Ramsay Garden: Poets, Painters and a Dreamer
Why is it significant?
Gaze up at the jumble of red-roofed towers, white harled walls, timber balconies and bay windows piled up below the Castle. It looks like a village from a fairy tale, invented by someone who loved both old Scotland and the Arts and Crafts movement.
Key Facts
| Place | Ramsay Garden: Poets, Painters and a Dreamer |
|---|---|
| Address | Ramsay Garden, Edinburgh EH1, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.94930, -3.19660 |
| Part of Walk | Painted, Carved and Planted: Edinburgh's Princes Street Gardens and the Mound |
| Generated | Generated |
Gaze up at the jumble of red-roofed towers, white harled walls, timber balconies and bay windows piled up below the Castle. It looks like a village from a fairy tale, invented by someone who loved both old Scotland and the Arts and Crafts movement. That someone was a biologist, a town planner and a visionary called Patrick Geddes.
The oldest part of the cluster is an octagonal house built around 1740 by the poet Allan Ramsay, a wig-maker turned bookseller and publisher who wrote in Scots. Edinburgh wits mocked its round shape as the goose pie, and Ramsay complained about it to a friend, a judge. The story goes that the judge replied that now he saw Ramsay inside it, he understood the name perfectly well.
His son, also called Allan Ramsay, became one of the finest portrait painters of the eighteenth century and principal painter to King George III. You walked past his elegant portraits in the National Gallery a few minutes ago. In the 1890s Geddes rebuilt the site around the old house as flats for university teachers and a hall of residence for students, believing that town and gown should live side by side in the heart of the Old Town, not flee it.
Geddes wanted beauty inside as well as out. He invited the Celtic Revival painter John Duncan to decorate rooms here with scenes from Celtic legend, part of what Geddes hoped would be a Scottish renaissance in art and thought. Next door he ran the Outlook Tower, with its camera obscura, as a kind of observatory for studying the city.
The poet Ramsay, the painter Ramsay and the dreamer Geddes all shaped the art of this city from one steep corner. Now walk back down Ramsay Lane and the Mound, and at the bottom go through the gate into West Princes Street Gardens beside the Academy, where a clock made of flowers is waiting.