The Gothic Space Rocket is right in front of you and probably no Edinburgh resident any longer notices it other than as a postcard landmark in the centre of this impressive city. Although how you could possibly ignore such a thing is beyond me. Massive, dark-stone space rocket like Thunderbird 3. I’ve seen workies abseiling up and down its crags and crenulations, cleaning and repairing, or maybe just because it was there.
Auld Sir Walt sits there in white marble effigy
under the great stone structure. Forever. Unmoving. Rain and shine; wind and
bitter cold. He looks like he was wishing he was back home in Melrose and that
he hadn’t been so clever at toadying up to German royalty.
It has 70-odd effigies within it, all characters
from Scott’s novels. The auld gimpy bugger who was probably wiser in his
Scottishness than someone as mere as I would ever be willing to give him credit
for.
Lefties such as myself will bang on about the chain-gang
he created a hundred feet below Salisbury Crags to dig out The Radical Road:
men who believed themselves skilled and politically educated and who took on
the system in their ramshackle way in 1820, he reduced – some say as a form of
work-creation, I say as a punishment for their subversive actions – to digging
out a 12-foot wide path on Arthur’s Seat because Wattie and his friends liked
the view.
The path is closed now and, I suspect, maybe always will be. They claim it’s cos of falling rocks – and, after all, no city wants boulders falling on top of curious tourists – but I suspect it’s Wattie’s revenge.
It ranges too high over him and embodies the triumph and endeavour of the
enlightened underdog and the aspirations of the ignored to make him feel
comfortable in chiselled marble effigy. After all, all he has to gaze upon is
the Princes Street traffic and baffled Orientals taking photo’s as a matter of
course. Even his mate Melville round the corner has a 70-foot view of the posh
New Town around him.
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