Good Morning or Good Evening, to whoever is reading this right now. Boy was I overly ambitious in saying that I am going to be posting multiple times a week. I am ragged and tired with how much adventuring that I have been doing on this trip. We’ve seen eleven castles/ruins, several graveyards, brochs, and a whole lot of new landscapes & horizons. So, like my last post, I’ll share some of the photos that really just tick my imagination. So without further ado, here are some pictures taken with the camera on my phone.
Ok, I’m going to start off with this monolith of a rock. Historically, the Vikings named it “The Storr,” for reasions that are obvious. It’s a big rok that just stands on it’s end out in the open. The hike up to it was moderately tough, depending on your cardio level, but the sitte is oh so worth it. So why this? Well, outside of my personal opinions of thinking that the vikings named it for more hilarious reasons than obvious one, it does stand out as a land marker. The picture doesn’t do it justice on how massive this piece of rock truely is.
So here is another perspective and angle of the same stone shown above. That little standing stone is over ten miles away. Ten miles and it still is visible to the naked eye. That’s crazy, and to think about how it was possibly used to navigate and know where you were by land and sea? That’s just wild to me. In a sense, this little piece of land invigorates my sense of worldbuilding. Not everything needs to be distinct and wild.
However, I can’t forget to place this simple monments to nature. The Storr, if I were to have it written into the setting of my novel, could be used as a obvious land navigation marker. However, what if a city was built up around it? What if the city built a castle on or into the rock of the Storr? What if an army made it’s desperate last stand right at the base of the Storr and their last ditch gamble was toppling the monolith onto the oncoming enemy army? Likewise, what if the enemy army just used magic to drop it on the allied army, ending the war once and for all? The posibilities are endless with the what if’s and what could have beens.
Ok, now I don’t know about you but I grew up playing the original Tomb Raider games for the PS1. As I got older, I contiued playing the franchise on each new console, following the Adventures of Lara Croft as she explored ancient tombs, discovering lost cities and relics. This church really tickled that same feeling when I entered it’s remains to seen the tombs of the Mcleod Clan. Each and every one of these tombs(I believe) are long passed chieftans of the Mcleod Clan of Scotland. Heck, they still are very much active and present to this day in Dunvegan Castle.
However, looking at this tomb, I couldn’t help but wonder: what if behind one of these tombs was an ancient passage way. What if that passage, led down beneath the church to the secret base of the Rebel army. Or if I keep it centered to the theme of Tomb Raider: What if the Mcleod Clan was secretly keeping something hidden in these ruins. An ancient Celtic Treasure or Roman Artifact that needed to be guarded. Sure that story would be a little bit different from the fantasy stories that I’m used to writing, but still, the portal to another world is always accessible whenever I see things like this.
Now to end this post, lets talk about the first castle that my wife and I visited yesterday: Bucholie Castle. Sadly, I wasn’t able to take any photos on what it looks like inside of this castle. Mainly due to the fact that we had a list of nine other locations that we wanted to visit before the days end. So we only got to see this one from the distance, but even with this, I could see where the bridge/draw bridge whould have been built to access this castle.
The lumps in the ground also imply that there may have been a wall/other structures that wrapped around the small penisula aswell. So why was it placed here? Was it to keep an eye on the coastline or was it to guard a highly traveled road nearby? Was it a powerful lord who had money to spare and just wanted to show off his influence or was it built to deter the enemy from raiding by the sea in this area?
For what ever reason it was built, I personally like it because I can just imagine this castle being owned by a small but powerful mercenary company that operated in the area/time period. This mercenary company does’t need to be massive, with thousands and thousands of troops. if anything, this group possibly would have no more than a few hundred members at any given time. Those small numbers, however, will filled with warriors and soldiers that could turn the tide of any battle. These mighty warriors alone could save an army, several of them together could change the tide of war, and anyone could imagine what the whole company could do if they marched as one army.
Ok, lets be a bit more realistic with this idea, what if this castle was still owned by a mercenary company with say, six hundred to a thousand men; that’s still quite the sizable army that could change the tide of any battle depending on how they are used. So either idea can work, it’s just a matter of power scaling and that is just one of the possiblities that I think of when I look out at these castle ruins.
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