Any plans for next week?
Got anything pencilled in already? A work commitment, perhaps? Appointment with millionaire patron? Candlelit dinner with potential lover?
Drop them.
Scotland’s annual history festival – Previously – returns from 18–22 November with 38 events and 11 venues (four of them right on Broughton’s doorstep).
The programme includes drama, talks, poetry, music, walks and books, with most events costing £4.00 and some being free.
Events which caught this correspondent’s eye include:
- Guided tour of Warriston Cemetery – explore north Edinburgh’s jungly necropolis in the company of volunteers who are working to improve it
- Scottish Women – Anne Harrower examines 300 colourful years of hard graft, witchcraft and ladies of pleasure
- The Vikings – Archaeologist Julian D. Richards reveals fascinating insights gained from excavating the winter camp of the Great Viking Army of AD 872
- The Women who Widnae Haud their Wheesht – Dr Lesley Orr looks at the lives of the women who fought for equality, plotting a course from early days to the present and looking a little way into the future
- Unicorns: A Zoological Analysis – Goat, horse, Scottish national symbol: the boundary between myth and material explained by researcher Elyse Waters
- The Flyting – Kennedy and Dunbar’s stunning 16th-century showcase for the Scots language, full of smut, insult and – by today’s standards – grotesque political incorrectness. Delicious.
All in all, it’s a jolly good thing, or as Festival Director Susan Morrison puts it ‘We are small but we are mighty’.
Full details and booking links are available here with interesting teasers and updates available on Facebook and Twitter.
