Castle Review: Castelo de São Jorge.
I like Lisbon. A mild, neat city, with buildings dressed in ceramic tiles and each pavement a sheen of slippery …
Category Archives: Tourist Review
Tourist Review (20): (The auld) Kirk Alloway.
So this is it. The kirk where a passing Tam o’Shanter had paused to watch the witches’ ceilidh. I immediately …
Tourist Review (19): Doune Castle.
Dunblane is situated at the end of a pleasant train journey and the beginning of the road to Doune Castle. …
Edinburgh and the Union in Ten Statues.
You encounter these creatures on either side of the entrance to the Scottish National War Memorial, or carved gorgeously in …
Tourist Review (18): Hailes Castle.
Startlingly, Edinburgh has awakened to find itself beneath a Mediterranean sky. The familiar spires and domes are now stranded under …
Tourist Review (17): Blackness Castle.
Off to inspect another ruined castle today, like a senile general who does not realise that the wars are over …
Tourist Review (16): Dirleton Castle.
With the arrival of spring, it has occurred to me once again that there are miles of unexplored countryside behind …
Tourist Review (15): The Cairngorm Reindeer Herd.
When the sun is unveiled over the Highlands, the colours pounce out of the scenery. The tawny hills are unexpectedly …
Tourist Review Special: Auschwitz-Birkenau
We’re on the road to Auschwitz-Birkenau. We leave behind Krakow, the most wonderful of cornucopias, with more treasures than the …
Tourist Review (13): The Glen Grant Distillery.
We’re on the road to the Glen Grant distillery. The passing hills and mountains bump the sky, as bare as …
Tourist Review (12): St Peter’s Seminary.
If the Puritan imagination soars in its revulsion of Catholicism – the mystery and superstition, the dark history and arcane …
Tourist Review (11): The Newly-Reopened National Museum of Scotland.
Sometime back in 2010, Tychy reflected on the ongoing three-year, £46 million refurbishment of the National Museum of Scotland: Refurbishment …
Tourist Review (10): The NASA Lunar Sample.
Our Dynamic Earth is “an amazing adventure” and “an interactive journey” which they keep in a big tent around the …
Tourist Review (9): The Corstorphine Hill Tower.
Corstorphine Hill is a large cake of cool, sleepy woodland which reposes above the Western suburbs of Edinburgh, a mile …
Tourist Review (8): The Water of Leith Walkway.
We should not have begun at the sea. It would have been basic narrative competence to pick up the “silver …
