Arthur's Seat
— — the city laid out at the foot of an old volcano.
Not only on a wall.
“An extinct volcano rising 251 metres straight out of a capital city. The summit is a walk, not a climb — forty minutes from the Palace of Holyroodhouse, on a path that turns to whinstone underfoot. From the top, the Firth of Forth opens north, Edinburgh Castle holds the west, and the wind almost always has something to say. from the studio
Arthur's Seat, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Arthur's Seat is the high point of Holyrood Park, a 650-acre royal park on the eastern edge of Edinburgh's Old Town. It rises to 251 metres above sea level and is the eroded remnant of a volcano active roughly 340 million years ago, in the Carboniferous period. The hill sits within a city of half a million people, a short walk from the Scottish Parliament and the Palace of Holyroodhouse. Several waymarked paths lead to the summit; the gentlest climbs from Dunsapie Loch on the eastern side.
The hill is a study in volcanic geology compressed into a single walk. The summit cone is basalt; the Salisbury Crags on the western flank are a sill of intrusive dolerite that James Hutton, the founder of modern geology, used in the 1780s to argue the Earth's age ran far deeper than scripture allowed. Hutton's Section, where he showed igneous rock cutting through older sedimentary layers, is still visible at the base of the crags. The whinstone underfoot is the same rock that paves much of central Edinburgh.
Edinburgh sits at 56 degrees north, and the summit catches weather coming off the North Sea with very little in the way. On a clear day the view runs from the Pentlands in the south to the Forth bridges and the coast of Fife in the north; on a thick day the cloud comes down to the Crags and the city below disappears. Walkers reach the top in roughly forty minutes from the Palace gates. The wind almost always has something to say, and the light changes fast.