The Sacred Well and the Howling Moor

This year I hope to put up more posts based around Gothic tourism - visiting places such as ruined castles, ornate graveyards, ancient monuments, great cathedrals, etc. Today's post is of a windswept moor - which if you have read 'Wuthering Heights', you'll know is a very Gothic sort of landscape. To get there, I went up through Culloden Woods, which has a clootie well now dedicated to St. Mary. Culloden Wood also has a ruined mausoleum once home to the remains of various members of the Duncan Forbes family of Culloden House, but I forgot to walk to that part of the woodland and take photographs - this I apologise for. As usual, click to enlarge thumbnails.

My intention was to walk all the way up to Culloden Battlefield, but I left too late in the day, and it was getting dark by the time I was up near the Battlefield, and I wanted to get back to the city before dark (especially as I didn't want to wait around in the Battlefield carpark for a bus, as it is windy and exposed up there, so quite chilly). Culloden Woods is easily accessible from Inverness City Centre by bus. There is also a bus up to Culloden Battlefield directly, as implied earlier. The weather was wet - drizzle and sleet down in the city, but snow up on the hill with the moor. The precipitation came in patches and flurries, with still moments in between. The skies were low and grey, and the sun seemed dim and always closer to the horizon than I wanted it to be.

The Bridge with the oak tree growing on it.

Culloden Woods is forestry pines - cultivated for timber, but it seems to be transitioning to more natural woodland, with areas of birch and more native pines, as well as the new 'Douglas Wood' section that is intended for children and is dog-less (hence the name; naming things with puns is pretty common up here!). There's a railway line cutting the woodland in half, and over that railway is a handsome Victorian railway bridge... with an oak tree growing on it!

St. Mary's Well in the rain.

Clootie well. Click to enlarge.

What I wanted to visit in the woods was the clootie well. A clootie well is a well where 'clooties' or cloth strips are hung around the well for some folk-magic or quasi-religious purpose. With St. Mary's Well at Culloden, the water is supposed to have healing properties, and to use them, you must tie a clootie dipped in the water to a tree above the well, with the sickness or disease disappearing as the cloth decays - I hope all those who hang non-biodegradable things on the trees around the well don't hope for healing! (I imagine there are many that are tourist mementos). There's more to the 'ritual' -if you would call it that - than this, but I can't remember all of it. I think there was once a plaque explaining how to 'use' the well, but it's now gone. 

Clooties on a tree near the well.

St. Mary's Well is not the only clootie well near Inverness - there's also the Well of the Spotted rock above Craig Dunain on the opposite side of the city, and a few others a bit further afield (Munlochy and Avoch both have one), plus there are other springheads with cultural distinctions of one sort or another - bits of history or folklore attributed to them. Clootie wells seem quite common in Gaelic countries - plenty in both Ireland and Scotland - but there are a few in England too. Wales has sacred wells, too, but all the ones I have come across do not have the practice of tying cloths near them, and are more specifically attributed to saints - usually 'Celtic saints', early saints from the Christianisation of the area. Perhaps I will visit more of the local sacred/special wells, and write about them on this blog. I already have a brief mention of the Well of the Spotted Rock planned for my next blog entry.

Blurry photo of a burn (stream)

There's several burns running down crags, which are both rather beautiful and fill the forest with the enchanting sound of running water. When I was there, it was raining, and very slippery, so I didn't get to photograph the crags well as I was slipping and sliding all over the place, hence there being only one rather mediocre photo of the burn near the path up the hill. Maybe if I go back up there, I'll take some more pictures of the forest itself.

I headed back down from the clootie well to the path along the forestry track, which leads out into cleared land that has reverted to a sort of moorland. It's windy and open, but quite beautiful. It had snowed a few days before, and the drainage channels redirecting burns through the land had frozen, and then started thawing, so there was fractured ice floating. It snowed again properly a few days later. There were a few patches of snow on the cleared land, but I didn't get any pictures. The low shrubbery and wild plants seem to close in around you, despite the wind blowing across and the distinct lack of trees other than a few lonely deciduous trees, birches mostly, stand scraggly and stranded out in the open.

View out of Culloden Woods into the cleared land.

One thing out on the open land that I don't want to either romanticise or sensationalise, but I feel should be mentioned because it is a part of the history of that land is the Prisoner's Stone. This isn't something I want to promote as something to visit because it's 'cool and spooky' or something, it's a place to pause and reflect on an atrocity that may have happened over 200 years ago, but which a lot of local people still feel strongly about today.  It's a site where something really horrible happened in the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden - 17 Jacobite prisoners were executed there, for being on the wrong side an 18th man was spared to spread word of what had happened. There's a bench, inscribed in both Gaelic and English; 'Murder of frozen souls here - marvel that I remained alive, to tell' is the English translation. I don't know if being killed on the moor was better or worse than the fate of those taken prisoner and forcibly marched to be 'tried' and executed in London, many of whom died on the journey. All of it is awful.

The Prisoner's Stone

The same surnames on the clan markers on the Battlefield are the surnames of co-workers, friends, and neighbours; there are still people for whom the dead are names in the family tree. It wasn't something I knew people felt very strongly about until I met some of these people at a protest against luxury housing being built on land that was part of the battle and likely has corpses on it, who were very upset because it was members of their family who died in the battle, and who couldn't collect their sons, brothers, husbands etc. after the battle because of fear of the Hanoverians, even if they died centuries before and had never met. They spoke quite passionately, and before that I didn't realise that it was such a personal thing for some still. Ancestry is very important to some people, even if it's not something that's as meaningful to me; I've always felt sort of detached from my long-dead blood ancestors, but a deeper connection to figures in history who align more with how I think, some of whom I am quite sad I can't write letters to! Since meeting those people, I've felt like it's important to treat it as a the site of something nasty in history, and while I think tourism is an important part of transmitting history, it shouldn't make the nastiness seem 'fun' - I think the bench is a good idea; gives people somewhere to sit and reflect on what happen, and what can get people to feel justified in killing each other.

The Gaelic inscription on the simple bench.

Beyond the Prisoner's stone is plenty of cleared forestry land, leading up to the road. The path I took wasn't that one, however, as I went between some leafless fruit-trees along a more sheltered footpath that runs alongside a farm track to the main road, and is part of the official Culloden hiking/walking trail.  

Walking towards the clouds on the moor.

After crossing the main road, I took a path continuing the hiking trail that leads past some houses to more cleared forestry land, windswept and dreary with snow-clouds closing in. There are stands of pines still (mostly) standing, except for those blown down by the wind. I continued out, and every now again the forestry path turned walking trail would open out onto glimpses of the valleys and snow-covered hills below. This far up the hill, there were plenty of patches of snow left and even when the breeze was light, it felt chill. The clouds were not just dimming the sun, but faint hues in them made me suspect that it wasn't rain, but more snow that was to fall.

The sun begins to set over the dregs of snow.

Along one path I took, all the trees that had been the exposed edge of the stand of pines had blown over, and the craters left by their roots had filled with water - meltwater, I would guess. The land there is moorland, crossed by a multitude of burns that I could hear, but could not see through the dense scrub (mostly whin bushes, a type of gorse, but with all sorts of other more damp-loving plants between, and then the odd young and bushy pine), and a mixture of hard and rocky patches of uneven glacial land and wet ground that tried to steal the boots off my feet each time I stepped in it (I tried to circumnavigate a section of path that was flooded, ended up taking a detour that led nowhere useful, and headed back). It's an eerie place to be. 

Snow clouds and felled land. 

I had headed off in the opposite direction to the battlefield to admire the scenery first, and maybe find a shortcut to Clava Cairns, but my detour delayed me and between the heavy cloud and the rapid decline of afternoon into evening, I was loosing daylight so I headed home - or at least to a bus stop first!

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I have several more posts in the 'Gothic Tourism' category to go up - Clava Cairns, Brodie Castle, and several graveyards, ruins, etc. that I visited last year but never had the time to process the images from. 

Ice-Skating, Botanic Gardens and River Ness

On Saturday, my friend Mavis invited me out to go ice-skating because Inverness Ice Centre apparently has cheap public skating on a Saturday afternoon. It was £5 for over an hour of skating, with an extra £1 for skate hire. Other people certainly bought their own skates, so that is an option. Both Mavis and I have been ice-skating before - but both somewhere between 12 and 15 years ago! Neither of us could remember how to ice-skate. By about my fourth or fifth circumnavigation of the ice-rink, I finally remembered how to skate well enough to stop hanging onto the wall and skate relatively freely with a little confidence. I even remembered how to turn on the spot and approximately how to stop without falling over. We both thought we'd escaped from falling onto the ice, right until 8 minutes before our session was over, when Mavis fell onto the ice. I came close several times, but thankfully the edge wall was there to save me, although I did do some rather ungainly slips! Mavis was a bit bashed but mostly OK. 

Photo by Mavis. Editing by me.

After we went skating, we thought about visiting Inverness Botanic Gardens (Floral Hall) which is pretty much nextdoor to the ice-rink, but they were just closing up. Instead, we posed for photos by the exterior of the perimeter wall, which had some rather pretty climbing plants growing on it. I get a little creeped out by certain bugs, which Mavis kept insisting on talking about, and I started getting worried that there'd be some in the bush I was posing by, hence why some of the poses get further and further away from the bush! I'm not entirely sure what the flowers were, but they were quite pretty. I am also not entirely sure how old the stone wall is; it looks quite old, but I'm not really sure how to tell beyond the profusion of lichens and the rather established climbing plants. 

Photo by Mavis, editing by HouseCat.

My thanks go to Mavis for taking these photos. She took them on my rather dire phone camera, so I am impressed that they came out this well because it is very rare for any photograph taken on my phone to come out well. It works better outdoors, certainly, but these are far nicer than my outdoor shots with the same phone camera. I did the editing afterwards because they were on my phone, but all I did was crop them down to squares, tweak the contrast slightly and apply the 'dusk' filter from ::PicMonkey:: because the grey weather made everything look dull, so all the actual photographic stuff was done by her.  

Photograph by Mavis, editing by HouseCat

My outfit might look like it's a bit much for the day before the midsummer Solstice, but the weather was grey and prone to rain showers, plus it was obviously going to be cold in the ice-rink, so I was wearing my thick and warm winter tights, a skirt with petticoats, bloomers, and a slip under my corset, blouse and dress... with a shrug! While I was skating I did think that it might have been sensible for me to have been wearing lace gloves. I almost always wear lace gloves, every single day, and the one day I don't (because I do have to wash them all occassionally) is the one day I regret not wearing them... typical! 

Photo by Mavis, Editing by HouseCat

My hair is currently pastel turquoise because that is what colour the green fades to when it has not been dyed in a while. My hair has become very fine and brittle after being repeatedly bleached, and my roots are growing out. My work have not made any complaints about my pastel-coloured hair, so I have not dyed it back to dark green. I do not mind covering up the bleached hair with dye, but I do not want to have to bleach my roots, as I do not want my hair to get any more damaged. My hair is snapping, both at points where it has been bleached and at points in the new growth, and it is also simply falling out. I naturally have rather thick, straightish hair that grows into a wave as it gets longer, but it is noticeably thinning around my hair-line, and also instead of growing into a neat wave, the ends curve and kink in all sorts of frizzy directions. I am laying off the hair-dye and bleaching for a good while! I have actually got nearly 2 inches of regrowth, but I am posing to try and avoid showing this. I do not plan on dyeing or bleachung my hair again until September, and I will need to get the fried-looking ends trimmed out of my hair, as the constant snags probably are not helping the snapping problem.

Photograph by Mavis, editing by HouseCat

The outfit I am wearing is: a ruffled blouse from eBay from one of many Chinese importers, a secondhand Bodyline dress that is from their 'separates' range and a bit short for Lolita so I wear it as a Goth dress, my favourite crochet lace shrug that was originally from Tesco but also bought secondhand, thick winter tights from Tesco, and a pair of very comfortable brogues with a slight heel from Gabor that I bought secondhand. I was wearing some extra layers under all that, including an underbust corset. I love thrift shopping, eBay shopping and scouring alternative-specific secondhand sales pages for bargains; it is the cheapest way to get nice Goth clothes.  

Photo by Mavis, edit by me

After we stopped for photos outside the Botanic Gardens, we wandered down towards Ness Islands. It turns out that it was the same day as the grand opening of the new skate-park on the ice-rink/Aquadome/Botanic Gardens side of the river, so we paused for a minute to watch people doing stunts on all the new ramps and things. There were people on rollerblades, stunt bikes, skateboards, etc. I used to do rollerderby on quad skates, and when I was younger I used to do a few stunts on inline skates (but nothing spectacular) and watching the kids (most of the people there were younger teens) on their skates made me a little bit jealous, but considering my unbalanced performance  on the ice skates, and considering that I have a co-ordination, balance and spatial awareness disorder, I probably won't try and join them any time soon. I no longer bounce like I did was younger,  and these days I risk actually injuring myself. 

Photograph by Mavis. Editing by HouseCat

Inverness has a series of pedestrian suspension bridges across the River Ness - two at Ness Islands,  and two between more central points within the city, so four in total, and the two bigger ones downstream are both of a rather pretty design. The two at Ness Islands are smaller and narrower, and replacements built in 1987/1988 for much nicer and sturdier-looking Victorian era suspension bridges (which were a replacement for earlier suspension bridges that got washed away in a flood...). The general idea was maintained in the new design, but it just isn't quite the same, and whenever anybody jogs or walks quickly across either of the bridges, they bounce like a trampoline which is really quite unnerving! The Happy Pontist blogged about them ::here::. 

Photograph by Mavis, editing by HouseCat

I also took some photographs of Mavis on the bridge, and she took some of me. My phone camera struggles with varied lighting, and the bright grey-white sky and reflections off the river really threw it, leaving the edges of the photos faded and my pastel hair looking almost as if it were glowing. In my edits for these photos I decided to enhance this effect and further fade out the edges. I darkened myself and the background slightly, too, in order to boost the contrast a little. The final effect makes me think of how I sometimes remember dreams; there are items, events and people who seem as clear as in reality, but then the setting seems to fade away into obscurity around them. My hair blew in the wind and went up above my head, all floofy, and my phone camera captured this really badly, so I just coloured in the blurry mix of white, brown, and turquoise with a turquoise to match my hy hair and make it look less like some weird monster had landed on my head. 

Photo by Mavis, editing by HouseCat

Mavis had never been for a proper walk around Ness Islands before, so we walked down to the bench and stoney prominance built into the flow of the river at the most upstream point of the islands, and then across all the various foot-bridges down to the most downstream end of the islands and then walked back into the town down the South bank of the river, passing lots of lovely houses and gardens, and then going up to ::La Tortilla Asesena:: for tapas. I had never had tapas food before, so that was certainly a novel experience for me,  and it was all rather delicious, especially the churros I had for desert. 

Autumn Road-Trip 2: Dulsie Bridge

While we were driving between locations, we took a detour to visit the Dulsie Bridge, as suggested by Suzy_Bugs. I really don't know much about its history. We parked up at a view point above it, and went for a stroll around the gorge-top path, and then to a little field with a fallen tree and some rather fabulous and almost fantastical mushrooms that the others took good photographs of, but which I took rather dire photographs of, so none of them are shown here. 

Dulsie Bridge. Photograph by Housecat

I think it's a very fantastical-looking location, something that could have been out of The Hobbit, or Lord Of The Rings, or maybe Game of Thrones (but the river would have to run red with blood for that set of books...). It is old, and it has been converted into a modern road bridge, but there is something both about the old stone bridge, and the deep gorge (which bears the marks of flooding quite a long way up the stone sides; I presume it runs VERY high with melt-water and rain in Spring!) with trees either side made me feel like I wasn't quite in the regular world, like I had either stepped back in time, or stepped sideways into a different world altogether, one more magical.

One of my favourite thing about old structures is how between a tendency towards materials such as local stone, and the blending actions of time, they seem to just fit naturally into the landscape. Part way through our visit, it began to rain again, and the skies grew grey with cloud. It wasn't the best conditions for photography, especially for someone who is inexperienced and unskilled like myself. I got a bit higher up the gorge, and tried to photograph along the river, but I was photographing through the trees beside me and I'm not sure how well that endeavour turned out. 

Dulsie Bridge, photograph by Housecat

Overlooking the gorge is the selections of large stones shown below - I do not know if they are a natural outcrop or the remains of a stone chambered tomb or cairn that has collapsed. Either way, they looked quite remarkable, and I had fun trying to deliberately give them fantastically vibrant colours, as if they were something from an illustrated fairytale. I'm not sure if it's really very successful; being colourful is not exactly my forte! 

Stones, photograph by HouseCat

I tried my best, and I think only the first photograph really worked. It's nice to have at least some mementos of visiting. If anyone knows more about the history of bridge, and why it is well known - other than it being rather picturesque - please feel free to inform me! More photographs from my road-trip will go up over the next few days. I visited quite a few places indeed, and I feel each one needs it's own blog post because a single post would be very long indeed - the same as when I visited Edinburgh or when I went to Rait Castle, Barevan Churchyard, etc.