The first poetry walk of 2026 took place not in Edinburgh but in St Andrews in mid-March, as part of this year’s StAnza, Scotland’s International Poetry Festival.

As you can see from the photos, we were blessed with (at least partially) blue skies, and what I’d expected to be a cold wind coming in from the sea turned out to be no more than a gentle breeze.

I called the walk ‘Waves as Blue as Air’, a line taken from the poem / song ‘We’ll Go to Sea No More’:

It was written by one, or perhaps both of the Misses Corbett, the sisters Walterina Cunningham and Grace Corbett who lived in Edinburgh, by the sea at Portobello. They were wrote a number of books in the early nineteenth century, most notably two editions called The Odd Volume (1826–1827). This poem features in the second of these. (The text above is taken from Poems of Places, Volume 2 (1876).)

With thanks to Riley for the photos.