The big house and the Druid Standing Stone

The standing stone in the field by a large house in Duror, Lochaber, is believed to be part of a former circle of Druid standing stones. I've not researched its history because, believe it or not, I actually lived in the house in the 1970s and the standing stone was just one of the many local attractions on offer.

In the 1970s in Scotland, it was still possible to rent interesting properties that had not yet been developed into corporate venues or exclusive B and Bs. Our landlord was from one of the the big landowning  clans and this was one of their family seats (the castle on the loch had already been sold). His father had been assassinated while serving as Governor-in-chief in Sarawak in the 1950s and his son didn't need a huge baronial.style house, so he rented it to us. We were relocating from Ireland to the West Highlands, and my mother chose it because she thought that my paternal grandfather might move in with us and occupy the middle floor. As it turned out, he never did, and that was for the best. We had a unique environment in which to stretch our legs, and  lived there for a little under three years. I have many happy memories of Duror, the village, and the landscape around the house, though the house was unsettling for me. Haunted, so they said. Definitely a bit of a bat problem, as I discovered when I was having a bath one summer evening in 1976 and a bat flew out from behind the gilt-edged mirror. 

J and I walked from Cuil Bay to the house. The new section of the cycle track passes in front of it, but the current owners have built a bank and planted trees on it, in front of the track As the old railway line used to pass through the fields behind the house, I'm sad that the cycle track doesn't follow that route, but I guess it's too close for the landowners to feel comfortable with. I've no idea of the identity of the current owners.

We walked on to Keil cemetery, where we looked at the ancestral graves of the landowning clan I mentioned earlier, and also found the more recent grave of my not-quite stepfather, who died in February this year, and was buried during lockdown. My mother can't walk up there, it's too far, and the grave was untended. I tidied it up and found some Holly with berries to decorate it. The cemetery is stark and beautiful in its winter foliage. 

When we got back, we went to the carol service at Portnacrois, near Appin, a moving and sparsely attended service. The vicar, Amanda, is humorous and innovative, though I still struggle with my mother's abrupt change in churchgoing habits following her remarriage. We had a chat about this later, when we were eating mince pies at midnight, but though what she says is fascinating, it's also  muddled and hard to follow. She definitely has some sort of dementia, and the threads of her stories become entwined. It seems, going by what she said, that  although she started forming her own opinions about religion and sectarianism at an early age, she would not have let her mother down by refusing to bring us up in the pervasive religion in which she herself dad brought up. However, on another day, she might well tell us a different version of this tale. Where does the person underneath go when memories fade?