Southern Edge of King's Buildings Campus

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 18 Nov 2021

The picture was taken from Craigmillar Park Golf Course, one of four round here. Edinburgh certainly isn't short of golf courses, and somebody calculated a couple of years back that they cover over 5% of its area. Although it is often said that Scotland has more golf courses per head of population than any other country in the world, because it is so sparsely populated as a whole, golf's overall land use in Scotland falls well below the figure for the UK (approximately 0.7%) and England (approximately 2%). Indeed it is claimed that in England twice as much land is devoted to golf as to housing. The King's Buildings is a campus belonging to Edinburgh University, or the University of Edinburgh as it is officially known, and it is home to most of its science and technology departments. It got its name, extremely unimaginatively, due to the fact that a king happened to be sitting on the throne at the time of its initial building, about a century ago. The roads through the campus were renamed, slightly more imaginatively, seven or eight years ago, and are all named after scientists. A lot of these scientists will only be known to other scientists though, so they don't exactly trip off the tongue! An interesting Wikipedia titbit on this subject is that one of the original names got rejected by the council as, unless extraordinary circumstances are deemed to apply, a person must be dead for at least ten years before a road can be named after them.

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