Punching Above My Weight

As you can imagine, works at the castle do not come cheap, so when you manage to furnish the castle with bargain purchases the joy is all the sweeter.

A newly restored basement room, originally the female servants' sitting room, holds a beautiful large antique bookcase. However, there are no books in the bookcase, and this looks awful as far as recreating a historic mood is concerned.  Over the last 6 months or so, I have been moving books that I finish reading into these shelves, to make them look more populated

However, I realised this was not going to cut it, as these books are modern and although reading is one of my favourite things, I was never going to fill the cavernous shelves at my slow rate of getting through books.

I decided to keep an eye out for job-lots of period volumes with attractive spines. It wasn't an active hunt and if I didn't get something in the next year, then it would not be an issue.

Last Thursday, 17 September 2026, this set of bound volumes of Punch came up for auction at Taylor's Auctions in Montrose. These were perfect as I already have Victorian bounds sets of Punch filling bookcases at the castle, so I could decorate consistently, although this selection does look more 20th Century. Anyhow, in the end, I managed to bag the 103 volumes for £50!

photo from online auction catalogue

I picked up the volumes today. Previously, I have had to box-up and move the books myself, but when I arrived the staff had already boxed them up and indeed transported them into my wee van. Nowadays, moving heavy items is much more difficult for me, so I was deeply appreciative that I had been spared the struggle. 

decanting books from the back of my wee van

I filled a sample shelf to judge the look. The books look very much at home. The ones which came out of the back of my van first were 1930 to 1940. I naturally wondered how Punch had responded to the declaration of WWII on the 1st September 1939.

one shelf filled!

It's actually quite frightening, the 6th September edition is full of war stories; the one from the 28th August is not. This shows a society that was taken by surprise. There is one chilling illustration of Hitler looking into a crystal ball labelled "1914" and seeing a skull i.e. a prediction that WWII is going to be a bloodbath comparable to that of 1914.  The cartoon was more on the nose than anyone could ever have imagined at the time.  I was going to put the image here, but it just was too dark.

Instead, here is a mildly witty but revealing illustration with an architectural flavour as befits this blog.

page from 6th August 1939

I recall my Dad regaling me with tales of people who buy "books by the yard" just to look good on their bookshelves. There was amused and amusing mock outrage. :-) The context of this remark is that my Dad is the biggest reader I have ever met in my life, bar none. He took out 4 library books every week, and read them cover-to-cover. This is in addition to the newspapers we took (typically 3 a day) and his own private collection of books. There was one enormous bookcase of railway books (my grandfather was a stationmaster) and one enormous bookcase of art books - reflecting some of his passions. These were assuredly read cover-to-cover.

When I was looking for books for the castle, and forewarned by my father, I did check out "books by the yard" but could not find any. However, "books by the metre" did get plenty of google hits. Presented below is a screen grab from a "books by the foot" website. £50 is a typical price.  

Thankfully, I did not betray my father, as I found out books can be bought in bulk very cheaply if they are the "Encyclopaedia Britannica", editions of "Punch" and works by Dickens and (particularly) Sir Walter Scott.

Most of the Punches are "half-calf" which means the spine is leather rather than the whole cover, so they work well on a book-shelf. The "leather" may actually be as leatherette even though the texture has "pores" and the scuffs show an underlying light brown, and they are certainly not the very posh hand-made bindings where there are ridges down the spine where the string holds the pages together.

Anyhow, I hope you appreciate these tips on how to avoid skewering your intellectual credibility with books by the foot.

Temu Ransom

I am installing a couple of chandeliers in the newly restored drawing room. I purchased these from eBay near the start of the project. This is a long, long time ago. :-)

If memory serves, I picked them up in person from Bridgenorth. The seller was also disposing of a vast quantity of second-hand lighting, and being able to inspect the goods in person, I took the opportunity to stock up.  I was aware, even then, of the high cost of large light fittings. I only regret one of the pairs of ceiling lights I bought, which look too much like 1980's reproductions and have such dark brown shades that their illumination is very poor.

Anyhow, the chandeliers require 12 matching shades. Glass shades of the appropriate size start from £80, making a minimum spend of £960. Eeeek! I found an suitable acrylic shade on Temu at £11 , so ordered a couple to assess the fit and the look.

The critical dimension is the brass gallery which holds the neck of the "glass" shade. I have a 4 1/4" gallery, obviously designed to take a 4" (102mm) neck. However. the Temu neck was just 95mm, so I was uncertain. Anyhow, the samples arrived on Saturday and thankfully the look and fit are great. Once installed on the ceiling, there's no way to tell the shades are not glass. The shade neck is indeed a little narrow, but I suspect no-one will ever notice.

I went to order the other 10 shades today and found out that Temu has increased the price to £17 and only 9 were left in stock at this "discounted?" price. I suspect this is a deliberate scam to catch repeat customers. I went in under another account and still saw the price hoick, but I am pretty certain there are other ways of knowing that it is still you.

Anyhow, I had to start a separate order item for the remaining shades at "full price", but the full price was still £17. Then Temu added on £27 import tax. Is this legitimate? I felt like I had no choice but to go ahead with the order, on the basis I was still winning on overall price.

Some later research showed that Temu orders over ~£130 do incur import tax, so I will know in future to break up a larger order and indeed to avoid repeat orders. It should have been simpler. Given that Temu market so aggressively, I was very nervous of an aggressive pricing structure once they have got you hooked.

Anyhow, looking forward to completing all the finishing touches in the Drawing Room. Gregor, my builder, says he will start laying the oak floor after he returns from a holiday in Malta.

Temu shades on 1980's reproduction Victorian chandelier

Reception Rooms: August 2026

We have been working most recently on the Drawing Room on the south elevation of the castle, and have now finished plastering and painting the room. This completely changes the character of the space into something  uncannily close to the domestic. Well over 50% of this room was derelict when I bought the castle and significantly there was no floor. The remaining work is to install oak strip flooring on top of the plywood subfloor and wooden fittings such as shutters and skirting boards.

This Drawing Room will be the second large reception room to be restored, following the Great Hall, which was completed last year. The Great Hall still has to have an opening ceremony. The one which I organised last August was cancelled at the very last moment by Angus Council, even though I had informed then well in advance. 550 tickets had to be cancelled, and I felt awful that people has travelled from different countries especially to attend the event.

With the Drawing Room looking less ruinous, I opened the door connecting it to the Great Hall, and the castle gave me the biggest and the most unexpected surprise! Even after 19 years of ownership, she still has secrets to reveal.

The Great Hall is noteworthy for not having any views of the surrounding countryside. All the windows are extremely high up, so all you can see is sky. In one sense this is disappointing given the magnificent location of the castle, but in another sense it creates a "womb like" atmosphere that cradles you. Guests have indicated that despite the enormous scale of the room, it still feels intimate and on a human scale.

the newly discovered line of sight to the south through the door 

The surprise is that the Great Hall does actually have the very best view of the surrounding countryside when the connecting door is open. The door you enter through to get into the Great Hall; the connecting door to the Dining Room; and the central panel of the large bay window on the south elevation align perfectly. So there is a wonderful line of sight through the building to the outside, that had been hidden for decades and has only just, to my great delight, reappeared.

Here is a photo of the dining room taken a few weeks ago. You can see that where coving is missing we have just painted a white band to give an impression of what once was.

the Drawing Room before final scaffold removal 

My builders came back today, after a 3 week break, and removed the remaining scaffolding to reveal the Drawing Room as a simple complete and vast space. I am so looking forward to guests enjoying it. Gregor said it is his favourite room today. and many visitors have said the same thing. 

Personally, my favourite room is the Great Hall which somehow channels the soirée, but the Drawing Room undeniably has the best views and is a space for daytime events.

the Drawing Room after today's scaffold removal

Fourth-Level Ferry Remote

fourth-level ferry remote

Restoring Balintore Castle has given me an unprecedented understanding into the meaning of the word "remote".

The first description of Balintore Castle I read featured the word remote and it seemed dreamily romantic. Certainly, my first visit to the castle, driving in darkness late on a snowy winter's evening, felt like I was on an odyssey to the end of the world.

Cut to a couple of years later, when I visited all properties in the vicinity, to ask for views about the looming wind farm development on the hill opposite the castle.  I walked to a nearby house, I knew, down a country path and talked to the occupants - at that stage it was a mother and son.

Whilst chatting I spotted a farm even further down the path, that I had never seen before. Again I talked to the occupants. Whilst at the farm, I spotted a small cottage even further down the glen and realised that Balintore Castle was not remote after all, and that this cottage won the remoteness prize.

There was a lovely young lady renting this cottage, who somehow commuted to Perth every day. Vehicular access stopped at this point, but a narrow footpath snaked to the head of the glen, and I surmised that by following this path I would probably climb a hill and then drop down into a neighbouring glen. However, the small cottage was the furthest extent of my journey, but I realised that the footpath could take me into even more remote territory.

I once explored the country round the castle and found the remains of a mediaeval healing well. There was once an abbey nearby. The flood plain at bottom of the Glen Quharity, which contains the castle, once grew linen for funeral shrouds. How on earth was there so much activity in this remote part of Angus? I realised that in past and in mediaeval times no-where was remote (in modern terms) i.e. there were no railway lines or motorways to be remote from. 

There is a spectrum of remoteness and not an absolute remote and this spectrum depends on our place in history, and where we live. There is an illumination to be had from travelling on this spectrum. Spiritual retreats, after all, have a tendency to be remote.

I once had an AirBnB booking cancelled on the grounds that the castle was "too remote". I was irritated by the fact that the guest must have known the location of the castle before booking it in the first place, and of course the question "Remote from where?" springs to mind. I think I was sufficiently irritated to impose my philosophical musings on the guest. "No-where is remote", I insisted, "if you chose a suitable starting point.

I have just returned back from a holiday visiting a friend on Orkney. Mark lives on the outer isle of Westray, so you have to take a ferry to the capital Kirkwall on the "mainland" or biggest isle of Orkney, and then a second ferry to Westray.  So, in terms of trips on a series of increasingly smaller ferries, Westray can be described as second-level ferry remote. 

Mark often talks about the small neighbouring isle of Papa Westray or Papay as it is known by locals. Mark's father and grandfather were involved in the history of Papay, and he talks about Papay as if it were a fabled lost continent. On this trip I had the opportunity to travel to Papay for the first time, so naturally I grabbed it with both hands. As I walked down the harbour on Westray to get the ferry to Papay, I picked-out the ferry as the biggest boat there: right at the end of the pier. Then a few moments later, I discovered I was actually already standing by the ferry and it was tiny. 

the Papay ferry

Papay ferry (interior) - the crew sit atop enormously high "driving" seats

Papay is third-ferry remote.

There is a small island off the east coast of Papay called the Holm of Papa which houses a unique breed of sheep that lives on seaweed, and a chambered neolithic cairn. Naturally, I wanted to go. You have to book a boat trip with the Papay ranger, but unfortunately we did not manage to organise this.

The Holm is fourth-level ferry remote. I suspect that it does not get any more ferry remote than this, and instead of boats and island of ever decreasing sizes, you simply get less frequent services of bigger boats from bigger islands. For example, there is a Papay to Kirkwall service once a week.

So the combination of islands and ferry services defines an integer measure of remoteness. Remoteness does determine lifestyle: life on the smaller Scottish Islands is very different to what most British people are used to.

There is a genuine comforting sense of a self-policing society which provides a greater level of safety. Given the number of random police raids on Balintore Castle of late, I felt much more at ease on Westray which has no resident police force.

Police travel to the island would be a major undertaking, and filter out such terrorising activities as a complete waste of tax-payer's money.

I am hoping to write more about the trip to Papay, but my mathematician's utter thrill at almost achieving 4th level remoteness, won the race to publish.

 

Restoration Books Now Available!

Books about the restoration of Balintore Castle are now available on Amazon - hurrah!

Dylan Mballa has written a Spanish language version with a beautiful cover that looks like an up-market role playing game. It can be purchased here.

Lorenzo Bentaila has written a French language version with a title containing a clever and revealing double meaning. It can be purchased here.

Both Lorenzo and Dylan are studying translation at the University of Toulon, and these books are the outcome of their 9 week academic internment projects with me acting as their supervisor. In fact it was a complete delight to supervise Dylan and Lorenzo, as they both worked hard and rose to the challenge of preserving the tone of the original English-language castle restoration blog articles that form the basis of the books.

I encouraged Lorenzo and Dylan to pick the blog articles that interested them the most, and suggested they might want to bring in editorial skills to change the content into a form more suitable for a book rather than a blog.

The positive result is that the two books are very different. There is content in the Spanish version that is not even present on the English blog that I provided to them privately from my "unpublished" cache, as the material is a little bit too racy! :-) Lorenzo, decided he wanted to work on the theme of "attractions in Scotland", so he translated a number of blog articles I wrote after a 2014 castle trip.

I tried to steer Lorenzo and Dylan to articles that had more of a literary content or told a complete emotional story, and this apparently is very different to the rather dry and technical content they are given in their translation classes. So I provided, say, 3 articles suggestions per week to given them the feel of genuine deadlines in a commercial environment and we would check up every Sunday evening on progress.

Lorenzo, Dylan and myself had a final project chat today, and they gave their internment presentations which were both excellent and interesting. They reported the highs and lows of working on the same task for 9 weeks: the isolation, the demoralisation and then the confidence that came as they made steady progress on a week-by-week basis. They wisely used their friends and family as sounding boards for their translations. As humans we need feedback.

The thing that made me most happy, was picking up that the project had been transformational for Dylan and Lorenzo, but in different and individual ways, and that the experience will inform their futures.

Of course, having 2 published books at the end of the day is brilliant, and at the start of the project it was far from clear that this "big ask" would be delivered. I was cheered by the fresh eyes and positive energy, they brought to a project that Angus Council is trying to destroy.

The French blog is here:

https://chateaudebalintore.blogspot.com/

The Spanish blog is here:

https://tradulab.blogspot.com/

Well done to Lorenzo and Dylan! 

And if you need a stocking-filler for your Francophone and Hispanophone friends... 

Pedagogic Polyglot Bloggery II

An update on the multi-lingual versions of the Balintore Castle Restoration blog...

In addition to the French version described in my last blog entry, there is now a Spanish version:


https://tradulab.blogspot.com/


Many thanks to Dylan, an undergraduate student at the University of Toulon, who has taken on the translation work as part of his academic internship.



He is studying translation, and now, much to his surprise and delight, is fairly fluent in four different languages French, English, Spanish and Bulu (one of the Cameroon languages).

One of my favourite quotes is from Charlemagne:

“To have a second language is to have a second soul.”

Oh, to have Dylan's souls!

Dylan

Pedagogic Polyglot Bloggery

I have recently been approached by a couple of undergraduate students, called Lorenzo and Dylan, from the University of Toulon.  They are interested in translating my castle restoration blog into a different language as their academic internship. Naturally, I agreed straightaway: it is good to get the word out there.  :-)

A friend called Boris is an academic at Toulon and the translation projects were actually his idea. As ever, student projects are incredibly variable affairs - attitudes vary from enthusiasm to indifference - but it is an open-ended opportunity where you get out what you put in.  Internships are intended to reflect the world of work, and recruiters often look closely at internship experiences.

Fortunately, the blog translation project is low risk and there is no downside. We seem to be getting by with a short weekly meeting, that will cover the 8 weeks allocated.

I will be extremely grateful for any translation done. I have given a rough target of 20 blog articles and publishing the outcome as a book on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. This service is free, and if you charge friends £10 for a physical copy of a book, then roughly you will make £5 and Amazon will make £5.

Dylan is on the Spanish translation and Lorenzo is on the French Translation. I appear to be flirting with the romance languages, or perhaps I am plebbing it in vulgar Latin: you decide.

The French blog has only recently appeared online here:

https://chateaudebalintore.blogspot.com/

You are very welcome to send Lorenzo encouragement and comments on his Château de Balintore blog. I know he is working hard to create a translation that is standalone, with an authentic voice and an individual style.

Lorenzo - l’auteur du blog du Château de Balintore