It boasts hot porridge doused in whisky, fresh ostrich meat, organic beers and hunks of wild boar, and it nestles under the battlements of one of the country's most imposing castles. Welcome to the farmers' market in Edinburgh, officially crowned as the best in Britain.
The city best known to shoppers worldwide for its garish tartan gift shops on the Royal Mile and Jenners, perhaps the country's most genteel department store, has seen off competition from five towns including Tavistock, Chepstow and Huntingdon. Its 65 regular stallholders drive beer down from the Black Isle near Inverness, ship fresh langoustine, crab and mussels from the island of Arran and boar raised on smallholdings and hill farms across the country.
The winter weather in Edinburgh, which stallholders admit can be miserable, has produced one of the market's most popular, even notorious, institutions: the Stoats' "porridge bar". It serves that famous staple of the Scottish diet with traditional salt, or a good belt of body-warming whisky and seasonal raspberries and cream. Ostrich, farmed in Lanarkshire, is about as exotic as it gets, said Caroline Hamilton, a lamb and beef stallholder at the market, whose stall was voted the market's best in 2004. "You don't come here to buy olives and red peppers. You don't get them,
because we don't grow them in Scotland."
Visited by between 6,000 and 10,000 shoppers each Saturday, the market has evolved since it first opened as a small monthly event in 2000 into a showcase for Scottish agriculture.
I understand that it's in Castle Terrace, from about 10 am.
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