Warkworth Castle, Northumberland

Posted on 30 November 2024 by Katrina

So here we are back at Warkworth Castle in Northumberland, it’s a great place to visit but isn’t so accessible for disabled people like many of these places. It’s owned/run by English Heritage, it was owned by the Percy family in Tudor times. You can see my previous post here.

Parts of it are covered but others are open to the elements. I must say that the stonework looks in really good shape.

Below is quite a grand staircase.

But the stairs below aren’t for the faint hearted.

Below is a really lovely part of the castle which is roofed, it’s a sort of ante room and I can imagine people millling about in it chatting, and sitting on the window seats.

I really admire vaulted rooms although I’m always a wee bit nervous of them, I have to remind myself they’ve been good for centuries so are unlikely to fall on me!

I spotted this teeny wee iron lion rampant badge from the bottom of a flight of stairs, it seems to have been set above what looks like a stone sink, but it might have been a cupboard. The lion rampant was the Percy family’s emblem/badge, but is of course better known as Scotland’s emblem.

Below is a view of Warkworth village taken from just outside the castle. It’s a lovely wee place with plenty of eateries, but we were on our way further south so didn’t have much time to spend exploring the place, we spent so much time in the castle.

Blackwell, an Arts and Crafts house, Lake District

Posted on 22 September 2024 by Katrina

When we were in the Lake District a few weeks ago one of the places on our list to visit was Blackwell, an Arts and Crafts house. I must admit that I hadn’t even heard of it until quite recently. It’s an absolute jewel.

Blackwell has always been a holiday home which is really sad, it would have made a wonderful family home although I suppose the winters in the Lake District can be quite grim. The house was designed by Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott. It’s not far from Bowness on Windermere.

The photos above and below are of the Hall. The stained glass design of tulips and blue birds looks much better in reality.

The hall is a large room, you could easily hold a dance in it. The copper lighting is original as is the peacock frieze at the top of the walls. This is actually wallpaper which has been recently refurbished. As you can just see on the left there’s another cosy seating area.

We joined in a guided tour which was interesting. Some of the designs are very reminiscent of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, he and Baillie Scott were designing at around the same time and were often competing for the same commissions. Of course Baillie Scott was also of Scottish descent.

The hall is a bit of a mixture of Tudor style, with its oak panelling and early 20th century styling. The guide thought that the fireplace was a nod towards Art Deco although the house is a bit early for that, the Dutch Delft tiles around the fireplace seemed a bit incongruous in the setting, but they are attractive. Every house should have at least one window seat I think, and this house has a few. They are perfect for reading in but the scenery outside might be a bit too distracting.

Or you could sit in the window below, the light should be good anyway.

This part of the house is quite dark, it was deliberate, to contrast with the bright light of the rest of the downstairs, but I’ll leave that for another post.

Blackwell stands above Lake Windermere, below is a view from the driveway towards the lake.

Niebert Windmill, Netherlands

Posted on 4 September 2024 by Katrina

The Niebert Windmill is still used for grinding flour, and you can watch it being ground, then buy some of it for your baking.

This is a very tall windmill, I think there are six staircases inside it and we went up them all. In the Netherlands most stairs resemble ladders, they are incredibly steep, even within private homes, often it feels safer to go down them backwards as then you can hold on to the step as well as the handrail.

The windmill is part working mill and part museum. You can watch flour being ground in some Scottish mills too, but ours are run by water power so don’t feature sails.

It was incredibly windy up there and although I’m not usually bothered by heights, this was scary as the fence is very small and it felt too easy to get blown over it. I didn’t stay there long! Somehow in the photo it doesn’t look at all high but six ‘ladders’ can’t lie! The flag is the Groningen state flag.

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.

Dokkum, Friesland

Posted on 10 July 2024 by Katrina

When we were in the Netherlands recently we visited Dokkum which is a fortified town in the north-east municipality of Noardeast-Fryslan in the province of Friesland. It’s a very scenic town.

Of course there are canals all over the Netherlands, but Dokkum is at the end of the road so to speak. During really cold winters when the canals freeze over enough they have ice skating races on the canals in eleven towns in Friesland, and this is the last one.

Small canals lead into a bigger one. In some places people have their boat moored in front of their house, much better than a car!

I think this a laburnum tree by the side of the canal in the photo below although it’s difficult to say as the flowers weren’t properly open yet.

This is a lovely town, well worth visiting if you are in the vicinity, but we were there on a Monday and not all of the shops were open, this is quite common in Friesland.

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.

My garden in Fife

Posted on 26 April 2024 by Katrina

Amazingly it was a blue sky day on Wednesday and we had absolutely no rain at all, but that east wind was still blowing, and a friend told me that she had had to scrape ice off her windscreen in the morning, when I was sensibly still in bed.

Anyway, I went out to take some photos of the back garden. Things are beginning to green up.

That big shrub to the left of centre in the photo above is going to have to be moved as it blocks my view from the kitchen window of nicer things, such as the pieris, I did not think it was going to grow so large and is not amenable to pruning. Such is life.

My phone tells me that tomorrow it will be four degrees celsius colder than it was today so it’ll be 8 celsius tomorrow, that’s 46.6 F, colder with the wind no doubt. It’s a very slow start to Spring.

Pining for the West

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