strange_complex | Entries tagged with castles

These were the other two main things we spent our time on while in Scotland, although I'm sure Bram Stoker would have approved heartily of both. I'll cover them below in the order in which we did them, with cuts to save your scrolling fingers.

We began our holiday in Inverness, from where we visited two local castles. The first was Cawdor, of "All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, thane of Cawdor!" fame, although far from being the sort of blasted ruin those words immediately conjure up, it is actually the very nicely-maintained living seat of the Cawdor family, and since we visited it in brilliant sunshine in early June, my prevailing memories of it will always be of the incredible smells and colours which filled its gardens and the banks of the stream which runs alongside it. It all made me think rather of Lord Summerisle's Castle, with its similarly bountiful gardens, dark wood furniture and armour on the walls, and even had some topiary in the garden which looked awfully like a pair of spread thighs to me. The family's motto, visible on various parts of the castle, is 'Be Mindful', and struck me as a nice example of the Tiffany problem - a perfectly valid early modern motto which now sounds anachronistic thanks to modern hipsterism.

( Floweriness, mottoes and some almost Wicker-Mannish topiary under here )

Cawdor was followed by Urquhart, on the shores of Loch Ness, which of course reminded me of another ruthless English-accented aristocrat, Francis Urquhart. He wasn't home, and nor was Nessie, but the castle was a very aesthetically-pleasing ruin which probably looked better for the fact that the skies had clouded over while we journeyed there from Cawdor than it would have done in bright sunshine. I mean, sunshine just isn't very Scottish-castley, is it?

( More lakeside broken battlements under here )

Back in Inverness that evening, I took advantage of the opportunity to meet up with local resident

celtic_rose, whom I have been LJ friends with for c. 10 years now, but had never met in person. She took me to a local bar called Scotch and Rye, where we had a grand old time chatting away, eating dinner and working our way through their extensive cocktail menu, trying a cocktail each from every one of the first four pages. We decided at 11pm that moving onto page five would probably be a bad idea, although

celtic_rose did go back and continue the great work the following evening! We were obviously having such a lovely time together than when we paid at the end of the night, our waitress asked us if we were celebrating anything special. Yes, we replied - meeting IRL for the first time after a decade of online friendship!

The next day we set off for Cruden Bay, where we started with Slains Castle (as per yesterday's post). After that, our next stop was Dunnottar Castle, which stands on an incredibly-dramatic rocky headland that can only be reached via a narrow spur and a lot of steps.

( Various additional pics under here, including one of four DracSoc members admiring its giant cistern )

The next morning saw us at possibly the second most exciting castle of the trip after Slains, by virtue of a similar combination of Gothic literary relevance and unkempt, enter-at-your-own risk promise: Gight Castle, the ancestral seat of Lord Byron's family. He never got the chance to own it, because his father gambled the family fortune away and it was seized by creditors, but the best-read member of the Dracula Society told us he would have been conceived there, and I believe her. It isn't really a 'castle' as such - more of a fortified manor-house in a green and pleasant valley, but anyway it was marvellous fun to rummage around, cautiously testing our footing and daring to climb up piles of rubble to the first floor, all again under suitably-grey Scottish skies and with nary another soul besides ourselves in sight. I'm sure Byron himself would be very pleased with how it has all ended up.

( More Romantic ruination under here )

Thence onwards to Huntly Castle, whose Earls belonged to the same Clan Gordon of which the Byron family were a branch.

( More details of its decorative stone-work, plus a silly picture of me pretending to be a prisoner taken by Nina )

Finally, it would be rude to visit Scotland without going to a whisky distillery. We went to Strathisla, which is one of a handful of distilleries claiming to be the oldest in Scotland(!). It is certainly very picturesque anyway, and as a great lover of Scotch whisky I enjoyed learning properly about how it is made. I'll have a better understanding of the vocabulary used to describe it in future - such as knowing that when a whisky is described as 'peaty', this is not because it is made with peaty water (as I had assumed), but because the malted barley is dried out over a peat fire before being ground up to go into the whisky. After our tour of the distillery itself, we were treated to a tasting in a lovely darkened room lined with leather chairs and tables with rows of tasting glasses, which was very pleasant indeed.

( More stills, barrels and DracSoc members in leather chairs here )

I thought their 12 year old single malt, just called Strathisla, was fairly pleasant, but I wasn't blown away by it and could take or leave their blends, so did not buy a bottle to take home. However, in the duty-free shop at Aberdeen airport I discovered a bottle of Ardbeg Corryvreckan, which I have been in quasi-religious raptures about ever since trying it at one of Alistair Carmichael's whisky tasting sessions at Lib Dem conference in Southport, and which I'd enjoyed a dram or two of in Inverness and Cruden Bay as well. So I coughed up and carted the precious nectar carefully home, where I immediately also ordered a pair of the proper whisky tasting glasses which Alistair uses, and which they'd also given us at the Strathisla distillery. They really do make a big difference to how the aromas reach your nose, and given that the whisky itself cost the best part of £60, I wanted to ensure I was getting the most out of it!

I had my first little dram last night, and it really is very special. My prevailing experience of it on my first try at Southport was that it tastes of bonfires, and it still does, but there are all sorts of other notes which come out as it oxidises and you add little drops of water - chocolate, musty leather, crème brûlée and something spicy between ginger and cumin. Definitely one to enjoy in moderation, and perhaps especially as the winter nights draw in, but an excellent souvenir to have brought back from my summer holiday.

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/611710.html

Just over a week ago I went on a five-day holiday to Scotland with DracSoc. As usual, there was a particular Gothic literature-related theme to our trip: in this case, that our main destination, Cruden Bay, was also Bram Stoker's favourite holiday spot, where he spent the month of August at least twelve time from 1893 onwards. But, while we were in the area, we also took the opportunity to visit its best castles and various other local attractions. I'm going to write up the experience in those two parts - first the stuff directly related to Bram Stoker, and then everything else.

Cruden Bay is a tiny fishing village on the east coast of Scotland. According to local Stoker expert Mike Shepherd (on whom more below), Bram discovered it after walking down the coast from holiday accommodation in the larger town of Peterhead, and decided that its quiet character, beautiful beach and coastal walks were more to his taste. Thereafter, it became his regular holiday destination, and importantly for us he stayed there for the first time in 1893 - half-way through the period of 1890-97 when he was slowly writing Dracula. Since he was so busy as Henry Irving's theatre manager throughout the rest of those years, he must have written most of the novel during his summer holidays in Cruden Bay.

The first two years, he stayed in the Kilmarnock Hotel, where we were lucky enough to be able to see his signature in the guest-book from his second visit in 1894:

After that, he began renting out a local cottage, now called Hilton, which has a garden with views over the surrounding bay. Again according to Mike, his own conversations with the current owners of the cottage, plus interviews which a journalist conducted in the 1960s, both brought up local memories of people regularly seeing Bram seated at a table in the garden writing - which of course would have included him finishing off Dracula during his first couple of years there.

Obviously, as many DracSoc members as possible stayed in the Kilmarnock Arms, but as they only had a limited number of available rooms, I was amongst a group of five who stayed up the road in the Cruden Bay Bed & Breakfast instead. I had absolutely no complaints about that, though - it was a very comfortable place with a genial host called Ian who enjoyed hearing all about our exploits and regaling us with his anecdotes, and bless him had gone to the trouble to make us feel welcome by decking the place out with vampire-related ~~tat~~ finery and even leaving a copy of Dracula out for us in the reception area in case we needed to refresh our memories!

Later on in life, Bram obviously came to find Cruden Bay too busy and bustling for his tastes, and instead began staying in a cottage at the even smaller village of Whinnyfold.

This overlooks a bay with dramatic rock formations, where seals were resting and calling out eerily when we visited. Apparently, it features heavily in one of his later novels, The Mystery of the Sea, which is entirely based in the local area, and features the ghosts of centuries' worth of sailors who have drowned on the rocks emerging from the mist and climbing, zombie-like, up the zig-zag path to the top of the cliffs.

Between Cruden Bay and Whinnyfold is a beautiful curving golden sand beach, along which Bram used to like to walk, either with his wife Florence, or on his own with one hand behind his back and his head bowed, deep in thought as he worked out the next stages of his latest story.

Here you can see Mike Shepherd (on the right holding a sheaf of paper) guiding a select handful of DracSoc members along the beach, talking to us about the local landscape, what we know of Bram Stoker's visits there, and the various ways in which it inspired his writing.

One such feature, at the Cruden Bay end of the beach, is this little cove, known as the Watter's Mou', about which he wrote a short story of the same name.

Just as we got to this, three deer, who had been startled by a man nearby walking his dog, came bounding past within a few metres of us, over a fence and off across a beautiful big green field of ripening wheat.

The biggest and most Gothic attraction, though, was Slains Castle, which stands on the cliffs just beyond the Watter's Mou' at the north end of the bay, and can be seen from almost anywhere within the village. Today, it is a ruin, having been de-roofed and partially demolished by an owner who no longer wished either to live in or pay taxes on it in the 1920s, but in Bram's day it was a splendid stately home, which he may well have visited. Certainly, it has two particular features which have their counterparts in Dracula's castle, which itself is clearly perfectly habitable with only a few partially-ruined features (the chapel, the battlements) in the novel. One is a tower perched right over a cliff-edge, which I struggled to really capture with my phone camera, but in real life very much lives up to the following description from chapter 3 of Dracula: "The castle is on the very edge of a terrific precipice. A stone falling from the window would fall a thousand feet without touching anything!"

The other is an internal octagonal room which may well have been the inspiration for these sentences from chapter 2: "The Count halted, putting down my bags, closed the door, and crossing the room, opened another door, which led into a small octagonal room lit by a single lamp, and seemingly without a window of any sort. Passing through this, he opened another door, and motioned me to enter." Obviously, octagonalness is likewise difficult to capture in a single shot, but anyway this is the room in question - though unlike the Count's equivalent, clearly it did have windows:

With or without those two features, though, Slains Castle is a very splendid place to explore, offering all the fun of ruination but also a largely-intact structure which means you can get a good look at the architecture underneath the original decorative facade, almost as though the outer finery had been peeled away, and also means that there are lots of enticing spaces to poke noses into and discover. Since it is still privately-owned and not maintained as a tourist attraction by Historic Scotland or the like, there are no health-and-safety features, it's all entirely at your own risk, and indeed a local woman called Jill who is campaigning to get the castle preserved and protected pointed out to us how one doorway lintel had collapsed since her own last visit only two weeks earlier. So, I join her in hoping that the remaining structure will be bought up by the Scottish government, stabilised and made safe for visitors in the near future. But at the same time, in its current state it makes for a wonderful playground to explore, so long as you pay due care and attention, and I'm very glad I got to see it this way.