No. 19. Balmoral Death Trip

From "The Flaneur of Utter Destruction"

Greetings. I originally planned to send out this excerpt from a larger work in progress on the weekend of the Queen's platinum jubilee, but life got in the way. For best results, imagine yourself back in time to the morning after Her Majesty’s appearance on TV with a CGI bear.

I

Strange monuments, macabre memorials, imperial detritus: these are things I know about. So I was rather surprised when, one summer night in Texas, my friend Sandy pulled out his phone and showed me an image of Queen Victoria’s Scottish Death Pyramid. Mysterious, ominous, encircled by trees beneath a glowering grey sky, it looked as though it had been left there by ancient astronauts. “It’s somewhere in the Highlands,” Sandy said.

And yet I had never heard of it. How was this possible? I had spent many years traveling the globe in pursuit of disorientation and de-familiarization, walking up Siberian mountains and driving through Central Asian deserts in pursuit of surreal and incongruous things. Clearly, the extreme boredom I had experienced as a youth in Scotland had blinded me to the possibility that the alienating strangeness I sought could also be found on my native soil.

Obviously I had to go and see it. But then the pandemic set in, and two years would pass before I was in Scotland again. A few days before boarding the plane, however, I shot an email to my brother Stephen, who, as an experienced hillwalker, knew the Highlands well. Stephen hadn’t heard of the pyramid either and so was especially startled to learn that it was situated on the grounds of Balmoral, Queen Elizabeth’s favorite estate, which he had visited numerous times. An immense pagan monument raised by the widow queen of the largest empire in history to her dead consort didn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d miss. And yet he had.

And he almost missed it again, as we shot past the extremely discreet entrance to Balmoral, on towards Aberdeen. Now, in my imagination, Aberdeen and the Highlands were impossibly remote. Indeed, in Scotland, anything longer than 30 minutes is considered an onerous drive you might want to reconsider, while the fifty-mile stretch that separates Edinburgh from Glasgow marks an east coast-west coast cultural divide that may not be quite as substantial as the one between NYC and LA, but they’re working on it. That extended sense of distance is not always psychological, however: shitty infrastructure and a lack of public transport can make a small country seem very large if you don’t have access to a car and need to go anywhere outside of the major population centers. And since I didn’t learn how to drive until I moved to Texas in my 30s, Aberdeen, the Highlands and Balmoral had always seemed very far away indeed, like some remote Siberian taiga.

In fact, it turned out that the Queen’s favorite estate was a mere two-hour drive from Dunfermline, where I grew up and where Stephen still lives. Driving that distance north from Austin would only get me as far as a kolache at the Czech Stop gas station in the town of West. I wouldn’t even make it as far as Dallas.

II

The entrance was marked by two symbols of the British state: a red telephone box and a post office located on top of a public toilet. Inside, we quickly got the sense that while the reigning Queen might permit visitors to come look at her ancestor’s death pyramid, she did not exactly encourage the practice, as there was no information to be had about the pyramid or its location — although the unfriendly woman behind the counter did offer to let us take a photograph of a blurry photocopy of a map in an old book.

We decided to use Stephen’s ordinance survey map instead. A short footbridge designed by IK Brunel led to the gate through which multiple generations of Royals and their staff must have passed many times. We followed instead a road that took us past some intensely calm highland cattle, an abandoned yet meticulously maintained golf course and then into a cluster of stone cottages. The empty, silent streets looked like an ideal home for brainwashed ex-spies who have no names, only numbers; or mutant children who can read minds and compel others to obey their telepathic commands. An immaculate green lawn lay across from the houses; a sign on the gate informed us that it was the wrong season for outsiders to walk on it.

Nearby we found a path that seemed to align with what the map told us was the road to the pyramid, but no sooner had we set foot on it than a robotic eye mounted on a metal stalk caused us to reconsider. This was retro-surveillance, from before that magic moment when the UK started competing with China for the number of cameras it could place on its streets, or the invention of Silicon Valley’s pleasure panopticon. It dated back to the time when only scarred megalomaniacs with cats on their lap and governments had the means to erect mechanical sentinels to watch over you. But that overt declaration of surveillance was much more threatening than the thought that an AI hosted on servers in a faraway data center might be tracking your movements.

So we followed a different path, which soon brought us to the foot of a hill. There, a small, unobtrusive sign, the only one we would see on this Balmoral death-trip, pointed us up towards the Prince Albert monument.

III

A soft landscape awaited us, as if we had entered a new, more serene reality designed for royalty. A lush carpet of moss lay beneath the fir trees, muting the sounds of the forest. I half-expected a mystic stag to appear in the distance; that it did not was mildly disappointing.

The path curved around the hillside, the air thinned, and a tall cairn appeared before us. Stephen had seen eight or nine of them marked on the ordinance survey map, though most were in a separate part of the forest, away from the pyramid.

I scanned the inscription: the cairn was dedicated to one of Victoria’s daughters. It also mentioned her husband, who was, like her father, a German prince. How the princess had died it did not say, but the monument was en route to that of her father, as if it were a sentinel guarding the entrance to the realm of the dead. For me, Queen Victoria was like an austere empress from a lost civilization, whose near-mythical solemnity was chiseled into the faces of the statues that stood on the squares of many British towns and cities. And yet, out here in the forest, she had succumbed completely to deep, atavistic impulses, piling rock upon rock in memory of a dead child.

This pre-Christian expression of grief broke through the carapace of her imperial persona, connecting her to the pagans that had lived on this land for millennia before her, and also to the 19th century peasants who had erected the cairn on her instructions. It also created a strange sense of proximity for me, as I thought of her walking the trail that I now followed; that sense of proximity then transferred to her great-great-granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II, who I now realized must also have climbed this hill many times, tracing the footsteps of her progenitors. That said, the hill did seem like a bit of a hike for a nonagenarian, so perhaps I was wrong.

“How do you think the Queen gets up here?” I asked Stephen.

“She probably rides a horse,” he replied.

Then I thought about Charles, who must also have been up and down this hill many times. What a bizarre fate! Waiting well into retirement age to do the job that he was born to do, and still not being able to do it, while enduring decades of mockery and ridicule. From his early days of talking to plants, to serving as the villain in the Diana divorce drama, to the ultra-humiliation of being caught on tape wishing he could be reincarnated as a tampon inside Camilla Parker-Bowles, he had had a rough ride.

Perhaps that was why, as I looked around at the beautiful estate that was his purely by accident of birth, I couldn’t feel any resentment. I tried, but it wouldn’t come. I knew all the arguments against the monarchy, of course, but republicanism, in a country where royals have long since lost the power to do anything except wave golden sticks in ceremonial settings, requires a degree of commitment, a certain metaphysical fervor. Like nudism.

I couldn’t be bothered. Having wandered through many a dull palace-museum in post-revolutionary republics, I found that I preferred my royal edifices with descendants of the original inhabitants still inside them.  There was nothing to envy in Charles’ life. He could have his estate.

IV

Three hours after leaving Dunfermline, we arrived at the top of the hill; so it was that my sense of time and distance both collapsed completely. And there, through the trees, was the pyramid.

Now on the tiny screen of Sandy’s phone, it had appeared immense, chthonic — a dark, sinister structure hidden in a dark, sinister forest. I distinctly remembered the sense that I was looking down on it from above. In fact, the pyramid was located at the highest point of the hill and enjoyed commanding views of the Queen’s vast estate. Nor was it all that dark. I recalled a blackness akin to that of the churches and tombstones of Edinburgh, that had spent centuries absorbing the damp and grime of the city; in reality, it was the plain grey of an ordinary Scottish suburb. Nor was it all that big; at somewhere between 30 and 40 feet tall, the Scots pines still towered over it. By the standards of Scottish pyramids (there being no others) it was a decent enough size I suppose; but relative to a Pharaonic monument it was very modest. In Ancient Egypt it might have passed muster as a tomb for a mid-ranking court functionary at best.

The last time I had visited a pyramid was in the Moscow suburbs; you could go inside that one and charge plastic bracelets with cosmic energy. Stephen, meanwhile, had been inside the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Egypt. At Balmoral, such penetrations were not possible. Now that the quest was complete, there was not a whole lot to do other than contemplate the pyramid from different angles. And so I walked around it, staring at the weather-worn stones, pausing by the stone plaque, eroded by 160 years of wind and rain:

TO

THE BELOVED MEMORY

OF

ALBERT,

THE GREAT AND GOOD:

PRINCE CONSORT,

ERECTED BY HIS

BROKEN-HEARTED WIDOW

VICTORIA R.

21ST AUGUST

1862

Then I walked around it again, and again – not too fast you understand, I had waited years for this moment; I had to give it time to sink in. Meanwhile, other visitors were coming and going — families and couples and hikers with dogs. The path had seemed empty on the way up, but it was getting quite busy at the top now.

Once again, I found myself impressed by Queen Victoria’s total surrender to deep, atavistic urges. The head of the Church of England had acted like a pure pagan, elevating the dead far above the living. Just as the pharaohs had given the best real estate to corpses, selecting areas with magnificent views for their tombs, so Prince Albert had been placed as close to heaven as was possible, and granted a panoramic view of the landscape, as if he were still reigning in death.

The contrast between the robust confidence of the Victorian era, with its science, engineering and railway-building, and the blank, primal horror of death as evinced by Victoria was profound. Albert had died during the high point of 19th century archaeological (re)discovery, when French and English explorers competed over who could acquire the most impressive relics and ruins for museums in Paris and London. And it was as if the uncovering of all those remains from the eschatologically obsessed civilization of Egypt had awoken similar desires in the hills of Scotland; a Queen’s dream of a dead god-man voyaging to the afterlife in his stone sky-ship.

I imagined the local peasants dragging the stones one by one up the hill, forced to surrender to the whims of a crazed monarch, like the children of Israel in the Bible. Perhaps a sky map painted on the ceiling, to guide Albert on his heavenly voyage, and of course ushabtis to act as his servants (enamel rather than wax, since he was a prince). Perhaps there was even some fine bone china buried in there with him, that he might enjoy his repasts in the afterlife in the same style as that to which he had been accustomed on earth.

And I have to say that being so close to the mummified carcass of a prince greatly improved the experience of standing on that hill. When I thought about Albert sleeping alone in the damp darkness, waiting for the moment of resurrection that he might be reunited with his grim-faced queen, it was as if that weird chthonic energy I had hoped to discover at the pyramid was crackling all around me.

Then I remembered that Albert was not, in fact, grinning lipless inside the pyramid, though where he actually was interred I had no idea. Come to think of it, I didn’t know where Victoria was buried, either. Westminster Abbey, perhaps? I had been there years ago, but all I could remember were the poets and scientists, and even then, I didn’t remember them that well. Newton and Wordsworth were in there, I think. William Blake, too.

V

We descended the hill and broke for lunch, after which we crossed a road to the other part of the forest. Here, the other cairns that Victoria had erected lay concealed, a royal necropolis among the trees, but with the aid of the ordinance survey map and Stephen’s compass we steadily made our way to each one.

The path wound this way and that way, up and down hillsides, in and out of clearings. Cairn led on to cairn, each one granted a position of elevation like Prince Albert’s pyramid (though none with so majestic a view) and soon I started to feel sorry for Queen Victoria, who had lost so many children. It was incredible! So much misery, so much grief: no amount of earthly status could protect her from the woes of the flesh, the inevitability of suffering. But by the fourth cairn I was starting to think that something was amiss. Being as uninterested in Queen Victoria as I am in modern royalty, I hadn’t actually bothered to do any research prior to the trip; but to lose four, five, six children was so extreme a fate that I would definitely have known about it. After all, I knew that following Prince Albert’s death she had gone into deep mourning and taken to wearing black all the time; if on top of that she had lost so many of her children then it would, without question, have been part of her legend. And there were more cairns to come, adding up to a total of fourteen. So rather than ignore or briefly glance at the plaque on the next one I read it all the way through and discovered that these cairns were not death monuments at all but rather life monuments, attesting to marriages between Victoria’s children and assorted Germans, (or at least they all seemed to be German to me).  

The landscape then was not only emblematic of death but also of fecundity. On this side of the forest a series of stone phalluses had sprung from the earth and now thrust themselves at the sky, demanding of the heavens that there be more cousin marriage, more consanguineous offspring. Back at the pyramid I had imagined Charles and William leading young George up the hill, to instruct him in the arcane rites of ancestor worship known only to the royal family’s inner circle. But now it seemed that the royals might practice other secret rituals, perhaps tracing and retracing sacred pathways between each stone phallus whenever it was time to produce a new member of the dynasty. I pictured Charles and William and Anne and the rest all wearing crowns of flowers and waving golden sickles in the air while calling upon the sun to infuse their loins with maximum fertility, as a smiling Queen Elizabeth looked on approvingly from a throne made of antlers. Perhaps they might even burn the occasional peasant in a giant wicker man, to guarantee the continuation of the bloodline.

And so we wandered, from one stone phallus to another in Victoria’s soft landscape of sex-death-magick. Atavistic indeed! How lush it was, how lush, and we followed the paths the monarch of our great-grandparents had carved out in the landscape, until we arrived at a penultimate cairn that overlooked Balmoral itself. The flag of the castle was not flying so I knew the Queen was absent, but her staff would still be working.

Which had been Queen Victoria’s room? Which was Queen Elizabeth’s room? What had those walls witnessed? When the royals came together in the halls of their ancestors, and then parted for the night, did they fall asleep only to find themselves swimming through each other’s dreams? What secret chambers did they find there? Did they encounter Albert on his voyage to paradise? And when the royals were not around, did their servants put on crowns and robes, and talk posh, and dine on suckling pigs and refer to each other as “Your Majesty”? And also, why didn’t the Germans bomb Balmoral in World War II?

“Let’s go,” said Stephen.