I’ve always felt it’s mad, criminal almost, to go all the way to Scotland (I live in London) only to visit its cities. Edinburgh may be the most handsome city in the UK, and home to one of its most celebrated festivals, but it is also the capital of one of the most beautiful countries on Earth. To pass up all that magical scenery when it’s right on the doorstep (some of it actually visible from Edinburgh’s hills) seems sacrilegious.
So when I took my son George, aged seven, to the Edinburgh children’s festival in June, we headed first to the scenic southern shores of the Firth of Forth in East Lothian for a few days’ exploration. We based ourselves in North Berwick, a quintessential Scottish seaside town that became popular in the 19th century, thanks to two golden sandy bays and proximity to several world-class golf courses.
Just 25 miles (30 minutes by train) east of Edinburgh, it’s a wonderfully nostalgic place, with vast beaches to play on, rock pools to explore, and great fish and chips at the Lobster Shack in the small harbour. One of the town’s main attractions is the hi-tech Scottish Seabird Centre (£8.95/£4.95), built at the turn of the millennium as an observation point for the spectacle of Bass Rock. In summer, this extinct volcano three miles offshore is home to 100,000 nesting gannets. It’s an impressively hands-on visitor centre, with zoom cameras and telescopes offering close-up views of the gannets (plus guillemots, razorbills, cormorants, puffins and numerous gulls) on the rock.
Even this, however, didn’t prepare us for the bumpy boat ride out to Bass Rock itself (adult £17, child £9) and the sight, sound and stench of these huge, noisy birds at close quarters. David Attenborough, no less, called this “one of the wildlife wonders of the world”. Almost every square foot of the vertiginous rock, as well as the air around it, was thick with gannets. The boat ride also takes in a smaller island populated by thousands of puffins – George, and the other kids on board, preferred these cute comedic birds to the full-on assault of the gannets.
Next day we visited semi-ruined Tantallon Castle (£5.50/£3.30). For an hour we were the only visitors at this red sandstone fortress high on a cliff edge, and soaked up the bloody history (it was besieged for the last time by Oliver Cromwell’s army) and fine views out to the Firth of Forth.
But enough of history, stunning beaches and amazing wildlife. For a seven-year-old boy (OK, his dad too), the highlight of the trip was the air cannons at East Links Family Park (adult/child £13, eastlinks.co.uk) that fire tennis balls at great velocity across the ramparts of the kids’ fort. There’s loads of other good stuff at this low-key park, but with few other visitors around, we spent most of the afternoon manning the cannons, whooping at every shot.
We didn’t have time to see all the family attractions on this coast – such as the National Museum of Flight – before it was time to go to Edinburgh.
The festival season is an industry in Edinburgh, which now calls itself “the world’s leading festival city”. As well as the main event and Fringe in August, the city puts on festivals, from science to storytelling, throughout the year. We’d come for the Imaginate children’s festival, nine days of shows by theatre companies from all over the world. The standard was extremely high, but it remains a relatively low-key event, taking place mostly in venues away from the centre and, unlike the festival proper, attended more by local families and schools than by visitors.
We go to a fair bit of kids’ theatre in London but have never seen anything as off-the-wall as the two productions we saw in Edinburgh. Fluff, an Australian play for younger kids about a group of lost toys had very little dialogue but a DJ to provide the soundscape; and German comedy Broken Dreams was a surreal, sometimes dark tale of unrequited love. It was a barnstorming musical comedy, if a little risqué for young kids (George smirked with delight at the mention of Beyoncé’s arse but, thankfully, missed the even cruder reference to doing the breaststroke).
We arrived too late for the festival’s opening weekend at the National Museum of Scotland (in which there were free performances and activities) and a month too early for the opening of the museum’s 10 new galleries, following a £14m redevelopment. This is already the UK’s most visited museum outside London, but the new galleries on design, fashion and science and technology, with original working machines and interactive galleries (design your own catwalk creation or run round the giant hamster wheel), should provide enough indoor fun – this is Scotland after all – to keep kids entertained all day.
Our favourite attraction was another Victorian institution, the Camera Obscura, a kind of 19th-century webcam that, using a simple roof-mounted pinhole camera, can zoom in on people walking down Edinburgh’s streets and project them on to a viewing table. With a few sweeps of the camera we saw the whole city – and I was reminded why Edinburgh makes a brilliant break for kids. It is small enough that we could walk almost everywhere and pack loads into a day; and the shape of the city – with Princes Street on one side, its gardens in the middle, and the castle and other historic buildings rising dramatically on the other – means its many highlights are always in view. We felt immersed in the place and its rich history.
I’ve never been to the festival proper and Imaginate felt like a nice little taster. We’ll definitely be back for the big one in the next year or two – and to explore more of the gorgeous country surrounding it, of course.
• The trip was provided by Visit Scotland and Festivals Edinburgh. In 2017, the Imaginate Festival runs from 27 May-4 June. Travel from London to Edinburgh was provided by Virgin Trains (from £60 return). Accommodation in North Berwick was provided by The Glebe House (£65pp pn B&B)
