East Lothian textures

We went walking yesterday. It was a day of textures.

Of denuded fields:

. . . of seasonal abundance:

. . . and decay:

. . . and textural contrasts.
I particularly enjoyed these sheep beneath the A1 fly-over:

and these jolly curtains against a sandstone wall:

We had a wander round Hailes Castle, whose ruins were alive with textural inspiration:

People have been carving their initials into the walls of the castle for over 100 years:

To my mind, this century of scrawlings only adds to the loveliness of Hailes. I mean, I’m not encouraging the wholescale desecration of ancient monuments or anything, but I did find the graffitti quite suggestive of the creative appropriation of the landscape, and a public use of space. This is one of the things I find so interesting about the Graffitti Project at Kelburn Castle. In this giant, collaborative artwork, four emphatically urban Brazillian graffitti artists decorated the walls of a historic Scottish building in a rural setting:

Personally I think that the spectacular chutzpah of the art only adds positively to that of the castle:

When I worked in York, I had an office in a building which had an array of different uses over the past six hundred years. During the early 1800s it had served as a girls school. On the windows of the pleasant room in which we held our conferences was the graffitti of nineteenth-century schoolgirls. As well as their initials, the girls had scratched out rumours and gossip and celebrated their romantic exploits on the panes of the glass. Their quiet teenage rebellion added enormously to the appeal of this room for me.

So today I am swatching up a sweater in celebration of the autumnal textures of East Lothian – a Hailes and East Linton sweater.

the colours are rather East Lothian too.

And thanks so much, everyone, for your comments on my review. It has been so interesting to hear everyone’s perspective on the issues Brocket’s book raises – particularly, I think, the class issue – and see the debate unfold.

exegisis, knitting, landscape, walkingEast Lothian, graffiti, Hailes Castle, Kelburn Castle, walking