Brantwood, Coniston Water, Lake District

Posted on 20 September 2024 by Katrina

A couple of weeks ago we drove to the Lake District which we hadn’t visited for about ten years. One of the first places we went to was Brantwood, the house which John Ruskin had built above Coniston Water.

It was a great choice of location.

It isn’t a terrifically grand house, I think it could be comfortable, which you can’t say for all such places. It’s often used for art and nature exhibitions. The rug and dress displayed in the photo below were made of nettles, something which they did during World War 2 as fabric was so scarce, These items looked like they had been made out of fine linen, I was agreeably surprised.

The dining room table below had been set using modern pottery by quite a well known potter I believe, so not in keeping with the house but good for exhibiting purposes.

Ruskin was a keen collector of ‘stuff’ beginning as many of us do with shells and stones.

But his collection is somewhat different from mine!

Ruskin’s bedroom below is very much a bachelor’s room. Originally there were paintings by Turner on the walls but they were sold off after his death, these ones are copies, but they’re really good.

The little bay window below is a tiny room just off his bedroom, there’s only really space for one armchair in it but it would be the perfect place to sit and read, if you could tear your attention away from the scenery.

There are various other buildings around the house which are used for exhibitions or for teaching. Below is a textile exhibition with nettle fabric, wool and silk.

There’s no doubt that John Ruskin was a strange man, sadly he’s probably best known nowadays for not consummating his marriage with poor Effie Gray. But he was an artist, writer, art critic, he was interested in so many things. I suppose he was either gay, just not interested in sex, but wanted to possess his lovely wife, just as he possessed other ‘things’. There’s no doubt that he was a handsome chap himself. You can read more about him here. I’ve only just realised that his parents were Scottish.

Duff House, Aberdeenshire

Posted on 10 September 2024 by Katrina

We’ve been doing a lot of travelling around over the summer, and I haven’t blogged about most of our visits to places. It was back in July that we travelled up to the north-east of Scotland to Aberdeenshire for a few days and one of the places we went to was Duff House, doesn’t it look fab?! You can read about it here.

Over the years it has been used as a private home, a hotel, sanatorium and prisoner-of- war camp. It was designed by William Adam, father of Robert. As often happens, the owner William Duff and the architect fell out and the house was never completed to the original plans. The house was built between 1735 and 1740.

Apparently I took 44 photos of the inside of the house, I’ll just inflict a few of them on you. Below is the library which might have looked entirely different in its heyday as the owners of the house decided that they didn’t want to live there, they had a better house! They gave the house away but sold most of the contents, so it has been furnished from elsewhere.

The dining room.

The house is now in the care of Historic Scotland and is part of the National Galleries of Scotland so it has a great collection of art. It’s well worth going to see even although it is fairly far flung from most people in the UK.

The architect William Adam lived in Kirkcaldy, just a stone’s throw from where we used to live, but someone in ‘authority’ at the council way back decreed that the Adam house should be demolished – and so it was – there is now just a boulder where the house was with a sign on it saying Gladney House was here! This is how it looked.

Mr Mac and Me by Esther Freud – 20 Books of Summer 2024

Posted on 18 August 2024 by Katrina

Mr Mac and Me by Esther Freud was first published in 2014, by Bloomsbury. I had meant to read this book when it first came out, not ten years later. It’s one of my 20 Books of Summer.

It’s well known I think that Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh moved from Glasgow to Suffolk when his career in architecture had ground to a halt. As World War One progressed they got into trouble with the authorities as some of the locals decided that the strange couple with the odd accent (Scottish) must be spies. Esther Freud has woven a story around them, embroidering what had happened to them there and how it impacted on them, as seen through the eyes of Thomas Maggs, a young boy with a damaged foot, something that he has in common with CRM.

Thomas lives on the Suffolk coast, his father is a publican, he’s abusive as a father and husband, and of course he has a drink problem, so Thomas doesn’t have a good relationship with him. When Mackintosh and his wife arrive in the area Thomas is attracted to the couple who show an interest in his own drawings and befriend him.

The Mackintoshes have money problems and Mac can’t even sell his exquisitely painted botanical art, never mind get architecture commissions, to make matters worse there are problems within Margaret’s family so she has to be away in Glasgow at times.

I enjoyed this one although it is tinged with sadness as the war takes its toll of the locals. There’s some lovely writing, descriptions of flowers, scenery and seascapes. But as you would expect The Glasgow School of Art also features and in the author’s acknowledgements at the end of the book she adds her own ‘heartfelt appreciation of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service for the skill, courage and determination they showed in overcoming the blaze that raged through the Glasgow School of Art just as this book was going to press.’

Of course fire came back again for a second bite of that building, such a tragedy. The remains, just a shell, are still wrapped in plastic, waiting for some sort of decision. It’s a deeply depressing sight.

Balvenie Castle, by Dufftown, Moray, Scotland

Posted on 17 August 2024 by Katrina

We were out and about in the far north-east of Scotland for a few days a couple of weeks ago, and one of the many places that we squeezed into those three nights away was a visit to Balvenie Castle near Dufftown. It’s in the middle of nowhere up a quite scary steep and very narrow road, and when we reached the castle it was shut! It doesn’t open on Monday.

Anyway, we were undaunted as we were able to step over the fence easily to have a closer look, we kept well away from the back as per instructions, and as we’re Historic Scotland members we weren’t doing them out of any money.

We were only there for a few minutes.

I took the photo below through the gate, as you can see it has a nice barrel vaulted roof.

Balvenie Castle was owned by a few prominent Scottish families in the past, including the notorious Black Douglases from 1362 to 1455. It’s a very scenic ruin, unfortunately the photo that I took of the farmland nearby came out too fuzzy to use. As ever, click on the photos if you want to see them enlarged.

I’ve just realised that this castle is actually owned by an absent American from Atlanta, Georgia! It is just managed by Historic Environment Scotland.

Sloten, Friesland, Netherlands

Posted on 17 July 2024 by Katrina

Sloten is another of the eleven ‘cities’ of Friesland, where they have ice skating races on the canals when they freeze hard enough.

The photo below is just so Dutch, boats moored outside your house, a canal, a lovely hump-back bridge and a windmill – what more can you ask for?

Well, another bridge with Jack standing on it is all I have of Sloten, it’s a very quiet but scenic small town. Even smaller than I thought when we were there, apparently it only has about 700 inhabitants. It’s the smallest Elfsteden in Friesland, the smallest of the ‘eleven cities’ five of which we have visited. Hopefully we’ll be able to visit the others some time in the future.

Hindeloopen, Netherlands

Posted on 13 July 2024 by Katrina

Hindeloopen is another one of the eleven ‘cities’ of Friesland, in north east Netherlands. I’ve always fancied being able to moor a small boat by my house so that I could just pootle about on a river, you can actually do that in the Netherlands, well their canals look just like rivers.

How scenic is the photo below, it almost looked like something from a children’s story book.

There are plenty of bridges and locks.

But Hindeloopen is very popular with sailors. I thought it would be similar to the coastal villages in Fife, but it was very different. There wasn’t much in the way of shops at all, just eateries, and there were millions of midges. You might think that coming from Scotland I would be well used to midges but I had never see anything like it, and it was a really windy day. I would hate to be there on a still day – if they have them.

There were lots more yachts than can be seen in the photos.

Beyond the harbour is the IJsselmeer. This used to be the Zuiderzee but in 1932 they constructed a dyke to close it off from the open sea, and now it is a freshwater lake.

It is very different from the North Sea in coastal Fife.

Windmill House and Garden, Sebaldeburen, Netherlands

Posted on 29 June 2024 by Katrina

In my recent post about the windmill at Sebaldeburen I mentioned that the job of windmill keeper comes with a house, a typically Dutch house but no two houses seem to be the same. The man who looks after the windmill took no credit for the garden though as he said that was his wife’s department!

The garden was all very lush, they had had as much rain as we had in the previous month or so, I think in another week it would have been much more colourful.

You can see that there are some veggies coming up in the photo below, amazingly they haven’t been chomped by slugs, which is what happened to my brother’s salad crops. They have been terrible this year due to all the rain. As you can see there’s even a large fruit cage in this garden, although if I had been lucky enough to have one of those I would have filled it full with berry bushes of all sorts, it looks a bit empty to me, but I suppose they are growing just what they can cope with, I still have some raspberry jam left over from last year despite giving a lot of it away.

If you look closely at the photos above and below you can see that someone (presumably the windmill keeper) has made a sort of mock up of a paddle steamer riverboat, using two big wheels as the paddles. If you zoom in on either end of the photos to see the detail you will see that there are a couple of stylish bird boxes attached to the ends. It’s quite a feature.

The windmill keeper spoke very good English and said that he had worked all over the world, incuding in England, Australia and New Zealand, but we didn’t ask him what he worked at, maybe it was windmills. The photo below shows a wooden model cutaway of the internal workings of a windmill.

It amazes me how someone came up with the idea as they’re so complicated looking.

Sebaldeburen Windmill, Netherlands

Posted on 24 June 2024 by Katrina

To me windmills were just things that were worked by the wind turning their sails, but it turns out that there are all sorts of different windmills. The windmill that we visited in Sebaldeburen lies between a ditch and a canal, with the ditch at a lower level than the canal, so an Archimedes screw is worked by the mill, to take the water from the lower level up to the higher, you can see the screw turning around.

Being in charge of a windmill is a very skilled job, and also quite hard work because if the wind changes direction the sails have to be twisted around to catch it again. That entails turning a hefty looking handcrank. You can see the handcrank in the photo below, plus the windmill operator and some family.

The surrounding fields are of course flat, but still scenic. Just very different from what we’re used to in Scotland.

Yes that is thatch that you can see on the internal walls, but the massive lump of wood in the centre is the windmill shaft which is constantly turning and the whole thing is very noisy, which somehow I don’t associate with thatch.

There are so many things in motion, grinding away, hold onto your hair!

There are lots of steps up, in the Netherlands they are more akin to what we think of as ladders, even in private homes the stairs are VERY steep, it’s often best to go down backwards.

Some disused windmills have been turned into holiday accommodation, presumably for the very fit!

From the ground floor in the windmill you can see all the water flowing underneath it, through a very thick piece of glass, I walked around it!

I well remember when I was in primary school we were given a lesson in lighthouses, and the life appealed to me, of course my teacher told me that girls couldn’t be lighthouse keepers, I could only be a lighthouse keeper’s wife, that’s what school was like in the 1960s! Being a windmill keeper appeals to me too, especially as the job seems to come with a very nice secluded house and garden. But I’ll blog about that some other time.

De Sebaldebuurster Molenpolder (Sebaldeburen Windmill)

Posted on 15 June 2024 by Katrina

It has been fairly quiet on Pining recently because we were in the north-east of the Netherlands, in Friesland, visiting the Dutch branch of my family, my brother has lived in NL for over 50 years. I had intended blogging while we were away but I never did find the time for it. In recent years Jack and I have been exploring this rural area, but amazingly we hadn’t ever visited a windmill, we rectified that this time.

From a distance they look so peaceful and scenic, but when you get up close they are really quite scarily noisy, and like something designed by Heath Robinson, but more about that in another post.

Bannockburn

Posted on 7 May 2024 by Katrina

We visited Bannockburn recently, a place we had never been before, it’s not far from Stirling. The famous battle was fought there in 1314 although there’s no actual archeological evidence of the battle now, the geography of the battle was known as it was the bogginess of the terrain and Bruce’s knowledge of it which led to the Scottish victory. There’s now a visitor centre there, but the statue in the photo below of Robert the Bruce by Pilkington Jackson was placed there in 1964. I have to say that modern day sculptors seem to have lost the art of sculpting, this one is really good.

There’s also a rotunda below, with a massive flagpole which dates from Victorian times although the rotunda is much more modern.

Inside the actual visitor centre we enjoyed a really informative talk by Callum, who certainly knows his subject. He used cards to explain where each army was and pushed them around as they moved around the battlefield. There were also animated films which Jack thought were a bit amateurish looking, but I really liked them, there were two dimensional figures which had a feeling of puppets the way they moved, I thought it was quite artistic.

The articles on display are all reproductions as there are no archaeological finds in the area at all. As the soldiers in the Scottish army weren’t actually paid they were given permission to pick over the battlefield and take anything away that they wanted, it would have been picked clean, anything which had been missed would have sunk into the bog over the centuries.

This is the view down to the area where the battle took place.

If you happen to be interested in the battle there’s a good You Tube animation of it below. The narrator is somewhat strange, there are some mistakes in pronunciation of basic words such as Scone which should not be pronounced like the baked scone, but should rhyme with ‘boon’ and incursion doesn’t have two ‘s’ sounds, plus the spelling is all American, but I suppose that’s me nit-picking.

Pining for the West

Meanderings about recipes, books, craft and more

Category Archives: Architecture