A Tale of Three Cities
Aberdeen
"On the rocks by Aberdeen,
Where the whislin' wave had been"
- Jean Ingelow
I have managed to keep just about everything free for the last three months and will continue to post as much free content as possible. I’ll still be posting every week but free posts will pop up once a fortnight plus occasional bonus posts. I’ll try to write about a place for my free posts and then follow up with bonus content on the place for my paid subscribers the week after, paid subscribers will also always get any aviation posts earlier than free subscribers.
For the rest of this month, though, I will be giving all of my free subscribers who were signed up on 1st March a free month’s subscription. I’ll also be adding a free month to the subscription of all my paid subscribers. Just to say thank you for your support.
Today, Aberdeen.
The name Aberdeen comes from the Gaelic words “Aber” meaning dull and “Deen” meaning wet. Okay, I might have made that up and it’s not entirely fair, Aberdeen is not always wet and, in truth, it is far from dull, it’s just that I prefer my cities in colour. You can tell true Aberdonians on the bus out of the city as, when you pass the Shell petrol station, they wince at the splash of yellow and red on the sign above the forecourt.
Aberdeen is famously known as the Granite City and while it’s true that the granite of the city centre buildings can sparkle in the sunshine, it is sunny just 16% of the time in Aberdeen (and I didn’t make that up). So, on average, it is not sunny 84% of the time in Aberdeen and during those times the granite does not sparkle. On those days – 132 of which have rain each year – it is just grey. The whole city seems grey, it’s hard to know where the pavement ends and the buildings start and where the buildings stop and the drizzle and grey skies begin. Clouds hang heavy just above the rooftops like wet Army surplus blankets. It is no coincidence that it is in this part of the world that the word dreich, meaning dreary or bleak weather, was first coined. That is how many people experience the city and that is a real pity because - even though it’s still wonderful in any weather - it is far, far more than that. In fact Aberdeen is, at the very least, three cities and most people only ever see one.
On a good day, one of the sunny ones, the Aberdeen that people generally know is a great place to be: the soaring grandeur of Union Street; the cobbled Castle Terrace and Merkat Cross and the huge ships that still berth in the quay right in the middle of the city. However, Aberdeen has much more to offer, Aberdeen is a seaside resort. Honestly it is, there is a wide esplanade beside the beach; an Art Deco ballroom; fish and chip shops and cafés galore; a leisure park (whatever that is) and even an amusement park with a Ferris wheel. This is proper seaside.
There is also a place called Innoflate which is the only place in the whole of Scotland where it is fun to be a manager and sack people for incompetence or negligence. That’s because Innoflate bills itself as Scotland’s first inflatable theme park. No matter how many tears and tales of woe and pleas for clemency and outpourings of contrition I heard, I would never tire of saying: “I’m sorry Sandra, you’re fired, you haven’t just let yourself down, you’ve let the whole theme park down.” Really, I would never get tired of doing that and I’m not a mean man. Okay, I might not be that blunt, I might let them down gently. I haven’t bothered researching whether Scotland has a second or even a third inflatable theme park, I am enjoying the idea of this one too much.
So, that’s two very different Aberdeens and sat just to the north of these two is the original Aberdon (mouth of the River Don); today it is known as Old Aberdeen. To say that its different to today’s city is to say that the sea here is damp and quite cool, it would get you nowhere near knowing just how different it is. It is a Hollywood set designer’s idea of what a venerable old city should look like with bits of Edinburgh and even Oxford strewn around and cobbles and chiming town clocks. I start my visit to Old Aberdeen at the King’s Museum on High Street, a wide marketplace and thoroughfare flanked by houses built of great rectangular slabs of stone, some grey but with browns and beiges and pinks in there, too. The museum is in the three-storey stone-built Old Town House which has had a chequered history itself. It was built in 1788 but incorporates bits of older buildings such as the crest above the door which dates from 1721 and the bell in its bell-tower which first rang in 1754.
As well as being where council meetings were held, it was also the old city’s court and prison. When the old burgh merged into the city of Aberdeen in 1891 it became a school, masonic lodge and public library. It’s only been a museum for a short time and is operated by the University of Aberdeen. The university is the sixth oldest in the British Isles, being founded in 1495 and, in Scotland, only Glasgow and St Andrews are older. Now known as King’s College, it still sits proudly at the other end of the cobbled High Street.
There are cars and yellow lines and road signs and modern shops in Old Aberdeen but I can barely see them, there’s something about the place that drags earlier centuries into this one. It’s a phenomenal place. Nowhere is more phenomenal than the Cathedral Church of St Machar. Apparently St Machar founded a site of worship here in the late sixth century and the cathedral was built at the start of the twelfth, though little of that building still survives. William Wallace was buried here in 1305 or, at least, a quarter of William Wallace was buried here.
Following his trial in August 1305, Wallace was taken to the Tower of London where he was stripped naked and dragged through the city behind a horse before being hanged. This wasn’t what killed him, though, he was cut down while he was still alive, emasculated, eviscerated and his bowels burned before him. He was beheaded, then cut into four parts; by this time his chances of successfully appealing the sentence were rather limited. His head was then dipped in tar and placed on a spike on London Bridge. His four quarters were sent for display in several towns around the Scottish border before one of those quarters ended up here. In 1856 a plaque was unveiled in Smithfield, near to the site of his execution, on it is the old Scottish battle cry Bas Agus Buaidh which means "Death and Victory”. I love Scotland, I have spent huge chunks of my life here, I admire the independence and the resilience of the Scots but I can’t help thinking that they could have chosen a better battle cry; maybe one that offered a choice, perhaps death or victory.
Inside the church you could be forgiven for believing that recent centuries have passed by this place without touching it even lightly. It’s all stone with tall arches below rows of small windows, perhaps forty feet up. The ceiling is amazing, panelled in wood, criss-crossed by beams and, at the junction of each, a heraldic shield. There are forty-eight in total and they represent, among others, the arms of the Royal Burgh of Aberdeen; King’s College; James V of Scotland; the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V; and Pope Leo X. This ceiling was created in 1520, inspired by Bishop Gavin Dunbar, designed by Canon Alexander Galloway and built by James Winter. If Hogwarts has a chapel, it looks like this.
Judith, who is clearing out the old flowers and handing out guidebooks, tells me of half a millennium of history as though she remembers it personally; no offence intended there, Judith. She says that this was half a cathedral as the other half had fallen down. She tells me of King’s University and its younger, protestant brother, Marischal University and how, for many years, Aberdonians could boast that they had as many universities as the whole of England. I don’t even care if any of it is factual, it is just a delight to listen to her lilting Aberdonian tales.
Thanks for reading Bunking Off with Adrian Bleese. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work or read more right now here Above the Law. For my paid subscribers, I’ll be staying in the Aberdeen area next week. For everybody else, we’ll move to Glasgow in a fortnight’s time.