Edinburghs

Before arriving in Edinburgh, Nataliya Bezborodova’s impression of Scotland was shaped largely by Hollywood. “My knowledge of this country was pretty much based on the film Braveheart,” she admits with a laugh, standing before the grand neoclassical columns of the National Galleries of Scotland. As if on cue, the castle’s daily gun salute fires overhead, scattering pigeons and punctuating our conversation with a jolt.

Three years have passed since the 47-year-old anthropologist left her home in Kyiv for Edinburgh, after the Russian invasion. Celluloid warriors have long been replaced by the rhythms of life in a city she now knows like the back of her hand. So well, in fact, that she has launched a walking tour revealing a layer even locals might miss: the story of Edinburgh’s vibrant Ukrainian community.

Bridges Across Borders: Tracing Ukrainian Roots in the Heart of Edinburgh started in June and is the latest in a growing portfolio of women-led immersive walks developed in partnership with Women in Travel CIC, the UK-based social enterprise that fosters gender inclusion in the tourism industry. It now offers seven tours celebrating multiculturalism in its many forms: from a Saudi-led deep dive into west London’s Edgware Road to a sensory stroll along Ealing Road in Wembley, north-west London, with its Hindu temples and sizzling street food. All tour leaders are trained through Women in Travel’s guiding academy, which aims to help women earn an income by sharing their stories with travellers seeking a deeper connection to a place.

The two-and-a-half-hour walking tour attracts a mix of locals and tourists, Nataliya tells me. “I’ve even had people from Ukraine join the group, who had no idea about our shared heritage with Scotland,” she says, as we stroll along Princes Street, the city’s main artery.

Scotland’s Ukrainian population has grown since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, with about 5,000 refugees arriving via Edinburgh. But, as Nataliya points out, the ties go back centuries. Dominating the horizon, the crenellated outline of Edinburgh Castle looms large. It houses St Margaret’s Chapel, built in the 12th century and named after a queen thought to be a quarter Ukrainian. Edinburgh and Kyiv were also formally twinned in 1989, Nataliya adds. We pass the Scott Monument, its blackened gothic spires piercing the sky. At its base, a kilted busker skirls a haunting tune on the bagpipes.

We are soon puffing our way up and down the leafy slopes of Calton Hill, pausing first at a plaque to Saint Wolodymyr – who helped bring Christianity to Ukraine more than a thousand years ago – and then at the Holodomor memorial stone honouring the seven million Ukrainians who died in the forced famine of 1932-33. “It’s a reminder that these things must never happen again,” Nataliya reflects.

A short walk away lies Royal Terrace, on the eastern edge of New Town, a handsome Georgian sweep of sandstone townhouses by the Scottish architect William Henry Playfair. Tucked between swish boutique hotels and stately homes, blue-and-yellow flags flutter at the Ukrainian community centre.

Inside, a plate of homemade potato dumplings, cooked by the centre’s summer camp children and topped with a dollop of sour cream, awaits. As we tuck in, Nataliya explains how the arrival of recent refugees has rekindled pride among Edinburgh’s older Ukrainian diaspora, whose first major wave came in the 1940s: “The newcomers helped them reconnect with a culture that had gone underground.” Today, the centre hosts coffee mornings, cookery classes and language lessons for the Ukrainian community, alongside a rolling programme of concerts and film screenings open to all.

Back out on the street, trams rumble by as we head west, passing familiar landmarks, including a bronze Sherlock Holmes, keeping watch at Picardy Place in tribute to his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, born just around the corner. In the shadow of the redbrick Scottish National Portrait Gallery lies our final stop: the Square, a Ukrainian-owned cafe that opened in 2023.

This modest slip of a building, with its slate-grey facade and plant-fringed window, is easy enough to miss. Inside, though, it’s quietly pioneering: the first place in the city to serve both Scottish and Ukrainian staples (though not on the same plate). The full Scottish breakfast – haggis, tatties and all – sits alongside Ukrainian classics such as holubtsi (cabbage rolls stuffed with lightly spiced meat).

The owners, Ievgen and Valentyna Loievska, arrived in Edinburgh from the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv in 2022. “The cafe was our way of bridging cultures and bringing people together,” Ievgen tells me. Within minutes of sitting down, the table groans under bowls of steaming borscht, plates piled high with dumplings, and deruny (crisp golden potato pancakes drenched in parmesan sauce). Just as I think I can’t manage another bite, out comes the grand finale: syrnyky – sweet curd-cheese pancakes swimming in velvety berry juice – as Nataliya shares what creating the tour has meant to her personally.

“Putting the tour together made me realise just how many Ukrainian landmarks are hidden across this city,” Nataliya says. “It’s about finding connections between seemingly distant cultures.”

As we wrap up, I’m handed a doggy bag for the journey home, a gesture that feels more like leaving a favourite grandma’s kitchen than ending a walking tour. An experience that initially seemed a little leftfield now makes perfect sense within the context of this city, I realise. In a place steeped in storytelling, Nataliya’s tour adds a fresh chapter to Edinburgh’s ever-evolving narrative.

Women in Travel’s Bridges Across Borders: Tracing Ukrainian Roots in the Heart of Edinburgh tour runs every Wednesday at midday and costs £58pp, including a taster plate at the Square cafe. Created with the support of Visit Scotland

A distinct farmyard smell lingers near the muddy Sheep Paintings. People walk slowly between two dense hedges of windfallen oak branches, or stand silently in a fragile cage of bulrush stems with light seeping through the mossy skylight overhead. I’m visiting the largest ever indoor exhibition of work by Andy Goldsworthy, one of Britain’s most influential nature artists. His recent installations have a visceral sense of rural landscape: hare’s blood on paper, sheep shit on canvas, rusty barbed wire, stained wool, cracked clay.

The show is a sensory celebration of earth – its textures and temperatures, colours, character. The seasons cycle through an ongoing multidecade series of photos featuring the same fallen elm. There are leaf patterns and delicate woven branches, crusts of snow, lines of summer foxglove flowers or autumn rosehips. Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years is a National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) exhibition in the neoclassical Royal Scottish Academy building.

After the exhibition, as a sort of cultural pilgrimage, I’m walking six miles across Edinburgh in search of works by the Dumfriesshire-based Goldsworthy and other artists who engage with the landscape. I start at the Royal Botanic Garden (free and open daily, rbge.org.uk), a short bus ride north of the National Gallery. Just inside the east gate, there’s a perforated sculpture by Barbara Hepworth with sunlight pouring through it.

“Art has made me look at the world … and engage with what’s around me,” Goldsworthy writes in the notes for Fifty Years. Walking up through shady beeches, blazing wildflowers and scented, bee-buzzing lavender, there’s a bronze girl in a waterlily pond, and a sundial by the Scottish artist and writer Ian Hamilton Finlay near the terrace cafe. Finlay’s best-known artwork is the garden he created with his wife, Sue, in the wild Pentland Hills (£15 over-16s, £10 for 10-15s, under-10s free, open Thursday to Sunday until 28 September, littlesparta.org.uk). He also built a stone temple in the rolling, wooded acres of Jupiter Artland, a few miles from Edinburgh, where Goldsworthy has put rocks in trees and trees in a stone-walled barn (£11.80 adults, £7.50 children). Celebrating both artists, Jupiter’s exhibition Work Begat Work runs until 28 September.

In the Royal Botanic Garden, Goldsworthy’s Slate Cone stands next to Inverleith House, where the gallery is showing feminist photomontages by Linder (free, until 19 October), who opened this year’s Edinburgh art festival (until 24 August). Enlarged images from her work (smiling mouths, bees, lilies) are dotted among ponds and flowerbeds.

Goldsworthy’s Slate, Hole, Wall, a round enclosure of stacked grey stones, stands in the gardens’ south-east corner, under a weeping silver lime tree sweet with honey-fragrant blossom. The Water of Leith Walkway runs close to the John Hope Gateway on Arboretum Place, and I follow it south-westwards. In Stockbridge, the Sunday market, shaded by whitebeam trees, offers loaves of artisanal bread, Perthshire strawberries and cakes made from insects. Almost hidden in branches under a bridge, a lifesize cast-iron figure stands in the river nearby, one of Antony Gormley’s 6 Times statues.

Another of the figures is buried chest-deep by the zebra crossing between National Galleries Scotland: Modern One and Two. Wandering past domed St Bernard’s Well, with its statue of the goddess of health, and picturesque Dean Village, crammed with fellow camera-wielding visitors, I detour to the Modern galleries up the riverside steps. Linking both museums is Charles Jencks’ huge Landform, with its grassy hills and curving pond. There are days’ worth of galleries, artists’ rooms and sculpture gardens to explore here, but the afternoon is passing and I have more miles and museums to cover.

Heading back along the leafy Water of Leith, I climb another steep flight of steps towards Haymarket. On the south lawn of St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, a labyrinth winds through aromatic yarrow and knapweed. Around this flowering meadow, as part of an installation called On Sacred Ground, there are rough benches elegiacally listing threatened Scottish species: corncrake, hawfinch, wryneck, ring ouzel, capercaillie. I walk on through Princes Street Gardens, back past the Royal Academy building, and drop into the National Gallery (free) next door to see Van Gogh’s impasto Olive Trees and William McTaggart’s stormy seascapes.

Up more steps, pausing to look back at distant views of the firth, and then down again across photogenic Victoria Street. Finally, I stroll through Greyfriars Kirkyard to reach the National Museum of Scotland (free, nms.ac.uk). In 1998, Goldsworthy installed four sunset-coloured blocks of split sandstone on the museum roof, with its panoramic city views. But the blue skies have turned stormy. “Our roof terrace is closed today – the weather is too dreich!” says a red sign by the lift.

Instead, I head to the basement, where more late-1990s works by Goldsworthy complement a brilliant gallery about Scotland’s early inhabitants. There’s Hearth, a burned circle on a platform of salvaged wood from the museum’s construction site. Stacked Whalebones is a pale ball of interlocking bones, the whole skeleton of a five-metre pilot whale found beached in Northumberland. Around golden bronze age torcs and silver Viking arm-rings, Roman carvings and flint arrowheads, the artist also designed Enclosure, two curving walls of reworked Edinburgh slates. Another backdrop is of stained Dumfriesshire clay like the Red Wall in the Fifty Years exhibition.

Outside, the Edinburgh fringe is in full swing (until 25 August). Among the crowds are buskers, jugglers, unicyclists. With just one night to sample its anarchic offerings, I plunge into dodgy cabarets and sweaty comedies in tiny underventilated venues. At 9pm, I’m back at the National Museum for an accomplished Lloyd-Webber-esque musical about Van Gogh. Towards midnight, I head to Summerhall for a strange, polyphonic prequel to Hamlet by the Polish choral-theatre group Song of the Goat.

The next day, as I walk to Edinburgh’s Waverley station, there’s a prismatic haze caught between the misty drizzle and breezy summer sun. It reminds me of Goldsworthy’s 1980s photo series with titles like Rainbow Splash Hit Water With Heavy Stick Bright, Sunny, Windy. As the train speeds south, through Northumberland and North Yorkshire, I see with new eyes the wave-pounded cliffs and bale-studded headlands, the dry-stone walls and sheep-scattered patchwork dales.

The trip was provided by Visit Scotland, NGS and LNER, York to Edinburgh from £23 each way, London to Edinburgh from £52 Andy Goldsworthy 50 Years runs until 2 November, £19 adults, £5 children, nationalgalleries.org).