Panorama of the Week: Scotland’s Eilean Donan Castle
Filed Under: If dreams really do come true, you could say that the Scottish Highland castle of Eilean Donan is proof.
Aye, the story — it goes something like this.
It was the early 1900s. Eilean Donan castle had been destroyed over 200 years earlier, and nothing but rubble remained on the island where it had once stood. A man named Farquhar MacRae was commissioned to help rebuild the castle, to restore the structure to its previous glory and grandeur. The only problem: there were no plans of the original structure that could guide its reconstruction.
Then, one night, a vision of the original castle in elaborate detail came to Farquhar in his dreams. With the dream fresh, he hastily scribbled and sketched his vision. He eventually completed the plans and the castle was rebuilt accordingly.
Years later, long after the Eilean Donan Castle reconstruction was completed, someone had discovered the original architectural plans for it in the Edinburgh Castle archives. When specialists compared MacRae’s dream-vision reconstruction to that of the original plans, they found something quite remarkable: MacRae’s dream and the original plans were 98% the same.
The 2% that differed? We don’t know. But we’ll take 2% as the margin of error on dreams coming true, any day.
Open the panorama up to full screen to admire Eilean Donan Castle on a surprisingly bright Scottish Highland winter day.
Panorama: Eilean Donan Castle, Scottish Highlands
For best panorama viewing results, press fullscreen (four arrows) and navigate around with your mouse.
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Disclosure: Our trip to Scotland and the Blogmanay campaign are brought to you by Edinburgh’s Hogmanay and is sponsored by VisitScotland, ETAG, Edinburgh Festivals, Haggis Adventures and Skyscanner. The campaign bloggers were sourced and managed by iambassador. As always, all opinions expressed here are entirely our own.
January 15th, 2013 at 3:08 pm
SO awesome. Thanks for that panoramic view. I read the story in the last post and look forward to see what this one had in store. I need to get to Scotland!
January 15th, 2013 at 8:13 pm
Yes dreams and story telling… something I will miss dearly (and already miss) about the scots and scotland. Sigh.. nobody to tell me stories in the dark now! Great panorama effect.. gotta show me how you do it;)
January 15th, 2013 at 10:16 pm
Lovely!!!!
January 16th, 2013 at 11:16 am
@Lori: Glad you enjoyed this panorama and the story. It’s hard to talk about Scotland and NOT tell a story : )
@Ciki: We’re missing it as well here in Berlin. Maybe we should round up all the Scots in town and hold a party. We’ll show you how we do this next time we meet…somewhere in this big (but small) world of ours!
@Andi: Thank you!
January 16th, 2013 at 12:25 pm
Beautiful! Brings back great memories of our time there!
January 16th, 2013 at 3:24 pm
@A Lady in London: It was a great time! Quite difficult to get all of us back on the bus after this castle.
February 25th, 2013 at 10:05 am
really so beatiful wish i could go to all place such as this in the world anyways hopefully thanks for sharing with us
March 14th, 2013 at 7:19 am
@Katushabe: Glad you enjoyed this! It is a beautiful place.