Reviving the Trinity Stones: A Treasure Hunt and a Jigsaw Puzzle
The two year Reviving the Trinity Stones project will be an exciting combination of a treasure hunt and jigsaw puzzle.. It is enabled by a Jean Guild Grant from the Old Edinburgh Club The Back Story In 1460 Mary of Guelders built her ambitious charitable foundation of a hospital and the Trinity Collegiate Church below the Calton […]
Table Tennis: A Notable Absence
Capturing vanishing Edinburgh history The Old Edinburgh Club has a mission to uncover and capture vanishing evidence of Edinburgh’s history. Table tennis is, I believe, a clear example of a portion of Edinburgh’s history in danger. Many people have played the game in a social context or on the kitchen table but its existence as […]
‘The Queen’s Lender’ review
The eponymous hero of this historical novel is George Heriot, jeweller to Queen Anna of Denmark, consort of James VI. The story extends from Edinburgh in 1593 to London in 1603 when James VI becomes James I and on to Heriot’s death in 1624. It is told as a series of short vignettes illustrating how […]
10 Scotland Street
by Leslie Hills (Edinburgh: Scotland Street Press, 2023) Book review by Edward Duvall I found reviewing this book a great treat. Leslie Hills has lived in the main-door flat at 10 Scotland Street in Edinburgh for 50 years and this is the fruit of her research in various archives into the residents during the preceding […]
Bodysnatcher
We were approached by Ringwood Publishing in Glasgow asking if we would review a new novel by Carol Margaret Davison, Bodysnatcher. We took up this kind offer, as it was based on the Burke and Hare murders and may appeal to our members. Here’s what Jo Chapman, one of our Council Members, made of it: […]
Summer visit to Mansfield Traquair
On 9 June, 10 members of the OEC enjoyed a spectacular visit to the converted church that is the Mansfield Traquair Centre at 15 Mansfield Place, Edinburgh. It is quite breath-taking inside with the magnificent murals painted by Phoebe Traquair (self portrait pictured left), who eventually finished them in 1901, and her story is worth […]
The Edinburgh Skating Club
Michelle Sloan’s debut adult novel, The Edinburgh Skating Club (Polygon 2022) skilfully combines two narratives, one set in 18th century Edinburgh and the other in the 21st. The two are connected by the well-known painting of a figure skating in a perfectly balanced position with one leg extended behind the body on what may be Duddingston Loch, often […]
The Arthur’s Seat coffins
They are back! After four months in the recent National Museum of Scotland’s paying exhibition, ‘Anatomy A matter of Death and Life’, the Arthur Seat’s coffins are back on free display in the Scotland Galleries of the National Museum of Scotland (NMS) in Chambers Street (section ‘Daith comes in’ of ‘Scotland Transformed’ on level 4). […]
Who runs Edinburgh?
Why ask who runs any city these days? The conventional wisdom is that cities have been hollowed out by global economic forces, that they are nowadays only interesting because of that process. If cities were once places of considerable power, they are no longer. Yet all is not what it seems. Studies of local power […]
Auld Greekie
Around the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, and particularly in the years between about 1810 and 1840, Edinburgh – long and affectionately known as ‘Auld Reekie’ – came to think of itself and to be widely regarded as something else. The city became ‘Modern Athens’, an epithet later turned into ‘the Athens of the North’. […]