The History of the Gra (y) (innit) e City

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!