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Myths and legends live

Unbind imagination

The portal opens

Alternate realities

Enriching a world turned grey

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The photo for this week’s prompt was taken in the Scottish Highlands at Eilean Donan, a castle built on a small island where the Loch Alsh meets Loch Duish and Loch Long.

The castle was long closed by the time we stopped there, briefly, but it is a place I had long wanted to see for myself. It is probably one of the most photographed castles in the Highlands and certainly one of the loveliest settings.

The castle was originally built in the thirteenth century, and was a stronghold of the Clans Mackenzie and MacRae, built to defend againt Viking invaders. It was destroyed after the clan’s involvement in the eighteenth century Jacobite uprising and remained in ruins until it was rebuilt and restored by Lieutenant-Colonel John Macrae-Gilstrap in the twentieth century.

The castle may be familiar to many as it has been used in many films over the years, including David Niven’s version of Bonnie Prince Charlie, Highlander, Bollywood movies and the Bond film, The World Is Not Enough, to name but a few.

Like all good castles, Eilean Donan has its fair share of ghosts. A ghost known only as Lady Mary is said to walk the bedrooms, while a headless soldier… clutching his severed head… id thought to be one of the forty-six soldiers whose heads were spiked atop the walls after the castle was taken during the Jacobite Rebellion.

But it is not only in the castle that strange things may be seen. The island is said to be the burial place of the Otter Kings and the waters of Loch Duich are home to a creature with a sinuous neck that sounds very like the fabled monster of Loch Ness.

The waters are also home to selkies, the seal maidens who can change their shape from seal to human by casting off their skins…but cannot change back without them. Legends tell how three brothers fell in love with three seal maidens and hid the skins, taking the maidens as their wives. The first, loving his selkie and seeing her distress, gave her back her discarded skin and was able to be with her once every nine nights. The second seal maiden found her skin and escaped back to the loch. The third died a horrible death when her husband attempted to burn the fur to prevent her from leaving… True love does not seek to hold or constrain.

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Thank you so much to everyone who took part this week and to everyone who reblogged the prompt, round up and the individual resposes! A new prompt will be published later today. As always, I will reblog as many contributions as space and time allows as they come in… and all of them will be featured in the round-up next Thursday.

All the posts are listed below, so please click on the links below to read them and leave a comment for the author!

Pingbacks do not always come through… if you have written a post for this challenge and it does not appear in the round-up, please leave a link to your post in the comments and I will add it to the list.

An invitation to writephoto writers…

As there are usually too many contributions to reblog all of them every week, and so that we can get to know their writers, I would like to invite all writephoto writers to come and introduce themselves on the blog as my guest! Click here for details.

Come and join in!

Many thanks to this week’s contributors:

Kerfe Roig

Hayley R. Hardman at The Story Files

stoneronarollercoaster

Leena at Soul Connection

Kathy Lauren Miller at A View to a Book

Rebecca Cutler at Beckie’s Mental Mess

Mary Suzanne Barrett

M. Brazfield at Words Less Spoken

Violet at Thru Violet’s Lentz

Suzanne at Being in Nature

Jen Goldie, who followed with parts two and three

Maria at A Heart for Africa

Jane Dougherty Writes

Karen DeMers Dowdall at Once Upon a Time…

Anita from Anita Dawes and Jaye Marie

Eluminora Creations

Teresa Smeigh at Tessa can do it

Roberta Eaton at Roberta Writes

Jim Adams

Sadje at Keep it Alive

Kyt Wright

Christine Bolton at Poetry for Healing

Sisyphus at Of Glass and Paper

Padre’s Ramblings

Neel Anil Panicker

The Dark Netizen

Ritu Bhathal at But I Smile Anyway

Fandango at This, That and the Other

Di at pensitivity101

Reena Saxena

Paula Light at Light Motifs II

Na’ama Yehuda

Iain Kelly

Bobby Fairfield at When the pen takes control

Deepa at Sync with Deep

Geoff Le Pard at Tangental

Trent P. McDonald at Trent’s World

Willow Willers at willowdot21

Twisted Thoughts at Ripples on the Pond of the Internet

Anjali Sharma at Positive Side Of The Coin