THREE LOCATIONS USED IN THE 2018 FILM MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS

 There have been a number of films made over the years about the relationship between Queen Elizabeth I and her first cousin once removed Mary Stuart, better known as Mary Queen of Scots.  One of the more recent films stars Saoirse Ronan as Mary and Margot Robbie as Elizabeth.  Here are three of the locations used in the film.

The film opens with Mary’s return to Scotland from France, where she had briefly been Queen, but her reign ended with the death of her husband Francis.  The ship carrying Mary landed at Leith on the outskirts of Edinburgh in 1561.  The beach used in this scene in the film is Seacliff Beach, North Berwick, a pleasant seaside town in East Lothian, a bit further south.

After landing at Leith Mary makes her way to Holyrood House in Edinburgh.  The exterior of Holyrood in the film was shot at Blackness Castle near Linlithgow.  Situated on a promontory on the south bank of the River Forth, just upstream from the Forth Road Bridge, Blackness Castle is a 15^th century castle owned by Historic Environment Scotland and is open to visitors year round.  The castle was originally built as a residence for the Crichtons, one of Scotland’s most powerful families at the time. 

Blackness Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1238628. Photo by Mike Pennington, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Meanwhile, Elizabeth is based at Hampton Court Palace on the outskirts of London.  The exterior of the palace in the film was represented by the magnificent Hardwick Hall near Chesterfield in Derbyshire.  We see the tall facade of the building and the formal garden fronting it.  Hardwick Hall is owned by the National Trust, and among its treasures are some fine tapestries.  The cafe downstairs offers a range of tasty meals, coffees, teas and cakes. The property is fully open until the end of October, and partially open thereafter.

Hardwick Hall - geograph.org.uk - 3339472. Photo by Chris Heaton, via Wikimedia Commons.

LITERARY PUBS: THE OXFORD BAR, EDINBURGH

The Scottish writer Ian Rankin is best known for his detective novels featuring Inspector John Rebus.  The series of novels, numbering 22 in all and which spawned a television series starring Ken Stott as Rebus, is set in Edinburgh.  The favourite watering hole of Rebus is the Oxford Bar, apparently chosen by Rankin because a lot of police drink there.  The bar is also a favourite of Rankin himself, who can often be found there enjoying a pint of Deuchars IPA.  Sean Connery has also visited, as has another detective novel supremo Colin Dexter, author of the Inspector Morse books.

The Oxford Bar can be found in Young Street, which is in the part of the city known as the New Town, something of a misnomer since the architecture is largely Georgian, and construction started in 1767.  The bar, which is a short walk north from Princes Street, has received many favourable reviews from visiting fans, being described as no frills, with prices to match.  The many pictures on the wall include photographs of Rankin and of Stott.

The Oxford Bar, Young Street - geograph.org.uk - 3150895. Photo by kim traynor, via Wikimedia Commons.

Map of Edinburgh New Town.

THE GREAT DIVIDE: ESPRESSO TALES/EDINBURGH AND GLASGOW

 In his 44 Scotland Street series, Alexander McCall Smith introduces us to some of the more elegant parts of Edinburgh along with its residents with their varying degrees of eccentricity.  In one of the books, Espresso Tales, we are briefly transported to Glasgow, where the youngest and most engaging character in the series, the mother-smothered Bertie, travels by train with his father in search of a mislaid car. 

There is often a bitter rivalry displayed between the first and second cities of any given country: Sydney and Melbourne in Australia, Madrid and Barcelona in Spain are two that spring to mind.  In Espresso Tales we are left in no doubt as to which of Scotland’s two largest cities looks down its nose at the other, not least courtesy of Bertie’s insufferable mother, Irene, whose withering remarks about Glasgow lead Bertie to believe that he is heading into the Wild West.  She mutters darkly about deep fried Mars Bars, and tells Bertie to wash his hands while there because “Glasgow is not a very salubrious place”.  She also cites the city’s mortality rates, from drinking, smoking and heart disease.  These foreboding comments are not helped by the fact that, on the approach to Glasgow, “the clear skies of the east of Scotland yielded place to a lowered ceiling of grey and purple rain clouds”.

In the event, Bertie has a splendid time in Glasgow, where on arrival he finds that the railway station is not that different from the one in Edinburgh, and neither are the people waiting at the barrier.  However, he finds the language spoken by the locals baffling, “quite like Italian in some respects”.  Bertie is introduced to this strange dialect in all its glory on meeting the local hard man Lard O’Connor, who lives in the street where the mislaid car is supposed to be, and who introduces Bertie to the Burrell Collection, a famous Glasgow art gallery. 

Main Concourse at Glasgow Central Station. Photo by DrHermannWaltz, via Wikimedia Commons.

Glasgow Central Station is a fittingly grand venue for arrivals at Scotland’s second city.  Originally opened in 1879, with the expansion of rail travel meaning the station was becoming too small, a rebuild took place from 1901 to 1905, with subsequent refurbishments leading to the light, airy concourse encountered today. 

The Burrell Collection, named after the late Sir William Burrell, is the result of Sir William’s love of collecting art and antiques, enabled by the fortune he made as a shipping merchant.  He gave his collection to the city in 1944, and the museum opened in 1983, greatly enhancing Glasgow’s image as a cultural city.  The collection contains around 9,000 items, including Chinese art, medieval treasures and works by famous French artists.  The museum resides in Pollok Country Park to the south of the city, accessible by bus or train.  Once at the park, there is a shuttle bus available for visitors to get around the park’s extensive grounds.

Burrell collection Glasgow. Photo by Helen Simonsson, via Wikimedia Commons.

Map of Glasgow. 

LONDON WITH A SCOTTISH ACCENT: BELGRAVIA

When Belgravia hit our screens recently, there were inevitable comparisons with Downton Abbey, both series being the work of Julian Fellowes and with the same team behind them.  There have been dark mutterings that Belgravia is “no Downton Abbey”, but in reality there is no reason why it should be.  Personally, I slightly prefer Belgravia,  as I think it has a more interesting storyline.  The one thing the two series do have in common is that they both make use of sumptuous period backdrops, both for the interior and exterior scenes.

Belgravia is a district of Central London where properties routinely sell for multi-million pound sums of money.  The area really began to move up in the world when George III moved into Buckingham House (better known as Buckingham Palace) and construction began of the elegant streets adjacent to the King’s gaff.  The series follows the story of the nouveau riche Trenchards (Philip Glenister and Tamsin Greig) and the upper class Brockenhursts (Harriet Walter and Tom Wilkinson), whose London base is in Belgravia.  The two families find they have something in common due to a secret from the past which has come to light.   

However, fans of the series who want to visit the location where the scenes depicting the streets of Belgravia were filmed will be disappointed if they head to London.  These scenes were in fact filmed in Edinburgh, in the New Town part of the city, in particular Moray Place.  The grand old houses of New Town make a good substitute for their London counterpart except that they are built from the kind of dull grey sandstone associated with this period in the Scottish capital.  The production team behind Belgravia overcame this discrepancy by the use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) to change the sandstone to the white exteriors seen in the real-life Belgravia.

Moray Place, Edinburgh 002. Photo by Brian McNeil, via Wikimedia Commons.

Some of the interior shots featuring the homes of the Trenchards and the Brockenhursts were also filmed north of the border, making use of Manderston House near Duns in the Borders area of Scotland.  This elegant Edwardian country house, built on the site of an earlier house dating from the late 18^th century, is now used as a wedding venue, and is open to groups of visitors by appointment.

Meanwhile, heading back down south, one property which particularly stands out is the one used as Lymington Park, Lady Brockenhurst’s country estate, where she and the Earl of Brockenhurst host weekend parties.  The real-life estate is another wedding venue, Wrotham Park, Hertfordshire.  The estate, to the north of Barnet, is a Palladian Mansion built in the 18^th century by Admiral John Byng, and features a long, sweeping lawn leading from an ornamental lake to a light grey facade with a grand pillared entrance.

Wrotham Park, Middlesex by Brayley (1820).  Via Wikimedia Commons.

These are just some of the locations for fans of the series to seek out, demonstrating that there is much more to Belgravia than Belgravia.

EDINBURGH ECCENTRICS: ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH'S 44 SCOTLAND STREET SERIES

The series of novels by Alexander McCall Smith known as the ’44 Scotland Street Series’, which started out as a series in The Scotsman, presents us with an interesting collection of characters who inhabit the address of the title, among them the child prodigy Bertie and his insufferable mother, Angus Lordie and his beer-loving dog with a gold tooth Cyril, always with one eye on tempting ankles to bite, and the anthropologist Domenica MacDonald.  Although the stories are fictional, the street and the favourite hangouts of the characters  are real places in the elegant New Town district of Edinburgh.

New Town is something of a misnomer, since this part of Edinburgh, considered to be a masterpiece of city planning, was actually built in the mid-to-late 18^th century.  The part of Edinburgh now known as Old Town had become intolerably overcrowded, necessitating an overspill of the population into another area.  Although the stone used in the construction of the buildings has a rather dour, dark appearance, the architectural styles make up for it, with the neo-classical style prevailing and the inclusion of Grecian pillars on the outsides as well as other embellishments in the interiors.  Moray Place, which features in the series, is a typical example.

Moray Place, Edinburgh New Town. Photo by Kim Traynor, via Wikimedia Commons

So where do the characters hang out?  The delicatessen Valvona and Crolla in Elm Row is a favourite source of upmarket edibles.  The deli has a cafe bar attached and is an institution in Edinburgh.  The goods on sale there include a variety of coffee called Scotland Street in homage to its role in the series.  Angus and Cyril like to visit The Cumberland Bar in Cumberland Street, which describes itself as a classic Victorian New Town bar.  It has been reported that the owner of the bar once ran up to McCall Smith in Waitrose to thank him for the extra business his bar’s new found fame had brought him.  The Cafe St Honore in Thistle Street was the scene of an intimate lunch in The World According to Bertie.  Another cafe called Glass & Thompson, in Dundas Street, which was visited by the Glasgow gangster Lard O’Connor, has sadly closed recently.

Cyril the dog gets about a bit, especially on the occasion when he is stolen and manages to escape from his captor.  The canal where he has his encounter with a group of eider ducks is presumably the Union Canal which links Glasgow and Edinburgh, while the river which reminds him of his early life in the Hebrides would be the nearby Water of Leith, which flows out into the sea at Leith.  Drummond Street Gardens is the scene of a brief canine love affair which results in six puppies, an event which elicited a huge response from readers worldwide.  

Water of Leith01. Photo by Christian Bickel, via Wikimedia Commons

Fans of the books who want to visit these and other places written about may be interested to know that in 2016 an app was launched by Global called the Alexander McCall Smith App, which features walking trails and quizzes.

Map of the city

FROM BURMA TO NORTH BERWICK: THE RAILWAY MAN

One of the most brutal episodes in the Far East during the Second World War was the forced labour visited by the Japanese on the allied prisoners of war who were taken to Kanchanaburi to participate in the building of the Burma Railway.  The railway is often referred to as the Death Railway due to the unimaginable numbers of fatalities which occurred during its construction: around 90,000 Asian labourers and 12,399 allied POWs perished.  One of those who survived was Eric Lomax, a British Army officer born in Edinburgh.  Although he did survive, he did not come out of it unscathed, as the 'demons' and the nightmares arising from his experience stayed with him well beyond his return to Britain.  Lomax is the 'Railway Man', the main character in a recent film based on Lomax's autobiography of the same name, with Colin Firth in the main role.

One of the film's main themes is the romance which develops between Lomax and a young woman called Patti (Nicole Kidman) after they meet, appropriately, on a train. It is Patti who helps Lomax confront his wartime demons.  The scene in which the couple are married was shot at St Monans Parish Church, a simple but striking place of worship in the Kingdom of Fife, which dates back to the 9th century.  The church occupies a lovely spot right next to the sea in St Monans, a former fishing village which is now popular with yachting enthusiasts.  Once married, they are seen making their life together at their home in a bracing beachfront location.  The filmakers chose Tantallon Terrace in North Berwick for the Lomax home.  The terrace is named after one of the big draws in the area, Tantallon Castle, which lies a few miles along the coast on a clifftop opposite the spectacular Bass Rock, a magnet for seabirds which is accessible via the boat trips offered by the Scottish Seabird Centre in North Berwick.  North Berwick is a harbour town whose most venerable building is the 12th century Auld Kirk, which in the 16th century was the scene of the North Berwick Witch Trials.  

Marine Parade, North Berwick - geograph.org.uk - 376591. Photo by Lisa Jarvis, via Wikimedia Commons.

 Aside from the above locations, Perth Railway Station plays a starring role, standing in for Crewe station, at which Lomax boards the train where he meets Patti, and again for Edinburgh Waverley Station.  Calton Hill in Edinburgh also gets a look in, with its unfinished 'acropolis' monument.  The hill is renowned for its magnificent views over the city. The Bo'ness and Kinneil Railway played a pivotal role in the meeting of Lomax and Patti; this heritage railway covers five miles of track between Bo'ness and Manuel Junction near the village of Whitecross, Falkirk.  Another iconic sight, which features in the film's trailer, is the Glenfinnan Viaduct.  This impressive structure, which is used by the Jacobite steam train, may be familiar to film buffs, as it was also used in the Harry Potter films (see my post 'Pottering Around on the Jacobite Steam Train', from 23 December 2013). 

Bo'ness Railway Station - geograph.org.uk - 1072827. Photo by Henry Clark, via Wikimedia Commons.