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 the label of an up-market wine. It can be purchased here.

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

I would leave it a few days before purchasing your copy, as the final versions of the books have still to filter through: Amazon takes 3 days to verify a book before publication. I will amend this blog entry when the books are ready to go.

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content in the Spanish version that is not even present on the English blog that I provided to them privately from my "unpublished" cache, as the material is a little bit too racy!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?

Botanical Notes II

In June of last year, I published two blog entries  Botanical Notes 1 and Botanical Notes 3. You may have wondered what happened to Botanical Notes 2, and quite rightly so. :-)

Anyhow, I was proof-reading this article late into the night last summer, and suddenly became so tired that the only option was bed. :-) I finally resumed and finished the proof-reading today.

Here we go ...

What got me started on the wildflower kick this year (i.e. 2025) was seeing the following plant growing by the road going past the castle. There were large vigorous clumps, richly covered in flowers and yet, I couldn't recall ever seeing anything like it before. The Seek phone App told me unambiguously it was Tuberous Comfrey, and I will assuredly remember this from now on.

Tuberous Comfrey - Symphytum tuberosum

The Rhododendrons on the castle drives are the delight of early Summer. Although these are often considered as invasive, growing conditions around the castle are so harsh that these are not spreading away from the drive and indeed any colour whatsoever is very welcome. Most of the Rhododendrons are the basic purple colour that you find in the wild, but I can help but feel there were once a variety of colours but they have reverted to the wild, usually stronger, type. Having said that there are still a variety of darker and lighter purples.

Common Rhododendron - Rhododendron ponticum

There is a single rather weedy red Rhododendron that looks like it might not last much longer. However, every year I remove the weeds around it in the hope it may flourish. If ever the castle were to have a garden, I would plant a variety of differently coloured Rhododendrons and Azaleas, as they do well in the area. Cortachy Castle has an amazing show.

Common Rhododendron - Rhododendron ponticum

The following plant I do recognise from the leaves alone as the Blaeberry. I stored the location in my brain, with the full knowledge that it will produce edible berries in the autumn. I was interested to see if Seek could make a foliage only identification and whether it would choose the Scottish name I knew. Anyhow, it correctly identified the Common Bilberry. I knew it was related to the Myrtle of the Alps, and this can be seen in the latin name. The incredibly expensive jam made from Myrtle berries can be seen in the shops in European skiing resorts.

common bilberry/blaeberry - Vaccinium myrtillus

I was at a loss trying to identify this delicate pink flower, and was surprised that it is turned out to be a member of the Mallow family. I can identify the more robust Common Mallow. And looking close-up at the photo you can see darker pink veins which are characteristic:

Musk mallow - Malva moschata

You see this yellow flower, known as the Monkey flower, growing in the steams at Balintore. It is a marginal that loves water.

Monkey flowers - Mimulus guttatus

I have known the ham and eggs plant (or bird's foot trefoil) ever since a childhood country ramble with the children's "Hobbies Club" at Ayr Library. The colours are indeed somewhat reminiscent of the egg yokes and bacon that appear in a cooked breakfast. The older gentleman guide made a great impression on me, and I just thought how wonderful to do such identifications. This blog article is in part his legacy.

bird's foot trefoil - Lotus corniculatus

I get the next one mixed up with the wood anemone - this is also white and also has 8 petals. However, the arctic starflower or chickweed-wintergreen has much more pointy angular petals very much looking like a traditional "star" shape.

Artic Starflower - Lysimachia europaea

The wood anemone in contrast has more rounded petals.

Mist and Smoke

In the last few months, I have been telling myself to get out the car whenever a scene that makes an impression through the car windscreen, might register as a photograph.

In practice, I rarely do as my phone is doubling as a Sat Nav. Google Maps tends to lose the plot in the absence of a mobile signal and certainly does not like photographic interludes. Also leaving the warmth of my vehicle's cab, is not an appealing proposition.

The two photographs below result from those occasions when intent and action aligned. They are not good photos in any sense but they do at least capture the mood of the current changing of season.

In the first "winter photo", the mist had come down over the mountain at the back of Balintore. This is one of my favourite landscape looks, as the mountains loom, as if toweringly and Tolkienesquely high, under the blanket of cloud.

Balintore under cloud - 31st January 2026

The second more recent "spring photo" shows heather-burning taking place on the hills around Balintore. Most burning occurs in the spring when the plant material has dried out, allowing it to burn, while cold, damp conditions underfoot mean the fire is most easily controlled.I had not seen heather-burning for some time, so I felt it was a spectacle worth capturing.

To the right of the frame were other mountains covered in snow, but the I couldn't quite fit them in.  I so wanted to call the photo "The Land of Fire and Ice" which I thought was another name for Scotland. The Internet tells me disappointingly, that this phrase refers to Iceland.

heather burning: 3rd March 2026

Heather burning is definitely on the decline. Anything to do with shooting is politically contentious, even though the scientific evaluation of the impacts is far from clear.

I can recall many smoky days with amazing orange sunsets at the start of the restoration. On one most memorable evening, there was a thick glowing orange atmosphere around the castle, lit up by brilliant sunshine. There were even embedded sparkles. To this day, I do not know the physics that were involved.

Now we are in March, I can announce with glee that this is the month in which we gain the most daylight. I was surprised by the amount of change when I heard this statistic for the first time recently. Kirriemuir gets an extra 2 hours and 24 minutes of the stuff in March. I will relish every second, and am quite inspired to draw this graph.