Before coming to Glasgow, Scotland for my exchange program this summer, I think I had an idea of what buildings in Europe would be like. I knew they would be older than anything in the United States, that was for sure. A fact I know I’ve shared with most of the people in my program is that only 2% of Ireland is covered in native trees (as opposed to the contiguous U.S., which boasts 881 native tree varieties). I had this neat idea in my head that the U.S. wins out when it comes to natural age, but the history housed in Europe, and in Scotland, would be unmatched.
I was largely right. I’ve spent many weekend excursions wandering through decaying castles, tripping over uneven cobblestones and facing not only the history of the country, but of the buildings that stand around me, still used like they were built yesterday. The lab I do my research in has been steadily updated since it was built in the 1920s; its third floor was originally built of timber out of fear that any heavier material would cause it to collapse into the old mineshaft it was built on. The stone staircase outside the main quads was moved here from the old campus in 1870, but it was originally built in 1690. There’s no denying that when I first arrived, I was in awe of the old world that seemingly lived and breathed around me, one you could touch and see and live in. There’s a sense that instead of just bearing witness to the history around you, you are a small piece toward its legacy.
The first excursion that completely shattered this image was a trip to Culzean Castle, a country estate 50 miles from Glasgow that’s been owned by the Kennedy clan since the 12th century (another difference from the U.S. here — very rarely does one use a lineage to describe the owner of a house). The castle is gorgeous, surrounded by palm trees and green houses, turrets, sea caves and a ruined arch that frames the whole picture. When we visited, I snapped a few photos before stepping up to read the plaque.
As it turns out, this crumbling frame to the castle was built very intentionally to look this way. It was constructed as a part of architect Robert Adam’s renovations in the late 1700s, made to look as if it is from a medieval era. Any remnants of an age gone by were entirely planned; the feeling of reverence that comes with looking at a piece of history was entirely manufactured. And I had totally fallen for it. It shocked me out of my awe, to think some guy in the 1700s had built it this way just because he thought it would look cool. I felt betrayed by this man, one who clearly had a similar admiration for the aesthetics of age as I had just been indulging in — an equally foolish feeling. Here I was, just another tourist staring at something I didn’t understand, assuming it was something old for the sake of it. Did it really matter if it was from the 10th century or the 18th? Or for that matter, the 18th or 21st? What is the special magic that exists from something that is so old, and why did the architectural history of this tiny hunk of stone shatter the illusion of it so completely?
I think I’ve had this view of history that people from the past aren’t conscious of their place in time. It feels anachronistic for a man born in 1728 to interact with periods that come before it, let alone want to emulate them or perceive them as old. When we learn about history in school, we learn about periods of time, buckets that rarely intersect. The egregious overstep Adam took challenged my notion of what history is and demystified the intimidating age and authority of that arch. It’s easy to get caught up in the romance of how we perceive a time period and forget that real, complex people existed within them just as we exist now. But history, as truth, is not a series of large ideas, but a summation of all the small ones — hence why attempting to present it is such a difficult task.
I experienced a similar moment a couple of weeks ago when I took a bus tour from Inverness to the Isle of Skye by myself. I squeezed into crowded seats as the tour guide wove through narrow roads of the Scottish Highlands and shouted through the fuzzy speaker about the history of the region, specifically the Battle of Glen Shiel, which took place in 1719 just outside Eilean Donan Castle in the steep Munros of the region.
It was odd to think about armies marching across the steep slopes of the land, but the story the tour guide told about the battle itself was even stranger to me. According to the guide, the Jacobite troops were defeated by the English troops after a storm caused the 5,000 men sent by Spain to aid the Jacobites to turn into 300. The Jacobites and Spanish quickly realized that they would not be able to fight off the English — they both outnumbered them and had a high ground. The hours-long battle ended with those same Spanish soldiers deciding to fight the English troops, and eventually be taken prisoner, simply to allow the Jacobite soldiers — who would have certainly been executed for treason — to escape back home. It was the end of the “little rising,” as the battle was informally known.
What struck me the most about this was the fragility of the Jacobite cause. Wars often feel like they have an authority to them — that they are won and lost on the leadership of a commander, on their organization and ranks, on their strategy. But these men didn’t really seem to know what they were getting themselves into. The idea of fighting a real war on those steep slopes felt almost comical. Any attempt to imagine it became each side’s soldiers falling over themselves sliding down the sides of the valley, like in a cartoon. Trying to lend it any weight felt a lot to me like that myth of the ruined arch. Military history, especially, is a kind of history that we lend a lot of power to. In reality, battles mostly consisted of overconfident men living to see another day on the generosity of others, or luck. We tend to put a lot of stock in history and revere those who came before — the costly wars, the genius minds — but sometimes the notoriety and authority they carry can feel just as manufactured as that stony arch.
You might say that my small stint in Scotland has made me lose respect for history and age a bit. There’s so much of it here, and it’s easy on your sixth or seventh castle to take it for granted. My care for the presentation of old buildings has broken down some; there’s less of a smoke screen of awe and respect for what came before. But I think I’ve discovered a new way to appreciate these sites. To see people from the past not as representatives of their time or a small piece of something much bigger, but as they were — human — is beautiful. And it’s a lesson that I continue to learn. Now, that’s what I look for when consuming history — the cracks in the legends we tell ourselves, the humanity in history. I try to go beyond the constructed story of a place or person and find what can’t be smoothed down.
Russian author Leo Tolstoy, actually, argues as much in “War and Peace,” my audiobook of choice this summer. His officers are bumbling and his soldiers are pivotal; his small characters have as much influence on the plot as anybody and his commanders sweep through the novel without much agency. His rejection of the “Great Man Theory” — that history is controlled by the decisions of these great men — in turn relies on the actions of the crowd of individuals and where they cast their bids. “Kings are the slaves of history,” he says. They are a facade, a front for the truth of the world that lies in the inextricably complex web of the everyman, men that are human, make mistakes, build buildings just because they look cool and maybe decided to back out of a revolution as soon as they saw their opponent across the hill.
I hope that when I think of my summer in Scotland, I think of that arch. I hope I remember to dissolve the aesthetics and posturing of the world and see what is true: that we’re all living for the first time, and, as Tolstoy says: “We can only know that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
Statement Columnist Cora Rolfes can be reached at corolfes@umich.edu.
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