#KateBushStan

[freedformwriter]

Diary of a Baggage Train: Day 2

The mood today is Kate Bush’s stellar 1985 track “Under The Ivy”. I start the day feeling a bit ruined and grey; how perfect that today’s big itinerary item is a ruined castle. Not one of those well-preserved ruins that populate the English Heritage days out. The ones with interpretive signs so that visitors squint and say, yes, I suppose I do see how these few rocks were once a citadel capable of withstanding the Vikings, Normans, or Yorkists. Those are ruins in custody and the authorities allow them, like respectable pensioners, to deteriorate only very slowly. If Drummond Castle were a person, they would be an extravagant society darling whose charming antics became ‘too much’ quite soon. Abandoned by their peers, the rot set in ferociously and their ruin was virtually overnight. From the outside it appears like a Sleeping Beauty castle with the four cylindrical turrets, the cloak of ivy, and the barbed wire perimeter. But, once breached, the bones of a Victorian mediaevalist fancy are obvious. Many of the walls soar up to the treetops, revealing the decadent lines of high ceilings, large picture windows, decorative fireplaces, and the cutoff ends of pipes I imagine once carried hot water to a dozen clawfoot bathtubs.

I’m not alone when I burrow past the Keep Out sign. The tourists are primarily continental, Dutch and German couples who arrive in their left-hand drive vans and a pack of French holidaymakers who make an enormous production of parking their rental fleet in the adjacent field. They are killing my magical commune with the past. Yet when they take their photos and clear off, I’m uneasy. I suddenly fear disorientation. Or absorption. Maybe there is a point to floor plans. I roll my feet softly forward as if one stomp might dislodge the keystone of the whole place. Architectural details take on a dangerous cast: the elegant swoop of stairs that ascends with no support, a dark cavernous hall where the brick roof clings on, a spot where the reclaimed forest floor gives way to the gaping hole down to the cellar level. The crows seem to know just how to time their caws for maximum eery effect.

The tragedy of Drummond Castle is actually distinctly un-gothic. I remind myself of this morning’s reading. After the war, the aristocratic owners removed the roof to void paying tax. Whether the villain of the piece is the hubristic landed class or the Atlee government will depend on who’s telling the tale. According to a woman who helps out at our Drymen B&B, the root cause of the rot was a fallout between the Duke of Montrose and his half brother. The Duke, she declares, is from here and can be seen from time to time in the village. The half brother was never seen in these parts. It’s unclear which brother stripped the shingles, but local loyalties are clear. By the 19th century, the Duke of Montrose owned 100,000 acres of this area, and all the inhabitants were ‘dependent upon the vast influence and affluence’ of the estate. I read this in Drymen’s Millenium Account, a local history compendium awkwardly if inevitably introduced by the current Duke of Montrose. The vast emptying of the Highlands prior to the Victorian era was, he declares, necessary in order to make agricultural improvements and halt the menace of famine. The librarian who gave me the guide apologised she couldn’t provide me with more selection, but she’d packed up the books. Moving? No, just closing. The small space was papered with posters promoting breastfeeding friendly spaces and offering to help families with benefit claims. Three older residents had just come in with cakes for some sort of coffee hour.

At the castle, I fight down the spooked feeling. Obviously, nothing could be more authentically gothic than a heroine fleeing the building fuelled by nothing but her own vague but profound sense of terror, but panic attacks suck. I want to reclaim my initial delight in discovering this out-of-time space. Though the inside and the outside of Castle Drummond merged through the fierce young forest, I find a spot beyond the bounds of the ruins. I lie down on the moss and channel my inner Kate. The ruins don’t send me dream of ghostly shooting parties, with their tailormade tweeds and changes for dinner and long, enervated days spent looking out the window into the wall of rain rolling off the sea. The earth doesn’t echo with the unceasing local labour that built and maintained this palace for the imported aristocratic friends of the Montrose family. Looking up at the new leaves and the old ivy, I sense stillness. And birds, so many birds. The crows, yes, but also a host of lighter notes signalling the same thing: home. Ruined for whom? All at once, I’m happy this place hasn’t survived to be one more tastefully updated hotel with a wet-weather wedding marquee and antiquated plumbing to plague the new owners.

The green on the grey, I feel it all around me.

[kbsd]

katebushstan. Drop the “dean” it’s cleaner.

honestly justin timberlake you're right that is the simplest and easiest solution here. sold