Tom Bruce-Gardyne

The Royal Mile is the most famous street in Edinburgh, running between The Castle (Edinburgh Castle, one assumes), and Holyrood House.

This is in many ways a charming and interesting book. There are many interesting shots of the variety of hotels, taverns, museums, hsitoric buildings and private homes along the way. It would probably be a great thing to read before parading down the street. It is supplemented by a chronology and a list of useful websites.

It does have some serious flaws. Some of the pictures are not captioned, and even reading the text around them isn't always enlightening. On page 27, for example, there is a picture of a large, plain, blood orange building. Beginning at the the bottom of page 26 and spilling over to the top of p.28, 6 buildings are mentioned. We can eliminate two of them by comparison with other pictures. Of the remaining 4, none mentions the striking color of the building, and the shot does not include any of the distinctive features mentioned in the description. On the basis of architecture and proximity, I suppose that this is Chessel Court, although one would have thought that a shot of their unique green court would have been in order.

There are no pictures of the new Parliament building, a structure which the author seems to view with skepticism. He expresses the (faint?) hope that it will age well. In point of fact, I found in the course of googling it that no-one seems to want too many shots of the building, not even the Parliament webpage. The best picture of it as a whole is there, but it's not obvious. There are a lot of shots of details of the building, but the shots of the whole building that I found were taken from so far away as to have no detail. I guess that I will have to buy the booklet.

The book, despite its flaws is quite educational, and I'd like to see the Royal Mile for myself one day.… (mehr)