Putting Humpty Together Again

Supplies for restoring a castle are not, unfortunately, to be found at your neighbourhood DIY superstore. Sometimes bespoke items have to be manufactured, such as a recent set of steel roof brackets which will no doubt feature as a future blog item. Sometimes, one has to bite the bullet and buy an antique item from a dealer. Before the cash register digits blur in front of your eyes, I should point out that sometimes there is another way.

Around a fortnight ago, I found out some old sheds were being cleared and I was invited to see if there was anything I could use. To most people the contents of the sheds would be period junk that they had absolutely no use for. To me, there was a chance of hitting gold ...

As I wandered around, I found a pile of old door facings that looked to be, more or less, identical to those at Balintore.  When I got back to the castle I put a sample length of the found door facings on top of a bespoke door facing I had made some time ago - see the photograph. They are identical in width and profile, but the direct copy of the Balintore original at the bottom is just a few millimetres thicker. This is the type of difference that simply won't be noticed. The result is that I can recycle the whole bundle of wood in the shed - hurrah!

door facings: one on the top was found in a shed; the one underneath is a copy of a Balintore original.

Also in the shed was a wooden crate of large old lamp chimneys with a few oil lamp components on top. I have been looking for large glass chimneys for years!!!!!!

Let me explain.

Glass chimneys and glass shades of old lamps are extremely fragile - almost as vulnerable as Humpty Dumpty. :-) The result is that most second hand oil lamps for sale are missing both. I have a couple of antique oil lamps, which are the two on the left below. My favourite has a blush cranberry milk glass font with gadrooning and textured Art Nouveau honeysuckle detailing. It is my favourite as I found it in an antique shop for £20 and knew this was around a quarter of the market price. My friend Andrew hates it with a vengeance and calls it the "brain" lamp. Decency prevents me telling you what my slater said of it. Anyhow, the other oil lamp with a clear glass font on top of a fluted brass column, was no doubt a similar bargain.

before: my non-functioning oil lamps

In an attempt to get these working again I bought a box of glass chimneys at an auction for a fiver. All the chimneys turned out to be too small.  :-( Finally, I decided to just buy an oil lamp with funnel and shade to get something up and running. I knew the lamp was a 1980's reproduction, but no matter, and I drove the 30 miles or so to pick up the eBay item, to ensure the shade and chimney stayed intact. This is the brass lamp on the right.

The brass lamp has given good service at the castle. We would use this as the only source of light to recreate the full Victorian experience of being at the castle. Using an oil lamp instead of an electric light, totally changes the ambiance. It is much dimmer and warmer in colour, and draws people together as you have to huddle round the lamp to see what you are doing.

Then earlier this year, when I was away, some visitors must have knocked over my one working oil lamp, smashing both shade and chimney. They did not tell me about this and I came back to the castle to find all the bits lying on the floor. :-( This is one thing I really hate: people breaking your possessions and not telling you. It's not like I am going to charge people money, because accidents do happen, but it does mean I have to go into inquisition mode and ask "Who broke this?" which is never a nice thing to have to ask, or be asked i.e. there is insult on all sides added to the injury.

Anyhow, given all three of my oil lamps were missing bits and in consequence were not working, the box of oil lamp bits was like gold. Today I managed to get all three oil lamps back into working order again! The brass oil lamp could still benefit from a shade - there were only two suitable shades in the box - but the lack of a shade does not stop it working. The actual flame of an oil lamp is sufficiently bright, that it is somewhat uncomfortable to look at directly. The replacement chimney in the centre is 3" in diameter, and the other replacement chimneys are 2.5". The box held 3", 2.5", 2" and 1.5" chimneys, so clearly they came in gradations of half-an-inch.

after: all oil lamps back in working order due to shed find

A bit of plastic (or so I thought) fell out the box. How did that bit of modern rubbish get in there?, I wondered and was going to throw this out. Before doing so, I realised the clear material was not plastic but mica, and that the item was something to clip onto the funnel to either prevent sooting or reduce the fire risk. The mystery item is modelled by the brain lamp below - who knew? 

mica attachment for oil lamp chimney

The rather moving aspect is that the chimneys were wrapped in pages from an edition of the "Town and Country" magazine dated 9th August 1950. This is a whole lifetime ago: 69 years. So whoever packed the funnels so carefully is likely to be dead. Unpacking the box, and unwrapping those shades felt like a very sacred connection to the nameless packer. I am very grateful to that person, who recognised the value of these items and the fact that they might one day in the future be re-used. They were not wrong.

The Stone of Hernia

Forget your Scone Palace and Stone of Destiny, when there is Balintore Castle and the Stone of Hernia.

One of the Balintore Castle gate lodge piers (i.e. stone gate posts) is missing a stone. Some of the pier stones have fallen off, but these can be clearly identified on the ground underneath. However, this one stone must have fallen off at some time in the past, but because there is nothing on the ground beneath the gap in the stonework, someone has clearly pinched it! :-( How I was ever going to replace this stone has been a long-standing worry at the back of my mind.

Recently, as Gregor and I were walking through the yard of a demolition and reclamation company in Dundee, called Gowrie Contracts, I spotted a pile of large pink blocks of stone that were the same colour as the gate lodges. I was apoplectic with excitement.

On our next visit, naturally soon afterwards, we came equipped with the dimensions of the missing block (7" x 14" x 24") and a tape measure. The missing stone is small, but puzzlingly all the large pink stones in the yard were not big enough. Suddenly, I spotted one block at the bottom and at the back of the pile and I rushed in with the tape measure. It has some carvings at one end which would have to be chopped off, but if this was done it would just make the largest dimension of 24 inches. Amazingly, in the whole pile of blocks, just one was suitable - the relief was palpable. I paid for the stone, but as it was right at the back, the agreement was that we would collect it another day, especially as it was raining.



Today, Gregor and I went to pick up the stone. You've guessed it - it was raining! By a combination of fork-lift and unexpectedly huge reserves of man-power we extracted the stone and got it into Gregor's van. It was only then that I twigged why only one block had been large enough. The missing stone is one of the smallest stones making up the gate lodges - but because everything at the castle is monumental it is easy to miss the fact that this stone is, in absolute terms, MASSIVE. And quite how MASSIVE the stone is, became patently obvious when we tried to move it without herniating a disc.

The replacement stone comes from the recent demolition of the old Brechin High School, and I have found an image of this online.

old Brechin High School

How such quality buildings can be demolished is beyond me. The carving of the stonework in the pile has been extremely well done.

Old Brechin High School is where Robert Watson Watt who invented RADAR was educated, and it amazing to think that a bit of the fabric of history that won WWII, is now being incorporated into Balintore Castle.

The final photo shows the Stone of Hernia back at the castle. You can see from the size of the chair beside it, quite how massive the stone is. The gate lodges were built a couple of years after the castle itself from a different sandstone. The castle sandstone was shipped in from Stirlingshire specially, and it is easy to appreciate why the gate lodges were probably made from a more local stone perhaps even from the same quarry which was used to build old Brechin High School.

the Hernia Stone back at the castle - chair for scale

The morale of this story, boys and girls, is that restoring a castle is as remote from a glamorous lifestyle as you can possibly imagine. Forsooth, it involves crawling over piles of stones in a demolition yard in the rain armed with a borrowed tape measure.

Castle Enters Broadband Era

When I got back to the castle around a month ago, the broadband was so slow that my computer thought the Internet was broken. Roughly 50% of web pages failed, depending on how bandwidth intensive they were. In consequence, I would have to try over and over again to get anything done. A single web transaction could take the whole morning.

For the first week, I was unable to access gmail at all. During the second week a single email would take 5 minutes to open. I would go away and do something else. 

Things have improved somewhat and I am currently running on 0.1 to 0.2 Mbits. However, everything is like wading through treacle. My productivity is right down, and even limiting myself to core web tasks results in me running behind i.e. it will take a whole day to do the things I would normally manage in an hour.

I have tried phoning BT/Orange/EE till I am blue in the face about bandwidth issues at the castle, but nothing has ever been done. When I got the phone line installed initially, broadband was running at 1.7 Mbits which was not ideal but perfectly workable. For all other services a drop in flow by a factor of 20 would be considered unacceptable and I pay the same price for the service as people in town who get 1000 times the flow that I do.

Anyhow, enough of this rant against "rural broadband" which actually should be called "rural  dial-up masquerading as broadband".

Around 5 years ago, I tried tethering my laptop to my mobile to see if I could use broadband over the phone network instead. There was one window in the castle where I could get a mobile signal. The experiment was a failure. I could get broadband but it was the same speed as the landline. In fact, it was essentially unusable as it also cut out every few minutes.

Anyhow, as I am at the castle for longer than usual and the Internet pain was grinding me down, action was required. Time had moved on, and I tried tethering to my mobile phone again. At some windows on the top two floors of the castle I could get a signal. Sometimes there was an E associated with the signal bars, which I understand is 2G+. In one room there was an H, which I understand is 3G+. I measured the bandwidth in the H room which is essentially the top of one of the towers: 3.5 Mbits ! The castle has never had it so fast.

Sticking my phone to a window pane with a sucker and working in an attic room was not the most comfortable or convenient web browsing experience, so following the advice of a friend I purchased a 4G router. This arrived late yesterday.

Anyhow, today was commissioning the router. Much pain as it was second hand and was password protected. I had to download a manual (very slowly!) to find out how to do a factory reset. Eventually, success in the attic room, but how to get the signal down to the kitchen wing for guests and indeed my main desktop computer there?

I normally use mains wiring to get Internet around the castle, as a single stone wall will kill WiFi, but this was not working for some reason. :-( Again much debugging. I walked round the castle testing which sockets worked with power line plugs and which didn't. Gregor had talked about "new" and "old" wires when I complained about networking not working through the wiring. This seemed nonsensical to me i.e. how can an Ethernet packet know the difference between an old and a new wire? In fact Gregor was totally right. From which sockets were working and which were not I deduced the signal was not getting through the new fuse box which is wired off the old fuse box.  

Essentially, through relatively recent improvements in the castle wiring, it no longer worked as a single network! :-) This is not strictly true, as during my testing, the odd Ethernet packet would successfully jump from the new wires to the old wires. It was about 1 in 4. This phenomenon would also appear to be intermittent, as it might explain why my media sever on my old wiring does not always talk to my media client on my new wiring. 

My proposed solution was to run a 50m mains cable from the boiler room in the kitchen wing to the attic room all the way up the servant's staircase to ensure the powerline plug connected to my 4G modem and the powerline plug connected to my desktop computer were on the same mains circuit. Would this work?

Hurrah, it did! I lost a few Ethernet packets in initial testing but then this soon stopped. I took some bandwidth measurements on my desktop, comparing the landline "broadband" with the mobile broadband. These came out at 0.2 Mbits and 10 Mbits respectively. For most people 10 Mbits is slow, but at the castle this is a factor of 50 improvement! In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

before: existing landline bandwidth test result

after: new mobile network bandwidth test result

new Internet journey 1/5: 4G router in tower window talks to powerline plug on extension cable

new Internet journey 2/5: 50m blue extension cable drops down servants' staircase

 

new Internet journey 3/5: extension cable plugs into socket in boiler room

new Internet journey 4/5: powerline plug takes signal from mains wiring (by-passing landline router on left)

new Internet journey 5/5: signal makes final hop to desktop NUC computer via yellow Internet cable 

As all mobile broadband users know, unlimited data is so expensive that it is not the norm and having a monthly data allowance puts this fear of God (and excess data charges) into uber-geeks like myself who eat bandwidth like hot dinners. Giff-Gaff do an "unlimited" package for £25: 20 Gbytes at full speed over a month, throttled back to 0.386 Mbits for any data over this but with no extra charges. While the throttled speed would be a problem for most users, it is still faster than the castle's landline, so here the package is a good option and this was instrumental in the 4G router purchase.

I will be making a claim against EE for a broken Internet service for the last 6 months, which is the period of time that the bandwidth has definitely been too low to be usable.

So the outcome is that the castle has workable Internet for the first time in 10 years. The larger picture is that the Internet is so important to basic life operation nowadays, that I have been through extreme pain over the last month and my mission to get something workable over the last week, has been like a drug addict trying to get a fix. The problem, of course, is with the service providers who know perfectly well their service is broken, but neither fix this, inform their customers nor provide compensation.

Seasonal Flowers

There's nothing like the imminent arrival of guests at the weekend to motivate some flower arranging. Out with the virtually dried daffodils from the Open Day, and in with what's currently in season: yellow Azalea and the first Rhododendron in flower here which is of a pink/purple variety. All free and all growing in the castle gardens.

kitchen counter 

Azaleas and Rhododendrons

Faking It

Strike me off the register of antique aficionados. I have just created a composite fake i.e. putting together two unrelated pieces to form a third that deceives the purchaser! During some recent home-making at the castle, I discovered that my £10 Victorian bookcase and my £20 Georgian bureau were the same width. I got Gregor to screw the two together. So while Gregor committed the act, it was my incitement that was decidedly criminal. :-) Gregor had previously fixed up the drawers of the bureau, as they had already fallen apart when the item was for sale.

I created a thing!

My part was to stain and polish the bureau and bookcase to get them to match as much as possible. You can still see a colour difference, but at least the bureau has been brought back to life in terms of tone: previously it had an almost bleached yellow appearance.

The moral of the story is that you can furnish a castle on a budget. You can buy lovely oak bureau/bookcase combinations from around the 1920's very inexpensively, but these have a somewhat domestic look and lack the muscularity of the 19th Century pieces that Balintore seems to need. The muscularity in this instance is only on the surface; the components are rather rickety! :-)

Mediaeval Well Stone Deciphered

My previous blog entry on the mediaeval well stone discovered in the area prompted a flurry of communications on the topic, and I have been given an extensive update on the findings of the academics by a Kevin Greig. Kevin, amongst seemingly endless talents, is a local historian whose specialities are Glen Isla and producing beautiful beautiful pen and ink drawings of significant stones in the area. The link is here.

I am indebted to Kevin for bringing all the information together, and I have used his text in the following with only minor edits for clarity. My personal theory that the person whose grave the stone marked then lent their magic to the healing well, is not supported by the archaeological evidence, and in fact the archaeology tells a quite different story! I was amazed that the actual story could be so clearly read from the stone itself, and to find out what this story is, please read on.

St Andrew's Well Update

the recently discovered well stone - the small square hole is modern

The recently discovered stone is the same slab mentioned in 1862 (by the Ordnance Survey) as being over St Andrew's Well: the description and location are too similar for this to be in any doubt. The Ordnance Survey describes the well as being built of stone rather than turf and marked by a cross-inscribed slab.

The geology of the slab is sedimentary and not local so it was worked at some distance from the site, most likely past the highland boundary fault. The stone is accurately dressed flat on the front and on the right edge leading in to a curved top. The left edge being worked but rough and unfinished. The top left has a sheer undulating side profile which is as worn as the rest of the slab but the undulation suggests a natural split in the rock.

The incised cross is thought to be either Cistercian (Cuper Angus Abbey) or Cluniac (Arbroath Abbey). The descending line of the cross was added in a cruder fashion later than the initial square "cross potent", though this is interpreted as a simplified "cross pattée".

the cross design was produced in two stages

The square hole incised at the base point of the cross is a modern addition. It started life as a grave slab. The date is unknown principally because it has been removed from its setting both as a worked grave slab and as a well marker but the work is described as an early example. The Cistercian period in Glenisla was circa 1230 - 1550; the Cluniac order was 1197 - 1522.

The associations with the different Abbeys helps no further, though Arbroath is associated with St. Andrew, Cuper is associated with Lintrathen through the Durwards of Peel. Monks from the Abbeys traveled to Glenisla and were accommodated, rather than residing there and the Abbey records have no documented interments in the Glens of Angus. The effort involved in transporting the carved stone a great distance and the cutting and lining of the lade from the Craig of Balloch as well as the religious dedication made the well of some considerable importance in its heyday.

Conjecture Based on the Above

The slab was originally tooled as a grave slab (the right hand edge and curves top and bottom make this likely) and was completed on the face, right edge and top right curve. It was also roughly hewn to shape on the left, but it this process the top left portion split off and was likely abandoned as a grave slab. The red line in the diagram below shows the rough worked left edge when the finished edge is reflected through the middle of the cross.

detailed diagram of well stone

The abandoned worked stone was no longer good enough for the precincts of the Abbey but was deemed appropriate for use in the distant consecrated well. Its unnecessary rounded base being sunk into the shallow water in an upright position at the back of the recess in the embankment setting.

The square hole held a leaded fixture which was nothing to do with its latter use in the sheep dip and is not documented anywhere as a Victorian attraction. This is supported by the 1862 documentation as it being much defaced. This makes it pre-Victorian in period. The slab was a well backdrop and therefore likely that the hole held a chain for a drinking vessel.

Summary

The slab was initially hewn beyond the highland boundary fault in one of the monastic orders for use as a grave slab. It was damaged during construction and was re-purposed as a venerated well at Craig of Balloch where it stood till after 1862.

There is one final test to verify that it sandstone, not limestone. A drop of vinegar on the back would fizz if it was limestone. If it is, it would not have survived exposure to the peat acid in the Craig of Balloch spring and would further deepen the conundrum of its origins.

The Pies Have It

Blog entries of late have taken a rather serious, near academic, turn. So what better time to revel in the glorious small details of life ...

Restoring Balintore Castle has entailed much transiting between Scotland and England, and having freshly arrived at the castle from a period south of the border, cultural differences are thrown into sharp relief.

Buying petrol today, I saw something that you would simply never see in England, a hot counter virtually monopolised by Scotch pies. Same form factor, just differing fillings ranging from "steak and gravy", through "chicken curry", "chicken and gravy" to one of my favourites "macaroni cheese". A macaroni cheese Scotch pie is triple starch: the pastry, the pasta and the sauce - yums!

hot counter monopolised by Scotch pies

When my friend Andrew visits for a day's castle restoration work, he will often bring two steak Scotch pies and two apple Scotch pies. I love the fact that the pudding has the same form factor as the main course, and together they form a quick, easy and delicious lunch when one does not want to be tied down with food preparation.

I don't think my English friends will be able to believe their eyes at this pie display!

As a child I loved fruit and vegetables of all varieties (and still do) but I found meat
and fish rather difficult.  A mince Scotch pie was right at the limit of what I could manage
- in consequence these got served up quite a lot during my childhood. My thresh-hold for
fish was even lower - here a fishcake was at the limit of acceptability.

As an adult I have no such reservations with food and although I am still "wary" of fish this is a theoretical "in the head" thing and practice never backs this up. And it has to be said, if you go to the right small shop in the locality of the castle the quality of the Scotch pies (particularly a good steak one) can be superb - far better than I recall from childhood.