I returned to the fantastical Edinburgh woodland that's my spiritual home
It was time for my annual trip to this destination
My summers always have the same rhythm.
There’s always a trip to a Scottish island in the mix, a jaunt to North Berwick, and taking a week off work during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, with plans to do everything and ending up doing almost nada because you can’t make a decision.
And, of course, we have to factor in a visit to the 100-acre Wilkieston attraction that is Jupiter Artland.
It’s been on my itinerary way back since it opened in 2009, which seems incredible.
That’s 17 summers at this place, though we have had a hiatus over the last couple of years, since we felt we’d seen everything so many times.
I found myself there again last weekend, and it still has the magical pull.
As you enter the woodland, there’s the gravitational impact of Anish Kapoor’s cast iron Suck, with its bottomless hole into the ground. Then there’s Antony Gormley’s Firmament - a steel outline of a crouching man, which is inspired by a map of the stars, and seems to have changed from rusty red to greige since we were last here.
On our July visit, it’s surrounded by budding brambles. That, for me, is even more of a memento mori than In Memory by Nathan Coley - an enclosed graveyard, with headstones that have blank slots instead of names and dates.
Never mind life, I just don’t want summer to end. Nature already knows it will.
The other side of the woodland, by the field, is where you’ll usually find Shane Waltener’s Over Here - a sort-of giant spider’s web for an invisible-yet-hench tarantula - but a sign tells us that this artwork is fragile and packed away for now. It used to frame the open view, and on this visit we were surprised to see how close the newbuild houses, across the other side of the wheat crop that fringes this estate, had got.
It was like they’d tiptoed over, in a game of What’s the Time Mr Wolf?
“It was all fields, in my day,” I wanted to say, but I didn’t, because I'm not 90-years-old.
As always, there are still blackbirds and squirrels, busying about in the undergrowth and flinging twigs hither and thither. Both species always seem so cranky at this time of year.
I blame hormones.
There’s also a tree that’s been felled in a previous storm, and people have slotted slate-y stones into the gaps between its knotty roots, so it looks like spaghetti carbonara.
There are other things I haven’t seen before, like the new addition of Tai Shani’s The Spell of a Dream, which is a monolithic blue figure sleeping in a glass coffin, a la Brothers Grimm.
It’s impressive, but Lara Ford’s Weeping Girls sculptures are where the most of my family memories are lingering. I’d take our nieces, when they were small, around this place almost every summer, and they especially loved that artwork.
We’d snap so many photographs at this spot, with our nieces copying the huffy poses of the rather spooky porridge-coloured wax girls with their clenched hands and stringy hair hanging over their faces. The kids got a little bit taller than the sculptures every year.
So many family groups must do the same. My camera reel is littered with those images, and there are ones of my three nieces-in-law also following that tradition, when we took them out here a few years ago.
And, of course, there’s the obligatory group family shot inside Andy Goldsworthy’s Stone House, with its rocky interior, and square window.
It’s so dark in there that, in any picture, everyone looks like a beady eyed pipistrelle.
On any of the family day-outs a decade ago, we’d be loaded with snacks - raisins and oaty bars, emergency Haribo and water bottles galore - and one of the kids would always need the loo half way round the walk. My husband would have a niece on his shoulders at any given moment.
They were always so naughty when we got to Scottish artist Anya Gallacio’s underground crystal cave, The Light Pours Out of Me, and would try to pocket any loose chunks of the amethyst, which was like kiddie catnip.
The same goes for the Charles Jencks Cells of Life turf sculpture. You’re allowed to walk round it, but not actually slide down the steep hills on your butt, do amateur Parkour or attempt a take on the Cooper’s Hill Cheese Rolling competition. We would try to explain the appropriate behaviour, but it was a bit like trying to get cats to queue.
I also remember, one year, the girls making snow angels in the popcorn that filled the Ballroom Gallery floor as part of Michael Sailstorfer’s temporary piece 1:43-47.
That wasn’t against regulations, but I’m surprised they didn’t try to eat it all. Anyway, they left with kernels in their shoes and ears.
I’m not sure they’d want to return to Jupiter Artland now that they’re teenagers. It’s out of style, as are aunties and uncles in general.
I could take my 90-year-old mum, as she loves it here too. It’s strange to think that there was a time when she could walk more than a few metres. She made the full figure-of-eight route on a few occasions. However, the last time we took her, she parked her wheelchair in the cafe and we went round without her. She was happy to live vicariously, because she’s that kind of person.
This time, it’s just me and my other half.
That’s fine, we enjoy the peace of the woodland, and the quiet contemplation, with zero chaos or requests for oaty bars and water.
Even without family in tow, it wouldn’t be summer without a visit to my spiritual home.
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