Broughty Castle

For reasons far more interesting than this blog entry will ever be, I had to kill some time away from the castle on Thursday, so local historic buildings were the order of the day. Broughty Castle in Dundee was the most obvious solution: it is nearby and I had unbelievably never visited before.

I generally don't get much time away from Balintore, so the respite from restoration duty was very welcome. Broughty Castle is now a small free museum run by Dundee Council, and is a brilliant asset for tourists. The problem is that locals tend to visit small museums only once, thereafter only taking visiting friends, so my impression was that visitor numbers could be on the low side.

The exterior of the castle and its location are arresting: a tall tower on a rocky promentory above the sea. So the castle is a good side-diversion for visitors to Broughty Ferry beach, and I suspect this is how it gets most of its visitors.

The interior of the castle is somewhat disappointing for architecture fans, as there are no clues as how to interpret the mediaeval building - constructed in 1490 and restored in 1860. The museum galleries were modern looking rooms. The only clues as to antiquity were the deep window recesses cutting through the massive stone walls and the vast timber ceiling beams, which although installed presumably in 1860, recalled the original mediaeval beams.

The problem is that the 1860 reworking of the building was to turn it into a "modern" artillary defence against a looming French invasion. In short, the make-over IMHO lost the mediaeval charm. A second sandstone ashlar tower was added to the orginal white rendered tower i.e. a new-L shaped extension was bolted onto one corner of the ancient rectangular structure. The new tower was not constructed without care i.e. it is in a mediaeval style, but considerations of preserving the archaeology of the older structures were not so much in vogue then. 

The castle's small modern generic municipal museum feel, could be turned into something far more spectacular and far more suited to its incredible setting. For example, I would like to know which room  was the orginal Great Hall, and to look at the vaulted(?) lower floors which visitors bypass to get to the gift shop, where visits start and end. All in all, I could find almost no information on the Web on the actual structure of the building. The best online source I could find is here.

I asked in the gift shop for a book on the castle. There was none. There had once been a thickish pamphlet but this was now out of print, and they had a single reference copy. The impression given is that although the building is very much in plain site of Dundee citizens, much less is known about the structure of the building than most other castles.

The modern military use of the building continued until the end of 1945!

I bought an interesting book in the gift shop on "reading" castles and this rather than one on Broughty Castle itself, that I might have preferred, is how I made my donation to the building.

I arrived at the Broughty Ferry beach car park early in the morning. On the journey, the sunshine at Balintore gave way to thick sea fog hanging over the Tay. The combination of fog and strong sunshine is a magic one for photographs. I remember a famous photographer saying that you do not a get a good photograph unless there is moisture in the atmosphere to make the light interesting and for the image to be of that transient moment i.e. distingusing that unique split-second from a bland summer continuum of bright sunshine.

Anyhow, as the fog blew off during the course of the morning. I took a series of photographs. I was not "taking photographs" as such but recording moments that caught my eye as I walked around. I held back often when it might have appeared that I was sticking a camera into someone's face. The resulting 7 photos below are not conventional but just me having fun.

The last photo shows that Dundee not only has a beach but a life guard station - the latter surprised even me!

Smashing Stone of Destiny Discovery

Some guests at the castle today were caught up in a fracas in Perth this afternoon. The glass case containing the Stone of Destiny, in the Perth Museum, ws smashed just before 2PM.

Of course this act of vandalism, no doubt, is inspired by the theft of the stone from Westminster Abbey by Scottish students in 1950. I had thought the story of this theft, which had kept the newspapers of the time humming, would make a good film.

I checked out IMDB and sure enough a film called "Stone of Destiny" had been made in 2009. I was bracing myself for some awful product of the parochial Scottish film industry. However, the film, IMHO, is probably one of the best Scottish films around. Obviously, it is primarily an audience-pleasing comedic heist movie, and is somewhat formulaic but serious themes are touched upon and above all the movie has a great heart. The cream of Scotish acting talent provides great support. 

I was sufficiently inspired by this under-rated and little-known film, to buy the source work called "The Taking of the Stone of Destiny" written by one of the students called Ian Hamilton. I saw him interviewed in later life on the Scottish news, and he was a wonderful character. He became a highly respected Queen's Council, so being called a "vulgar vandal" by the press of the time was still causing him great amusement.

I told the castle guests that I would show them the book, so took it off my booksheves. This evening, I was sitting in the kitchen idling through my copy of the book (still unread), and spotted to my huge surprise that it was a signed copy. I screamed with delight. Ryan thought I had seen something overly ribald in the pages. :-) The copy was not sold as signed on eBay.

So if it had not been for the vandalism today, I would not have made this delightful discovery. Destiny?

Great Hall Grand Opening

With the restoration of the Great Hall at Balintore Castle essentially complete, it feels right to have an official Grand Opening event. This has been the longest, costliest and hardest part of the restoration so far, so a celebration is more than in order.

Here is the text of the public invite I have sent out:

Great Hall Grand Opening Invitation

you are cordially invited to the Grand Opening of the Great Hall at
Balintore Castle on Sunday, 3rd August, 2025. Food and beverages will
be provided at no charge throughout the day.

The completion of this phase of the restoration project is the most
significant step forward, since Angus Council pioneeringly bought
Balintore Castle for the nation in 2007.

Please help us celebrate the support of Angus Council for its
built heritage and show your support for the project by booking
(free) tickets for the event on EventBrite here:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/balintore-great-hall-grand-opening-tickets-1447645038279

The "celebrity" cutting of the red ribbon will be at 11AM, but volunteers
will be on hand throughout the day to help explain the rich and intriguing
story of this architectural masterpiece.

Great Hall after restoration - still to be decorated

Great Hall after restoration (detail) note carefully sourced extra warm light bulbs

fireplace before reestoration

fireplace after restoration

north-west corner before restoration

north-west corner after restoration

The Little Dog who Vomited all over Kirriemuir

Dolly AI-reimagined at Bonfest !

Meet Dolly the dog! Ryan the chef at Balintore Castle has been dog-sitting Dolly, while her owner is on an extended trip to Australia. On her first stay, Dolly was a ball of fur and badly needed a haircut. However, it emerged that she has a lovely placid personality, loves to be around humans and can be taken for a walk without requiring a lead. In short, an ideal pet who is no trouble at all to look after.

On her second recent stay at the castle, Dolly arrived with the much needed haircut and for the first time I twigged she was probably a Cairn Terrier. I have a soft spot for terriers and love their sparky independence. Ryan and myself bonded much more with Dolly during this stay: we both admitted to being immorally lookist and the haircut was the key. :-)  Ryan allowed Dolly much greater freedom this time round as she was a known quantity and allowed her to do her own thing inside and outside the castle, instead of being kept in a room or on a lead. Dolly did not betray this trust, except on one occasion when she decided to eat half a dead rabbit she had found and on another occasion which is the subject of this blog ...

I was sorting out guest rubbish for recycling, pulling out the cans and bottles etc. Occasionally, gems appear such as an unopened packet of crisps. On this occasion, there was a whole unopened pack of butter. When you are banned from driving for a year and in consequence cannot go shopping and live with a vegan chef, a pack of butter is a rarity to be celebrated. I put the butter to one side.

I then discovered a smashed up Victorian pink glass flambeau lampshade which must have been broken by the guests and put into the bin. I ran into the guest accommodation and the table lamp which had been fitted with this shade was missing. I checked the cupboards, and the lamp was nowhere to be found. It had been stolen, to try to hide the crime. I was heartbroken given the trouble I had taken to source this Victorian lamp and shade - both items were irreplaceable. Guest are told they must report and pay for broken items so I felt betrayed as well. I burst into tears and rushed to my neighbour's house to let it all out. After the recent significant and devastating burglary at the castle, any new incident can set me off.

I was too upset to continue sorting out the rubbish, and left it to the next day. The next day was Saturday the 2nd June, and BonFest in Kirriemuir - the annual rock festival celebrating the legacy of Bon Scott (1946-1980) the lead singer of AC/DC who was brought up in the town. Ryan attended the event with Dolly and a human friend. Normally you would expect humans at such festivals to overindulge, but no it was Dolly who was living the rock-and-roll lifestyle.

She vomited in Ryan's bedroom that morning. What emerged was so thick that it hung over the back of Ryan's chair and did not drip to the floor. Dolly vomited (amongst other locations) on the floor of the "The Star Rock Shop", the oldest sweet shop in Scotland let alone Kirriemuir. On coming back to the castle, Dolly vomited on the floor of Gregor's carpentry workshop. Ryan was so fed up with dealing with vomit that day, that he simple sprinkled sawdust over the two deposits. In a carpentry workshop, sawdust is not in short supply...

Later that day I resumed dealing with the waste. There on the ground was an empty pack of butter save a tiny quantity remaining in one corner with little teeth marks in it. I think we all know who the culprit was. :-) My builders mentioned they had seen Dolly in the area of the refuse bonfire pit.

So if the guest had reported their breakage, I would not have been so upset, the pack of butter would not have been left, and Dolly would not have eaten it and then vomited it out onto the mean streets of Kirriemuir. I have never watched the "A Series of Unfortunate Events" franchise, but suspect Dolly's misadventures of excess at a heavy metal festival are right up there. 

The good news is that the following day, I did a more careful hunt in the guest accommodation and found that the antique lamp had been stuffed at the very back of a cupboard.

When Dolly arrived at the castle for her latest stay, she did not have a day bed where she could be with Ryan and myself in the kitchen, so we put her on some wool wadding that was used as packaging material. Later on I fabricated a doggie day bed from an Amazon Prime cardboard box, and unholstered with the said wadding. 

Dolly in her Amazon Prime day bed

You can see from the photo above, that Dolly is not always a heavy metal hooligan or leporine desacrator, and usually serves little dog cuteness. :-)

Gavin's Dance Floor

In the previous episode of this blog, my builders' insistance that the floor of the Great Hall should be left the natural blond oak colour of the newly installed reclaimed wood was pretty apparent, and their arguments were, it has to be said, perfectly valid.

However, where there is a choice my natural instinct is to go with the historic reality of the building, and at Balintore the original Great Hall floor was painted a dark brown that matched the other woodwork in the room. In fact, without Gavin's and Gregor's intervention, I would not have considered a blond floor in the first place.

What a dilemma!

I am someone who naturally consults with others where there is debate. It's not that I am weak-willed or indecisive, but the more angles one views an issue from, the better informed and better the resulting outcome. I showed my guests the stained samples of wood, and the clear consensus was the stain named "smoked oak". This tint was what I myself had chosen and had found was the closest match to the historic colour. Obviously, I kept my own view hidden for the longest time. :-) An extremely talented artist I know, just clearly stated that it was obvious the floor had to go dark. That was one of the clinchers.

I am also someone who does not believe in "decisions". One tries something out to see if it works. In that way you never make a mistake. This is a common technique in software engineering: you may not know how to solve a problem but you give yourself a hour or so, to work on a reduced version of the problem with a particular solution technique. By the end of that hour, you will generally know whether the approach is promising or whether you should try something completely different instead.

The actual moment I had to tell Gavin and Gregor that I was going dark was rather intimidating. It was the end of the day. We needed to move on the floor, and G&G asked what I was doing.  I mentioned I was going dark, but that we needed a test area and that I would order a single tin of "smoked oak".

Gavin joined together some spare flooring to produce a 2 foot by 2 foot dance floor and he applied the stained wax oil.

Gavin's dance floor

I was super delighed at how it looked, and eventally Gavin with some reluctance said that it did look good but just for this limited area. Because the grain of the oak shows through one's initial thought is that this is just the natural rich wood colour.

I can remember that moment in childhood when one realises that most wood is actually "white" in colour, and the "brown" material one has seen up to that point is actually due to a stain.

I naturally wanted to record the floor in a blond state before it went brunette:

goodbye blond floor 1

goodbye blond floor 2

Today Gregor stained a section of the actual floor within a doorframe, and this was final confirmation that it was full steam ahead. All three of us liked the effect.

test patch on actual floor

Great Hall Wood Stains

I sent away for eight samples of a floor wax containing a stain, to see which colours might sit well in the Great Hall.

As ever with colours, it is always best to have a swatch in your hands. Relying on seeing a colour on a computer monitor has gone totally wrong in the past. The paint might have been a lovely toffee-colour on my screen, but what came out of the can that arrived through the post was definitely green. In the end, we just used the green paint (with a catastophically distant hint of toffee) in the originally intended room.

Gregor sanded 5 short offcuts of oak flooring for me to use. The test-staining results are below:

On the left of the photo is a section of pine I used to get all the colours in one place. My first observation is that the stain looks tacky on pine, but some of the colours do look good on oak.

You may wonder why there are only 7 test patches - well my sachet of dark oak stain arrived dried out. The company are sending a replacement.

The stains work best where you can clearly see the original wood grain (e.g. American, Antique and Smoked Oak). To my eye the original oak fitttings in the Great Hall lie somewhere between Antique and Smoked Oak, and on balance I would be happy to stain our new oak architraves and skirting boards Smoked Oak.

Obviously, I will be consulting on this one. When someone can hold the samples in place, I will take a picture.

The bigger debate is the floor. Gregor wants us to leave the oak unstained, and I have a great deal of sympathy with this, as the stain will not wear off and one is using the "natural" wood. However, the oak is very, very white - you can see the unstained oak on the left.

I cleaned the surface of a surviving section of Great Hall flooring earlier today, and it is a very dark brown.

So that is the debate: leave the new material "au naturel" or match the historic colour?

The sanding is well underway in the Great Hall. The photo below was taken during the 40 Grit pass. We have now done a 100 Grit pass, and we have 150 and 180 Grit passes still to go.

Gregor and Gavin were reluctant to have their pictures taken during the sanding, but I managed to catch a cameo when they were not looking. :-)

Chateau Shenanigans: A Book Review

I was put on to this book by Alasdair Malcolm, who was the little boy who lived opposite my granny in my home town of Prestwick. Alasdair is himself now a published author, and local historian extraordinaire. Having left Prestwick a long time ago, those connections I still hold are of great value.

Anyhow, Alasdair's English cousin Tony Malcolm, has documented his own restoration of the 13th Century Chateau Gros Puy in North Dordoigne. So many expats are living in this region of France, that it is often called Dordoigneshire. 

The book documents exactly a year covering 2020-2021. Tony started writing the book in lock-down when he was stuck in the UK and had nothing else to do. So while Covid is not the theme of the book, it forms a background thread, which will be of value to future historians. It is noteworthy that we have turned a blind eye to Covid and have not addressed the pandemic in our culture, however, Tony's document coming in from the side is what we do have.

I should start by saying that the book is not a work of literature such as "A Year in Province" and as I worked my way through the book, I did ask myself about the motivation of the author.

One common motivation is when real-life castle restorations feature in TV documentaries: the restorers lose editorial control, so they are then motivated to put the record straight.

Tony says he was portrayed as a "hapless" restorer in Channel Four's reality show "A New Life in the Sun". Of course, at the end of the documentary everything is portayed as coming out all right in the end.

When Tony's wife Zak applied to appear on TV, she hadn't perhaps thought this lack of control through, and their feeling on watching the program was that they had just about got away with it i.e. it wasn't as bad as it could have been. It must feel like a betrayal of sorts, when you have befriended the film crew over a long shooting schedule. This is precisely why I have tried to avoid the media at Balintore.

The gold standard restoration vlog is "Chateau Diaries" on YouTube: this and another restoration vlogs came out of "Escape to the Chateau DIY", when British castle restorers in France realised they could take editorial control into heir own hands. So some good has come out of these predicable and formulaic portrayals by British TV production companies.

Crucially, Tony is an advertising copywriter so writing is a natural form of expression for him, and the book is written in an easy-going, easy-to-read and entertaining way. The writing is peppered with silly school boy jokes, wordplay, advert references (many from the 1980's golden age of advertising!) and French words. Tony is trying to compensate for his lack of French, by dropping French words into his English. I learned the wonderful word "déchèterie" this way.

However, eventually I realised there was no great literary ambition, no message, no theme, no advice - just a man telling his story in his own way. And the book is all the better for this very straightforward tale telling. His wife Zak is clearly the anchor for much of the restoration and a very capable individual, but the stresses of the restoration gave even her mental issues. This rings a bell with my own restoration.

Tony is prone to anxiety and depression and he is commendably open and honest about this and has written a book on mental well-being. In fact, depression is often almost a prerequisite for creative people and people that just go out there and actually achieve things. Tony and Zak's drive is, quite frankly, amazing and I am hoping to learn some lessons from them. 

It's not quite clear how things are going at the chateau nowadays, but the latest video from 2 years ago on the YouTube channel indicates that they are providing a wedding venue and chambres d'hôtes (B&B accommdation) for guests.

When Tony talks about the death of his fifteen-year-old labradoodle Cosmo (to whom the book is dedicated), the book suddenly moves in an epic and universal phase that alone justifies reading the book. Cosmo made the journey with the family from the UK to France, and is buried at Gros Puy.

While vlogs about castle restoration are common these days, actual books are rare, and these provide a greater insight into the process and motivations. So with the Prestwick connection, and subject of the book - there was no way I was not going to read it, and I am so pleased that I did.