Today was a bit of a dawn to dusk thriller, from my managing to retrieve
my cashcard from the autoteller that consumed it last night, to our piece
de resistance visit to Slains Castle ruin- the inspiration for Bram Stoker's
Dracula.
In between we made it to the Buller of Buchan, a kind of near-doughnut shaped
rock right on the coast, the Romantic wildness of which had stirred the
imagination of our predecessors thus:
' If I had any malice against a walking spirit....I would condemn
him to reside in the Buller of Buchan' (Johnson)
B&J actually hired a boat to take them through the narrow gap from
the sea to the Buller's centre, but even circumnavigating it externally
was a thrilling (and somewhat vertiginous) experience. The sea barely choppy
today, with the water a beautiful emerald tinge against the rosey granite
boulders.
This experience, for Nina too I think, felt extremely close to that recorded
in the original journal - we felt as if we'd 'caught up' with B&J somehow..
I mention this particular sensation, as it was made so much more acute by
the experience of Slains Castle, so opulent in the 18th century, and so
theatrically derelict now.
It is a genuinely poignant place, but only slightly slightly sinister.
It reminded me of some of Rome's ruins - Nero's Domus Aureaus maybe, in
that the remainder was 'readable' in the sense of how it had once been intimately
inhabited.
Suddenly we felt the gap of history.
