Just over an hour’s drive north and you come to Edinburgh, the childhood home of Robert Louis Stevenson and where JK Rowling wrote some of the Harry Potter books in cafes near the Royal Mile (the historic street connecting Edinburgh Castle to the Palace of Holyroodhouse).
The glittering, diaphanous horses of the Faerie Queen are especially wonderful. These ballads have been the inspiration for an exhibition of very beautiful dolls made by the artist Anne Carrick and on permanent show at Smailholm. He had stayed in the nearby farm as a child and later published an anthology of border ballads – love stories, tales of fairies, feuds and battles. But he had a special love for weaponry here there is a panoply of swords, poniards, battle axes, maces, blunderbusses, flintlocks, even a breastplate with a bullet hole – and it is this kind of gruesome detail that children love. Scott collected everything from fine china to exquisite lace doilies.
#Beatrix potter the complete tales full#
In the front hall stand dummies in full armour brandishing broadswords and all around are deer antlers and animal skulls. This is Scottish baronial architecture at its most extreme: a gothic extravaganza of crowsteps, turrets and gargoyles. Children can also go in search of the 10 crocodiles cunningly hidden in the grounds.Īnother great Scottish storyteller was the novelist Sir Walter Scott, and nowhere could be more entrancing – or more intriguing – than his country house Abbotsford, near Melrose in the Scottish Borders. Outside there is a huge pirate ship climbing frame and a garden scattered with wire figures bringing Barrie’s characters to life. The house has a dressing up box and drawers to open, keyholes to peer through and little cubby holes and sprawling bean bags where children can settle down with a book from the collection. Here you should definitely visit Moat Brae: a beautiful, fully restored Georgian house and garden that JM Barrie visited regularly as a child and apparently inspired him to write Peter Pan, which has been transformed into the National Centre for Children’s Literature and Storytelling – a museum and interactive playspace-cum-library. Some of the Wigtown Book Festival’s children’s events take place in Dumfries, which is about an hour’s drive east. Young book fans at the Wigtown Book Festival. Just outside the town lies the magnificent stone circle of Torhouse – home to the tomb of Galdus, the mythical Scottish king. Wigtown has more than a dozen secondhand bookshops and the annual Wigtown Book Festival hosts shows and workshops for children as part of the 10-day literary celebration in Scotland’s National Book Town.
There would be no better launch pad than Wigtown, a pretty coastal town in the south-west and Scotland’s answer to Hay-on-Wye.
Some of the country’s greatest writers, such as Robert Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson, had close connections with the area. I would start any trip to Scotland in Dumfries and Galloway – all of southern Scotland has an extraordinary wealth of stories and attractions that children will love. When I was a child growing up in Edinburgh, my zoologist father was fairly regularly fielding perfectly serious questions about Nessie, the Loch Ness monster. Really, there is nowhere quite like Scotland for living myth. My sons, who came north frequently on family holidays, loved the sense that history in Scotland somehow feels more present and real – you can see armour, you can climb around old moats, you can touch portcullises. The line between the past and the present, and between what is real and imaginary, feels more porous here.
Countless writers, songmakers and poets have been inspired by its mountains, its castles, its heroes and battles, its fairies and monsters. It’s also a most exciting country, with formidable landscapes, exciting cities and, most importantly, great imaginative wealth. Scotland, which is currently celebrating the Year of Stories 2022, is steeped in history and legend.
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