Gothic or Gothic Revival, that is the question?

We woke up to a cloudy morning, one of the few on this trip. In ten days, we had enjoyed eight sunny ones, four of them with completely clear skies. There had been a little drizzle in Fort William, and that was about it.

All in all, completely un-Scottish. Not that we were complaining.

Despite the grey sky, we decided to explore Glasgow on foot. The umbrellas were tucked into the backpack just in case, but this was our last day here, and there were very few things that could have kept us in the hotel room.

Besides, rain would not necessarily have spoiled Glasgow that day.

Perhaps quite the opposite.

If there are cities that look good under a grey sky, Glasgow is certainly one of them.

We came across one such scene within the first minute of leaving the hotel.

When you are used to the churches back home and their bell towers, your eye is quickly drawn to a church at the end of the street, with its tall, pointed spire.

You assume it is Gothic. With a tower like that, you can hardly go wrong.

Almost.

I later read that it was actually Gothic Revival. Nothing dramatic, because from a layman’s point of view, the distinction seems completely irrelevant.

Architectural history would probably snap back at me here: “Irrelevant, yes. You were only about 500 years off.”

Either way, the height, the pointed forms and the dark morning sky worked rather well together from where we stood in the street.

Edinburgh had clearly spoiled us

The further we walked, the brighter the sky became. It was as if someone had sliced away the clouds that, just a few steps earlier, had been threatening rain. The sky began to break open, the stone regained its colour, and that Gothic seriousness slowly faded away.

As in almost every major city, there is plenty of construction going on in Glasgow. Wherever we looked, at least one crane seemed to be sticking out of the city skyline. While looking up, we suddenly found ourselves standing in front of a building with the words King’s Theatre across its façade.

We took a quick look, snapped a photo and carried on.

The street ahead stretched out in a long, perfectly straight line, with rows of buildings on either side. At the next intersection, something across the road caught my eye: a large stone building topped by a distinctive green dome.

“That has to be some kind of library,” I thought.

And it was.

Edinburgh had clearly spoiled us a little. At first glance, neither the theatre nor the library seemed particularly remarkable.

But if you take the time to read a little about them, you soon realise that neither should be underestimated.

Katharine Hepburn once performed at the theatre, which meant that, for the second time in just a few months, we had found ourselves following in her footsteps. In February, we had walked down the Spanish Steps in Rome, where she filmed Roman Holiday with Gregory Peck. Now we were standing outside a theatre where she had once performed on stage.

The library, meanwhile, is one of the largest public libraries in Europe and holds more than a million items in its collections.

Sometimes it’s nice to get a little lost

I like walking through a city and getting a little lost among its streets. Navigation is useful just to give you a rough idea of which direction you need to go. After that, you simply wander wherever you feel like, and at every intersection, you look to see what might be hiding to the left, to the right or straight ahead.

At one of those intersections, an interesting view opened up at the very end of the street. A golden dome, with a tall, pointed church spire beside it, standing almost like a guard. Gothic Revival, of course. We know our stuff by now.

The golden dome, however, belongs to a Sikh temple.

Right. I may have congratulated myself too soon. I have no idea what Sikhism is. Google.

Okay, it is a monotheistic religion that originated in India and has around 25 million followers worldwide.

Interesting, but not quite interesting enough to make us walk all the way over there.

Across the road, slightly higher up, we spotted some trees and a bit more greenery, so we crossed over and headed uphill. The university, our actual destination, was somewhere in that direction anyway.

We had not gone far when another set of towers appeared ahead of us. Four of them this time. One in particular caught my eye, the one on the left.

Tall, built of stone and so reminiscent of the towers of the British Parliament that it instantly made me think of London. It looked as though someone had broken off a piece of the Houses of Parliament, brought it up to Scotland and hidden it on this hill in Glasgow.

We had discovered all of this within the space of just a few minutes, without any of it being part of our plan. And we would almost certainly have missed it all if we had been getting around by some form of transport instead of walking.

Sometimes it’s nice to get a little lost.

Kelvingrove Park: first impressions can be deceiving

From the towers on the hill, we followed the trees as they gradually led us downhill. Before long, we found ourselves standing in front of a sign for Kelvingrove Park.

The park below the university.

So we had found it after all.

What really caught our attention, though, was the large grey building on the other side. Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.

Well, we might as well head over and take a look.

The first few metres, however, were not exactly the sort of scene Glasgow’s tourist board would probably choose for the cover of a brochure.

Apparently, they had not got around to emptying the bins yet, as rubbish was scattered all around them. But fair enough, if that was the worst of it.

All you had to do was turn 180 degrees and the view became much more inviting. There was greenery everywhere, just as you would expect in a park, with the occasional university tower peeking through the trees.

There is a much bigger story behind this fountain.

In 1859, clean water was brought to Glasgow from Loch Katrine, almost 50 kilometres away. For its time, it was an extraordinary feat of engineering. A bit like building an entirely new water supply system from Ljubljana to Bled today. Except that we would have to take excavators, trucks and other modern machinery out of the equation and replace them with horses and oxen. And since we are in Scotland, we might as well throw in a shaggy Highland cow or two.

The arrival of clean water greatly improved living conditions in the rapidly growing city and helped reduce the spread of disease.

Today, this rather simple fountain stands as a reminder of it all. And behind it is a story far bigger than the fountain itself.

A fibreglass Elvis Presley

Our walk through the park brought us to the museum, that grey rectangle we had spotted on the sign when we entered.

But the grey was now gone, replaced by a reddish building that looked more like a palace than a museum.

Admission is free. One more reason to go inside and have a look if you are already here.

Kelvingrove is quite an unusual museum. To me, it felt like stepping into a huge antique shop belonging to an enthusiastic collector who had spent a lifetime gathering anything that happened to catch his eye.

First, there is a model of the solar system. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a stained-glass window appears, one that clearly once belonged in a church or monastery.

A few steps further on, a real suit of armour awaits.

It looks serious and imposing. Just as your mind starts drifting back to the Middle Ages and you find yourself wondering how anyone even managed to get into something like that, let alone fight in it, all that seriousness disappears in an instant.

Because right in the middle of the hall stands a bright blue sculpture of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll. Made of fibreglass. A futuristic Elvis, then.

Judging by the belly, this must be Elvis rather closer to the end of his career.

In the next hall, a real Spitfire hangs from the ceiling. An aircraft that became one of the symbols of Britain’s fight against Nazi Germany.

And underneath it... elephants.

The largest of them is Sir Roger, a real Asian elephant that once lived in Glasgow Zoo.

You continue past Rani Lakshmibai, an Indian queen who rebelled against British rule. This time, at least, she was surrounded by several similar figures, apparently connected to Britain’s former colonies.

No fluorescent Elvis caught our eye this time.

But just when you think you have figured out the museum’s logic, strange masks from Oceania appear, followed by Inuit clothing alongside Arctic foxes and polar bears, and a towering totem pole made by the Indigenous peoples of North America.

In the space of just a few metres, you travel halfway around the world and through half of history, until eventually you are no longer quite sure where, or when, you are.

Just when you think you have seen it all, you look up above the staircase and find a crowd of human heads staring back at you.

It is an art installation called Expression.

I did not look too deeply into what it was all supposed to mean. But if it makes you curious enough to stop and look, then I suppose it has already done its job.

And then we come to probably the most famous work in the entire museum: Salvador Dalí’s Christ of Saint John of the Cross, which was once voted Scotland’s favourite painting.

One glance is enough to see that Dalí did not paint the Crucifixion quite as we are used to seeing it. We look at Christ almost directly from above, with no blood, nails or wounds, while a peaceful coastal landscape stretches out below him.

With the painting, Dalí tried to bring faith and science together. In what he called a “cosmic dream”, he is said to have seen the nucleus of an atom, which took on a metaphysical meaning for him and became a symbol of Christ and the unity of the universe.

Well, if he says so.

Confused? Wait, we are not done yet.

A little further on, the skeleton of a giant deer is already waiting for you. And of course, because apparently all of this still is not quite enough, they save a dinosaur skeleton for the end.

Right, I think we have finally seen everything.

And after planets, armour, elephants, Spitfires, polar bears, Dalí and a dinosaur, I really do mean everything.

Elvis has left the building.

How many kelvins are there in the River Kelvin?

We stopped outside for a quick snack, and that was when it finally started to rain.

Well, there it was.

Scottish rain at last.

Nothing dramatic, though. Our path took us beneath a thick canopy of trees, so we barely got wet. In fact, it was a rather pleasant walk, especially since we picked up a bushy-tailed companion almost immediately.

A squirrel.

Clearly used to people, it came right up to us several times.

To reach the university, we still had to cross a bridge over the River Kelvin.

Physicist William Thomson, a professor at the nearby University of Glasgow, became Lord Kelvin when he was granted a peerage. He chose the name after this very river, and the Kelvin temperature scale was later named after him.

So how many kelvins was the River Kelvin when we crossed the bridge?

About 283, which tells you precisely nothing.

Ten degrees Celsius sounds much more useful.

Hogwarts without Harry Potter

The university sits at the top of a hill. Compared with those unfortunate bins that had greeted us in Kelvingrove Park, everything up here was neat and tidy. Students hurried off to lectures while we slowly made our way uphill.

It is the fourth-oldest university in the English-speaking world. The whole concept is quite different from what we are used to back home. In Ljubljana, individual faculties are scattered across different parts of the city, while here much of university life is concentrated on a single campus. Law, economics, social sciences and humanities, languages, mathematics, physics, computing, engineering, medicine...

Practically a small city of students in the middle of Glasgow.

At the top, the university’s enormous façade comes into view, too large to fit into a single frame.

By the time we had walked its entire length, the heavens opened.

We hurried through the entrance and into the courtyard to escape the rain.

And there, everything looked exactly as you would expect from an old British university: stone walls, lawns, tall windows, towers with pointed roofs, and two large quadrangles connected by an arched passageway lined with columns.

This is probably one of the most photogenic corners of the university. No wonder the whole complex is so often compared to Hogwarts. Harry Potter was never actually filmed here, but once you walk beneath these arches, the comparison does not seem quite so far-fetched.

Where are all the pews?

Our Uber dropped us off on the other side of the city, right in front of the cathedral. It was still raining, so we quickly headed inside.

The first part of the cathedral is almost empty. A vast stone space with, somewhere near the middle, a souvenir stall waiting for you.

Not exactly what you expect to find in a cathedral.

As we walked towards the other end of the cathedral, something did not quite add up. The main nave suddenly comes to an end, and there is still no sign of anywhere to sit and pray.

Then you pass through a stone screen and find yourself in a completely different space.

Well, not really. They just put the pews in here.

Now it looks more like a church.

And it is beautiful. A high wooden ceiling, a long row of arches, large stained-glass windows and, of course, the pews.

I later read that this division was intentional. The stone screen once separated the area for ordinary worshippers from the part of the cathedral reserved for the clergy.

The city of the dead above the city of the living

The Necropolis rises on the hill above the cathedral. Another unusual sight for us, as it was the first time we had seen a cemetery built on a hill.

In fact, the graves begin right around the cathedral itself and then continue up the hillside. Some are simple headstones, while others look like small temples, mausoleums and monuments.

The whole place feels more like a park than a traditional cemetery. Paths wind between the graves, greenery is everywhere, and the higher you climb, the more Glasgow opens up below you.

Around 50,000 people are buried in the Necropolis, even though there are only about 3,500 tombs and monuments. Many were buried in shared, unmarked graves, which means that some of the green spaces you see today are actually the burial grounds of thousands of people.

Apparently, even in death, we are not all equal.

Near the top stands the monument to John Knox, the leading Scottish Reformer who played a key role in Scotland’s transition from Catholicism to Protestantism. The monument was already standing here before the cemetery was created.

So the cemetery did not get a monument. The monument got a cemetery.

And this is the view from the very top.

With Glasgow spread out below us, it would almost have been beautiful. If we had not been standing in the middle of a cemetery.

When Glasgow becomes a gallery

There was still plenty of time before evening, the rain had stopped, and we still had enough energy left. So instead of calling another Uber, we decided to walk back to our accommodation.

And along the way, quite by chance, we discovered something that, in my opinion, Glasgow does even better than Edinburgh.

Huge blank walls of multi-storey buildings have been turned into enormous works of art.

They call them murals.

We really liked this.

A boring blank wall can stay a boring blank wall.

Or you can hand it over to someone who knows how to turn it into something that makes you stop as you walk through the city and actually want to look at it.

An idea we could quite easily steal back home in Slovenia. We certainly have enough artists who could turn walls like these into something worth looking at.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped for lunch, and after that, all that remained was the final climb back up to the hotel.

One of our best trips

After ten days of walking, trains, buses, Ubers, castles, lochs, mountains and cities, our journey through Scotland was slowly coming to an end.

Tomorrow, all that remains is the journey to Edinburgh Airport and the flight back to Slovenia.

As for how Anja experienced our trip through Scotland, she will tell that story in the next post.

If you ask me?

This was one of our best trips.

It had everything. Cities and castles, Harry Potter, lochs and mountains, long train journeys, the search for Nessie, mysteries and stories that meant Scotland never felt like just another country we were travelling through.

On our family ranking, it sits just behind Helsinki and our visit to Santa Claus in Rovaniemi.

And considering the competition, that is pretty high.