Hermitage Castle - Dare You Visit?

Hermitage Castle

There’s nowhere quite like it (Thank God, they say). Desolation raw with hard history. Rain-sodden. The very air thick with foreboding. Closer, a perceptible shift occurs, pressure drops, chill descends, tightening across the temples. Alongside, Hermitage Water mutters warnings of what awaits behind the bare-branched bend....

Visual violence so visceral that your eyes recoil, you gape as from a stomach-punch. Senses struggling to comprehend detect only a void, an absence and vulnerability. All that binds you securely to life feels severed.

Glowering, squat and square the fortress broods upon a blood-drenched past. Four massive blank facets with dead vacant sockets, resonant with the cries of the damned and abandoned. Dreadful symmetry standing guard still to the ‘bloodiest valley in Britain’.

Within all is ruin, as if in denial of immanent dark arts and dark deeds. No legal, religious or moral authority could hold for centuries. Malevolence reigns on; circling, searching for weakness, a miasma too foul for modern sensibilities.

Legend, folklore and history entwine. Lawless times and endless violence, Liddesdale housing the worst of those ‘shaking the border loose’ (see Robert Low’s 2021 trilogy on the Border Reivers). The capital of the age - treachery, murder, thieving and burning - nothing was safe in the Debatable Lands. Although no question of who ruled here.

Pre-dating these predatory clans, gruesome cruelty was served upon the innocent unfortunate to live in the shadow of those grey walls. An early lord invoking supernatural assistance in Redcap Sly, to terrorise his tenantry until dragged to an aptly hideous demise at nearby Ninestane Rig. Yet that ' familiar spirit ' lingers still?

As dusk draws in, gratefully ready to leave and strangely drained of all joy and hope, take care not to turn your back too soon. For what was that flash of red at an upper portal, that heavy thud by your feet? Quickening your pace, and from a safe distance, a final glance into the gloom, into the valley; Hermitage Castle, embedded like a rotten tooth in an empty maw.

For those wishing to see the castle at its best ...... you can't; the site is closed to the public between October and April. For your own protection. The safer view is via the Gallery on the wikipedia website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermitage_Castle.

Image credit: Iain Lees (via Creative Commons).                                              

Paul Thompson