Bower of bliss: Apollon Terroriste by Ian Hamilton Finlay at Little Sparta in Lanarkshire. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
Little Sparta is a garden about 20 miles outside of Edinburgh in the rolling, romantic Pentland Hills made by the late artist Ian Hamilton Finlay.
Or rather, it is not a garden so much as an artwork, a poem, even: it is arguably, in fact, Scotland's greatest work of contemporary art.
Hamilton Finlay, who died in 2006, described this garden as not much a retreat as an attack: it is a rigorous yet romantic acreage that plays out his obsessions - the French Revolution, Virgil's Eclogues, the battleships of the second world war - in poems, inscriptions and sculpture. He plays with and transforms the idea of Arcadia; the idea of the English landscaped garden; the idea of the ideal Virgilean smallholding as poeticised in the Georgics.
Walking round this garden is a delight to the senses. Water gushes into pools, a golden head of Apollo glints through a birch-grove, poems carved on rocks rise up through the grass - it's sermons in stones and books in brooks... It's one of the loveliest and most intellectually rewarding things you could do during a trip to the Edinburgh festival. Transport is provided to Little Sparta from central Edinburgh for the festival period: take advantage of it.
