St Monans

Fife coastal Path

Morrone

Morrone is one of Scotland's smaller hills, notable primarily because of its' location. The starting point of the walk is at a car park at the end of a dead-end-road running from the famous Highland village of Braemar. 

Morrone is a good sized hill, with few exceptional features of its own. What draws walkers to its' grassy flanks is the stunning 360' views the summit provides of mountains in every direction. To the South the Glenshee Hills fill the sky, Eastwards the Lochnagar and Eastern Grampians dominate, while the whole of the Northern aspect is filled with the Cairngorms impressive bulk. The photo above (click on it to enlarge), is of Beinn Mheadhoin ("Byn Veeyan") miles over Deeside to the NE, known for its strange crowning of surreal granite tors.

From the little car park by the pond, a track cuts its way around a fenced wooded area before joining a rough track up to some houses. Once past these dwellings, a green signpost points the way up the obvious track which takes the walker all the way to the summit, via a couple of gates in the deer fencing, a series of cairns and a broad grassy ridge.

Morrone is only a short walk, suitable for families, children etc. It doesn't take too long, isn't very demanding and requires very little hill-navigation. The ability to read an OS map is useful at the beginning of the walk in negotiating the various tracks, paths and building between the car-park and the track, once on the hill itself there are very few challenges.

Like so many other summits in this area (Mt Blair, The Cairnwell), the top bristles with the ironmongery of the mobile phone network. Driving through the ski-resort at Glenshee on the way Northwards, I was aghast at the way the place looks in the summer, when it is very much out-of-season. Take away the glistening snow, and the area is a mess of bulldozers, piles of earth, steel girders, ugly carparks, unfinished drainage works, faded cafe's and industrial detritus. I understand that people enjoy skiing as several members of my family do. Surely though, along with the development of winter resorts, there is a responsibility to leave the hills looking less like a post-industrial disaster area, during the off-season? Today, Butchart's Corrie is The Butchered Corrie.

Hopefully technological advances will mean that grim structures like these on mountain tops will be significantly reduced in size and ugliness over the next decades. Balancing the environment, tourist access for walkers like me, and general economic activity is a precarious business, in which decision makers can almost do no right at times. Some of the metal-structures on the hills obviously make money, and create jobs despite their hideous landscape blight.

Conversely it was sad to see the charred remains of the Spittal of Glenshee Hotel. I remember stopping there as a student for a coffee on my way up to explore these hills for the first time, in the early 1990s. The coffee wasn't great, and the tartan tourist tat was a bit gaudy - bit it was once a thriving little mini-economy. While the House of Bruar is over-sized and has spoiled one of my favourite little corners of Scotland, it successfully milks the massive passing trade on the A9, and has clearly found a niche market. It seems a pity that something smaller, less pretentious and pricey can't be make to work at the Spittal of Glenshee. It was also sad to see the Fife Arms Hotel in Braemar looking very closed-for-business at the height of the summer tourist season. The hotel, in the centre of the village, is a huge Victorian pile, which is something of a centre-piece in the place. Apparently, it isn't closed for good though, it has been purchased and is being re-developed.

Dreamy Grampian Scenery in the mist, from Morrone

Morrone is a lovely little afternoon jaunt if you don't have the time or energy for a full day out in the huge mountains which surround it. It is a wonderful viewpoint, rewarding the walker with glimpses of many of Scotland's well-known Easterly mountains. With Braemar immediately at the foot of the hill, there is easy access to the chippy, if like us, your walk involves incentivising children to complete it! It is possible to make complete a circuit over Morrone, by following the bulldozed track made for servicing the radio-mast, back over the Southern, then Eastern side of the hill. We returned directly down the path, as by this stage the lure of the Braemar chip-shop was too enticing.

An Arbroath Album

 There is still some shipbuilding going on in Scotland..

 Lobster

Camera Shy 

 Rustbucket

 The leaning tower of Arbroath

Hmmm......

Rock III

Rock II

you want to know how noisy my house is?

my other son is a drummer!

(all images enlarge by clicking on them)

Hell's Hole - Malin Head

Film Notes: Lore

Cate Shortland's Film "Lore", comes highly rated. The DVD box blurb is weighted with impressive plaudits, while Rotten Tomatoes gives it a hefty approval rating high in the 90s. The awards which decorate the cover, along with the weighty subject matter all added to the sense of anticipation with which I sat down to watch it. Perhaps it is unfair to load any film with such unreasonable expectations because, despite it being a very good film - I was left feeling a little underwhelmed. Maybe if the pundits hadn't 'bigged it up' so monumentally, it would have been easier to appreciate it on its' own terms.

"Lore" concerns the plight of the eponymous character, a 14 year old German girl left in charge of her younger siblings during the collapse of The Third Reich, and the Allied invasion of her country. The grip this film has had on so many of its' admirers flows from the way in which the central dilemma of the main characters creates a tension in the viewer. This tension is transmitted by the repeated questioning of the viewer as to whether they can sympathise with the main character or not.

Lore and her siblings are the central figures, and are hugely vulnerable underdogs, in a hostile and threatening world.  In standard films, we would immediately know therefore, that these were the 'goodies', who would be threatened by 'baddies', and so the battle (of guns or wits) could commence on well-established lines. Lore is more complex than this, in that while the children in Lore are vulnerable, and central to the plot - they are in many ways ghastly characters. The parents, we learn, are absent because they are fanatical Nazis; one of whom is still fighting while the other is in Allied custody. Worse still, the indoctrination Nazi-youth ideology is so thorough in Lore and her family, that they are infected with the toxins of Aryan supremacism, anti-Semitism, Fuhrer-worship and holocaust-denial. 

The dilemma is created time and time again in the viewer in scenes such as the one in which they face trying to cross an American check-point. We are accustomed to, and comfortable with, the image of the American GI as the liberator. By the time we reach this scene, we have travelled with this little vulnerable group of children over many miles and through great suffering. The American GI is a faceless bureaucrat who does not let them pass, because of paperwork irregularities - without any regard for their plight. The film provokes us to 'side' with the kids, before then reminding us that they are representatives of the evil of Nazism, and that the American troops were indeed liberators. This tension is ratcheted up even further when they realise that the only way of explaining their lack of paperwork is to pretend to be Jewish - and therefore victims of the Hitler regime.

If the viewer is placed in the moral-dilemma of knowing where to place their sympathies in Lore - it is a dilemma which parallels the struggle going on within Lore herself. Her battle revolves around the one person who actually cares for them, provides for, and protects them on their journey across the war-ravaged remains of Hitler's Germany. The young man who does all this for them is called Thomas, and he is a Jew. Lore is depicted as being torn between all her perverse ideological instincts (which regularly rear their ugly head) to hate and despise Thomas on one hand; and the evidence of his invaluable protection on the other. Central to this evolving tension is Lore's own sexual awakening as a 14-15 year old who is trained to hate, but is increasingly attracted to Thomas.

The film is disturbing in that the scenes of carnage, bloodshed, suffering and sexual violence associated with wartorn Europe easily earn it a (15) certificate. Lore is also beautiful (not in terms of plot), but in the way that it is shot. The filmakers capture so much beauty and confusion in the way that they construct the visual aspects of Lore, that this no doubt has contributed significantly to the rave reviews.

Given the power and poignancy of the central tension of the film, which creates this parallel tension in the viewer, and the stunning cinematography; why did it fail to live up to expectations? Part of that (as suggested) is that Lore has gained expectations which are unreachably high and so some sense of anti-climax is inevitable. A bigger problem is that the filming and moral-dilemma which work so well, somewhat overwhelm the story. In fact, the narrative is rather thin, and in terms of the Thomas-character somewhat peters out. If the dilemma and filming had been mapped onto a more robust narrative, then the characters might have not merely been symbols of fixed moral positions, but might have been allowed to grow and develop more; or even become more self-aware.The end is nicely tantalising though, when we are given a hint that Lore will not forever accept the tyrannical rule of her Nazi-saturated wider family, but will gain some independence of mind. 

Lore is a troubling, beautifully shot movie, with a nice central motif of the dilemma of the central protagonist, mirrored in a tussle for the viewers empathy. It has the added advantage of being a unique film, not just a re-hash from the Hollywood formula repository. Its a very good movie - but perhaps just not as good as it claims to be on the box.

Rock!

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