I am a sucker for story
telling and decided one way of getting my fix in a small town like Aberdeen would be to book myself into a
guided tour of the city. Not long ago, I
had gone on a private tour of Aberdeenshire where our Scottish tour guide (a fiddler
by profession) puff-chestedly dismissed Shakespeare’s Macbeth as pure fiction.
Time for another one, I thought, and this time about the Granite city itself.
So booked myself a walking
‘medieval history’ tour. The weather, predictably,
was bad. After 3 days of glorious sun,
just on the day I decided to go on a walking tour, it pours. And it didn’t stop for a good half hour at
the beginning of the tour. If I had been
the tour guide, I’d have said with a flourish of my hand ‘Welcome to the Grey-innit City!
Expect grey and never be disappointed!’ But ours didn’t. Instead, how
she pulled her parka hoodie on, fished out the laminated notes from her
water-proof messenger bag and went on with it, without so much as a whimper
about the spoilsport rain. Like, it was
just the way of life. ‘We do everything
in the rain here’! Her attitude seemed to scream.
Btw, tour guide was ginger
enough and accented enough. Talking of
accents, the pronunciations of R was most interesting. Pointer no. 1: Scots
lurrrve to over-pronounce their R’s and refuse to pronounce their T’s. Some
samples : I-run smith (Ironsmith).
Today’s tour was another
reminder that Aberdeen is no Edinburgh.
The other 12 ladies who turned out today (pretty good number I would say)
were ALL local. Most of them in their
40s and 50s. Disadvantage? No one asked any questions. And the tour guide took a lot of Scottish
words for granted. Like Brae. And Wynd.
For the uninitiated, Brae is a hilly street and Wynd is narrow alley-like
street that connects 2 parallel bigger streets.
Btw, the most interesting
part of the tour was how she said ‘Pay attention to the street levels’. I’d have never thought about it. And I never did, in the 2.5 years that I’ve lived
here. Apparently, the city is built over
7 hills each of them connected to each other by bridges. The much-in-news, Bon Accord Gardens is the most (may be the only?) green
of the valleys today. And through it
flows the Denburn river. Yes! There is a
river flowing through those gardens.
Under it to be precise! What a
story! For under those gardens, right
next to the railway tracks flows the Denburn river. All culvert-ed and discreet. The very river from which the city gets its
name. Aber-den, meaning mouth of the
River Den. Intriguing.
Some of the other interesting
titbits –
1)
RGU’s student
halls in Woolmanhill were once called ‘Rotten holes’ coz that’s where young
unskilled labourers from the nearby mill lived’. Wicked thoughts as I make
parallel connections.
2)
The site of
Trinity Centre was once a thoroughfare.
3)
The Green was an
open market-place.
4)
All those streets
called Baker’s lane, Candlemaker’s lane etc. all leading up to the Green make complete
sense
5)
The site of a
certain hotel/gym today could have been the site of the Harbour once upon a
time
6)
Shiprow, now a
street, could have been a parking lot for boats.
Rather an interesting 2
hours.
I’ve got 2 more tours booked
one for each, so watch this space for more in the month of June and July.
You know what would be
interesting to know? The areas around
the city centre, how they developed and who lived there. Like Balnagask, Peterhead, Fraserburgh
etc. Will keep my ears and eyes open!
