Balintore Castle

26/10/2024

This castle blog entry is going to be a bumpy ride, so be warned, but this is the reality of castle restoration.

My Testimony This is a pretty horrific story. AirBnB found me guilty of violating guest privacy, and in consequence removed money from my h...

23/10/2024

Another one of those stories that I would not have believed, had it not happened to me.

Little did I think when contemplating the purchase of a castle, that it would ultimately result in sharing a bed with these delightful membe...

11/10/2024

If you would like to do something special for Halloween, why not come along to a ghostly story-telling event at Balintore Castle? :-)

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ghosts-beasts-and-bogles-tickets-1026757418077

This is part of the Scottish International Storytelling Festival and takes place on 2nd November 2024 at 10:30 AM. Refreshments are provided. Tickets on Eventbrite are strictly limited, on a first come first served basis.

This is a rare opportunity to visit the castle. Open days have not been possible, as the Council closed the main approach road for repairs a year ago and it has still not been fixed. Thankfully, there is a secondary approach.

Join local storyteller Eileen Budd by the fireside at Balintore Castle for Halloween ghost stories of Angus. Refreshments provided.

28/09/2024

An update on the new bridge being built at Balintore Castle has turned me somewhat philosophical:

Yesterday, at the end of the working week I took a little walk to the Balintore Castle Gate Lodges to see how the rebuilding of the bridge t...

25/09/2024

Such excitement in the Quharity Glen, the new bridge has arrived that will once again connect residents to the road network. After a year of being isolated, we are feeling like the inhabitants of Brigadoon - the village than only appears once every 100 years. :-)

Whether a bridge can arrive is indeed a philosophical question. Perhaps until the structure is installed in situ with a "over-pass" and "un...

06/09/2024

Some photos to celebrate today's glorious sunshine, and a moan about the Council's Roads Department.

The bridge by Balintore Castle's gate lodges has been closed to traffic for almost a full year now as it has been deemed unsafe. To say this...

03/09/2024

Hoist away ...

A Great Hall need a great light - and I mean great in both senses! On the 29th August 2024, the huge Art Deco lantern, collected from an a...

19/08/2024

How off the wall does it have to get at Balintore Castle, before one has knowingly entered another dimension? This blog entry addresses this question head on.

Last Saturday lunchtime, I dined with a delightful lady whose right-side was painted white and whose left-side was painted black. I urged he...

17/08/2024

You may know of Burnett's Secret Garden, but do you know of Gregor's Secret Door?

As I passed Gregor in the carpentry workshop at the end of a working day recently, I asked "What have you been up to today?". "You can see f...

01/08/2024

Life is far too hectic for writing blog entries at the moment, but I managed this brief epistle off the back of a couple of photos I was sent:

On the 12th of July this year, I organised a dinner party at the castle for my great friend Görkem (Gorky). Gorky was last in Scotland 10 ye...

25/06/2024

You may wonder where "Botanical Notes II" has gone. Well, it was turning into such an epic that I put it on hold, and have rushed ahead with the rather more lightweight "Botanical Notes III".

Further adventures in trying to master wild flower identification. I often see this small purple flower growing at ground level, but have ne...

25/06/2024

A blog post just to celebrate the summer weather.

It's High Summer at Balintore Castle! This year we have neither had the usual biblical plague of rabbits, nor the annual invasion of sheep. ...

19/06/2024

It has been a day and evening of big skies at Balintore Castle - very special conditions when photos emerge with a tincture of magic.

I took the first photo in "night mode" as it was after 11PM, and this generally gives good pictures all the way from from good to low lighting conditions. However, the image in my viewfinder was blue but the reality of the long midsummer evenings is that they look almost like day. So I took a "normal" picture which captured the actual colours well, if at the expense of some noise.

Which photo do you prefer?

They were taken just seconds apart but reveal the ambiguity of midsummer evenings: is it night or is it day? Even a camera cannot decide.

19/06/2024

The sky above the castle is doing amazing things this evening. These were taken after 10PM. The joys of the long mid-summer evenings. No photo manipulations!

15/06/2024

Anyone reading this blog article will instantly recognise that I am not a botanist. :-) However, I am genuinely proud of spotting the rare occurrence of both blue and pink Forget-Me-Not flowers on the one stem.

I am a great lover of nature but do not know enough species names. The philosophical question is whether there are always more names to lear...

14/06/2024

The dog of one of my guests at the castle, set off after a rabbit this evening and has not been seen since. So if you see this handsome chappie in the vicinity of Glen Quharity, then please get in touch.

He answers to the name of Seb. The owners suspect he will seek out human company as he is a very social dog. The last time he ran off, they found him at a farm house a few miles away.

13/06/2024

Writing this blog article took a couple of evenings of research, digitisation and transcription as I wanted to get the history correct.
Hopefully, I have resolved all my earlier confusions:

Two historically significant letters were found in the castle in the 1960's in the hallway just to the north of the Great Hall. To save the ...

06/06/2024

Blog entry with progress from today at Balintore Castle:

Sometimes it is good to just post a photograph from today, rather than get one's knickers in a twist about how to best write and present a b...