Mount Stuart

I'm writing this the morning after the night before. Last night I was so tired I could barely see ... but it was a most enjoyable day that led me to this pass, so I was perfectly happy to slide off to bed in the knowledge that the gas man was due in the morning...

So. Up at an insanely early hour, we set off at 9am to drive to Colintraive, to take the two-minute ferry ride to Bute to meed up with my friend Paddy and a group who were Journeying on Bute. We were to meet them at Mount Stuart, a fantastical stately home in the countryside outside Rothesay, which I have known about for all the almost 5o years I've lived here but have never visited. Because of a noisy family in front of me at the ticket office, we were a tad late catching up with the group, missing the chapel as a result, but still had 75 minutes of a private guided tour of the empty house. I have uncomfortable feelings about such places  - though oddly was less discombobulated  by the magnificence of the palace in Pushkin, near St Petersburg, than by this crazy edifice in my own neck of the woods. Paddy soothed me by reminding me of all the work and opportunities given to craftsmen and artists, many of them Scots, by their owners, but the amounts of wealth involved made me deeply uncomfortable. (The links I've provided fill in all the gen about the house and about Journeying.)

After the tour, we revived ourselves with - in our case anyway - mint and nettle tea and a cheese and ham sandwich in the cafe before setting out to explore the grounds. They cover a huge area, leading all the way down to the shore of the Firth with views across to Ayrshire and Cumbrae, with a mixture of the exotic and the local in the planting and many huge trees - and the sun began to appear, after some doubtful skies earlier. 

Because of this - warmth and lack of rain - we went to the beach for the packed lunches that the group had (we'd had the cheese sandwiches ...) followed by a talk by yours truly, which is why we were there. There are pillars in the house that were never completed - they're in the top right of the collage - because the craftsmen working on them were called away to serve in the 1914-18 war. They never returned, and the marble had dried out, and the pillars were just left. It is possibly the most affecting single item in the whole edifice. So I read a couple of poems which I wrote on the Somme battlefields, as well as one from the Normandy beaches about the futile journey made by some of these young Americans who travelled all that way only to be killed as they leapt from the landing craft. It was quite challenging, reading on the shore with my back to the small waves, with them all sitting round on the sand, but it seemed to be effective and the response was lovely. Himself said it was fine.

My friend Paddy went in for a swim. So did one of the men. I thought of Lady Findhorn, and paddled. It was not warm. Then the group set off along a tree-lined path behind the beach, following the shore with its views of Toward and home (so close, but such a long drive to get there), inspecting the boathouse with its little stalactites and stalagmites, investigating the little church with its history of change ( one of the Stuarts became a Catholic and changed its orientation, apparently.) We couldn't get in - it seems to be under complete renovation. We inspected some superior and historic graffiti on the doors, and we prayed in the graveyard. And then we returned to the house, now closed for the day, the loos, just about to close, and the cars. I sold a copy of my book to one delightful participant, and we set off for the ferry and home.

And as I cooked our dinner, rather later than usual, I thought of my friend Paddy, having led the group all day, easing us through transitions and showing us the paths through the woods, now cooking dinner for them, all 10 or so of them. She's only a year younger than I am. I take my hat off to her.

The main collage shows the central hall, the unfinished pillars and the library; the extra our picnic on the beach, the little church, and the approach to the side of the house from the shore.