Todd Nelson, A Return to Dunnottar Castle
As I think back, while visiting Dunnottar Castle for the second time a few weeks ago, my grandfather was the living link to the old country. Not because he was born there—he was the second generation born in the new country—nor because he had visited. He hadn’t. It was because he grew up hearing his grandmother’s Glasgow accent.
Jeannie Callum Nelson was the matriarch, cared for by her children and grandchildren every Sunday, assuring she had coal and comfort. One of my favorite old family photos shows my father as a toddler on her knees, his father and grandfather sharing the moment in the backyard of a house in Tonawanda, New York—the new country—labeled, simply, “four generations.”
My children have a “four generations” photo, in our backyard in Massachusetts: my grandfather seated at the center, my father, me, and Ariel, Spencer, and Hilary. Our first visit to Dunnottar Castle was a few years behind for me and granddad; it was still many years ahead for me and Ariel. The photo is poised between visits.
I was the fourth generation born in the U.S. and the first Nelson to return to the old country. In 1977, several weeks before flying home to get married, after a year spent at Stirling University, my grandfather met me in Scotland—his first trip out of the country; his only trip back.
We visited the registry of civil records in Edinburgh, where we located the leather-bound volume in which Jeannie’s marriage to Alexander Nelson was recorded—written in an antique script, with all the right family names, witnesses, addresses and clergy. It was a full-circle moment for us both, though it would be many years before I comprehended it as such. Now I can view the same exact page on the Internet. It’s not the same, though. Being there at grandad’s side, holding the old book, is the true experience.
One day that week, we took a bus tour. It went to Balmoral and Aberdeen and to Dunnottar Castle, a fantastic stone ruin atop the pudding stone headlands south of Aberdeen. It was ancestral home to Sir Robert de Keith in 1314, First Earl Marischal, and bears all the scars of Scottish history—Viking invaders, royal visits (Mary Queen of Scots, James VI), fires and assaults, convictions, and dereliction. It was saved from total ruin in 1925 by the First Vicountess, Lady Cowdray. The Marischal line ended after the 10th earl, George Keith, died without heir. These stones exude Scottish history.
Perched hundreds of feet above cruel rocks, buttressed against waves and invaders, Dunnottar is a castle you would rather defend than attack. It is a fortress …with cozy parlors and a dance hall. It has its own bakery, and brewery, using the cistern in the courtyard to obtain safe drinking water.
In September, I got to revisit, retracing with my daughter the steps up the fortified stairway that my grandfather and I had trod. She was now the student in Scotland, having just completed a graduate degree, and I had become the living link to my grandfather. Boucle bouclé, is the term the French use for this arc of connective stories. In her master’s degree thesis, Ariel calls it “narrative cartography.”
I came bearing a few pebbles—circle rocks—from our Maine beach, an offering to the stones of Dunnottar from a world away; from the shores where our family arc had taken us over those four generations. Ariel and I each tossed a pebble from the window of the castle keep onto the cliffs. And a jar of pebbles from the cove at Dunnottar sits on my mantle back in Maine, emblems of our intergenerational and geographical journeys—one and the same thing, when it comes to the old country.
Dunnottar made an impression on me, lo these 42 years hence—its stone steps that generations have trod; that I have trod with the generations; the windows looking Viking-ward on the North Sea and on hay fields to the west; its aura of stolid power and protection and isolation.
And I ponder our own actual family “castle”, the wee stone cottage in the village of Spott, west of Dunbar, where grandfather’s great grandfather was a plowman. They never met. There are no photos of our family there, alas, but it still stands; is inhabited; awaiting a visit. Next trip. With fresh pebbles to exchange. I’d just like to set my foot on the stone stoop that generations have trod.