Scottish history

Slains Castle – A House of Ghosts

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“We came in the afternoon to Slanes Castle, built upon the margin of the sea, so that the walls of one of the towers seem only a continuation of a perpendicular rock, the foot of which is beaten by the waves. To walk round the house seemed impracticable. From the windows the eye wanders over the sea that separates Scotland from Norway, and when the winds beat with violence must enjoy all the terrifick grandeur of the tempestuous ocean.I would not for my amusement wish for a storm; but as storms, whether wished or not, will sometimes happen, I may say, without violation of humanity, that I should willingly look out upon them from Slanes Castle.’

So mused Samuel Johnson who passed this way with his friend and travel companion, James Boswell, in the late summer of 1773 on their journey through Scotland to the Western Isles. Johnson’s account of the trip became the famous A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, later followed by Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, which brings the irascible Johnson joyfully to life. This being two-hundred-and-fifty-years since their passage through Aberdeenshire on their circuitous route westward, I felt compelled to visit the castle today.

Johnson doesn’t mention staying there, the castle then under the care of the Count of Errol, but he and Boswell spent the night at Slains after an excursion along the coast. It must have been opulently appointed in its day, but it’s a bleak and desolate ruin overlooking the cliffs now, the wind rushing through its empty corridors and doorless openings straight off the sea.

‘I had a most elegant room,’ Boswell writes: ‘but there was a fire in it which blazed: and the sea, to which my windows looked, roared: and the pillows were made with the feathers of some sea-fowl, which had to me a disagreeable smell: so that, by all these causes, I was kept awake a good while.’

In his half-waking, fitful sleep, he imagines the ghost of Lord Kilmarnock who had married into the Erroll title and was beheaded on Tower Hill in 1746 for his part in the Jacobite uprising. Wandering around the castle’s old halls and passageways, I couldn’t help but think of what other ghosts it might be host to.

The original thirteenth-century castle, a fortress built by the Comyn family five miles further along the coast to the south, was forfeited after the Battle of Barra in 1308 to the Hay family after the defeat of the Earl of Buchan, John Comyn, whose troops scattered and fled from the battlefield when Bruce himself appeared waving his standard. The new castle was built in the sixteenth century by Francis Hay, the ninth Earl of Errol, and grew from its original tower house into a Baronial style mansion. At the time of Johnson and Boswell’s visit it was still in the title of the Erroll line, but was sold in 1916 by the twentieth earl, whose finances, following previous generations of lavish spending and an agricultural recession, couldn’t maintain the upkeep.

The castle is most famous today for hosting Bram Stoker in the early part of the twentieth century, who would holiday regularly in nearby Cruden Bay and was thought to have been inspired by its setting. It’s certainly dramatic, and with the tail end of Storm Agnes still bringing the spray up over the rocks and flinging the crows from the castle turrets, I spent some time watching the waves crashing into the cliffs from a window at the northern end of the ruins. I could almost feel Johnson’s breath on me. ‘Well, sir!’ he seemed to be saying. ‘What did I tell you?!’

Later, walking along the cliffs, I watched a solitary cormorant surfing the air between the waves, its dark aquiline shape momentarily vanishing behind crests in the swell. I wondered if it relished a storm, and whether Johnson’s ghost was watching too, looking out from one of the windows in the castle’s now empty rooms.

A Time of Balance

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‘I set off an hour before sunrise. It is still dark: very dark, and I can see very little beyond the dim circle of light from my head torch. The thick scent of pine fills the air as I start up the trail. The presence of trees, melting into the darkness either side of me, are felt rather than seen; the still, almost-full harvest moon having disappeared into the cover of pine branches. A nervous glance behind reveals the comfort of a slowly brightening sky, suffused with faint orange and aquamarine banding toward the rim of an unseen eastern horizon. Amidst gaps in the canopy above, bright and brittle stars vanish and reappear. The tree cover opens a little and the moon’s glow pulls me upward.’

As the Autumn equinox approaches, here in the Northern Hemisphere, I am drawn back to our local hill and this moment from a couple of years ago when I climbed to one of its summits to witness the equinox sunrise. The short essay I wrote about it was published on The Clearing: Little Toller’s online journal of Nature, Landscape and Place. You can read the full piece here, or by clicking on the image above.

Traditionally marking the second harvest, a time to gather in the bounty of late summer signalled by the full moon, the Autumn equinox can also be a time of balance, of reset: a chance to take stock before the long slide into winter. Wishing you all a moment of balance as we begin our journey toward the darkness of the winter months.

The Moor, the Sea, the Sky

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I’m delighted to have an essay included in the latest issue of Stravaig: an online journal for the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics.

Based on the thinking and writings of Kenneth White, the centre describes Geopoetics as being ‘deeply critical of Western thinking and practice over the last 2500 years and its separation of human beings from the rest of the natural world, and proposes instead that the universe is a potentially integral whole, and that the various domains into which knowledge has been separated can be unified by a poetics which places the planet Earth at the centre of experience.

It seeks a new or renewed sense of world, a sense of space, light and energy [and] also seeks to express that sensitive and intelligent contact with the world by means of a poetics i.e. a language drawn from a way of being which attempts to express reality in different ways e.g. oral expression, writing, visual arts, music, and in combinations of different art forms, sciences and thinking.’

Geopoetics is by nature, interdisciplinary, and engages with a broad range of practitioners in the arts and sciences, bringing ways of expressing the world together through both the journal and regular symposiums, seminars, workshops and retreats.

My essay ‘The Moor, the Sea, the Sky’ is a development of earlier work first featuring on Elsewhere: A Journal of Place in 2022, and comes out of my residency with Island Dark Room in the February of that year as part of my wider PhD research. It explores the moorland of Lewis both symbolically through the work of Lewis poet Iain Crichton Smith, and viscerally through my own experience in context with the thinking of anthropologist Tim Ingold.

You can read the essay by downloading Stravaig 13 here.

Our Lady of the Storms

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With the long, cold month of January drawing to a close, we took a walk along the Aberdeenshire coast from the historic fishing town of Stonehaven just ten miles south of Aberdeen. It was still cold, but dry with little wind, the sea flat calm and the low sun of a northern winter’s afternoon casting its glow across the clifftops. The path climbs steadily upwards from Stonehaven’s harbour above the rocks and old fisherman’s cottages at Cowie, where tall poles once used to spread and dry the fishing nets still poke up awkwardly out of the communal green space like some ancient wooden henge.

We were making our way to an old Catholic chapel perched precariously high on the sandstone cliffs and once dedicated to the Pictish Saint Nathalan who is attributed to several of the early churches of Aberdeenshire. His treasure is said to have been buried wrapped in a bull’s hide somewhere between the old chapel and its outer wall. The extant building dates to the thirteenth-century – some six-hundred years after Saint Nathalan’s time – and is also known as the Chapel of Our Lady of the Storms, re-dedicated to Saint Mary in 1276. The ruins of Cowie Castle, built by the Scottish king Malcolm Canmore in the eleventh-century, are just a short distance to the south, passed as you approach the chapel from the direction of Stonehaven along the narrow clifftop path. 

We spent half an hour or so wandering around the chapel’s burial ground as the sun sank steadily toward the fields. An old yew tree and holly tree take up much of the chapel’s roofless interior, and its stone arches catching the low winter sun in the stillness of the late afternoon created that eerie sense of time’s suspension. We found no treasure, but there are the gravestones of local fisherman lost at sea and a memorial commemorating a crew of lifeboatmen who drowned in the February of 1874. The sun finally dipped out of view and we made our way back along the cliffs, the old fisherman’s cottages at Cowie shrouded in deepening shadow and the waves just audible amongst the rocks below.

The Don: A Sacred River

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“Ian Grosz takes the reader on a journey, often on foot, to the half-hidden spiritual locales of the Don. Replete with historical and archaeological resonance, his journey through road, trail, stream and field is an elemental dance of often elusive elements. Spiritual faith as a palimpsest of earth, rock, water and culture remains a central theme as he leads us through histories of Gaelic saints, Pictish stones, cairns and Aberdeenshire stone circles with their distinctive recumbent stone. Places of transformation and spirituality are never far away from the divine river. The ancient goddess endures in a looping and recursive movement that exists differently from linear formulations of time and space.”

Neil Curtis and Jo Jones, Introduction, Four Rivers, Deep Maps, pp. 21-22.

The book Four Rivers: Deep Maps was published by UWAP and had an official launch early in Nov. There will be a second launch in the UK in the first quarter of 2023. The book has a diverse range of creative and scholarly responses to the two regions of Perth, WA, and Aberdeenshire. My own contribution is reviewed here by Neil Curtis in the book’s introduction:

UK stockists may be available next year, but if that’s piqued your interest, you can order the book directly from the publishers. Click on the image to go direct to UWAP for this and their other titles.