Paula McGuire's Big Adventures


DEATH: it’s life’s only certainty. And yet, sometimes I’m just not so sure about it. Fine, I know it’s coming, but I’m just not convinced I’ll be at home when it does. I’m out a lot, you know, dangling over precipices and hurtling across skies – how is it ever to find me there? This week though, death didn’t need to seek me out, as I popped along to one of its hunting grounds to walk among those who have outgrown it.

Kelburn Castle and Estate in Ayrshire is that rare Scottish breed – history with a decent sense of humour. If you haven’t already witnessed its infamous graffiti project, Police Scotland will probably want to check your alibi. Far from being a relic of a time long gone, Kelburn Castle wears the new face of an old masterpiece, with a vibrant skin of 21st-century design daubed across its 13th-century walls.

Sprawling around this bastion of Brazilian artwork – owner Lord Glasgow invited four Brazilian graffiti artists to paint the walls – is a 3,500-acre estate that combines the natural with, well, the frankly super. Waterfalls, themed gardens and the burn from which the name derives sit alongside a bustling indoor play-barn, a music festival so cult it shames Hubbard and, for a few nights last weekend, a full-on zombie outbreak.

Based around the park’s Secret Forest, which, even with sunlight and an angina spray can induce palpitations, Kelburn’s Hallowe’en Haunted Forest invited champions among men – and anyone with parental consent and a spare tenner – to take a self-guided walk around what a better wordsmith than I would call the night of the living dead.

I’m an adventurer, sure, but I’m no martyr, and even Tenzing Norgay needed back-up. Never one to scrimp on brain safety, I enlisted the protection of one so lofty that pigeons find him comforting: artist, podcaster and knight of the undead, Gavin Spence. Self-appointed knight, granted – there’s no hierarchy beyond the grave.

Met on arrival by general manager Jared Bowers, Gavin and I approached the situation like we would a cliff edge: with trepidation and a lasting power of attorney. The ticket collector had already succumbed to brain-lust and, had it not been for Jared guiding us enthusiastically through the fresh cemetery and willing victims, I might have given up the ghost before my hand stamp had dried. Already the larches were weeping and the yews were inconsolable as, beneath their up-lit branches, screams pierced the forest floor. No sooner had my cochlear recovered than it was rattled by the sounds of what I’m certain was medulla-munching – although I guess it could have been the hypothalamus. With the gift of a hot apple cider – in recompense for our eternal souls, I’m sure – Jared left us in the saloon to await our fate. For the subsequent few minutes, it was to risk our digits poking around in mystery boxes of eyeballs and grey lady’s hair, and to try out a vampiric coffin for size – too big and too small for this Goldilocks pair.

As we weaved towards the exit, quarantine signs loomed and the face masks provided only reminded us that each laboured breath could be without succession. What exactly would we be up against outside the inn? Our own mortality, that’s what. Bolstered by the wary looks on the faces of our newly-founded team, we listened in earnest to the instructions from a sympathetic government official, who informed us of the outbreak and our role in re-establishing human habitation of the area.

So far, none had been successful, but surely eight completely unskilled and entirely unprepared visitors would sort the situation right out? Well, we’d be damned if we weren’t going to give it a good go. And damned, it seemed, from the moment we stepped into that forest.

As far as courage goes, mine had gone far enough by the time we reached the first outhouse in the woods and a bloodied doctor, surrounded by meat hooks and hanging bags of remains, leapt out of the doorway. Her mouth said good luck but her eyes said goodbye as we pushed forward, past the border control horse, and into the thick of it. Far from political satire though, our three-line whip was slightly more sinister, with the triple threat of decapitated bodies, crazed survivors and tortured souls around every corner.

Sudden fear, more than any other emotion, tells a person a whole lot about themselves. It told me profanity isn’t on the tip of my tongue at all times, it’s diving off the end with its own loudhailer.

We crept up creaking staircases, into woodcutters’ cabins with unmade beds and severed heads, each of us taking a turn to lead the pack and inflame our larynxes.

On edge like a sugar-fuelled cornice, I effed at screeching zombies and blinded at twitching shadows, while Gavin’s neck took on owlish properties, as he tried to anticipate attacks from all angles at once.

Bonded in a way that only animated corpses and superglue can inspire, our trembling troupe reached the mad scientist’s lab with neither scratch nor bite, only to be gassed into reanimation before our way was finally out. Giggling in maniacal relief, we skipped back towards the safety of the saloon, cursing our own recent folly, and barely noticing the burning cars by the roadside, or the shuffling footsteps that rustled from the nearby bushes...

I’ll tell you all now, I was bitten.

I can barely suppress my appetite for a good oblongata. Like the zombies, maybe death will catch up with me one day but, when it does,

I’m coming out the other side with brain in my teeth and an afterlife worth living.

Don’t worry if you missed Kelburn’s Haunted Forest, as the estate will soon be transformed into Santa’s Secret Forest, and maybe he’ll grant your wish for another zombie outbreak: http://www.kelburnestate.com/event/santasecretforest