Douglas Castle

Sir Walter Scott based his 1831 Castle Dangerous on Douglas Castle, Lanarkshire. Once the fortified home of the powerful Earls of Douglas and then a seventeenth and eighteenth-century mansion. Coal mining in the 1930s damaged the foundations and it was demolished before the end of that decade, this forlorn tower its only surviving monument.

It struck me as an apt picture of human might, human wealth and human wisdom: impressive and terrifying in their day, but ruinous, depleted, empty and useless within a few generations. The wisdom of God and the riches of Christ, in contrast, cannot, and will not, diminish.

As the partridge sitteth on eggs, and hatcheth them not; so he that getteth riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a fool. Jeremiah 17:11