Shadows from the Greater Hill

And I thought last year I was onto something new when, for 30 days on the trot, I walked up Blackford Hill and wrote a poem about it.

For reasons that will shortly become clear, hopefully at least to me, I have in the last few weeks been buying copies of books issued by The Ramsay Head Press, the Edinburgh publishing housed founded in 1970 by Norman Wilson, also responsible for starting the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1947. Another batch of books arrived this morning, these from Glasgow’s Provan Books. Included was a near perfect copy of Shadows from the Greater Hill (1987) by Tessa Ransford, some of the pages are fused together, easily fixed, which suggests it has never been read.

Tessa Ransford was a poet of distinction responsible for establishing first the School of Poets and, two years later in 1984, the Scottish Poetry Library. She nurtured the latter through its first 15 years, overseeing its move to purpose-built premises in the Cannongate. In a writing career stretching over five decades she published well over 20 poetry collections, six of the earlier ones by the Ramsay Head Press.

Shadows from the Greater Hill is a thing of simple beauty, from the dust jacket:

Not only a book of poems but a book that is a poem - and, more than that, a poetic diary, reflecting a year in the life of Arthur’s Seat, one of Edinburgh’s most spectacular landmarks. Arthur’s Seat, whether in reality or imagination, is the starting point for each poem.

The poems are supplemented by black & white photographs taken by Edwin Johnston. Johnston died in 1993 and despite a packed life as an architect, writer and teacher, an obituary in The Independent starts by referencing his work on Shadows of the Greater Hill. They’re wonderful, proper photographs, not the sort of hyper realistic stuff you get with an iPhone, they complete what is a love letter to Edinburgh’s most famous hill.

I didn’t know Tessa, but as the mother of my dear friend Roland, I had met her a few times, the last being a chance encounter in George Square gardens in August of 2014. She was alarmed at my lack of concern about Scotland’s future, and although I can’t now recall exactly what was discussed that afternoon, it was certainly thanks to her that I voted Yes on 14th September.

Both she and Roland gone now, Arthur’s Seat still a reassuring presence over the Athens of the North.

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