Tag Archives: Scotland

Old dressing room, Hampden Park

Saturday 22nd August 2015, 12.10pm (day 1,458)

Old dressing room, 22/8/15

Hampden Park is Scotland’s national football stadium and also home of Queen’s Park FC, currently in the fourth tier of Scottish football, a bizarre but strangely endearing arrangement surely not replicated elsewhere in world football. The stadium has been on this site since 1903 and when it was substantially rebuilt in the 1990s this old version of one dressing room was preserved as part of the Scottish Football Museum. In this room, more or less, Real Madrid and Eintracht Frankfurt prepared before the 1960 European Cup Final, often cited as one of the best games of football ever played (7-3 to Real).

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Clydeside, Glasgow

Friday 21st August 2015, 10.05am (day 1,457)

Clydeside, 21/8/15

Two faces of Glasgow. Yesterday, the pre-industrial, Victorian, under moody clouds thing. Today, definitely post-industrial, attempts to modernise the remnants of late 20th-century industrial landscapes (the modernistic building ahead being the Glasgow science park, opened in 2001; and the tower is the tallest building in Scotland, apparently). But still, the moody clouds thing.

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Necropolis

Thursday 20th August 2015, 3.55pm (day 1,456)

Necropolis, 20/8/15

So I find myself in Glasgow for a couple of days, meaning the four biggest cities in Scotland (Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee) have all made it onto the blog in less than four months. I don’t know the place well but at least this afternoon proved that it does give good cemetery.

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Tay Bridge

Friday 26th June 2015, 2.25pm (day 1,401)

Tay Bridge, 26/6/15

And so home again, a 7-hour train journey from Aberdeen to Hebden Bridge. My second return trip up the east coast of Scotland in the last few weeks, so a chance to revisit a theme hit not so long ago, the crossing of the River Tay. The stumps are those of the first Tay bridge which collapsed (due to crappy construction) in a storm shortly after it was built.

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Ceilidh

Thursday 25th June 2015, 10.20pm (day 1,400)

Ceilidh, 25/6/15

i3 (Information, Interactions and Impact) has been a good conference, and though Aberdeen, and particularly the Robert Gordon University campus, has done its bit to help, conferences are in the end about the people. So here are some of them, giving it a right old Scottish knees-up at the conference dinner.

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The River Dee

Wednesday 24th June 2015, 1.05pm (day 1,399)

River Dee, 24/6/15

The city of Aberdeen makes a picturesque debut on the blog. If you’ve never been I guess you might imagine it to be a rather dour place but this shot proves otherwise. OK, it’s not taken in the city centre, but it’s still well within the municipality — this is taken from the edge of the Robert Gordon University campus (location for my conference) and the large Auchinyell council estate is not more than 300 yards away from this point. If only it had delivered some nice golden light as well, but alas, this was not to be.

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Arthur’s Seat and the Firth of Forth

Tuesday 23rd June 2015, 11.00am (day 1,398)

Firth of Forth, 23/6/15

Another trip to Scotland, this time for a conference in Aberdeen. Another long train journey north, which took hours but was mostly worth it thanks to the views, including this one of Arthur’s Seat — its second appearance on the blog (after this more close-up shot in April 2014). Not a bad shot considering it was taken from a moving train through a very grubby window.

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Loch Esk and Craig of Gowal

Saturday 9th May 2015, 1.30pm (day 1,353)

Loch Esk, 9/5/15

You didn’t think I was going to come all the way to Scotland to work and not get a walk in, did you? This is about an hour north of Dundee by road, the southern edge of the Cairngorms National Park. Here we are about 2,600 feet above sea level, at the head of Glen Clova. A good walk today.

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Magdalene Green, Dundee

Thursday 7th May 2015, 7.00pm (day 1,351)

Magdalene green, 7/5/15

I’m not facing head-on the General Election that is taking place today. In any case nothing will be resolved until tomorrow morning at the very earliest, and probably several days after that if the opinion polls are to be believed. I left home very early this morning because of work commitments in Dundee, Scotland, a city I have never visited before, and this shot of the evening light there (plus the small plane — does it look like a blotch, or does it add to the shot?) makes this only the second Scottish location, after Edinburgh (April last year), to feature on this blog. It may be that the Scottish Nationalists hold the balance of power after today’s voting, so this could be an appropriate location to spend the next few days.

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Arthur’s Seat

Tuesday 8th April 2014, 9.30am (day 957)

Arthur's Seat, 8/4/14Among Edinburgh’s many endearing qualities is the fact that it has a mountain right in the middle of the city. OK, so Arthur’s Seat is only a little mountain, but it’s rugged and you have to do some scrambling to get to the very top. It’s great to get up to somewhere like this and still be down again in time to start work by 10am, which is what I did this morning.

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