Looking at the Ruins

Early this summer I spent a few days looking at landscape and ruins in Morayshire, where some of my novel would be set. One very sunny afternoon I visited the ruins of Spynie Palace, once the residence of the powerful bishops of the region before they moved to Elgin. Very little remains now except the shell of the building, a narrow tower you can enter and a castle keep, which I couldn't get into because of building work going on. I sat on the remains of the stone walls and read through my Historic Scotland brochure, which provided several illustrations of what the place might have looked like in its heyday.

At one time the palace looked out on an extensive sea loch and was therefore a centre of trade as well as 'spirituality'. In time the loch silted up and shrank, its access to the sea blocked. There is still a small loch there, but no longer near the ruins of the palace. You look down on a wood and a jungle of vegetation. As I wandered about trying to make sense of what the ruins represented I thought that they did constitute a metaphor for the history I was trying to reconstruct. All we have from history are ruins - bits of stonework, battered weaponry, manuscripts written in to the layman impenetrable holograph, tombstones, fragments of clothing, domestic implements, etc. etc. To the historian these items are eloquent, but only to a certain degree. I was fascinated watching a television documentary recently in which forensic specialists examined four skeletons from a naval cemetery at Portsmouth (I think) and full of admiration for what they were able to tell us about the individuals these skeletons once inhabited. I found their commentary astonishing in its detail. But for all that we cannot wholly reconstruct the past. There are always gaps. We can only come at a tentative understanding through speculation, attempts to empathise, imagination.

Trying to do what I have set myself to do isn't easy. It feels at times like chipping away at a forbidding rock face. I can't make it move fast. I want to be sure of my context and the more I discover the less I feel I know. I don't want to play fast and loose with indisputable facts. I had a look at one of Nigel Tranter's novels that deals with this period - Honours Even, it's called - and he does exactly that. He has Charles II crowned at Scone before the Battle of Dunbar and has the Scottish regalia placed in Edinburgh Castle after it had been taken over by the Cromwellian forces. Both are wrong. Tranter was very knowledgeable about Scottish history. He must have known these facts were wrong, but maybe thought that changing things round a bit made for a tighter fiction e.g. allowing for a daring raid on Edinburgh Castle to get the regalia away to Dunnottar. But that raid isn't so daring because it passes off without much tension. So the book ends up being neither good history nor, for that and other reasons, good fiction. Hm.