How did Scotlands proud heart of stone turn to this self-satisfied flab?
THERE ARE plenty of ruined buildings in Scotland but no ruined stones. This sentence, which I first came across engraved upon slabs of unpolished slate by the Edinburgh letter-cutter Jane Raven, drifts into my mind every time I travel north of the Border. It hews a deep sense of history out of the imagination: a feeling for the landscape sculpted by great geological powers; for the cairns, stones and carvings that form the bedrock of Scotland’s culture. It is no accident that the symbol of this wind-blown, rain-lashed country should be a raw hunk of rock — the Stone of Scone — upon which, according to legend, all Scottish kings were once crowned. This is a nation that was founded on hard stuff. It has shown in the people. This is a nation forged by the perseverance of Robert the Bruce, by the craggy asceticism of John Knox, by the unyielding empiricism of David Hume. So it was with some expectation that, last weekend, visiting Edinburgh for the opening of the festival, I set off for Li
