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

Historic Discovery Identified

In my previous blog entry, there were some photos of a cast iron address stamp for Balintore Castle sent to me by the purchaser of this historic item. The enigmatic initials A.B. appear on the stamp, and the label on the wooden box which holds the stamp is all but illegible. I could, however, make out the words STATIONER, "103 XXXX STREET" and "GROSVENOR" - presumably this was the address of the stationer which produced headed note-paper with this stamp.

A.B. ?

I guessed the address might be Grosvenor Square in London. Are there any streets in the vicinity with 4 letters? I consulted Google Maps.

Bingo, it jumped out at me: "Park Street". I was overjoyed.

I now started to look for a stationer with a shop at 103 Park Street, but hit a brick wall. What about just trying the address? I found this link which indicted the 4th Baron Inverclyde lived at 103A Park Street from 1930 to 1933. Many people would have lived at that address, but what was the baron's real name? Drum roll - the baron went by the name of Alan Burns, our A.B. surely?

Arms of Lord Inverclyde

After military service in WWI and WWII, he became the aide-de-camp to the Governor of Gibraltar, 1920–21. I was born in Gibraltar!

After leaving his regiment, he retired into private life as the master of Castle Wemyss (which he inherited from his father) and as a man-about-town with a bachelor flat in Mayfair.

Castle Wemyss

He acquired hunters, a yacht, and a grouse moor. The grouse moor acquisition suggests he might have bought Balintore rather than rented Balintore. He was, after all, one of the richest men in Britain. However, given I have not heard of the baron before, and leasing shooting estates was so common back in the day, on balance I believe he was just one of the many shooting tenants.

The baron married twice (an heiress and then a film/theatre star) and divorced twice. He died without issue at the age of 59. The title became extinct and Castle Wemyss was demolished in 1984. Castle Wemyss was in Renfrewshire and is not to be confused with Wemyss Castle which is still in Fife.

He published a memoire of two cruises called "Porpoises and People".  I failed to find a copy on the Internet. Can anyone help me out?

A friend did more research on the stationer front, and discovered a Royal stationer called H&M Massey who traded from 41 Park Street. The bill in the photo below, for sale on eBay, is for headed notepaper. We have come full circle.

Bill from H & M Massey

It now beyond doubt: we have identified an A.B. (on the iron stamp) who lived at the address on the paper label on the box holding the stamp, and who bought a grouse moor (Balintore is the address on the stamp).

How fabulous to have such an aristocratic and super-rich individual as a former owner of Balintore. Alan looks like a bit of a playboy, somewhat channeling Lord Lucan in appearance, but he also put in his public service in best noblesse oblige tradition. The fact we both lived in Gibraltar and at Balintore is extraordinary.

It is also a coincidence that the purchaser of the item at a local auction is also called Alan.

The earl would have walked from his flat in Park Street to the stationer in Park Street to order headed notepaper some time between 1930 and 1933. The iron block would, I believe, have been kept at the stationer's. However, in 1933 when the earl moved away (the year of his second divorce) he would have picked up the block and taken it to Scotland with him presumably with the intention of taking it to a local stationer. It is most likely, since the stamp is still in the area, that it came to us via this second stationer.

Amazing Historic Item Discovery!

I received an email out of the blue a couple of weeks ago. The sender, Alan, had purchased an job lot of items at auction. On opening a small wooden box, he found an item that turned out to be connected to the history of Balintore Castle. Naturally, I was overjoyed at his discovery, and asked for some photos.

Alan called the item a "wax stamp", but I suspect it is an "ink stamp" for headed notepaper, that would have been kept at the stationner's i.e. "Can you send me 200 more sheets of headed notepaper for the castle?". Written correspondence was much more of a thing historically. In the 1920's there were 13! postal collections a day in Blackpool, so mill-workers on holiday could exchange correspondence with friends at home, several times a day.

Your challenge is to identify the owner of the stamp, on the evidence of these photos alone.

The unexpectedly weird thing is that I think I have done it, despite the pretty illegible text. :-) I will reveal all in a later blog entry so you have time to do your own research. Perhaps you will come to a different conclusion?