#dunsinane

My hand slipped

It's been nearly two weeks now since @azirafellfirst and I watched Macbeth from the front row.

Just seven years apart from each other...

Black Hill and Dunsinane Hillfort

Everyone has a list of places on their bucket list. Here are a few of mine.

Dunsinane in Perthshire

Zuihōden in Sendai's Aoba ward

Graveyard at Mibudera Temple in Kyoto

Masakado-zuka in Tokyo

When my kids love a book, they immerse themselves in it. When my son was four, he came into the dining room hiding behind an armload of Japanese maple branches I had just pruned. Trying to be a good mother, I quelled my immediate impulse to tell him to get that mess out of my house and instead asked him what on earth he was doing.

"I'm Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane," he replied, with a tone of "what the heck else would I be doing?"

Well, okay then, I'll allow it. But he still had to clean up his mess...

As my children lounged in the tub, they inevitably asked me to tell them stories, and not being a good maker-upper-of-stories, I told them the best stories I knew: Hamlet, Macbeth, The Tell-Tale Heart.

Revisiting Places: Dunsinane Hillfort

We walked up to the Pictish hillfort 'Dunsinane', a name and place, which Shakespeare used in his drama 'Macbeth'. Historically, this is believed to be the site of a battle in 1054, where Malcolm Canmore defeated Macbeth in a competition for the Scottish throne. There hillfort itself appears to have been occupied in the Bronze Age and the Early Middle Ages and still retains many features typical for a hillfort. However, during the Victorian Age, many adventurers and hobby-archaeologists who had read Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' decided to explore Dunsinane and since their methods weren't quite as scientific as today's standards they ended up destroying potential evidence and left the top marred with many pits. We then walked up the hill next to Dunsinane, Black Hill, which allows for a great view over the area, as well as the hillfort.