Hours in ruins

Now. Nooks and crannies. Those two most definitely are my favourite things. Fortunate, therefore, that I find myself living in Scotland where we have no shortage of either, because nooks and crannies can be found in most buildings that can claim to be anywhere in the realm of ‘hundreds of years old’. The highest quality specimens, in my opinion, are often hidden in medieval ruins.

I am fascinated by the Middle Ages and, like many other people, by ruins. There’s just something about ruins. I guess they are romantic and dramatic and all that, but I think I am captivated by crumbling buildings because they are like whispers: one can’t quite hear them, so one must listen more carefully. When I look at ruins, I can’t quite see what they once were, but with suffficient pointers I can just about imagine it. And it’s the imagining that slows my steps and holds my gaze until hours have passed, my feet ache and my head spins.

The best ruins are the ones where one can explore at will and without masses of other visitors milling about. Craigmillar Castle outside Edinburgh is one of my top picks so far. I mean, honestly, stuff Edinburgh Castle, Craigmillar is the real deal with nooks and crannies aplenty! I have visited twice and practically had the place for myself from cellars, kitchens, halls, chambers and stairs to the tallest towers and rooftops.

Entrance to the original towerhouse at Craigmillar Castle. Enter here, all ye who wish to lurk!

I didn’t expect to like Linlithgow Palace quite as much. Last seen as a renaissance show-off piece of the Stuarts, I thought it might be, well, too palatial to my liking. But no, on a quiet winter Saturday Linlithgow rendered itself magnificiently to lurking, which is the perfect pastime in nooks and crannies.

A nook, a cranny and a spiral staircase in Linlithgow Palace. Lurk away!

At the moment, however, monastic buildings are rising my charts of cranniesque nookishness. If I were a medieval person, I think I would be either a) dead, because the life-expectancy of women really wasn’t that great, or b) a nun, because nuns come closest to educated women with independent careers. That’s why Inchcolm Abbey, although a past home of Augustinian canons and not nuns of any denomination, is now the ruin I can’t get over. In its amazingly well-preserved 15th-century cloister I can just about hear the compline bell and feel my feet freeze under the refectory table, whilst I simultaneously lurk to my heart’s content in the 21st century. For hours.

A continuum of crannies through the 13th-century chapter house door and across the cloister at Inchcolm Abbey