Eilean Donan

The wedding would have been a week ago.

I’m hardly out of trackpants these days, but I could have been wearing a kilt at the joining of hands for my friends Merrie and Kris. It would have been a wonderful wedding, at the gothic castle of Eilean Donan.

I remember with fondness when I last saw them, and we took generous gins up to the best view of Melbourne’s skyline where Kris said: There’s a couple of kangaroos kickin’ the shit out of each other. Just, Scottish poetry.

Not to worry, the wedding and gin will come soon enough.

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Eilean Donan Castle / Dornie, Scotland

With roots in a sixth-century Christian mission, the thirteenth-century castle of Eilean Donan was built to protect the earldom of Ross against Norse expeditions backed by the Lordship of the Isles. The defensive buildings of history, like technology development in modern wartime, often materialise at liminal human boundaries. This castle is no different, straddling an ancient geopolitical boundary, but also a natural one, clinging to a tidal island where the three sea lochs meet.

It is a place I will visit when the sun has set on this pandemic. I wonder if you have visited it already?