Permanent Quality Temporary Roof

There was a single storey walkway on the north side of the main body of the castle with a lead covered roof. Duh! Naturally this was the amongst the first lead to be stripped when the building was abandoned. The walkway did not stand a chance. The paperwork to get this fixed up has been a nightmare of delay-after-delay, all the while water has been dripping through here into the basement below. This is the only place water is still getting into the building en masse albeit by percolation. It has been a source of considerable distress: this part of the basement is permanently wet.

My builder and I finally snapped and we decided to build a temporary roof here. I hate wasting time and resources on something that is not the final solution - but enough was enough. The temporary roof will protect the building and it is cleverly a couple of feet above the original roof. so we can eventually construct the proper replacement underneath in the dry.

The photos show the step-by-step construction of the roof. My builder has achieved an amazing quality of build, and has chased it exceptionally neatly into the contours of the building. He assures me it will last for decades, which made me laugh. And certainly, it buys genuine time for the building. :-)

roof beams in position; sheeting before affixing

roof from the inside

roof now felted

windows blocked, roof in place

roof drains into this light well below - fortunately we excavated working drains!

Don't Look Down !

'Tis the season for roof repairs! We suspected a residual leak high up on the east elevation was coming from a box gutter above the (collapsed) oriel window. This rather vertiginous image looking down the sharp pitch of the castle's roof, shows the location of the gutter in question behind a section of the lead covered stone parapet which extends all the way round the castle.

box gutter in poor condition - don't look down!

The gutter was indeed shot - here exposed is the "wall head" a wooden beam on top of the wall to which the rafters attach. You can see that due to the leaky gutter, it has been wet for a few decades too many and is now an inappropriate shape.

rotten wall head in situ

The wall head has been removed here - fortunately the roof of the castle is over-engineered to the max and obligingly stays in position.

wall head removed

 New wall head in place:

new wall head in place

Box gutter is fixed on the outside - yes you can look down now!

repaired box gutter

It is likely that the box gutter will have to fixed-up like this all the way round the castle and this is ongoing work. Fortunately, this (fingers crossed) is the only one which is actively leaking and so had to be sorted ASAP.

Moi, Unsightly? 2

Many thanks for the feedback on my letter in the previous blog entry. Taking all
views into account, including those of sensitive and intelligent souls I particularly
respect, I have decided to change the text of the letter that I actually do send.

While I enjoyed writing the previous letter, and was delighted when other people
said they enjoyed reading it, perhaps enjoyment is not always the morally correct
criterion in communication.

I often refer to Ernest Hemingway's words on the art of writing. I paraphrase "One should
kill one's children." Hemingway's children are those sentences or turns of phrase of which
one is proud. Is anyone able to supply the proper quote?

Anyhow, I have appended the rephrased letter. If I manage to make it past the age of 70
I will permit myself the indulgence of sending the earlier letter, but claim senility. :-)

Dear Mr. and Mrs.  <XXX>,

I notice that amongst the publicly distributed and collated submissions sent to Angus Council both for and against the development of the Carrach Windfarm, that you describe my house "Balintore Castle" as unsightly:

The (windfarm) project is well sited away from high hills and walking trails and is far more likely to attract visitors than the unsightly Ballintore (sp) Castle as recently featured on the STV news.

Please accept this letter as an invitation to visit Balintore Castle. I shall be happy to provide a personal guided tour of the building with refreshments. It gives me great pleasure to show people round a building that I am restoring. that I love and that I find beautiful.

Kind regards,

Dr. David Johnston

Moi, Unsightly?

This blog entry is part of a far larger story that has yet to emerge. However, the basic rationale goes as follows: when one is the victim of criticism that one feels is unwarranted then it is correct to use some appropriate channel of communication to put forward the case in one's defence. I am appending the text of a letter that I have written and will be sending, that illustrates this principle in microcosm.


Dear Mr. and Mrs.  <XXX>,

I notice that amongst the publicly distributed and collated submissions sent to Angus Council both for and against the development of the Carrach Windfarm, that you describe my house "Balintore Castle" as unsightly:

The (windfarm) project is well sited away from high hills and walking trails and is far more likely to attract visitors than the unsightly Ballintore (sp) Castle as recently featured on the STV news.

Please accept this letter as an invitation to visit Balintore Castle. I shall be happy to provide a personal guided tour of the building with refreshments. And if it proves impossible to extend your aesthetic boundaries to encompass this masterpiece of the Scottish Baronial style, then I daresay that I shall rest assured that your continued condemnation is firmly based upon the evidence of a visit.

Kind regards,

Dr. David Johnston

The Last Downpipe !

The roof of Balintore Castle is a complex landscape of apexes, valleys, eaves, towers, finials, viewing platforms and turrets. While this gives delight to the eye, stemming leaks is an on-going endeavour. The recent torrential summer rains have been a good opportunity to run about the interior, and spotting the remaining places where rain comes in. Despite the major and highly effective fix to a box gutter described in the last blog entry, a new leak has been spotted in another location on the east elevation. Fingers crossed there will be some time to sort this out before winter makes this impossible.

Other roof work is more deterministic, such as the replacement over the last few days of the last missing downpipe. Below is the "before" photograph showing the ferns growing in the damp gully created by the absence of a downpipe. Before, I bought the castle there were ferns growing like this all over the building.

gully before clearing

Below is the "after" photograph, showing the cleared gully - just before the new downpipe and hopper head were put in place. The scaffolding was erected to provide high-level access.

gully after clearing

November 1963

The picture below shows the external scaffolding currently in place on the east elevation, that has been erected to fix a leak in the lead box gutter built into the parapet wall. The small but continual leak has, over decades of neglect, destroyed the wooden floors all along the east elevation, so we also had to build a scaffolding tower on the inside to the same height to give internal roof access. Doing anything at Balintore Castle is hard! Using a combination of internal and external access: rotten timbers were replaced; the box gutter was "jacked up" by the 4 inches it had dropped, the roof was stripped, felted and re-slated. Now the box gutter is so firmly supported you can walk in this.  If you had tried to do so last week, you would have fallen through and dropped four floors accompanied by a shower of rotten wood.

Scaffolding on East Elevation

The internal scaffolding allowed unprecedented access to one of the attic bedrooms, and we found the following "graffiti" on the walls. It had clearly been under some wallpapering done in November 1963. I'm surprised decoration had been done this recently, but suspect it was virtually the last such. 

The text, which has been contrast enhanced for legibility, reads as follows:

PAPERED BY C.K.ScoTT
FOR B&G K. Nov 5TH 1963

PASTE BOY ANDREW PETRIE
FOR B&G K. NOV 1963

I know Petrie is a local name - does anyone know the paperer or paste boy?  Who are B&G K? :-)

Historic Graffiti Discovered on Attic Bedroom Wall

Intactus Orielus

Many thanks to the friends who emailed this scanned image to me today. This is the first time I have seen a detailed picture of the dining room's oriel window. Given that this collapsed around 14 years ago, this photograph is as invaluable resource for reconstruction.

I've just shown my builder. His response was "That's horrible, looks like it has just been stuck on as an afterthought!". Interestingly, this is also how my architect (and an expert on the castle's architect William Burn) feels.

The previous image I had seen, a postcard from the 1920's with a distant view of this east elevation, did not make the oriel look quite as bad. Because the oriel is picked out by sunlight here, it looks even more detached from the main structure. The story of why the oriel window collapsed, a much speculated-upon conundrum, deserves a blog entry to itself.

In a similar vein, if anyone reading this has any interior images of Balintore Castle, please, please get in touch! I am trying to stay very faithful to the original look of the building.

Oriel Window at Balintore Pre-collapse.

Gosh, this Internet thing is kool! An hour after posting this blog entry, a friend alerted me to this further image on the Web of the oriel window:

Another Oriel Image Pre-collapse.

I would have to pay for a non-watermarked, high-resolution copy, but the information is out there.