The White Knight Walk

Saturday afternoon, post-market, the day still glorious, given the storm warnings, and the need to walk off a fig and prosciutto pastry, took The White Knight Walk.  Down through the allotments, past the rugby pitch, through Wrack Wood, a daydream-seat at the rest-and-be-thankful bench, then to the spooky Duff House Mausoleum.  Burial place of the Earls of Fife.  There is a recumbent carved effigy of a knight in armour to the rear of the mausoleum, which must be circled and the knight’s forehead touched, otherwise, The White Knight Walk is ‘a bogey’*.  (T.H. White wrote the fantasy series, ‘The Once and Future King’.  His Sir Lancelot is genius). 

The 2nd Earl Fife passed off this white knight effigy as one of his ancestors.  But it’s the ‘Ill-Made Knight’, as is actually the grave-marker of one ‘Dr. Alexander Douglas’ which the 2^nd Earl had moved to the mausoleum, for the look of it.  No knight.  No Relation.  An inkling into the personality and possible reasons why the very same 2^nd Earl of Fife’s wife, Dottie, shot him in the long gallery.  Which I’d imagine is a painful place to be shot.

There are also ghosts. 

Obviously.

The ghosts on Saturday were of the ancients in Wrack Wood that have been felled this last summer.  It’s a graveyard of giant tree trunks, haunted by black toadstools and fungi, and smells damp and boozy.   Sad to see, but necessary, the rot in their heartwood visible.  Unlikely they’d survive more winters.  But no new tree-planting has happened yet, and the Himalayan balsam is popping up like zombies.  Chi-gunged the river then pulled up some balsam, reported the site online.

Above the stained glass trees, the elegant chimney pots of Duff House, where there is a murder every night.

Crow that circles.

Crow that roosts.

Images for this journal have been posted on Insta @purplehaze_journal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ill-Made_Knight

https://www.douglashistory.co.uk/history/memorials/duff_house_mausoleum.htm

*https://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/sndns456

https://www.historicenvironment.scot/about-us/news/countess-fife-returns-to-duff-house/

https://www.invasivespecies.scot/report-invasive-plant-sighting