Today I’ve been visiting Cramond. This is a well-known small village right at the western end of Edinburgh, on the coast of the Firth of Forth. I first remember it from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – one of her suitors (Gordon Lowther – the boring one) lived in Cramond, and sang in the choir in Cramond Kirk.
Apart from being a beautiful village with a historic Kirk, Cramond’s other well-known feature is that it has an occasional island. Cramond Island is joined to the mainland by a causeway which is passable for a couple of hours each side of low tide. At other times, the causeway is submerged and the island a genuine island. And of course sometimes people get stuck on it because they don’t leave enough time to get back acros the causeway before the tide rises and covers it. Following on from yesterday’s literary allusion, I’ll mention that just such an event features in “One Good Turn”, one of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels. (Not the best of them – that would be “When will there be good news?”, and of course that’s not as good as “A Life”. Or “A God in Ruins”; or even “Behind the scenes at the Museum”. Just saying.)
So I went out to Cramond island and it is indeed very pretty. There was also a strong wind coming in off the Firth so although it was sunny it was also quite cold. I walked out to the island, walked back, had some excellent lunch and then walked up the River Almond Walk – as far as I could, as it was actually closed due to land slippage.
Then back into the city, where after some drifting around I found myself in the Balmoral Bar sipping a Gin Martini. I’d like to report that it was great, but in fact it wasn’t – lots of gin, very little martini, and pretty tasteless. Should have stuck to single malt….
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