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.