Merry Christmas 2023

A Merry Christmas to all friends of Balintore. Regular readers of this seasonal epistle will be perfectly aware, that you are entirely safe from boasts about overweening achievements over the year and the even more nauseating boasts about the achievements of one's children. Instead, this blog tells it like it is.

Despite a letter from Angus Council prohibiting all restoration work (yes really), a new crew member, Craig, started working on the roof in the summer, to stop water ingress before winter. It is the height of insanity to allow a Grade I building to disintegrate through neglect and lack of maintenance.

Water ingress is the number one cause of buildings deteriorating. Heavy storms cause leaks in areas that never leaked before and this year particularly was no exception. During Storm Babet, I counted 30 leaks - very distressing.

Craig has tracked down quite a number of the leaks to water coming down chimney stacks, rather than problems with the roof itself. Remedial work has involved re-pointing the chimney stacks, and sweeping the chimneys. The theory is that a blocked chimney allows a "swimming pool" to develop on top, during heavy rain. This trapped water then gradually leaks out causing areas of the castle to be damp for long periods.

The plan was for Craig to spend 3 days on the roof. He has now been here for 6 months, but he has proved very useful on a variety of other jobs about the castle.

In the last week or so, Gavin and Gregor have been clearing out the Great Hall. The only previous work done on the Great Hall was to floor over the top, essentially sealing the volume, using money from the GoFundMe campaign.

the Great Hall re-emerging

Gregor was exceptionally happy to start work proper on the Great Hall. "I want to see this room restored before I croak it.", said Gregor. "I feel exactly the same way.", I replied.  :-) It has been a voyage of rediscovery to see the room emerge again. We had been using it as a dumping ground for scaffolding and timber salvaged from the castle.  The remains of the original tall sash windows from the Great Hall are in this timber pile, and we have set aside these and other items that will give us clues for the restoration. Other rotten timbers are just being cut into firewood. I find this distressing as there are surviving parts that have been beautifully carved or beautifully painted, but it's just got to go. The castle is around 200 years old and these Baltic timbers could have been 200 years old when felled, so one is using 400 year-old wood just for the fire.

much diminished pile of grot on the Great Hall floor

The castle has a new door ! In order to remove rubble from the Great Hall
as quickly as possible, a door was cut into the wooden structure closing off the collapsed oriel window in the dining room. Outside the door is a "runway" constructed out of scaffolding, where Gregor and Gavin model the latest wheelbarrow fashions, before tipping their contents over the edge. A pile of rubble is growing in a most satisfactory fashion on the ground beneath.

castle's new door

new scaffolding catwalk behind the door

The next step with the Great Hall is to floor it and I am hoping for this to be done in January. A floor makes a room properly usable and allows you to truly appreciate a space i.e without constantly having to monitor where your feet are going. There will be big celebrations when this is done, and I am genuinely excited about moving the Great Hall forward. It is such a huge room and in such poor condition that we have mostly neglected it for 16 years. However, with other easier areas of the castle restored, now feels like the right time.

I have been rather hands-off the restoration personally this year as I was doing contract IT work for the Met Office which has been interesting but extremely demanding. However, the project work was successfully (as far as I know :-) ) completed by the time my second contract ended this September, and I had definitely been looking forward to devoting much needed time to the castle. Frustratingly, I had to spend some time in hospital in October and December, but I am hoping to get back to castle fighting-fitness ASAP.

We have had a number of extreme weather events over the last couple of years (think storms Arwyn and Corwyn and the 40C summer), and it was extremely exciting to have advance notice of these within the Met Office, until sufficient confidence was gained in the forecasts to announce these to the public. The resulting weather warnings were unfailing correct, and it is a tribute to how forecasting has really improved over the last 30 or so years.

 

You may have noticed the rather low number of blog entries this year due to the demands of the Met Office. :-) However, I rallied in hospital in December when I realised that attending to blog entries that had been pending for several years, was one of the few productive things I could manage. That and reading of course.

I am currently spending Christmas with friends in the Norfolk countryside.
We had a trip to Norwich yesterday, and in an old church converted to an
an antiques saleroom in the centre of town, I discovered this: a candlestick telephone which had come from Lintrathen just a couple of miles from Balintore Castle.

We had both come a long way from the wilds of Angus - it's a small world. 

a serendipitous telephone

I joined my friends who were shopping for cleaning products at a local supermarket, as they are getting the house ready for a dinner party. It was a revelation that people shop in a very different way. I have not brought cleaning products for my house in Oxfordshire for the last 27 years, as before he died my father overstocked on said items. At the castle, I order industrial quantities of basic cleaning products over the internet: the niceties of branding, fragrancing and product differentiation go over my head.

In complete contrast, the aisle of cleaning products was a temple of veneration and study for my friends. They dismissed the "first kiss flower" toilet cleaner (the mind boggles); the "janitorial pine" toilet cleaner and the "two thick moppets".

I have provided a couple of links that prove I am not making these products up. One cannot help but feel society has gone off the rails. :-) With these unerring markers of societal disintegration, may I wish you all the best for New Year 2024.

My Part in the Kirriemuir Bank Heist of 2018

Results Gym, Kirriemuir
(once the Bank of Scotland)

On an unconscionably hot and sunny day back in that halcyon era when the town of Kirriemuir had two banks rather than none, I innocently inserted my bank card into the Bank of Scotland's ATM. I then looked at the screen, but the full sun falling onto the surface rendered it illegible.

This particular cash point was installed in a window opening so high above the pavement that there was no way I could lean over the screen to create a shadow. Famously this ATM was so high off the ground that there are many photographs of shorter Kirriemuir residents standing on a chair to take their money out.

There was nothing I could do to advance or cancel the transaction, so I joined the queue inside the bank to report their "broken" facility and to somehow make the intended cash withdrawal. Naturally, during the wait (the queue was long) the cashpoint swallowed my card. I kept going outside to check the situation on the street and at one stage there was an ominous clunk.

The teller told me that I could not make a cash withdrawal as I did not have a card, and I would have to wait at least a fortnight before they could return the card. "But the card is right there!" said I pointing at the back of the ATM. "We don't have the key.", said the teller. "I do not believe you.", I said, "I demand to see the manager.".

It took an hour speaking to the manager who also denied having the key. I told him that I would not be leaving the bank without my card, as it was my only card and I would be unable to do any shopping of any form and I did not have any family I could borrow money from.

I told him that their set-up was a disaster waiting to happen, and the swallowing of the card was their responsibility not mine. I said that this disaster must have happened in the past and would happen again, and I was amazed that they had not put an awning up or something to mitigate the situation.

The manager denied this had ever happened before. At that very moment, a little old lady came into the bank extremely distressed that her card has been swallowed due to the bright sunshine. I insisted vehemently that I would not be leaving the bank, and eventually somehow he managed to open the ATM and give me my card. Duh!

I wrote an official letter of complaint to the Bank of Scotland: no reply was ever forth-coming. I repeatedly emailed the manager to find out what mitigation measures were being put in place, and he never responded. Perhaps, it is karma that the eventual mitigation measure was for him to lose his job as manager when the branch was closed and the ATM removed.

Anyhow, I hate the inertia and illogicality of large organisations when there are simple solutions to problems. In lieu of constructing an awning, I got a plastic sign made (thank you eBay) which read:

screen illegible in strong sunlight
press red button to release card

The bank manager said it was my fault the card was trapped by not hitting the red button. How was I supposed to know? I had never needed to hit the red button before.

I was careful to chose a sans-serif font to match that of the ATM and dimensioned the sign to fit a blank rectangular area on the cashpoint. I chose red letters on a white background, as befitting signage required in an emergency.

I am a time and motion expert, so one evening after giving a talk on the castle restoration in Kirriemuir, I donned my balaclava and armed myself with a black skeleton gun, in which I had mounted a tube of industrial strength adhesive. I was aware I might be caught on CCTV - hence the balaclava.

I hung around the town centre in the dark waiting for my moment to pounce i.e. when no-one else was around. The only problem was a young, rather drunk man, who didn't seem to be moving."I am bigger than this." I eventually thought and proceeded to glue the sign on regardless.

The drunk man was wide-eyed not quite believing what he was seeing. Sometimes when confronted you just gotta tell it like it is: "I figured this town could do with some better signage." was my verbal response to his silent accusing glances.

For some reason my friend Andrew would not collude with me on the crime.

Happily, I think the sign stayed in place for around 18 months, no doubt rescuing many a burger from card kidnap. I don't think the public (or even the staff?) would have detected that it was not an integral part of the ATM, although I do not know the story behind its eventual removal.

After the closure of the Bank of Scotland, there was a ram raid on the Royal Bank of Scotland's ATM, that caused the latter's closure: a coup de grâce if you will. The ATM's of Kirriemuir have suffered many an ignomy. :-)

Ironically, the Bank of Scotland building is my favourite in Kirriemuir. It has stone canons on the outside that are so reminiscent of those on Balintore Castle that I reckon the same stone mason is responsible. The Kirriemuir stonemasonry firm of George Watson worked on Balintore Castle in 1860, so there could easily have been a member of staff who continued on to the 1880's when the bank building was being built.

The Crystal Stars that Bind

 

marble hallway ceiling at Mount Stuart House

This is a tale of how beautiful architecture can connect humans across time and space.

After my father died, I felt my sister, my Mum and I should still go on family outings. My sister had pulled the plug early on with driving lessons, and my Mum had stopped driving on the day I went off to university. In the throws of empty nest syndrome, she had driven into the family home's gatepost, and never drove again. I like to think of it as an unfakable sign that I was truely loved. :-)

I have clipped my gatepost many times, and I am still driving! :-)

Anyhow, it was up-to-me to do the driving for the trip  and I suggested they might like to visit Mount Stuart House on the Isle of Bute off the west coast of Scotland, as splendid architecture (as we have subsequently found out) is what will get me out of my armchair.

This trip was all agreed. We had some distant relatives on the Isle of Bute, so a visit to them was planned on the afternoon of the day trip. The ferry leaves from Wemyss Bay which is about an hour's drive from my home town of Prestwick.

As we drove there I surprised myself by overtaking much of the traffic. In England I am a slow and cautious driver, but coming to Scotland I was just not used to the much slower pace. I apologised to my family.

Mount Stuart House was magical. I have never liked the outside from photographs - rather blocky Venetian Gothic - but the inside is full of colour and decorative art, drawing on myth and paganism. William Burges is responsible for much of this work under the patronage of the Third Marquess of Bute, who was the richest man in Victorian Britain. I rate Burges in the same category of genius as the better known Augustus Welby Pugin.

I loved the stained glass windows depicting the nine muses of Ancient Greece (Clio, Euterpe, Thalia, Melpomeni, Terpsichore, Erato, Polymnia, Urania, and Calliope), and I was bowled over by the central marble staircase.

The 80 foot high ceiling above the staircase is inset with 6 pointed star-shaped crystal prisms, arranged in the shape of the northern night sky constellations. The sun shining through the stars produces rainbows on the floor of the hallway. The 12 stained glass windows of the clerestory represent the signs of the zodiac. The overall effect is magical.

Jump forward many years to 2015 and I am attending a school reunion in my home town of Prestwick.

My parents were long dead by then, but I was determined on this trip to catch up with some of my parents' close friends that were still around, and the day after the reunion, I did precisely this. My first stop was a couple (Mary and Ian) whose connection to my parents went back to WWII, and I drove round to their house.

It was that nightmare scenario: the house was locked up and looked deserted. Were they still with us? I talked to the neighbours who informed me that they were now in different nursing homes in the next town of Ayr, but they couldn't quite recall the exact name of the nursing homes, but they knew a vague location. So, I drove to the area and was literally asking stranger after stranger on the street, if they knew of a nursing home nearby.

It took me all day but eventually I tracked the nursing home down where Mary was residing. I was very nervous about the meeting. Would there be recognition after so long and even then what would we talk about? I needn't have worried, I fetched a lot of names out of my childhood memory and we chatted away. Mary and Ian and my parents had worked together in the same office. It was just as much of a comfort for me, as it was for Mary, to chat about old times. Mary was now in a wheelchair and had to be wheeled around, but she had all her marbles.

I mentioned the last family trip to Mount Stuart House as I knew Mary came from Bute. I described the joy of the 6 pointed star-shaped prisms. Mary suddenly jolted, and became very animated. Her grandfather had been an upholsterer at Mount Stuart House, and when she was a little girl, he had given her one of these crystal prisms. She had kept it at the back of a drawer, but did not have any idea where it was now.

There was a little bit of indefinable magic about the unexpected coincidence in the almost random turn in the conversation. It is a piece of stellar magic that I will always treasure.

Stiff Mallards

the Balintore brace of Mallards

The area around Balintore Castle is often used for shooting, and occasionally the game keeper or shooting agent asks me to show their guests around the building. I am of course delighted to do so.

After one such tour, a lovely Dutch couple presented me with a brace of Mallard by way of a thank-you. It is a mistake to think that shooters are portly, middle-aged men, with florid complexions in tweeds. It was an education to find out that shooters do not, in general, look like they shoot. :-)

Mr. and Mrs. Mallard were tied together at the neck by string, and I placed them over a door key in the kitchen wing. I took a photo. The image was a beautiful Hogarthian study in Chiaroscuro (see above). The kitchen wing was like a fridge at that time of year, and I knew you could "hang" birds for about 12 days to develop the flavour.

Mallards are amongst my favourite birds. I think of them as the Jack Russell of the duck world. They are colourful, small and lively and the joyous quack they make sounds like they are laughing.

I have been informed that to save plucking or eviscerating fowl, you can simply cut the breasts out. Mallards are renowned for their large breasts, and if you want to increase the breast meat in a strain of duck you introduce some Mallard. :-)

So breast excision is what I was planning to do. Only, I had not done this before, and was somewhat trepidatious. To be honest, I kept putting this off. As day 12 approached, I was genuinely going to do the deed, then some emergency arose and I didn't. Finally, it came to the morning I was going to leave the castle and drive to England. Packing took longer than expected and there was no more time left to process the mallards. What could I do? I contemplated strapping them in to the passenger seat of the car, but worried about them honking, in the soundless sense, during the long journey as temperatures rose to those of England.

I would have to bury them. Now I hate wasting food, as my friends know, and it also felt like ingratitude for the gift but there was no alternative.

However, with the severe sub-zero temperatures the ground was rock hard and I could not get a spade to break the surface. Suddenly, inspiration or at least lateral thinking hit.

There are plenty of rabbits around Balintore, and a rabbit hole is pre-dug! I selected a pair of choice rabbit holes, and inserted the rigid-frozen drake into one and the rigid frozen duck into the other. A light dusting of vegetation and the graves were hidden to the human eye.

It is left to the readers' imagination how much I traumatised the Balintore bunnies.

I am the Ghost of Balintore Castle

my mummy sleeping bag looked like this

One Sunday afternoon, very early in the restoration of the castle, I was digging out rubble as usual. I was getting rather cold and the only resolution at the time, in the absence of any heating, was to get into bed. 

This was the time when the Harry Potter books were being released, so I grabbed my copy of the latest one, and jumped into my mummy sleeping bag which was resting on top of a camp bed for some reading pleasure while I warmed up.  However, I found myself falling asleep and I rationalised that I must be rather tired after all and that 40 winks would be in order.

I woke up conscious of some movement at the window. It was a woman looking in, hands over her eyes squinting to see what she could see in the low light conditions. I deliberately hadn't cleared the cobwebs on this window because I didn't want to disturb the poetic ruin look.

When people came to the castle, I would always offer them a cup of tea and a look around. However, I was worried, that if I moved after sleeping I might startle the woman. "Don't be silly, David, get out of bed and offer this woman a cup of tea.". 

I got up but the woman disappeared, and I moved to the front of the castle, where a car had been parked but was just starting up its engine, The woman was in the passenger seat, and another woman was in the driver's seat. 

I waved through the glass to them and they rolled down the window. "We're just going! We're just going!" repeated the passenger seemingly endlessly. "Would you like to see round the castle?", I asked, "You obviously have come up the drive so you must have been interested.".

They took a lot of persuading, but finally relented. I wouldn't force anyone to do anything against their will of course, but the initial reluctance was a little puzzling.

Anyhow, I completed the tour and found myself alone with the driver of the car to whom I had been chatting during the tour.

"Is your friend OK?" I asked "She didn't say anything during the tour, and looks very pale.". The driver replied "When she looked into that room in the castle, she thought she saw a coffin on a trestle. When she saw a body that was not moving, she thought she was looking at a corpse. When you finally sat up, she thought she you were a vampire rising from the grave.".

It all suddenly made sense. The passenger had been scared out of her wits. A mummy sleeping bag is the same shape as a coffin, and only my sleeping face had been poking out. Through the cobwebs and the darkness, the woman's imagination has joined the dots in the context of looking through the window of a ruined and abandoned gothic castle. There was absolutely no indication of anyone being in residence.

This incident is one of my favourite dinner party stories as it captures well how people go into a different mind set when they visit a castle. The poor passenger obviously tells the story at her own dinner parties, as it has come back to me through friends, with a little bit of exaggeration IMHO in the scare department. 

Prior to this incident, I was rather sceptical about ghost stories and paranormal phenomena. After this incident I must shamefully admit how much enjoyment I got out of scaring someone so severely they turned as white as a sheet and were rendered incapable of speaking. Perhaps I could do this professionally? You couldn't have a better venue than Balintore. 

And in this public forum, I finally have the opportunity to apologise to this poor woman. From the above, it should be clear that I had absolutely no intention of frightening you. Please get in touch - I would love to read your version of events.

Forty Below

Forty Below: A Long-Overdue Essay on Cold and Balintore Castle

the first heating at Balintore Castle

At secondary school, I was impressed by a Jack London short story, possibly called "Forty Below", which detailed life in the extreme cold in the far North of America. Not only was this level of cold mind-blowing, but it could be poetically unit-free as -40 Celcius is the same as -40 Fahrenheit. And while I have never experienced such temperatures, it is only since buying Balintore Castle that I have experienced -18C, and got rather too close to hypothermia for my own comfort on a number of occasions.

I knew before purchasing Balintore Castle that "cold" would be an issue. A castle is the archetypal cold and drafty building, and nearby Braemar is the coldest place in the UK, so how was I going to heat this vast building, let alone afford to do so?

It swiftly became apparent that people in the past were hardier than nowadays. The Victorians had no notion of building insulation, but wore more layers of clothing in heavy fabrics, were more physically active and must simply have had a different mindset.

The only sources of heat originally at Balintore were coal fires. Getting these going again has been very rewarding, and although a coal fire does heat a room somewhat, a whopping 80% of the heat goes up the chimney and only 20% goes into the room. The effect is certainly nothing like modern central heating. Huddling round the fire is the order of the day.

When I first lived in the building, there was no heating full-stop so winters were a challenge. I recall one night early on, where despite a four season sleeping-bag, my body temperature continually dropped throughout the night and I was woken up again and again by the cold. Normally, you expect to warm up in bed, so this experience was my literal and metaphorical wake-up call.

I evolved a sleeping solution using 3 high tog duvets. My discovery was that the 4th duvet adds weight but no extra warmth. When I was sleeping in a tiny caravan round the back of the building, I was inside a 4 season mummy sleeping bag with the zip on the right pulled fully up and my head in the hood, with a woolly hat on. On top of the sleeping bag were two plump duvets.

If I moved at all in the night, and the zip came down even 6 inches or so, the pain from the cold in my right arm would wake me up. I taught myself to sleep absolutely stationary and flat on my back, using mind control to resist the temptation to sleep on my side, which is my natural inclination,  I went to sleep like an Egyptian Mummy and woke up in the exact same position.

I kept a litre bottle of water by my bed, and this regularly froze completely solid overnight. I had rain butts to collect water and the huge volume of water inside them froze totally solid during the record-breaking winters of 2010 and 2011. In normal winters, you only get a frozen outside with liquid water inside.

The caravan was totally uninsulated, and only consisted of a single metal shell, reminiscent of a tin can. I had set up an electric heater there and a small computer desk. With the bed folded out, only a square foot of floor remained and it is hard to believe that for 2 years I lived on that square foot.

In the middle of the second bitter winter in the caravan, I reach the point of stir-craziness or cabin fever. I knew that with one more night in the caravan, I would go mad, and moved into the castle for good, even though my bedroom there lacked glass in the window and even lacked a floor. I had to skip across floor joists to reach my bed, and had to remember in the mornings not to step out normally as I would fall through the joists to the dirt floor three feet below. There was only one morning I absentmindedly forgot about the joists and tumbled onto the earth.

Anyhow, things got better in the castle with an electric underblanket and I would switch this on for the first part of the night to warm up the bed. In the extreme cold, it is sometimes worryingly touch-and-go whether the bed is warming up with body heat alone. I would often fall asleep with the electric blanket on and wake up at 2AM absolutely stifling! 

In fact the first evening with the electric blanket I was able to watch "Frozen Planet" in bed. I hadn't been able to watch this documentary series before because the combination of real physical cold and on-screen cold was too much to bear. As I settled down in bed, I thought "Do your worst, David Attenborough!". :-)

The first heating in the castle was a green enamelled Norwegian Jøtul stove which I bought on eBay and picked up in Milngavie. It had originally come from Mull. My friend Andrew and I lit it tentatively the first time, and thereafter I would always put it on for his visits. We would side astride the stove like riders on a horse as it started up, so desperate were we for any kind of warmth. We both recall the first occasion we got the temperature in the room up to double digits. It was a moment to celebrate and somewhere there is a photograph.

At Balintore, piling stoves high with wood is the order of the day, and we always knew the Jøtul stove was pumping out the heat, when the caribou's bottom on the moulded cast iron side panel of the stove started to glow red. I have subsequently found out this is not good for the stove, and no longer do I aim for this.

A friend visited from London. I made him dinner, and between courses I announced "It is time to run round the castle now". The order was met with complete disbelief. I had got into the habit of running round the castle between courses as it is when you are sitting still that your body temperature starts to drop. So laps round the castle were the quid pro quo for formal dining. I normally never kept still inside the castle and danced to keep warm from waking up until going to bed. I was living a cold-induced rave lifestyle.

I have lived in the castle with a foot of snow inside the building. There was no glass in all the windows of the Victorian kitchen for the longest time so fine snow could blow in, and I found myself walking on top of a foot of snow while cooking for about a week.

My friend Andrew and I remember one time each of us was sitting with a cup of tea at the kitchen table, obviously with our coats on. The windows on each side of us had holes in the glass, and the wind was just howling through the kitchen where we were sitting. This was a common occurrence, but the bleakness of this particular occasion when we tried to have a normal conversation while both shivering has imprinted, with both of us clinging desperately onto the cup of tea for residual warmth.

So over the years I have "toughened up" a bit. Although, I am never quite sure if I have actually just learned to discern "feeling cold" from "being cold". Now "feeling cold" can be unpleasant but one can still get on with things. However, "being cold" is another matter. This is the bone-chilling cold, which brings pain to one's feet and hands, that drains one's soul, and renders tasks impossible and requires intervention. At the castle intervention used to be taking to one's bed. Andrew who works in agriculture engineering in all weathers, will work through the "pain in hands" stage to the "no feeling in hands" stage. I take the pain as the warning sign and stop there.

One Christmas early on, I stayed up at the castle instead of visiting my friends in Norfolk, as the 14 days off would give me a lot of uninterrupted time to work on the building. I was doing some wiring in the loft of the kitchen wing. I could spend 15 minutes wiring (which needed gloves off for dexterity) before my hands would hurt too much. To thaw my hands would take the next 30 minutes in my bedroom with the Jøtul stove. I achieved that fortnight what I could have done in a day in Summer. It was a learning experience.

Once when I came up from England, I was discussing matters with my builder of  the time called Andy. After 5 minutes of standing still, not only was I shivering with the cold but I was violently spasming with the cold. "You've turned into a southern softie, David". I could only reply "Yes.". 

Three weeks later when I had acclimatised as much as you can to cold, it was another freezing cold day. Andy must have been feeling the cold himself, as he announced "I don't know how you can live here, David.". Result! 

My current builder Gregor recently confessed that he has frequently turned up in the morning, not expecting me to have made it through a particularly cold night.

It is useful to have a thermometer to measure the temperature for safety.

Sometimes, you find are just being a wuss and it is not actually as cold as you  feel it is. At other times, your instincts are spot on and the temperature is indeed so low that things could quickly become dangerous without action.

My experience suggests that 13C is the safe temperature - you may feel cold but you are OK. Below this wear a coat indoors. 5C is where things start to get unpleasant, and in high humidity 5C can feel as cold as when it is sub-zero.

Below zero temperatures need not be as bad as you may think. Snow can blanket the castle and of course bright sunshine and below zero temperatures is a mood lifter. You need one space you can heat up as a refuge from the cold. I did not have this for quite some time at the castle, and the alternative of retreating to bed felt like a defeat.

I had grand plans of installing a Ground Source Heat Pump (GSHP) at the castle and powering this by the castle's old hydroelectric station. The magic about a GSHP is that you put one unit of electrical pumping energy in, and you get 5 units of heat energy out, so it works out to be the cheapest form of heating to run. However, the capital cost is high. I was looking at 40k for Balintore, so I demurred to a good old oil boiler. The oil heating works well and keeps three zones of the castle, on three heating circuits, nice and toasty.

In the film "Gone WIth the Wind" the character Scarlett O'Hara declares "I'll never be hungry again", and I have often pondered a similar declaration at Balintore "I'll never be cold again". 

To this end, while open fires look lovely and I will keep a number operational at the castle, I now have no qualms about putting a wood-burner in front of a fireplace as with these 80% of the heat goes into the room and only 20% up the chimney.

I am still staying in an unrestored heating-free part of the castle over this winter, but watch this space.

So, fingers crossed, it is unlikely that I will ever return to the early castle days of "Jack London" levels of cold at Balintore, but I thought I had better record them for posterity as few would believe them otherwise, and looking back I can scarcely believe them myself.

Dinner for 25 !

Yesterday, I held a dinner party at Balintore Castle to thank everyone who has supported the restoration over the years. Some of the guests are involved with their own restoration projects and have provided advice and a shoulder to cry upon, when things have not gone to plan. There was a contingent from Wales and a contingent from Orkney, so quite a gathering.

The event, more or less, was at full moon (actually tonight) so was one of the castle's Lunar Dining Club soirées, albeit one at a larger scale than usual - 25 guests rather than just a handful. In fact, I catered for 32 to be on the safe side, but there are always last minute cancellations and no-shows.

Naturally, I was too preoccupied to take any photos, but friend of Balintore James sent me these rather splendid ones, so I thought I would share.

I love to see light shining out of the windows at Balintore, as it is a sign that the building is alive. The photo below shows the full moon. It is actually a night shot, but digital cameras perform miracles with exposure nowadays.

I had pleaded with my builders Craig, Gregor and Gavin to clear the chimney in the Servant's Dining Hall in the basement  for the event so we could heat this space with a wood burner. Finally on Friday, after several months of encountering impenetrable blockage after impenetrable blockage, the stove was installed. Result! For several weeks, Gregor's chimney rods were stuck up the chimney, it was Craig's refusal to give up that eventually retrieved them. This chimney goes from the very bottom of the building to the very top, so challenging is the word.


Here, in another night-time shot you can see smoke coming from the Servant's Hall:

I picked up the massive wood-burner from an architectural antiques yard outside Bath for £60. I put a large pan of water on top of the stove, just to clean the surrounding fireplace, and the water boiled in just 3 minutes. I was so pleased by the sheer quantity of heat pumped out by the stove, and it was gratifyingly warm during the meal. Below you can see the stove on the go and the red wine chambre-ing on the mantel shelf above

We set up 4 tables each with 8 place settings, and did our best to create a festive ambiance for the guests. Winter is now beginning to bite and I have been suffering from some health issues, so we all badly needed distraction and cheering-up. The dinner party was just the ticket.

The menu so you can recreate your own Balintore dinner party at home:

starter - stuffed mushrooms

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/triple-cheese-tarragon-stuffed-mushrooms

1st course - Mark's pheasant and apple stew

https://www.gressinghamduck.co.uk/recipes/pheasant-breasts-casserole-with-bacon-and-apples/

main course - venison casserole
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/succulent-braised-venison

dessert 1 - Bailey's and Coffee Cheesecake

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/baileys-cheesecake

dessert 2 - Veronique's French Apple Tart

venison casserole

Bailey's and coffee cheesecake

A special thank-you to all my friends who stepped in concernedly to help, given my health issues, with the catering and clearing up. They were amazing. I was told just to sit at the dining table and enjoy myself, which I did, flitting between tables during the meal like a social gad-fly. :-)

Isambard Kingdom Brunel

The famous engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (IKB) was an illustrious Victorian gentleman with his finger in many pies. The architect of Balintore Castle, William Burn (WB), was also an illustrious Victorian gentleman with his finger in many pies.

It is almost inevitable, therefore, that at some stage they should have their fingers in each others' pies, and friend of Balintore, Gareth, has just unearthed some evidence of this at the new museum in Bristol dedicated to the life of IKB.

Gareth's photos tell the story, but it is astonishing to think that WB was going to build IKB, his own version of Balintore albeit with sections of the building in a very different (and clashing) style. IKB himself was an architect and constructed many buildings including a house in Abingdon, close to my home in England, that was once pointed out to me. So for IKB to engage WB, must have meant that he rated him very highly.

The Toilet Paper Mystery

I have been charged twice recently for unpaid postage. My suspicion was that someone in the Post Office was on the fiddle, and there was no indication of which eventual deliveries had merited the extra charges.

However, today this letter arrived:

Inside was a short section of toilet paper folded in an exceedingly neat manner:

Can anyone solve the mystery or identify the printing? All I can conclude is that someone in the Glasgow area (the post mark) wants to wreak revenge for some unidentified wrong-doing of mine by charging me postage by using no-longer-valid stamps. £1.10 is a lot to pay per wipe. :-)

PostScript

The mystery was solved by my housekeeper who contacted the guest that took away the key to the AirBnB in error. He attempted to post it back and was able to identify the envelope. It's still a mystery why the key was not inside the pocket of toilet paper, but the envelope has been with the Post Office for 3 weeks so anything could have happened.

Butler's Pantry 2

Gregor and Gavin have finished repairing the lining of the window reveals in the Butler's Pantry.

Here is the after:

And here is the before for comparison:

The restoration of the original door of the room is underway:

Gregor asked me if I wanted him to restore the original door. I responded "What kind of question is that?". Gregor knows that I am scrupulous is re-using every single bit of original fabric when I can, and of course in reality, it is good that he actually did ask. Gregor misses no opportunity to tease me mercilessly, so it is only fair that I reciprocate. :-)

The original door would have been here:

I have decided to move this blog more into the multi-media age, as a video can give you a far better feel for a space than a sequence of photographs. The video below hopefully captures the feeling in the Butler's Pantry, largely before the full restoration that lies ahead. 

 

You will notice in the video that Gregor has freed up the three-point lock on the large iron door to the silver safe. The relative proportions of brute force and WD40 required have not been revealed. :-)

 

Butler's Pantry

The butler's pantry in the basement is one of the most intact rooms in the castle.  Having said that, the flooring had been totally removed long before I bought the building, so the space was not usable.

It still has its original window, with just one broken pane of glass at the bottom right, The original door is still there too, but it had been kicked off its hinges in the past, so is rather in need of repair.

window in butler's pantry

Gregor has recently been repairing the wooden linings round the window, using new bespoke linings manufactured locally with an absolutely identical profile. The cost of these was eye-watering. We have been very careful to "repair" existing fittings throughout this restoration, not only does this exempt the work from any form of planning considerations but it is also perhaps the purest and best approach.

paint "lip"reveals location of original worktop for butler's sink

I instructed Gregor to keep the 5 short existing sections of moulding on left hand side in the above image. These reveal the location of a worksurface which would have held a butler's sink. There was a blocked-up drain underneath as corroboration. When I visited Mellerstain House in the Scottish Borders, I was delighted to see their butler's pantry and committed the details to memory.

In fact, it was the blocked-up drain than prevented us from rebuilding the floor over the top for the longest time. Unblocking the drain was quite an adventure in itself but this is a story for another day - suffice it to say that the drain is now flowing.

Anyhow, Gregor called me over a couple of days ago for a site meeting in the butler's pantry, and asked how we were going to line the walls underneath the worksurface and wouldn't it be better to take the new lining down to the ground instead of just replicating short sections? Gregor was of course correct, and I abandoned my principle of retaining all original fabric in this one instance. The five short lengths could go, especially as there was already a lot of this original lining surviving in the room.

Anyhow, removing this small amount of original fabric made me record the "before" and indeed create this particular blog entry. You can see the original lining on the left hand side of the window reveal, and the new lining on the right hand side of the window reveal.

original lining on left

new lining on right

While the Victorians generally had great attention to detail, I am constantly amazed that linings on sides and on tops, don't line up! :-)

Chicken-of-the-Woods

One of the side-effects of walking in the countryside with friends at this time of year, is unscheduled foraging. As soon as I walked past this bracket fungus growing on a tree in the vicinity of the castle yesterday, I instantly knew what it was: "Chicken-of-the-Woods" (Laetiporus sulphureus).

I had the fungus pointed out to me around 20 years ago, on a professionally organised "fungus foray" at Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire. Unfortunately the Oxfordshire fungus was high up on a tree and well out of reach. This time the fungus was within arm's reach - hurrah! The guide had told us that Chicken-of-the-Woods" is one of the most delicious there is: both looking like and tasting like chicken and we should grab any opportunity to try it.

I could not believe my good luck this time and picked one piece. Of course, correct identification is vital. The seek App on my mobile phone also identified it as "Chicken-of-the-Woods", and prior to cooking I looked at a number of YouTube videos, for both identification and preparation purposes. For example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K8HuTHTyP8

However, "Chicken of the Woods" is so distinctive being a bright yellow, growing on trees, and consisting of multiple clusters of fans, that it could hardly be anything else - and certainly none of the dangerous fungi in Europe look anything like this.

chicken of the woods growing wild

The YouTube video suggested marinating in olive oil and Teriyaki sauce, and I improvised with olive oil and Soy sauce - 2 minutes was enough.

marinated chicken of the woods

The video barbequed the slices for 2 minutes, but I fried for 3 minutes ensuring that the pieces were well-cooked and had turned brown at the edges. Cooking the pieces well removes any risk from natural bacterial contamination apparently.

cooked chicken of the woods

I presumed that "tasting like chicken" was just a figment of the imagination as the slices look like chicken. In fact, the fungus really does have a mild taste of chicken, and there is also a good robust and meaty texture. This contrasts with some mushrooms which go slimy after cooking.

This delicious fungus would work well with a venison casserole and presumably would keep more texture than a conventional mushroom. "Chicken-of-the-Woods" is much more quorn-like than mushroom-like, and it probably would work well in a casserole where it would absorb other flavours. One YouTube video makes a version of KFC from "Chicken-of-the-Woods", and anything which brings in other flavours like the KFC batter, would be a great accompaniment.

I would go so far as to say "Chicken-of-the-Woods" is the best edible fungus I've tried! :-)

My Big Fat Greek Rap Posse

In January of 2021 I was approached by a Georgios from Newcastle-upon-Tyne who wanted to book a night in the Kitchen Wing AirBnB at Balintore Castle but he insisted he needed a lot of snow.

I did my best to explain that conjuring up snow on demand was not within my capabilities :-), but that the castle was in a part of Scotland where there would be a number of heavy dumps throughout the winter but you could not predict when these would be. Even the UK Met Office admit that predicting snow is known to be a particularly hard problem, and you can only give a relatively accurate prediction of snow a day ahead.

I was down in England at this time so I would have to communicate with my builder Gregor on the weather, and then relay the information to Georgios. This was almost on a daily basis, and I wondered why I was going to all this trouble; if only I had a webcam at the castle and could have pointed Georgios at the URL.

This was during the third lockdown and so the calendar was totally empty of AirBnB bookings. Georgios mentioned his party were doing a work photoshoot and this legitimised the use of the accommodation. Then a "rap video" was mentioned, but the whole thing sounded rather dubious. I suspected the group just wanted a mini lockdown break, but the AirBnB guidelines stated the onus of legitimacy is on the guests not on the host, so I was not worried.

Finally, around the 7th of February there was a massive dump of snow, and Georgios booked in for the 10th. I was crossing my fingers that the snow would linger around the castle. My neighbour contacted me on the 10th, in a state of some alarm, to say there were some young people cavorting in the field in front of the castle. I was able to reply "I believe that is my Greek rap posse.". It's not often that the Fates conspire to give one the intense joy of delivering such good lines. :-)

Much later, Georgios sent me a link to the resulting rap video on YouTube. His stage name is Arva, and so the guests had been legit after all, and what's more the video and song "Lady" are excellent: there is real art in the cinematography and real musicality and an excellent "flow" in the track.

The video does feature the objectification of women as is standard in the rap genre. One is accustomed to this, but when one sees mild lady bondage in one's own salon :-) this objectification does rather make one ponder. However, there is post-modern humour and irony in the presentation, so I don't think the imagery is problematic.

objectified lady, doubly exposed, on sofa in salon

Later on, an acoustic remix appeared on the same YouTube channel - this time shot indoors in the big Victorian kitchen.

I am highly impressed by the group's professionalism, efficiency and economy. They produced two quality videos out of a single day's shooting at the castle. There was clearly no messing around. I did not get any filming fees, and they just paid for a single night's accommodation.

The important thing is that Balintore Castle looks great and particularly so in the snowy landscape. Three days after the dump, when filming took place, there had been a considerable amount of snow melt, but the blanket of white was good enough to give an atmospheric winter vibe. The drone shots and one particular bit of VFX where the castle is mirrored in the sky are outstanding.

rap video opening credits

drone shot of snowy landscape

rap posse on castle terrace

Overall, I was delighted to have been a minor accessory in this work of art. The other videos on the ArvaOfficial channel do not quite have the same magic. Ironically, I subsequently went to work for the UK Met Office, so perhaps my regular weather bulletins for the Greek rap posse reveal a pre-woven tapestry by the Fates of Ancient Greek mythology.

magical castle with stars shot