And in Broad Street may be found the house in which George Gordon, Lord Byron, lived in his school days. In Don Juan, he autobiographically remembers—
"As 'Auld Lang Syne' brings Scotland one and all,
Scotch plaids, Scotch snoods, the blue hills, and clear streams
The Dee, the Don, Balgownie's Brig's black wall,
All my boy feelings, all my gentle dreams
Of what I then dreamt, clothed in their own pall
Like Banquo's offspring;—floating past me seems
My childhood in this childishness of mine:
I care not—'tis a glimpse of 'Auld Lang Syne.'"
Aberdeen is a sea city, lying between the mouths of the Dee and the Don. A bridge, dating from 1320, crosses the Don, and Byron steadfastly avoided it, lest he, a single son, might be found thereon on the single foal of a mare, and the prophecy be filled, the brig fall down.
One day in a small booth off Union Street I stopped to buy strawberries—if you pick up southern England in early May and make Inverness in late August, you can follow red strawberries and red poppies in the wheat all the way from Land's End to John o' Groat's. I asked the price of the berries and was told. I asked again, and again. Finally, not ears but intuition told me. It was a Scandinavian-Gaelic-English. I remembered that in Edinburgh I had once asked a policeman the way, and hearing his reply I turned to my friend—"Wouldn't you think you were in Minneapolis?" For especially in Aberdeen you are looking to that Norway with which Scotland was so closely linked, as with all the Scandinavian countries, in the early centuries, till the Maid of Norway, granddaughter to Alexander III died on her way to take the crown, and till after Margaret of Denmark brought the Orkneys and the Hebrides to James III as her dowery.
"To Norroway, to Norroway,
To Norroway o'er the faem;
The King's daughter of Norroway,
'Tis thou maun bring her hame."
And I remember the tragedy of that frustrated journey—
"O forty miles off Aberdeen,
'Tis fifty fathoms deep,
And there lies gude Sir Patrick Spens,
Wi' the Scots lords at his feet."
Remembering the sea, which I had not yet seen, I tried to make my way down to the shore, but Aberdeen is a sea-port, and docks instead of shore line its sea edge. What I was seeking was rather rocks—
"On the rocks by Aberdeen,
Where the whistlin' wave had been
As I wandered and at e'en
Was eerie—"
And after a visit to the fishmarket, which is a truly marvelous monstrous place, I set out to find the rocks, toward the south.