Into the West…the Isle of Skye!

Yesterday the luverly Lyn drove us to Cullodden battlefield to meet up with a three-day tour that had left Edinburgh early that morning. Lyn sat with us in the car filling us in about the history lesson we may have missed, and talking up her “cuz” Neil (the tour guide) as a “blether” which means he talks too much, but in a positive way. The big white Macbackpacker bus rode into the parking lot, and Neil jumped out in a genuine kilt, bare legged beneath. The FREEZING wind suddenly felt colder, and with one big whoosh threatened to make our introductions far too reveling. He was a great talker, as promised, and at the battlefield I finally wrapped my metaphorical head around the Jacobite uprising. I walked alone over the huge field, site of the last pitched battle on British soil, and was impressed not just by my newfound knowledge of the battle particulars but by the fact that the view all around; grey skies, forest, snow-capped mountain ranges, was just the same as the sights seen by all those men that day, doomed to die; highland warriors. On a lighter note, I got to see some absolutely beautiful period flintlock pistols, and hold a reproduction to get the heft of it. I want one.

After Cullodden we drove down past the Loch again, past the Grampians and Glencoe vale, and over Skye Bridge to the Isle of Skye. All the way our driver Neil told myths, legends, facts and jokes, and played genuinely good Scottish folk and offensive Billy Conolly songs. A military helicopter flew past as e rounded the corner in view of Skye, and it was like Jurrasic Park 2.

Seriously, though, Skye is beautiful: I think the Skye Bridge is as close in name and destination to Bifröst, the Rainbow Bridge to Asgard, as I’m likely to get in this lifetime. We drank ale and (Daniel) ate salmon in the Saucy Mary with local fisherman, and I slept in the bed of a Viking King of Norway. Bliss!

Kilts, fjords and fairies

As you can tell immediately by the title, Skye is awesome. I woke this morning to a crisp silver-white sky over the Atlantic, lapping at a stone wall merely two meters from my bedroom window. Across two or three hundred meters you can see another thin peninsula dotted with white cottages, and to the left the Skye Bridge, curving up gracefully from the mainland to touch down nearby.

(^not my photo, obviously)

and it just got better. God, I can’t even remember everything we did today! We were on the bus by 8:30 and drove out to the mountains Red and Black Cullin. On the way we heard about the story behind Saucy Mary; an entrepreneur who used to tax sailors coming into the harbor, and for an extra tax would perform a castle-top striptease. Then Neil told a fantastic tale of Cú Chulainn chasing and fighting a mythical heroine, locally aka Skiath. The river is supposed to be full of fairy magic that gave this fearsome lady her strength and long life, and we took up the challenge of putting our faces in it for seven seconds. As you can imagine, i was very awake after that.

We drove to Dunvegan Castle, the ancestral seat of the MacLeod clan, and inhabited by that family in an unbroken line since the twelfth century. The castle is closed to visitors for the winter, but contains a silk tapestry/scarf/flag called the Fairy Banner. The banner was given to the clan by the fairyfolk father of the wife of one MacLeid chieftain, and is said to be able to call the fairy powers to the aid of the clan in a time of dire need.

We had sweet potato, chilli and coconut soup, plus coffee at Skye’s main town of Portree, then drove off again through more ridiculously beautiful peninsulas and mountains. All the towns here have very bizzare Scandinavian names like trottenish and uig.

We walked up Storr rock, meaning ‘big’ in old Scandinavian, where every film ever has been shot, including highlander, stardust, and the new Aliens movie (with Charlize Theron and the Swedish actress who played the Girl wtdt). It was a steep slippery walk and in a few places huge rocks had fallen onto the path, causing us to divert and look fearfully overhead at the spires you can see in the picture. The clouds enclosed the east side of the mountain in opaque mist, and hooded crows soared beside us making strange ‘p-lop’ calls that sound like drips echoing off stone. To the west, the sky opened out further and showed shreds of blue. From atop the Storr we could see vast distances either side; the shoreline curved each way into folds and fjords of high green or golden hills and sheer black cliffs.

Our next stop was one of these, named Kilt, after the giants’ causeway-like formation of rock that gives the cliffs a tartan pattern. Neil had a kilt for the occasion, for dress-ups. One of the other Aussie girls on the tour said laughingly to me: ‘omg, have you seen the medieval club that meet every week at Melbourne uni?!’ I said: ‘what do you mean the medieval club; the SCA, the Varangian guard, or MARS? Or maybe the fantasy society?’ and without giving her a chance to draw astonished breath, I rocked that kilt. It’s an old fashioned brave heart kilt which is literally also a big blanket.

After the kilt cliff we drove to a sheltered valley in the middle of a wide mountain-ringed plain. Within this valley is the weirdest patch of land I’ve ever been in. It’s believed that fairies have always lived here in Skye, and the remaining fairy population live in a castle in this valley. The valley is much greener than the surrounding plain and contains about 100 strange small hills, like a miniature himalayas or something, and little groves of tiny trees that are in appearance full grown but shorter than me. There is hill taller than an the rest, with a broad rocky head on top of it, which could be a castle in keeping with the miniature scale. Remember; fairies in Celtic mythology are much more like Tolkien’s elves than tinkerbelle. And they can be dangerous. One part of the myth tells of a man who bought the land ad built his house on it, moving in with his wife and children. He dug up peat from the glen to burn on his fire, but was warned fiercely against this by other locals, who said ‘you might have bought this land, but you don’t own it.’ But this man didn’t believe that the fairies had any real poer to drive him away, and persisted in burning the peat from the glen. Gradually his cattle sickened and died. The vet could find no cause nor cure. Then his children; the physician couldn’t help. Then his wife. Depending on the version of story, the man threw himself off a cliff or perhaps only moved away, but I’ll tell you what I saw:

There are the definite remains of a house in Fairy Glen, walls two or three foot high. Through these walls; ie through the actual middle of the thickness if the stones, are about seven big trees, much much bigger than the quaint stunted trees all around everywhere else. These trees look exactly like they have been intentionally planted underneath the stone walls to bring the farmer’s house down; there are no trees growing in that area that are not coming from inside a stone wall. Supposedly in addition to the sickness of the farmer’s livestock and family, the fairies caused these great trees to take root inside his walls and destroy his house from inside out.

I have video filmed with my iPad of us driving into the Fairy Glen: I can’t post it here but I can email it. You get to hear our great guide talking too!

We all walked around by ourselves like we were on mushrooms and came back quiet and starry-eyed to the bus. Then Neil surprised us with a present for the ninety minute drive back to our village; whiskey! It lasted shamefully briefly between eleven of us, swigging and passing up and down the bus. We came back home in excellent cheer and I cooked for 12 of us with £12.70 worth of groceries. The gang have all gone back to Saucy Mary’s.

Bath & Oxford

(Delayed post)

Bath

A week ago we took three busses and two trains to get from the twee Welsh village of Llandissillio to Bath, England. Bath is the original tourist town, populated with gorgeous Georgian architecture and aristocracy from Jane Austin times, Medieval cure-all entrepreneurs before that, Romans before that, and before them, according to legend, King Lear’s uncle.

After a mind-numbing day of travel and the critical introduction to Mary Wollestonecraft Shelley’s *The Last Man,* we arrived in Bath at nightfall. The hostel we stayed in -St Christopher’s Inn, had a white staircase leading up three storeys with each flight of stairs smaller and narrower than the last, so that I felt like Alice in Wonderland by the time I arrived at the top. Petite French and Asian girls completed the Illusion. The architecture was uniformly beautiful, as expected, but unexpectedly so was the smell! As a tourist town for the moneyed up and coming, with a centuries-long reputation to uphold, Bath is brimming with cafes and restaurants, delis and even one Cheesemonger. You would love this town, Martin! The other tourists here are idiots like tourist throngs the world over, but here they’re idiots in the sense of the £500 cuff links we saw for sale. Anyway, we walked around and saw enough fantastic looking eateries that you could have every meal for a week at a different one and not run out of top-notch stuff. I saw the first specialty coffee maker’s since leaving Melbourne, which I dragged Daniel into both days. They offer three -or maybe six- different blends every day, in very cool surrounds and nice cups, and actively frown upon the use of sugar.

There were soap and perfume stores calling to my vanity and my purse, but swiftly shrinking as that is, I didn’t indulge. I even saw a Lush! It’s silly and capitalist, probably, but seeing branded stores like Vodafone and Lush, which I used to see in Melbourne, give me the warm and fuzzies just a little. Also we saw fire twirlers in Queen Square; I miss fire twirling.

The first morning we took a free walking tour, during which the guide forgot what he was rambling on about at least four times and mentioned something he saw on morning tellie about Australia in 1983. But we got to see Royal Crescent (below), and found out that John Cleese lives in one of these with his Mini parked out front.

After this we were all set to go for a dip in the Roman Baths, but- how disappointing; they’re not for use anymore due to being priceless ancient relics. There is a modern swimming pool running off the same hot springs, but it costs for two hours the same as two nights’ accommodation, so we were priced out of the upper class lifestyle there. We did, of course, pay to get into the original baths, even if I only got to put my hand in the water.

-the head is Roman, after the goddess Minerva who was associated with the holy spring,
and the stone shows a Roman name carved into it: can you read it?-

Then we sat in some city parks, and we walked down to the river Avon via the very cool Tulpenny bridge. On the way home we passed the enormous gothic Abbey in the centre of town, and despite the abbey being dark and closed someone was raging on the organ (I think it must have been practice for an approaching Bach concert). Even from outside with nary a door ajar, the sound was incredible, and I stood staring up rapturously at the vaulted windows.

The next day we went into (and quickly out of again) the Jane Austen centre, I FINALLY bought a uk sim card and promptly called my grateful mama, and we visited the humble but interesting William Herschel museum of astronomy, in the house where Herschel lived in the early 1800s. Herschel was the proverbial star-gazing professional musician, but found that the telescopes he could buy were not good enough, so began to make his own. He made dozens, discovered Uranus and some comets, and became the astronomer-to-the-king. Bee-tee-dubs: did you know the Georgian period refers to a time in English history when four king Georges in a row ruled? (between 1720 and 1840) There was supposed to be a king Frederick in the middle, but an act of God prevented him from kingship and from mucking up the nice order.

And then we caught the bus to Oxford…

Oxford

Dumped our bags and went out to grab a burrito. On the way there we passed the “FACULTY OF HISTORY” building and I nearly fell over a bike chained to the fence. We sat facing the windows and Oxford really is choc-full of professors. They’re everywhere in the streets, and fly down the roads on their bikes with their wizard beards and burberrys trailing in the wind.

The next day we went on another free tour, but this one rocked. The tour guide was younger than me, if you can believe it, and a Townie. He took us around some of the colleges like Balliol, Trinity, Christ Church, Rhodes and Merton Hall, through to the Radcliffe Camera, the Balliol Library and the menacing Examination hall.

He pointed out Blackwell’s Bookstore, whose three joined shop fronts are impressive enough, and informed us that beneath all of these -and indeed the road we were standing on- is the Guinness World Record’s largest single room selling books. I bought *Lyra’s Oxford* by Phillip Pulman, and then found the lit crit section and swapped it for Tom Shippey’s *J R R Tolkien: Author of the Century*. Tolkien lived and taught in Oxford, and we bought tickets into his old college of Merton for a snoop. The chapel was neck-braking and serenely empty, paved with ancient tiles set between gravestones from the sixteenth century.

On the way home we found an enormous installation of the sawn stumps and felled root systems of 40 meter old growth trees from African rain forest. The exhibition was in Trafalgar square and Copenhagen previously, and is called Ghost Forest. I remember reading that the artist Angela told an old Oxford artist friend about her plans before hand and he said “it can’t be done; Don’t try.” at the time, he was installing a seven foot bronze of himself, naked, on the roof of his own college.

Spooky London: Highgate Cemetery and the Grim Reapers of London

Friday 21st October

High gate east and west, and the grim reaper tour

We tubed up the northern line again to return to Highgate and the East Cemetery that we missed yesterday. We bought some sweet pastries at a bakery cafe, and I paid more attention to the strange and wonderful buildings in the village.

We walked down from the village via the broad leafy road again, but detoured through the edge of parkland that sits on the side of the road across from the twin properties of Highgate. The tour began momentarily after we arrived, and I had scant time to marvel at the Anglican chapel and entranceway to the lauded East Cemetery. Highgate cemetery is one of the famous Victorian Seven or some such, a collection of seven cemeteries drafted when London city churchyards could no longer fit any more eternal residents. Highgate straddles the summit of one of the highest points in the city, and even in death, people will pay for a room with a view, so Highgate became the most desirable resting place of Victorian London’s well-to-do.

I marveled to learn that my appreciation of cemeteries and joy of spending time in them would have been common in the Victorian era; large parties of ladies and gents would often go to promenade at Highgate, and stand on the balcony of the old mansion to get a view of the tombs along the Egyptian avenue. So far the East cemetery was fitting in perfectly with my two favorite fictional cemeteries; the unnamed location of Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book and Fable II’s Bowestone Cemetery, which I’m now sure were based on Highgate. Walking through the vine-covered pillars at the entrance to the Egyptian avenue would have been impressive even without having read The Graveyard Book, but the twin literary experience heightened and deepened it; I was walking through the historic avenue itself, a beautiful living relic of Victorian style and sensibility, but at the same time I was walking through the fictional avenue, beside the character of Nobody Owens and sharing in all that that place meant to him. I even saw a great big apple tree, and there is indeed a wide sloping corner of unconsecrated ground.

I listened attentively to the guide, and as soon as he finished a story I’d dash off like a Gormenghastian pixie mad thing and take a bazillion photos. I got progressively more and more enrapt in this until Daniel had to call me to catch up with the swiftly traveling group and the dismissive glance of our stern young tour guide told me that I was in Very Big Trouble. I spent the rest of the tour with my proverbial tail between my legs and kept with the group. We were told stories of lion-tamers and world-famous wrestlers, alas for a historian I’ve no head for names or dates. We passed huge inverted black pyramids and obelisks following the Victorian interest in Egyptian art, and i think even heiroglyphics. We saw many more examples of the heavy Victorian symbolism that we’d begun to notice in the West side yesterday, our guide jumping into an excellent explanation or anecdote often just as I noticed a particular trend or stand-out example. The rawness and faithfullness of the symbolism was surprising and arresting; we saw upturned burning torches, extinguished, a lot of skulls, hourglasses with wings (“time flies”) and sleeping angels.

The tour was over far too quickly, ever minute having been a thrill and joy to me, and as I suspected we were not allowed to dally inside, so no more poetic ponderings, or photographs, for me. Time flies indeed.

Grim Reapers of London Tour

We took the northern line back into London central, alighting at bank and wandering through fantastically named streets such as Cheapside that look like the set of Mary Poppins. We walked alongside the themes, smelling the hot caremelised peanuts and hearing vendors hawk their wares, until we were at tower hill, the announced location of the Grim Reapers of London Tour. Wooooh. Scary voice. Claws.

Our guide arrived, inconspicuously dressed in dark casual clothing, with somewhat straggly black hair and large furtive eyes, looking quite a lot like James Nesbit’s Jeckell/Hyde. He took our money, haggled with a tourist over the fact the price had been raised, bought a bottle of water, and then took us to a dark empty patch of tower hill garden to begin the tour. Just after the introductions, a guard strode toward us and kicked us out of the park (“closing time now”) and so we were told about the hill’s history as a medieval beheading pavilion from across the road. I couldn’t tell whether our guide had done the tour too many times to care, or not enough times, but his eyes kept darting and the stories were more dramatic then interesting at first. This could be, though, because I’d heard them all before at the Tower of London. We walked along every fifteen minutes to a different location and a different story, all the while noticing other tour guides aloft, lit by streelights, surrounded by the upturned faces of a crowd of scared or laughing tourists (and secretly thinking e should have gone with one of them instead).

Soon, though, the stories were new and unknown, about Victorian London rather than medieval London, and our guides owl-like eyes became haunting and his stories less dramatic and more sterile facts, suggestive possibilities. The picture that he painted of life on the poverty line in Victorian London was horrifyingly grim in itself. We followed the scenes of Ripper murders like a weird game of connect the dots, crossing over a plague pit that had been excavated and lit under glass. The guide explained the dozens of plagues that decimated the London population over the centuries and finished with an appalling joke about how on a hot day the smell there was terrible, which had all the girls -myself included- exclaiming “yeugh!” and covering our mouths. We toured one f the few surviving Victorian alleyways, now servicing restaurants in the inner east, and were told that for the survival of so few historical laneways we could thank the twentieth century’s most influential city architect; Hitler (the blitz destroyed a huge amount of London among so many cities). Another grim reaper of London, then.

The tour travelled on through Shoreditch (mighty boosh!) and ended in whitechapel, which turns out to be named understatedly for a HUGE white stone church with roman pillared verandah and all. The guide pointed out the boarding house, above the extant Ten Bells pub across the street, and quite convinced me of his suspicions about the identity of Jack, which I have now totally forgotten. All in all, it was a great gloomy, spooky day in wintery London town.

Glasnevin Cemetery Tour

Note: I took lots of photos but these will have to get added at a later date due to connection difficulties.

Update: photos have arrived!

We took a Guided tour about Glasnevin cemetary today, and i had the treat of visiting my first ever funerary-themed museum. Downstairs from the visitor centre, it is small but full of interactive exhibits, several exemplary of new techniques of history-making that I had learned about at uni (such as a looping audio ‘display’ of gravediggers’ anecdotes). Read an intriguing snippet about the first, and likewise oldest, modern cemetary in Europe, the Père Lachaise Cemetery, which I’ll be sure to visit when we’re in Paris.

Glasnevin has a sunken ring of tombs similar to those grouped around the main tree in Highgate, except these doors were all uniformly plain black, and had varyingly impressive monuments erected in stone in the grass above each. Our guide Bridget had a terrific memory, and informed us of dozens of prominent rippers and the dates and connections of the movements of which they were a part. I think my favorite was Maude Gonne, a handsome feminist and revolutionary, best known for being the object of William Butler Yeats frustrated affections. Apparently he proposed to her on several occasions and was refused. What a woman!* During the tour and much to my amusement, we were followed around by a teenaged work experience student called “Nile” (that’s how it was pronounced) who was tall and silent, with pale skin and oily black hair, and reminded me more than a little of the ill-fated coroner’s assistant in True Blood.

The cemetery was founded by Daniel O’Connel, and like Highgate had its early days in the Victorian. It was O’Connel’s vision that it be open to those of all faith or none. This in itself was unusual: I suppose at the time all other graveyards would have been attached to specific institutions of worship and therefore strictly managed by the authority of each. Mr O’Connel also wanted the yard to be open to the poor, who mightn’t be able to afford a burial otherwise. Especially in the Victorian age, britain was obsessed with death and the higher classes, said our guide, planned for their funeral with all the care and detail -enthusiasm even- that nowadays is put into a wedding. These aspects of Glasnevin are not exactly unique: relatively cheap plots were made available at Highgate, but the grounds were divided into only two areas: the greater area for Anglicans, and the other reserved for Dissenters.

At Glasnevin, we were shown the “cholera pit,” the swollen grave of hundreds of thousands of victims of the disease. Cholera broke out during hard times when literally a hundred people would live in each of the tall Georgian townhouses; three or four families to a room, without clean water. The most poignant part of all came toward the end of the two-hour tour, when we stopped outside the Angels’ Corner. This was a large grassy square in one end of the cemetery, without any stones at all, aside from sitting benches and carved angels standing around the outside. In nineteenth century Ireland stillborns were buried under many ditches and hedges: they were not usually allowed to be buried in consecrated ground. If you’ve read Tess of the D’Urbervilles, or maybe Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book, you might remember the concept of consecrated ground. Glasnevin provided infant burials free of charge, and were happy to it in consecrated ground at that. The man in the family would ride their bike to the grounds and hand a shoebox over the counter, and at the end of the day they’d all the little boxes would be buried and someone would say a prayer.

On a less somber note, I found out that columbarium comes from the Latin for dove’s honeycombed homes, and that the day the first grave was dug at Glasvenin, the owner of the home nearest the gate thought to his’self: I’ll need to get a liquor license. “The Gravediggers’” has been open ever sinceand, and is now run by his seventh generation descendant. A few years later the authorities introduced a law that all interments must take place before half-twelve, so as jobs wouldn’t get left half done. The pub also presented the opportunity for body-snatchers to ply their trade, as apparently elsewhere they got away with extracting their prize and walking them out, arm over shoulder like a drunk friend. According to Glasnevin records, not a single grave was ever interfered with here though. Eight towers and specially trained bloodhounds let loose each night saw to that.

Was freezing by the time the tour was over; desperate for a coffee, but the cafe was morbidly expensive. So we scuffled home, arm in arm against the chill, with the giddy humor and high spirits of hypothermia. I am writing now in the brick-arched crypt-like basement of the hostel, in a corner full of mismatched-era upholstered armchairs, like a mad hatter suite. Naturally the fire in the grill is not only a gas powered fake, but broken. On a side note, I began reading Oscar Wilde on the way here, I’ve been sucked in by Hemingway’s “deceptive simplicity” instead, and really wishing that I was living in Paris in the twenties, with Ezra, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Eliot, and all the rest of the “Generation Perdue”.

I can tell you, though, that I’m glad to have not been here (in Dublin) in the twenties. The prosperous periods seem to have been decades apart, and the history of republicanism is very one step forward, two steps back. They are rightly proud if their achievement of freedom and the centuries of thriving culture that preceded English occupation, but even now the austerity measures are all over the tv, and on the face of every Dubliner. Still, they’ve had a more than their fair share of man-loving writers, poets and revolutionaries, and I’ll always love them for that.