columns of dolerite that make up the sill (although if you want to see some really impressive columns, you should see the basalt lava over down towards Duddingston Loch). Paying my respects to the mighty James Hutton at the beginning of the Radical Road and then following it round to the north. Looking at the shapes in the rock face as I pass, which is a little like finding shapes in clouds. This is where the dolerite is better than the basalt. It’s more variable. It gives rise to a wider variety of images. There’s the face of a roman emperor with a long, stiff, noble nose. Here’s a mythical beast, a manticore, maybe, perhaps the hybrid offspring of the Arthur’s Seat lion itself. Further along there is an accurate 1:20 scale model of the Chrysler Building.

If you come up here at different times of day, and if it’s a day when the sun is out, trying to make an impression, the shadows will expose different secrets and different structures. One day, still early in the morning, I was on my way back, going down the north route past St Anthony’s Well and St Margaret’s Well, and then back up and round the Radical Road with the crags on my left and the new estate on my right. I sensed what was in the rock face almost before I could see it. I had that buzz of excitement you get when you know something good is gonna happen. High up on the western tip of the crags, before you get to Cat’s Nick, there she was. Wings spread out to try and catch any sun that was going, head held high, eyes gazing out over the city and beyond. There was that angel whose face I recognised from the Circus pub and the Newington Necropolis.

Of course, I went back a couple of times to get a better look, but I could never remember exactly where the angel of the crags was. And the sun wasn’t ever right, either not in the right place in the sky to create the right shadows on the rock or (more likely) hidden behind clouds, so no shadows at all.

I asked Nessie about the angel on the crags and whether she’d seen it. What with her being such an active person, she also went up Arthur’s seat fairly often. So It shouldn’t have been a surprise my bumping into her up there one morning. She hadn’t seen it and didn’t believe me, and, like I said, I couldn’t show her. Anyway, we climbed up together that day, the direct route of course, except that she suddenly sprinted off, scrambled over the sharp rocks at the summit, and vaulted onto the trig point in one move like a cat.

She’d got so much energy, that girl. Such grace. Such balance. How many Nessie’s does it take to change a light bulb? Two. The first to stand on the second one’s shoulders rather than using a step ladder.

She stood there imperious, her hair floating on the wind. When I got within earshot a couple of minutes later she pointed out that she was now the king of the world and I had to do her bidding.

Right then I would have done, too. I thought she was magnificent. Such exuberance. Such boisterousness. Such enthusiasm. For a couple of weeks that term, I was in love. But, truth is, we never got close enough. We’d talk, but the connections were always superficial. We’d always have the typical compare notes, music conversations about the Orchestral Manoeuvres album or Daniel Miller or the League’s Holiday 80 EP, but nothing deeper. Then she’d talk about herself. And always in the future tense, making suggestions as to what we all should do, letting us know what she was going to do, telling us what adventures she’d planned. As we walked back down that day, she was full of her next trip. She was just watching the weather and judging the conditions before going off on a wild jaunt up some bigger hills. Talking ‘bout Munro and walking on snow hikes.

And she never helped me find the angel.