Castle Pond Redux

In a previous blog entry I described how I discovered that the castle once had a boating pond and the story of how this pond had once been flooded to provide a top-up reservoir for Dundee. However, in 1957 there was a tremendous storm that washed away the reservoir. The rather sad body of water that remains to this day is even smaller than the original boating pond.

In response to the blog entry, I was sent a photograph that pre-dates the 1957 flood, showing the reservoir in its sizeable glory.

reservoir before the 1957 storm

I was delighted to receive this photo and determined to re-create it by finding the same vantage point on the hill behond the castle. The visit of Canadian friends during some glorious sunny weather last week was the perfect excuse to go hillwalking and finally to do the detective work. It appears that the original vantage point is now inside an area of forest, so the closest sensible matching viewpoint was a little above the forest where the castle just comes into view. It is clear that the current pond once extended almost to the dark green trees on the left, and extended between the two dark green clumps of trees on the right. In fact, light green silver birch trees are now growing in the regions where the pond used to be. Silver birches are known to suit damp conditions. So finally there is conclusive proof of the reservoir story.

depleated reservoir today

Another piece of evidence is this sluice gate sitting high-and-dry well above the current level of the pond. The structure has the same shape as an ancient Egyptian temple and is encrusted with a virulent orange lichen. The effect is both archaic and other worldly.

reservoir sluice gate

I wrote the story of the discovery of the pond as an email to friends. Now seems the appropriate time to put the text on this blog and thereby to close the current chapter in the boating pond's story.

Discovery of the Boating Pond

One day, my friend Andrew mentioned that he would like to try and find the remains/foundations of a boat house which appears in an old map of Glen Quharity. As it was a lovely sunny evening, I said "What about now?". We followed some of the old glen "roads" on the map, which I guess were never more than dirt tracks. but which were now grown over.

After getting rather lost in the woods, we glimpsed the castle through the trees, and got back our sense of direction. We then got lost again following the bank of a river, but climbed up a forrested rise, and glimpsed a body of water shining through the trees. Our destination! In fact what looks like a tiny lake from the castle is clearly, at ground level, a huge and totally man-made boating pond with stone-built banks. The boating hut, on the north shore, is more or less intact - thanks to a liberal coating of creosote.

So this is Balintore Castle's boating pond!!! The configuration in relation to the castle made it a certainty. When an Edinburgh architect was offered the castle in the 70's for £100, a "loch" was included. This must have been it. I hadn't realised until now that this pond/loch had been a major part of the castle's entertainment infrastructure. The amount of manpower required to dig this out, line it with stones and create the supply and drain must have been phenomenal. The drain sluices have collapsed somewhat, so the pond is lower than intended. If the sluices were fixed, it would be twice the size.

As we arrived, a heron flew off and there was a rather upset swan in the middle of the water. We decided to leave northwards along a track that had clearly been the carriage access from Balintore Castle.

As we were on the point of leaving, Andrew asked "Shall we look inside the boat house?". I replied "We would have to climb down that big slope and back up again - it's going to be very tiring.". Suddenly with a "What the hell!", Andrew headed off helter-skelter down the slope. I had no option but to follow.

Miraculously, the door to the boat house opened . "What's that?" asked Andrew peering in with his torch. "It's looks like polythene sheeting." I replied looking at a pristeen white mass in the corner of the building. "It's a swan." said Andrew. "It must be sleeping" I said, as there was no sign of decay or damage. "No, it's dead." said Andrew and sure enough there was a very slight but still unmistakable odour of decay, reminiscent of dead seagulls at the beach. So the swan in the lake was the distressed and bereaved mate - a neighbour had mentioned seeing a swan lingering in the area.

The whole trip had a magical quality: passing along overgrown tracks and then discovering that the castle had a boating pond. With the dead swan, the story took on a further mythic dimension. Of course, neither of us had a camera! We subsequently found out that the game-keeper at the time had removed the dead swan from the water and placed it in the boat house. The skeleton of the swan remains to this day.

Kitchen Fireplace and Insulation

newly installed fire canopy in action in castle kitchen

It is with huge relief that I can report that the new fireplace made out of the opening that once hosted the kitchen range at Balintore Castle appears finally to be working. This has only taken 5 years! The blog entry documenting the earlier failure can be found here.

The recent key insight to get the smoke to draw up the chimney instead of into the room was realising that the large rectangular void was essentially an inglenook fireplace, and I googled for "problems draw inglenook". Apparently, most inglenook fireplaces will not draw naturally and they need a "fire canopy" to focus the flow of air, so that the velocity becomes large enough to take the smoke with it.

Thanks to eBay I recently picked up a MASSIVE second-hand fire canopy for £65 in Worcester. Sourcing items for Balintore has taken me the length and breadth of the country. I schedule these pick-ups to be en route when I am making other journeys - so the logistics are finely honed.

The canopy made such an enormous difference that Andy actually shook my hand! Investing in one and transporting it 400 miles had been somewhat of an act of faith on my behalf so I was delighted.  There is still a small amount of smoke in the room, but hopefully by sealing the canopy in position instead of propping it up with a bit of wood, and perhaps installing a "granny" on the chimney pot, the level of smoke will become acceptable.

You will see the canopy is 8 inches off centre. This is because the inside of the chimney turned out to be not quite symmetrical. Andy said he has the tools to do some surgery on the top of the canopy to centralise the set-up.

Now that there is a source of heat in the kitchen, it is time to keep the heat in. And in the last few weeks, there have been great strides in insulating and then lining the kitchen in plasterboard. On the left is the before picture with insulation in progress. On the right is the after picture with the left-hand wall, the far wall and the ceiling insulated and lined. The kitchen is such a big room that the cost of the materials alone is frightening. The right-hand wall is fully internal and therefore the lathe-and-plaster survived the worst effects of water ingress and could be left alone. Fortunately, it is more important to insulate external walls.

To keep the historic lines intact there was a limit on the depth of insulation that could be used. This is typically around 50mm as the lathe-and-plaster is 2 inches thick. Sometimes we managed a little more, sometimes the lines dictated a little less. So I'm pleased that we have installed as much insulation as possible, and that the historic interior has been kept "as is". Restoration is very much a finely tuned compromise. On the other hand, this is not a source of great worry or deep thinking as the building shows you the way. The pictures are courtesy of my friend Andrew.

                before: insulation being installed                              

after: insulation and plasterboard in place

Molotov Cocktails and Dirty Protests

During the current mêlée of work at Balintore Castle to make the kitchen wing habitable, all forms of washing facilities have been lost. Getting ever dirtier is a fate, nay responsibility, for the would-be restorer of a castle.

A friend in Dundee, motivated by charity or olfactory onslaught, offered to let me have a bath in his flat. The relief of cleanliness is inestimable by those unaccustomed to building restoration. The bath water assumed the colour of a peaty highland stream.

The next day, the ironic duty that fell upon me was sweeping chimneys. Needless to say I was black afterwards, and have remained so since.

I managed to clear the chimney which served the right hand range in the old castle kitchen. There were three blockages as I pushed the drainage rods up the flue, but by attrition first compacted dirt, and then secondly nesting twigs would fall as each blockage was breached. I ran out of strength at the third blockage, but Gregor my carpenter gave a final push which broke through. We did not manage to get all the way to the top of the chimney, but 18 draining rods, each 3 feet long took us up 54 feet which is most of the way, and the test fire we lit underneath suggested there was a good upwards draft, though smoke filled the kitchen. Originally, the range would have been sealed in whereas we were testing an open fire in a coal basket. The plan is to connect up a wood burner.

The next chimney to sweep was the one connected to the top room in the entrance tower - to provide some heat while the kitchen wing is out of commission. Slowly we are moving through the building clearing the chimney stacks. After doing each stack, Andy my roofer, puts wire netting over the corresponding chimney cans to prevent the rooks putting more twigs down as they attempt to build nests.

I managed to get three lengths of drainage rod up the flue in the entrance tower top room, but it hit a solid-feeling earth blockage. The initial run of flue is essentially horizontal, perhaps 30 degrees, so there was no way anything loosened (if at all) would fall down by itself. Gregor had no joy either. Andy volunteered to rod downwards. At the top of a long ladder leaning against the vertiginous chimney stack, in a safety harness, Andy thrust purposefully and forcefully downwards with a long length of 2" by 2" wood and then with the drainage rods but each time nothing gave way.

It was going to have to be the age-old technique of dropping down a burning rag to set fire to the twigs lodged in the chimney. Rags were soaked in diesel, dropped down, and clearly twigs were burning as smoke poured out of the chimney. Rooks wheeled around and looked-on, alarmed as one of their homes was being immolated! The burning carried on for around 30 minutes, but prodding with the rods showed no improvement, pouring diesel down gave an impressive "woof", but the blast of the explosion put out the fire and further burning rags gave no noticeable progress.

Andy with his safety harness, draining rods and 2" x 2"

Andy drove to a neighbour's to procure petrol as this is more flammable, and at one stage a Smirnoff vodka bottle full of petrol was passed hand to hand. Yes, Andy was fighting the avian wars with a Molotov Cocktail. Despite our high hopes, this failed to do any better than the diesel.

The next suggestion was to use a gas burner from the bottom. The flame head was taped to the drainage rods, lit, and then thrust up the flue. Each time the flame went out after a few seconds as the oxygen burnt out in the flue. Physics in action, or is that physics in stasis? The problem was that as the chimney was so completely blocked and for quite some distance, that burning solutions were not proving successful as air could not flow in any shape or form to assist the process, though Gregor did smell diesel from inside the fireplace suggesting some had dripped to the bottom.

At that stage of maximum despair I had to made a trip to a carpentry workshop in Kirriemuir. When I came back, Andy told me that the new wood stove I had bought for the top room was no good either. I entered the room thoroughly dejected, but looking around I saw the little wood stove burning away merrily. Hurrah - I was a happy bunny! There was, however, a huge hole in the wall! Andy and Gregor had made this hole exactly at the position of the bend in the flue: removing 5 buckets of earth from the vertical section when went upwards and 2 buckets of earth from the horizontal section when went to the left. In short this chimney would never have been cleared without this radical approach. A hundred years of rook twigs had turned to a dense rich compost. In fact the compost was soaking wet with rainwater and this explained the damp green patch in the wall that had always been there - directly in front of the bend in the flue. One damp problem now solved. Andy later blocked off the new hole. At the end of the day, Andy swept the remaining two chimneys in the same stack and netted them all - the other two were considerably less problematic.

new stove finally working - note hole in wall solution

When I tried to go to bed that night, I discovered there was a rook in my bed! There was only one entrance to the narrow room, so there is no way I could escort it out without it getting into a flappy panic so I had to crash elsewhere in that castle that night and hope by morning that the rook was gone.

The next morning the rook had indeed gone, but it had pooped spectacularly in my bed. The smell was indescribable and the subsequent laundering deeply harrowing. By coincidence, the rook's nest had only been a few feet from my bed and now that its overnight accommodation had gone, it had used mine instead - complete with "dirty protest" to illustrate what it thought of our activities. These are very smart animals indeed.

In fact, there are still rooks in the building and every-so-often in the night I am woken up by the noise of a rook's flappy-walk as it makes its way along a corridor and tries to get into my bedroom with me. To discourage overnighting with a rook, I normally shout something like "GERROUT-OF-IT", not a sudden noise which might make them panic but a prolonged exclamation to inform them of my presence. Normally they turn around and do the flappy-hoppy thing back down the corridor.

The evening following the traumatic night of the avian dirty protest, I could hear a rook attempting to enter my bedroom yet again. I bemoaned my fate and shouted my usual "GERROUT-OF-IT". Imagine my embarrassment to discover it was not a rook but my neighbour who had entered the building for a social call! As knocking on the front door of such a big building does not work, my friends know just to let themselves in.

Invermark Castle

Carpe Diem is never more applicable than during rare good weather in the Angus Glens, so today's sunshine and warmth put a trip to Invermark Castle on the cards. This is the single remaining castle in the Angus Glens that I have yet to visit, or rather more accurately this is the last unvisited out of the six shown on the Angus Glens' web page. I have visited the other castles in the following order:

1. Balintore Castle
2. Forter Castle
3. Cortachy Castle
4. Edzell Castle
5. Inverquharity Castle

My friend Andrew and his father were up for the visit, so we all made a day of it. Invermark is located well up Glen Esk, so although it is not far from Balintore Castle as the crow flies, I was surprised at how long the journey felt after entering the eastern end of Glen Esk. So much so, that we decided to stop off at the Glenesk Retreat for coffee and cake even before we started sightseeing. The proved to be the correct decision as the road to Invermark Castle was subsequently blocked by sheep being herded, and had we not had refreshments beforehand we would have been gnawing fingers off. The Glenesk Retreat is more than just a cafe/restaurant: it contains a small folk museum and resources for the glen community. The staff are amazingly friendly and chatty, and we were made so welcome that I would go back again and again.

Invermark Castle turned out to the perfect Scottish tower house: massively solid and vertiginous with the walls still resolutely intact up to the wall head. There have been two building phases: the first three storeys in the early 16th century and then the fourth storey in the early 17th century.

Invermark Castle: north and west elevations

Invermark Castle: south and east elevations

Invermark Castle: south elevation - at last some fenestration!

I was struck by the almost total absence of windows on three of the elevations: there were some slits in the stonework but that was about it apart from the later openings at the top level. I was relieved when I did find a few modest windows at the south of the building that you cannot see from the path which runs adjacent. This is a serious defensive structure and consequently would have always been extremely dark inside. Andrew's father said he was pleased he lived in an age when one did not have to hide behind high defensive walls. I pointed out that living behind high defensive walls was a huge improvement compared to not doing so! :-)

Invermark Lodge

old parish church by Loch Lee

Given the good weather we were tempted further along the road to look at Invermark Lodge (1852), and further yet to the quaint ruined late 17th century old parish church on the banks of Loch Lee. I climbed up the inside wall of the church yard to look over to check how close the loch was. The loch was lapping right against the walls! I wondered whether this has always been the case, perhaps the level of the loch was raised when it became the water supply for Brechin. In any case, few churches can have such a spectacular setting.

Invermark Lodge (1852) is one of the premier shooting lodges in Scotland and it nestles perfectly in the contours of Glen Esk. It is built of Aberdeenshire granite - just a few miles north of Balintore the geology switches from lowland sandstone to highland granite.

One can more than understand the attractions of the surroundings of the lodge on a day like today, even given that Glen Esk has one of the highest concentrations of Adders in the UK. Winter must be a different story altogether, as the region is even more remote and even higher-up than Balintore. It is likely that Invermark Lodge is cut-off a number of times each winter. I am grateful to Andrew's Dad, who worked in forestry, for teaching me the difference between a Silver Birch and a Downy Birch today. I had previously thought they were the same species.

current (19th century) parish church Interior

On the walk back, we explored the current parish church. The interior is

a time capsule of devout but dour 19th century Scottish Christianity: beautifully fitted out in wood; still equipped with a foot-pump organ and a gas light for the raised pulpit. I am fascinated by the phenomenon where remote places often transport you back in time as well.

A delicious late lunch, during a second visit to the Glenesk Retreat, confirmed how great a place this is and before departing and driving home we explored the attached museum. A number of rooms were set-up in the Victorian period, and given I am trying to do this at Balintore, I was enthralled and on high alert as to what worked well and what was less successful.

I absolutely loved Invermark Castle, and given free rein on which building to restore I might have gone for this. The interior has totally gone, so a restoration is a simple and relatively inexpensive matter of replacing the roof and the floors, unimpeded by existing structures.  The level of resources so far expended on Balintore Castle would have completed the restoration of Invermark several times over. I had originally intended to restore a tower house, knowing that this was a more tractable though still considerable exercise.

Given the architectural and historic significance of Invermark, only a highly authentic restoration would be permitted, if at all, and of course it belongs to the Dalhousie Estates rather than me! My own personal take is that most historic ruins should be sensitively restored: buildings only fully make sense when in use. At the very least floors and roofs should be put back, if nothing else, so we can explore the structures in indoor comfort.

Simon Marsden on Balintore Castle

As English author and photographer Simon Marsden (1948-2012) is now himself the other side of the veil, I hope his spirit feels that it is a fitting tribute to his work that I have included his entry on Balintore Castle here. The entry come from his marvellous book “Phantoms of The Isles” which features haunted buildings and places from all over the British Isles. The book is no longer in print and I would like to feel that by digitising the information, and being careful to obtain a high quality scan, I have secured its future. I can definitely recommend the book. My own copy was a gift from a friend of Balintore called Duncan.

I have yet to tell the many ghost stories associated with Balintore Castle on my blog. Simon's own "ghost" story is the first to appear here. In fact, it is quite uncanny: aspects of Simon's tale tallies with other ghost stories I have heard and there would appear to be no way that Simon could have known about these prior to his visit.

I have appended the text from the book entry. This was digitised by opening the scanned image with"Google Docs". This did a reasonable conversion (JPG to TXT), though the output needed some manual tweaking.

I used the "Hugin" stitching software to combine three A4 scans into a single image. This accounts for the distortion, though the scanning quality itself is high.

BALLINTORE CASTLE

Angus, Scotland

I came upon this mysterious castle unexpectedly, after getting lost in one of the wilder areas of Scotland. It is dramatically situated high up on a remote grouse moor and I instinctively felt drawn towards it. The eccentricity of the architecture and the uniqueness of the setting gave its decaying towers an unearthly atmosphere of impending doom that made it perfect as an illustration for a book that I was preparing on the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe.

I drove slowly through the deserted lodge gates and up the long driveway. At close quarters the castle looked even more forbidding, as if something quite horrible had happened there once. Then, hidden behind the building, I saw a small modern house with a young child playing outside. As I parked my car his mother came out and I asked her if she would mind if I took some photographs. She said that she had no objection but advised me not to go inside as it was unsafe. I then asked her what she knew of the castle's history, but she said she was sorry she knew very little about it except that it had been used as a shooting lodge before being abandoned. I said that I thought it looked very haunted at which point she laughed nervously and seemed to be about to say something, before turning and walking away.

With a sense of both exhilaration and trepidation I walked around to the front of the house and began to take photographs. Unnervingly the hanging wooden shutters would occasionally slam shut in the wind. At one point, I climbed an old iron spiral staircase to look into one of the windows, half expecting to find some awful spectre staring back at me, but it seemed deserted. By now it was slowly beginning to get dark so, happy with the pictures that I had taken, I returned to my car.

As I went back down the driveway I was thinking about writing to the county library in the hope of learning more about the house when I noticed a small boy, about ten years old, standing near the gates on the opposite side of the road. I smiled at him but he didn't smile back. He appeared to be very sad, with a faraway expression on his face. He was dressed like a gypsy and as I turned the car to drive away I felt that something was wrong. I had driven some thirty yards down the road when I looked in my rear-view mirror: he had gone.

I returned but couldn't find him anywhere; he seemed to have vanished into thin air. At first I felt very confused. His clothes had seemed as if they were from another age – perhaps I had seen a ghost? I sat motionless in the car as the idea slowly sank in. Later I felt a strange relief, although still somewhat disturbed by the expression on the boy's face, and I thought how ironic it would be if I should have encountered a spirit there. rather than the terrifying apparitions that I had imagined haunted the castle.

Later that month I received a letter from the library. They too had very little information on the house except that it had been built by a David Lyon, MP, in 1865 and was described as an elegant castellated mansion, in somewhat bleak surroundings. It had then changed hands several times before the end of the nineteenth century. It seemed that nobody wished to stay there for long. Subsequently it was acquired by a Lady Lyell and even then it was only used in the shooting season, until it was finally abandoned in the 1960s. They did not know who the present owner was.

The Lost Boating Pond

What most people do not realise is that Balintore Castle had its own boating pond. In fact despite owning the castle for a number of years, I have only recently myself made the discovery.

My friend Andrew was examining some old maps and a body of water near the castle was labelled as "boating pond". We explored the area on foot and everything pointed to this being a man-made feature, and one clearly associated with the castle. There was a boat house, and even an old dedicated driveway running down from the castle to the pond, still there but overgrown and now forming part of a field. I had just never noticed it before. Of course, things are often only obvious with hindsight, and indeed since the discovery other sources have corroborated that this body of water is genuinely the castle's original boating pond.

The pond is visible from the castle and I had thought nothing of this, but the reverse angle tells the full story. This fantastic panorama, taken by my friend Alistair, shows the castle intentionally framed by the pond's designed landscape. And just as the castle was designed to be seen from the pond; the pond was designed to be seen from the castle.

view of Balintore Castle from its lost boating pond

The pond is currently half its original size. There are some breaches in the stone-lined banks that are reducing its size. However, not much work would be required to bring it back: it could be once again a brilliant recreational facility for boating and fishing.

Whilst touring the pond, Andrew and I spotted some large concrete sluice gates sitting high and dry. They seemed to be rather too large and rather too late in period for the pond, but we didn't really think anything of it.

Several months later the last piece in the jig-saw puzzle emerged with a tale from Andrew's father. Before 1957, the whole bottom of the glen in this area had been been dammed to form the top-up reservoir for Lintrathen Loch that supplies Dundee with its drinking water. This explains the large sluice gates - the original boating pond had been submerged under the top-up reservoir, presumably for decades.

In 1957 there was a tremendous storm, the rain fell so heavily that the rush of water off the surrounding mountains totally washed out the top-up reservoir and presumably this natural disaster also perpetrated the current damage to the pond's infrastructure.

Instead of repairing the reservoir, a newer and much larger one was created at Backwater nearby. The project starting in 1964 and the reservoir was opened in 1969.

The moral of this story is how the layout of the landscapes around us can look permanent, but that they can have gone through vast changes even in relatively recent decades. If we look for the clues in old maps; listen to the stories of those who live in the area but above all stay alert to clues on the ground, then history will tantalisingly peel off her layers.

Mole Man Metrics

If I may mischievously misquote the first line of one of my favourite novels "The Go-Between" by L.P. Hartley:

"The country is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

then this contains an essential truth, of the difference between town and country that is pertinent to this blog entry. A couple of fields down from Balintore Castle in the Auldallan direction, a macabre spectacle is currently on display - a phalanx of crucified moles. I have never seen this before, but logic tells one this is a mole catcher's way of letting the world know he has done his job well. In my job we have "software metrics"; here we have a head count. I would contest there is no moral difference.

Indeed a year or so earlier, I spotted a be-tweeded figure walking around a field on the other side of the road. His movements were strangely slow and he was clearly communing with a higher power. "What is he doing?" I asked. "He, " replied my friend Andrew who is infinitely more steeped in country lore than myself "is the mole catcher". 

It struck me as odd then, as it does now, that a living can be made this way and the odd yet deliberate movements of the mole catcher indicated that he was tuned into the natural world in ways that I couldn't even imagine.

Making a spectacle of death is overlaid in the human domain with much cultural significance, not just the afore-referenced and timely crucifiction at Easter, and I am put in mind of one of my favourite songs "Strange Fruit" which contain the relevant lines.

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

In truth, I am not certain I have seen a mole in the flesh  before. They were somewhat larger and more uniform in size than I would have expected. Their claws are eerily reptilian, creating an ambivalence with the lovable moles in children's literature. However, I inwardly salute all wild mammals who can make a living in the wilds of Angus, especially those that can do it underground. :-)

"strange fruit" close to Balintore Castle