The Companion Guide to Edinburgh and the Borders - Hardcover

Youngson, A.j.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1900639033 ISBN 13: 9781900639033

Publisher: Companion Guides, 1993

Synopsis

Edinburgh is one of the world's remarkable cities because it contains both an old town, rebuilt on the medieval street plan after being burned by an English army in 1544, and right alongside the old town a new town, a planned concentration of eighteenth and nineteenth-century classical buildings which is more extensive that anything else of its kind in Europe. Edinburgh is a city of contrasts, historic, varied, surprising, challenging, spectacular; it canbe gloomy, mysterious, even forbidding; loveliness is not its forte. The visitor to the Borders is imagined as starting in Edinburgh, and taking any of four routes to the Tweed. Then, starting from Berwick-upon-Tweed, sucessive chapters take the reader on a tour to the source of the Tweed and from there back eastwards to Edinburgh. The final chapter deals with the remote hilly areas that lie close to the Border itself. A.J. YOUNGSON is former chairman of the Fine Art Commission for Scotland.

About this title

From the Back Cover

EDINBURGH is one of Europe's most elegant and cosmopolitan cities, the Old Town rebuilt on the medieval street plan after being burned down by the English in 1544, and the eighteenth-century classical New Town more extensive than anything else of its kind in Europe. Edinburgh was the capital of an independent kingdom for more than two hundred and fifty years, and it has the air of a capital, with buildings where kings were born or where some of their more prominent subjects were assassinated, streets once trodden by Mary Queen of Scots and Bonnie Prince Charlie, and a rich artistic life that comes into exhilarating full flower in August with the Edinburgh Festival.

Edinburgh is also the gateway to some of the most spectacularly beautiful country in Britain: lying southward is the romantic landscape of the Borders, a country of ruined abbeys, castles that have withstood countless sieges, and great houses still owned by families 'that the Flood could not wash away'.

Synopsis

One of the classic "Companion Guides", this is devoted to the city of Edinburgh and Scotland's border country. Each volume in the series aims to provide a comprehensive travel companion in the person of the author, who knows intimately the places and people of which he or she writes.

Edition details

• Publisher: Companion Guides
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1900639033
• ISBN 13: 9781900639033
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 464