a journal of...

A journal among friends...
art, words, home, people and places

Wednesday, February 5, 2020

A day in Stirling, another in Dunblane: seeing the light



The train from Edinburgh to Stirling is easy and calm, although an accident on the line...a death, it turns out...has us a few minutes late, and saddened by the incident.

It's not a far walk to Munro House, Princes Street, run by Richard, who even before the appointed time leads us up into our cozy, cheerful garret...reminding me of the one Mary Ellen and I stayed in for our short stay in Paris last August.  It's small, but has everything we need for our only night there.  Richard has comfort built in to his place...he has, we can tell, a caregiver's heart.

We hurry out to catch lunch, then do Stirling...a tour of the castle, a walk through the village, a fine dinner at Brea...before Denise makes her drive to Oban and the coast, and I to Dorothy and Will's in Dunblane the next morning.


The castle is a castle, but has a lovely view in all directions of the town and landscape below.  





There were renovations going on, but inside, several charming discoveries...a chapel I remembered well from my last visit nearly twenty years ago...so beautifully plain and open with a light ray-panelled ceiling, light ochred walls with old repainted scrolls along the top edge and a wide, deep balcony above, from which I took a photo of the front window and the ceiling worked down to meet it.


In a room tucked away, two singers, a lute player and a soprano, both fine musicians, sing ancient Scottish songs, and I, because I can't help myself, join in on one sotto voce (or so I think...until the soprano sends me a look)...the Innocents song, which I've always loved, though I wasn't familiar with the words she was putting to it, in Tudor English.

Out in the corridor, which was once, according to the guard stationed there, a classroom for an armory before being put back in castle mode, I could trace the places where the classroom walls once stood.  (Now that I write that, I wonder that it fascinated me so, but it did.)

While Denise went on to find her rental car, I walked back to the Munro and spent the late afternoon in the parlour reading a few of Richard's books about Stirling's history (one of wars, wars, conquers and brutalities and Stirling not the better for any of it)...comfortable in front of the window in the lounge, as the light left the sky.

In the morning, we had a chance to talk with our host while he served breakfast...there were two others in residence, clearly people he's had as guests before, for they teased one another.  Over coffee and tea, we heard about Richard's life, his opening of the mind which led him to this house and to the guest house world, so much happier and freer than his old states of mind and work.  It is an opening many of us have found ourselves facing, though our paths through it differ.

I will let him speak for himself here, in the bit he wrote for his website:  Having initially gained a Law Degree, Richard has worked (paid and unpaid) in the Health & Social Care sectors for nearly 30 years which enabled him to live/work in Dublin, California, London and Northampton (his home town) before he saw the light and decided to come to Scotland, the home of his ancestors.

And then we are on our separate ways, the train north to Dunblane and Dorothy, my path.


Again, an easy train ride and Dorothy to meet me at the station.  I have become spoiled by trains here and wonder for the umpteenth time why such travel isn't available for me at home. (I do know why, of course, but still it irks me.)

Dorothy walks me through the village where first we stop for mid-morning scones and coffee in a cafe, more and more found in places like this, run by young men and women with an eye for good ingredients and perfect coffees and teas, really good sandwiches and even better soups.  Then through an old graveyard where her family lies, and finally up the hill to her house, new since I last visited, a beautiful, smaller but iconic place once belonging to the large house above, a sort of cobbler's cottage, if I am remembering correctly.  Whatever one calls it formally, it's simply charming.




As indeed our day together turns out to be, so good, under the narrative of Scottish skies, for catching up with a friend, sharing news and philosophies around the kitchen table, laughing at old stories, the sort of visit we don't ordinarily get to do an Atlantic away.  There was a chance for a phone call to Will, who was traveling then.  And a walk up through a sort of wild park trace built by an American who had not forgotten his roots.








After a good lunch of cullen skink and a tiny 'flapjack", which after the earlier breakfast and scones was more than I could manage, it was time to return to the station for the next leg of my journey...to Glasgow and Ada's family.  That chapter must be its own.




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