Scottish Islands Explorer 44: Jul / Aug 2017

Rum’s Kinloch Castle
Rum’s Kinloch Castle
Page 20: Kinloch Castle with
Hallival beyond
(© Mel Worman).
Above: Kinloch Castle Great Hall
with portrait of Lady Monica
Bullough.
Opposite top: Emily Richards on the
castle steps at the start of her
residence (© Mel Worman).
Opposite below: Billiard room
(mapio.net).
Born in New Zealand in 1869, Monica was
the daughter of a French aristocratic family
exiled in the Revolution. Despite a
subsequent conventional upbringing in
England, her life before George was anything
but secure. When she met him in around
1897, she was living alone, separated from her
first husband and child. She, too, was the
subject of scandalous, albeit unproven
rumours. After her divorce was granted, she
and George married in 1903, in Kinloch
Castle itself.
Together they turned the castle into a
fantasy home. A ballroom with a ceiling
covered in stars; their enormous yacht
moored up in the bay while they partied in
the castle; a Japanese garden and hothouses
where miniature alligators swam; cuttingedge
technology of the times such as the giant
Orchestrion, showers with bizarre settings,
and one of the first private telephones in
Britain.
Pathways or Patterns
When I first came to Rum in 2013, after my
partner, Mel, had found a job with Scottish
Natural Heritage looking after the castle, I
was lost and uncertain on the island. I was
also terrified by its seemingly unending
wilderness and lack of any conventional
pathways or patterns. I could find my way
around cities with no problem, feeling at
home in the multicultural, metrosexual world
of London or Berlin. But on Rum there
seemed at first to be no place for me. How
could I ever belong?
Yet Kinloch Castle, with its extravagance,
impracticalities, and wondrous inventions, is as
strange as a city and more beautiful. And in the
mornings, coming from our flat into the Great
Hall, with the light shining through the mellow
colours of the stained glass on to the red Persian
rugs, Steinway piano, moth-eaten lion skins, and
carefully carved oak balustrades, stared at by
long-dead stags whose heads loom from the
shadows in the gallery, I felt strangely at home.
I gazed up at Lady Monica’s portrait and
thought that despite the immense differences
in our looks, financial assets and social status,
she, too, had not entirely belonged anywhere,
either sexually or socially, and that even today
her memory is often overshadowed by gossip.
Yet here, she had apparently found a place
where she could be happy.
Here Together
Monica loved the castle and the island. She and George
came here together every year until he died in 1939, and then
she returned alone most years until her own death in 1967.
Aware of her mortality, she sold island and castle to the
Nature Conservancy Council (now Scottish Natural
Heritage) in the 1950s for a knock-down price, insisting that
they were both protected and inseparable.
I agree. A landscape is not made up of opposing elements
which can be separated simply into ‘natural’ and ‘man-made’.
Imagination shapes landscapes, even those that seem most
untouched. All of Rum has been shaped by human beings
and their behaviour. Here are traces of crofts, burial places,
religious sites and tracks going back into prehistoric times.
From the Vikings, to the crofters expelled in the Clearances,
to George and Monica and their retainers, people have come
and gone, leaving traces of their histories, strange and
beautiful as the island itself.
The castle is part of this history, and it is more. For many
visitors, it represents fantasies about what an island should be:
a refuge, a fairy tale, a holiday home, a hunter’s paradise, a
wild place, a business. And as for residents, people do not
generally come to Rum for any sensible economic reason; at
least, that's not the main reason. Rum inspires people; it
allows them to dream, to be themselves in a way that most of
modern life does not. Like Kinloch Castle, Rum often
represents the dreams of people who do not quite fit into any
normal world.
People have to dream before they can make things happen,
and Kinloch Castle still inspires dreams. For me, it proves
that even in the most unlikely places, the most unlikely things
can happen. And during my two years on Rum, as I learned
to love the island along with the castle,
I learned something else. Where we live is not just about
where we belong, but about what we can imagine.
22 SCOTTISH ISLANDS EXPLORER JULY / AUGUST 2017
JULY / AUGUST 2017 SCOTTISH ISLANDS EXPLORER 23