Darby's Castle

(Album: Kristofferson - 1970)

See the ruin on the hill
Where the smoke is hanging still
Like an echo of an age long forgotten
There's a story of a home
Crushed beneath those blackened stones
And a roof that fell before the beams were rotten
Cecil Darby loved his wife
And he laboured all his life
To provide her with material possessions
And he built for her a home
Of the finest wood and stone
And the building soon became his sole obsession

Oh it took three hundred days
For the timber to be raised
And the silhouette was seen for miles around
And the gables reached as high
As the eagles in the sky
But it only took one night to bring it down
When Darby's castle tumbled to the ground

Though the shared a common bed
There was precious little said
In the moments that were set aside for sleeping
For his busy dreams were filled
With the rooms he'd yet to build
And he never heard young Helen Darby weeping
Then one night he heard a sound
As he laid his pencil down
And he traced it to her door and turned the handle
And the pale light of the moon
Through the windows of the room
Split the shadows where two bodies lay entangled

Oh it took three hundred days
For the timber to be raised
And the silhouette was seen for miles around
And the gables reached as high
As the eagles in the sky
But it only took one night to bring it down
When Darby's castle tumbled to the ground