A Day in the Country

You can’t beat Glasgow, with its free museums, gorgeous research library, lovely University and massive parks, but when you want to go castle-hopping on this auld isle, we’ll go during the week. Weekend tourism is tough — long lines, slow traffic, higher prices on train fares. Going when most people are working is a lot more fun; the castle personnel has more time to answer questions, and it’s an altogether more satisfying experience. For maximum “the whole place to yourself-ness,” may we recommend winter touring over summer? Just wrap up tightly; the wind chill scything off of those stone castle walls is no joke!

This week we traveled with the student version of the International Club. It’s a group more apt to engage with us, as without having to chase after kids, they have more time to be curious and outgoing. Kirstin split us into four groups so we could tour Drumlanrig Castle and the gardens, which are extensive and fairly formal. Since. D. had personal photographing permission from the Duke of Buccleuch, those who traveled with T. and D’s group cast frequent and envious glances at his camera!

Going on castle tours is fascinating, not so much for the castles themselves, but for the tour guides. So far, all the tours we’ve been on have been led by men and women in their late fifties or sixties who have a reverence for the history they are passing onto us, and razor sharp memories.

They also have an ease with dates and names that we never will. They blithely point to murky paintings and identify the subjects as “the priest who was beheaded because he disagreed with Henry VIII’s decision to put away Anne,” and “Bonnie Prince Charlie” is referred to almost as casually as a relative (which he might be). Depending on where we’ve been, further north or south, the guide will firmly place the castle history either on the side of the Jacobites or the side of the Loyalists. Time does not seem to alter the issues.

Drumlanrig is stuffed full of treasures. With so many of the French aristocracy fleeing Madame Guillotine and emigrating to Edinburgh and other royal Scottish estates, there was an abundance of French antiques left there. Quite a few of Louis XIV’s gaudier gifts from the castle at Versailles remain, in their ivory-inlaid and gold-plated glory. There are two hundred year old clocks, a Rembrandt painting, marble-topped dressers, and actual three hundred year old Queen Anne chairs… Still, even the lives of the Duke’s family, the rightful castle inhabitants, were as tarnished as anyone’s.

“Oh, she was the mistress of Duke so-and-so,” our guide pointed to a painting of a woman wrapped in an ermine cape. “She wasn’t royal and had no business being painted in ermine, but, since she had a male child, which secured the line for the Buccleuch family…” A few rooms later, he casually pointed to the painting of a woman of whose seventeen children none lived to be older than the age of eleven. What really struck us was a painting of a woman wearing the exact same dress as another woman across the hallway … the first woman to wear it was the lady of the house, who fled the coming of the Jacobites. Her successor actually wore it and was painted in it, as if it were her own dress. What cheek!

Swaddled in luxury, richer by far than most of us will ever be, and they still had to put up with sadness, war, and people they didn’t like, and they had to do it all by candlelight in dim, drafty castles. Money still can’t buy happiness — but apparently a close facsimile will generally do.

Beyond the acres of lawn and the formal rose and sand gardens around Drumlanrig Castle are endless green hills grazed by herds of sheep (do watch your step), and bisected by fabulous bike trails (and they have bike rentals there!). There are lovely stretches of woods and paths, waterfalls, the occasional “heather house,” which is like an extraordinarily artistic gazebo, and the peaceful susurration of wind in beeches, yew, sycamore and giant sequoias — which was a surprising and familiar sight to the Californians in the group.

Many estates have artists and craftsmen on site, selling their wares in castle buildings. Drumlanrig’s stables have been converted into a really neat blacksmith’s area with craft stalls, an organic grocery, a snack shop, and a bicycle museum on either side. (Like a magnet to iron filings T. was drawn to Arlo Artwork, where she added to the many pounds of polished rocks she already owns by buying yet more. She may have to make another visit in the autumn.) Though we enjoyed the little shops, the most important purchase of the day was from the large Victorian greenhouse, where D. triumphantly discovered a rosemary plant, and brought it home. The first piece of our windowsill herb garden!

This will probably be our last little castle jaunt for awhile. D. is feeling the pull of time, and has been working on his Master’s thesis dissertation whenever he can. Next week he meets with his advisor again, and will begin the home stretch of putting his theories on paper. Meanwhile, T. has finished a fast-paced week of final revisions for her second novel, and on Monday the work in earnest begins on pulling major plot threads together for the third.

But for now, we are enjoying a restful, quiet weekend. Hope you are, too.

– D & T

(P.S. — Check out the Flickr page within the next few days for more of the 300 pictures we took in and around the castle grounds.)

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