Mischief Motif

When I discovered that two of today's vistors to Balintore Castle were professional musicians (a violinist and a composer), I couldn't resist insisting that instead of signing the visitors' book, that they pen an original composition. Naturally, when said musicians become world famous, the vistors' book will itself become extremely valuable.

It is a credit to their musicianship and good-natured tolerance of a laird's eccentric nay mischievous whim, that they both obliged in fine form. The "Balintore Castle Motif" was personally premiered for me on a smart phone app, and it sounded suitably moody and mysterious. 

Given the monumental nature of the restoration task at Balintore, then I fear the "Jig" may yet remain unfinished, but thanks to Haydn, there is a good provenance here. How much does an original Haydn manuscript go for?

today's page from the Balintore visitors' book

Summer Flowers

I had only intended dressing the kitchen wing with flowers for the open day earlier in the year. However, fresh flowers are so transformative and joy-bringing that I have kept up the tradition when visitors are expected and of course the arrangements will survive for a week or so.

This year has been amazing for Foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea) with some banks in the vicinity of the castle being completely carpeted. When I was looking for something from mother nature's discount flower shop to shove in a vase, there was no debate. It is impossible not to put the fallen bells on the ends of one's fingers, and Wikipedia informed me today that accordingly the name Digitalis comes from the Latin word for finger. Duh! I had never put the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle together until today.


The display below is something Greg created, which I then augmented by shoving in more spikes (including the rarer white and pink flowers) to augment the common purple on the principle that nothing succeeds like excess.

foxgloves from the castle grounds

A friend from Oxford brought me some lovely yellow roses on a recent visit. This was so appropriate given my recent predilection for fresh flowers, and I placed them strategically on the dining table.

the gift of yellow roses

Barn Find Bedside Cabinets

One item which holds its value as an antique is the humble bedside cabinet. The reason is that these pieces of furniture are eternally useful and even smaller modern interiors can accommodate them. It is normally paired items that come at a premium, but even a single well-made bedside cabinet can fetch a good price.

While rummaging round a dark outbuilding that was being cleared, I stumbled across two identical units: apparently these were base sections for an upper level gun cabinet.  However, they jumped out immediately as suitable for bedside cabinets. My quest for bedside cabinets has lasted many, many years so I got very excited and quickly asked if they could be for sale. They were - hurrah!

Once I got them in the light, I realised they were very faded. They are rough provincial pieces made by a local carpenter, but having said that, little details such as chamfered edges show they have been put together with a great deal of care. They are solid pitch pine, with just the teeniest bit of dry rot in one. Both have an oak back rail. 

I stained the cabinets to a more consistent dark colour. For comparison purposes, the photo below has one cabinet before staining on the left, and the other cabinet after staining on the right. In the photo the stain looks a little too dark, but this is just an artifact of the camera's auto-exposure. In fact, I spend a deal of time and effort to get the tone right by eye. 

barn find cabinets before and after staining

After staining, I sealed the units using a clear furniture wax. The final result can be seen below with the cabinets installed in one of the castle's kitchen wing bedrooms.

cabinets installed in a Balintore Castle bedroom

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