Thursday, December 22, 2016

The Weight Of History

We seem to have visited more castles than usual on this trip. Yesterday we drove out to Stirling Castle in the afternoon and enjoyed a ramble around its precincts despite the extremely blustery conditions. It doesn't bear thinking about what it might have been like to inhabit the place in its heyday, though whoever had designed the various exhibitions there did an excellent job of attempting to take us back in time.

As in Edinburgh Castle there was a whole segment of the building given over to a history of one of the regiments associated with the Highlands. This involved a curious and touching mixture of gung-ho enthusiasm for all things military with an awareness of the probable misery of most soldiers' lives, especially when one entered the rooms devoted to the First World War. Suddenly the colours drained away to leave us adrift on the bleak mud and khaki of Flanders and the like, fortunately in imagination only.

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