Distant Melody

I got a bit obsessed with islands today, particularly Staffa and Iona. I hope this is Staffa - if someone local sets me right, it will not be the first or last time I look a fool. My navigation skills are as point-and-press as my photography. Staffa is where one can visit Fingal's Cave, but that is not what was on my mind as I gazed across the water at these moody cliffs

As a teenager, I fell in love with the music of Fairport Convention, and particularly the voice of Sandy Denny. Sandy made a couple of LPs independent of Fairport, and one of those was Fotheringay, with this title song

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How often she has gazed from castle windows o'er
And watched the daylight passing within her captive wall
With no-one to heed her call

The evening hour is fading within the dwindling sun
And in a lonely moment those embers will be gone
And the last of all the young birds flown

Her days of precious freedom, forfeited long before
To live such fruitless years behind a guarded door
But those days will last no more

Tomorrow at this hour she will be far away
Much farther than these islands
Or the lonely Fotheringay

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I knew it to be about Mary Queen of Scots. I knew it to be about her incarceration in Fotheringay Castle and subsequent execution there. Of course I knew Scotland has many islands and the reference in the last line led me to jump to the conclusion that Mary was held in a castle on a Scottish island. Something in the ethereal nature of Sandy Denny's voice confirmed this, and the picture in my mind's eye was exactly like this one

It's only recently - 50 years later - I have caught up with the fact that Fotheringhay (note the 'h', which somehow makes it less Scottish) is actually in our neighbouring county, Northamptonshire, and its castle - also the birthplace of Richard III - is now little more than a nondescript lump. I prefer my fiction to the mundane truth

I told you I'm used to looking a fool