Happy Christmas 2012

I would like to take this opportunity for wishing my blog readers, whether occasional or regular, a Happy Christmas for 2012, and a Happy New Year for 2013.

So how would I review the year that is almost past? For me, 2012 has seemed like a year on steroids, by which I mean events have powered me through the year without first asking if I wanted to get involved. For if asked, I would assuredly have given the answer "no". 

Most of my time away from work, has been spent embroiled in legal disputes. This is never a good thing. Past experience has told me to stay well away, yet I find myself currently and unwillingly with around 12 different cases on my hands. Most of these are connected with protecting the interests of the castle, when I would much prefer to devote my energies to the restoration. As legal matters emerge from subjudacy, I will be able to talk about them on the blog.

The most public matter was fighting the proposal to put a wind farm adjacent to the castle. Even after 5 years, the matter has stressfully not been settled one way or the other. This year Angus Council said "yes" to the development; the councillors overturned this decision and said "no"; and most recently the developers have submitted an appeal to the Scottish Government. My neighbours and I have rallied several times throughout the year, when our efforts were required. The Dundee Courier called my speech at the councillor's meeting an "impassioned plea": even this was an understatement. Such is the importance of the matter, that I almost burst into tears at this public meeting.

On the positive side, I was delighted to host a visit of my Canadian relatives to Scotland in the summer. This side of the pond, my family has largely died off, so you have no idea how important this visit was. They last visited Scotland when I was 11, er, quite some time ago, but I remember it so well. This time there was a new generation in tow, and the joys of laughing and joking in a family unit again cannot be underestimated.

It was a good opportunity to visit Balmoral Castle for the first time. Even though this is close to Balintore Castle, I have held off as the public only get to see one room inside the palace, and I would have felt short-changed on my own. As it turned out, we visited on a wonderfully sunny day, and the castle and grounds looked amazing. My Canadian relatives are market gardeners, and were entranced by the Queen's vast and immaculately tended flower and vegetable gardens. As a non-gardener, even I was impressed!  Despite looking large in films and TV, the Balmoral ballroom is tiny, and is barely much larger than the great hall at Balintore Castle which is just a shooting lodge rather than a palace. Did I gloat ? I should say so. :-)

What you can only experience by visiting Balmoral, is the way the stress of the outside world drops away as you walk through the entrance gates and up the long drive. It is unexpectedly magical. For the first time, I got a real sense of why the Royal family love Balmoral. And of course, Queen Victoria purposefully would have not wanted a large ballroom, as she escaped from and eschewed the formality of the court.

Other good news over the last year was landing contract work with a company, Schlumberger, that I had worked for before. It is strange rejoining a workplace after an absence of 5 years. There is an argument that one should never go back. I do not subscribe to this, as I was happy working there 5 years ago and if anything even happier working there today. Fortunately, I have a good memory and names came back to me, though often at the very, very last moment.  :-)

I will get back to full hands-on restoration in the spring, but for now funding has to be earned by a day job. Fortunately, my hardy builder keeps things ticking over at the castle in all weathers and seasons.

For my Christmas picture this year, I thought I'd finally stitch together a winter panorama taken in the grand saloon of the castle, during my original photographic survey of the building. While you may be wishing for a White Christmas; there should thankfully be no more White Christmases indoors for Balintore castle, as below.

Happy Christmas!

David

A White Christmas Past -  Indoors at Balintore Castle !

Wrap Around Kitchen

One of conditions of buying Balintore Castle was that I had to present a photographic survey of the building at time of purchase to Angus Council. On the principle that it should be possible to do any task oneself to reduce cost, I set off on my £32 Tesco bike to the castle, armed with my Dad's old tripod and a cheap hi-def second-hand camera off eBay. 

I took around 2000 shots altogether and blew a DVD ROM with a website of archive images. Hopefully this satisfies the requirements for an historic archive. The Council requested a new copy of the DVD recently, so it was an interesting opportunity to revisit. Hence this blog entry!

The castle at that stage was extremely dark inside, being all boarded up, so all shots had to be taken with  long exposure on a tripod. The in-built flash would only reach a certain distance, so I wiggled my cycle lights in the dark recesses during the long exposures. Believe it or not, this technique worked.

Balintore Castle Kitchen Panorama 2007

For every tripod set-up, I rotated around and took a panorama of images.At some stage in the future these could be stitched together. I only stitched a few panoramas together at the time - including this one of the castle kitchen which I hope you enjoy! Ironically, nowadays the iPhone5 can do real-time panorama in-situ.

The panorama here is actually extremely misleading - it was almost totally dark in the kitchen.to the naked eye and there was a blizzard blowing outside! The cycle trip between my B&B and the castle for the four days the survey took was always during a blizzard. At one stage I stopped cycling as an experiment, and the wind started blowing my bike and me backwards UP a hill. 

Throughout the shoot, my hands were in continual pain due to the extreme cold. My technique was to stick them under my armpits for 30 minutes or so until some semblance of circulation restarted, On the last evening at the B&B,  my fingers swelled up alarmingly and turned bight red. I suspect it was first stage frost bite!

In case anyone wonders why I cycled rather than drove, as would have been sensible in the wintry weather, it was because I had flown up to Dundee for a job interview, courtesy of the company! After the interview, I bought the bike, and cycled to the B&B. This only took 6 hours - and it was the first and last time I cycled from Dundee to Balintore. It looked feasible on the map, but I hadn't factored in the ultra-challenging and lung-busting topology.

Octopus in Armour and Other Halloween Ponderings

At Halloween one's mind is drawn to ghouls and those spirits who are no longer with us. How can this possibly be relevant to Balintore Castle? Well, read on ...

On a recent trip to Westminster Abbey, I unexpectedly bumped into one of my favourite neighbours from Balintore Castle.  I had no idea he had taken up permanent residence in London, so the encounter was one of great delight. And indeed the last place I expected to find Charles Lyell, whose family still owns the land surrounding the castle, was buried under a slab in the main aisle.

Charles Lyell's Tomb

Even before moving to the Angus Glens, I was aware that Lyell was a geologist of great repute, whose seminal work "The Principles of Geology" was responsible for widely establishing the principle of uniformitarianism, which states that the processes that had formed the landscape in the past are still at work today. I also knew that Lyell was an intimate of his namesake Charles Darwin, but even then to have made it to "scientists' corner" in Westminster Abbey is no mean achievement. I understand Lyell's observatory at his family seat of Kinnordy House a few miles from Balintore Castle, is still in existence and is being, or is to be, restored.

octopus in armour?

halibut in space suit?

An eagle-eyed friend who accompanied me on the trip to Westminster Abbey, spotted this extraordinary ghoulish carving on an ancient tomb (above left). What is it? We weren't sure if the head had worn away, but no, it is some kind of putative "octopus in armour". There is but a small leap to Admiral Ackbar (above right) of Star Wars ( a halibut in a space suit?). It just shows you that any CGI monsters we can create nowadays are more than matched by the artists of history. I am thinking particularly of the mediaeval depictions of hell and the outandish creations of Hieronymus Bosch that defy modern understanding. So what does the"octopus in armour" signify? Did it mean the resident of the tomb had died in a battle at sea? Neither my Latin was up to the challenge, nor my friend of other ethnic origin.

red heraldic lion

white heraldic lion

Another creature much in evidence at Westminster Abbey is the heraldic beast, which is one of my very favourite subjects ever. A successful treatment of a heraldic beast is one of the very toughest tests, that will only be passed by the best artists. It is not about the  naturalism in the fantasy, but whether there an animus in the creature, and an observing mind behind the depiction. The heraldic beast may be regal and may be magnificent, but with an additional cadenza of humour or pathos, you know you are seeing the very best of class. Mary Queen of Scots'  tomb features this mercurially disturbing red lion, while the woebegone beast in white marble is a masterful study in misery.

Ring of Bright Terror

I got woken up suddenly in the middle of the night. There was something under my bed ... breathing ... and breathing loudly at that. Eeeek! I could tell it was large when it moved around. I would have put it at the size of a small child or thereabouts.

I was petrified. What could it possibly be? Anything this large had to be a mammal. The next thing I heard was foxes barking outside my bedroom window. Aha! It was a fox under my bed, which could ... which could easily savage my throat. Eeeek! I made certain the duvet was pulled well-up over my head in strategically ludicrous defence. I was too frightened to investigate in case, whatever it was, attacked. I stayed as still as I possibly could, rigid with terror, in the hope it would go away. Eventually, I dropped off to sleep again.

The next time I spoke to the gamekeeper, who lives next-door, I described my experience and asked if the creature under my bed had been a fox. He told me a fox would not approach a human, and that it would be an otter taking refuge from the foxes outside. How shall I put it? The castle is not hermetically sealed from the fauna of the neighbourhood by any stretch of the imagination, so anything and everything has come a-visiting at some stage. More animal tales will follow ...

I had read "Ring of Bight Water" as a child and knew that otters were not to be trifled with, as these creatures took off the fingers of the author (Gavin Maxwell) and his young assistant (Terry Nutkins). Indeed I had thought the author's choice of pet to be highly unsound. The duvet over the head was definitely a good move. :-)

the other otter encounter

Beelzebub the Sheep

The first time I saw Beelzebub, he scared the bejasus out of me. As I was driving home to the castle one night in the utter dark of the countryside, Beelzebub's diabolic visage suddenly appeared out of nowhere just feet in front of my car's windscreen.

His eyes were glowing red, his powerful horns curved round, in the very physiognomy of "Auld Nick" himself! It took me a few moments to rationalise the experience, and that this was actually "just" a sheep by the very edge of the road.

The problem was that Beelzebub, was not your normal "sheep in a field" type of sheep, with eyes that glow green in car headlights. No, he loved standing by the side of the road and given passing motorists, particularly at night, the collywobbles. And for whatever reason, his eyes glowed red in car headlights!

It wasn't just me - he would spook visitors to the castle as well who arrived by night.  My thoughts were that if the devil really did manifest himself in animal form, then that animal would be indistinguishable from Beelzebub.

Beelzebub The Sheep

Midnight The Bunny

Driving back home to the castle at night after work, I would often spot a "midnight black" rabbit at the same spot: on the right hand side of the single-track road, just on the approach to Balintore House - reputed to be the earlier mediaeval incarnation of Balintore Castle.

Anyhow, as I was often passing this spot at midnight, the rabbit was clearly "Midnight the Bunny", and a sighting of "Midnight at midnight" would greatly gladden my heart. 

I am an animal lover, not in the sense of putting polka-dot dresses on chihuahuas, but in the sense of taking great joy from my fellow creatures with whom I share this planet.

I was explaining to an acquaintance that this must be a  biological "sport", given that the colouration differs from the normal "wild" one. I was told that this was rubbish, and that the rabbit must be the descendant of a Dutch Rabbit that had lived at Balintore House in the past !!

The web and an animal expert neighbour have told me this mutation is indeed quite common, and one can find parts of the country where black is more prevalent that others colours.

A wild black bunny!

Jeepers Creepers: A Tale of Two Castles

Each Autumn the Scottish Military Vehicle Group takes its Jeeps on a "Quarter Ton Fun Run". I am led to understand that stops are required to ease leg cramps and aching buttocks, as these vehicles were built to take on and defeat the Third Reich not to give comfort and a good driving experience!

This year's stops were at Glamis and Balintore Castles. I think the mutually-flattering spectacle of vehicles and architecture is magnificent. If anything, methinks Ms. Balintore wears her khakis somewhat better than Glamis. :-)

Jeeps at Balintore Castle

Jeeps at Glamis Castle