Fences surrounded Slains Castle, with turbulent messages: “These ruins are unsafe.” Yes, but for very different, much older reasons - right? To get to the ruins, I had to traverse a slender, nerve-wracking causeway; the sea below curves around in a huge deep gash. With, at most, half an hour of daylight left, I crossed the neck of land, climbed the fence and walked into the ruins. The inside of the castle was as stark and white as a scraped-out skull. In the widening shadows I could just see where the interior walls had been. When I followed their traces, I could map the castle’s design, and at one end there must have been a great drawing-room with huge windows. What a view! On a clear day can you see Norway? The freezing sea out there boiled with ice that afternoon. I went to the edge of the cliff, and thought about shouting at the waves, as Stoker liked to do, but a new squall came in, and this one had knives in it. Time to go. I hauled up my hood again. Two hundred miles due south, hacked at by the same wild, cold sea, I’d find Stoker again, under another gaunt and skeletal ruin standing high against the winter sky.
