From stately home to statelier home!

I had been asked not to arrive at my next host’s until after 5.00pm as there would be no-one there to greet me so, to kill some time and to break up the four hour journey, I diverted to New Lanark on the way. New Lanark was a cotton mill and workers’ village set up in the early 19th Century by a forward-thinking mill owner. He provided the first crèche for workers’ children and schooling for all children up to the age of 10 and beyond with evening classes for those who worked in the mill after that age. He also formed the first co-operative store on which the whole co-operative system was modelled and was an all-round good guy who was, typically, disliked by his fellow mill owners for his philanthropic ideas. It was a very interesting two hours and I was glad I’d gone, but I didn’t have time to stop off at any other places (like the Falkirk Wheel) afterwards.

I was glad that I’d read the book about Kincardine that Maggie had lent me as it gave me an inkling of what I was going to, but the reality of turning in through the Lodge Gates, driving up the three-quarter mile driveway and then arriving outside the house, was still awe-inspiring! I found ‘The Laird’ in the Walled Garden mowing the grass and he quickly showed me to my room before returning to his mowing, because he needed to get it done before 6.00pm when he had a prospective wedding party turning up to view the place. Later on, Nicky returned from the funeral that she had had to attend, and we all had supper together. I knew I was going to enjoy this placement when we had globe artichokes and melted butter for starters followed by homemade chicken kiev! Two other WWOOFers were due to arrive later in the evening – Amanda and Owen from Canada. They had been here about three weeks before and then gone off to Skye and on to another host.

Our first job was weeding the rose beds in the Walled Garden, which is a wonderful space – it has a series of hornbeam hedges which screen off areas of the garden so that it is like a series of rooms, but it has a central fountain with gravel paths radiating from it. The water for the fountain comes from a spring up on the hill behind the house and although at no great pressure it is constant and crystal-clear. The beautiful herbaceous borders and the well-planted vegetable garden are all managed by Nicky, her sister, Verity, who works one day a week, and WWOOFers and it is amazing how well-tended it all looks. Andie has recently had to take on all the grass mowing on the estate as the elderly man who did this has become too ill to continue, so that is an extra burden on top of all his other work. The estate lands (all 3000 acres) are mainly leased to other farmers, but Andie and Nicky host quite a few corporate events, as well as weddings. In Scotland, it is the minister who is licensed to carry out weddings, not the venue, which means that you can choose to get married virtually anywhere.

The main reason that Nicky chose to have WWOOFers at this time was to help with the Deeside Suzuki Piano Festival which was being held at the castle for three days during the first weekend that we were there. Nicky is a Suzuki piano teacher and gives lessons in the music room at the castle. It is a very interesting method of learning a musical instrument as the child learns the sound of the piece before ever seeing the musical notation and the parents are heavily involved, too, in reinforcing the lessons at home with much praise and enthusiasm. This will be the seventh festival that she has hosted and it involves about 30 children and their parents who come to stay – not all of them stay in the castle, some just come for the day-time events. However, there were about 24 for breakfast each morning, more for lunch, and about the same for dinner. Our jobs were to be the behind-the-scenes help: making sure that the tea/coffee/squash station, outside by the marquee, was always topped up; laying up and clearing away the meals and generally helping to keep things rolling along like a well-oiled machine. It was great fun, but very humbling as some of these children were only about five, but played the piano really well.

Nicky gave us a quick guided tour of some of the rooms before people arrived: the Chinese Room contains a beautiful carved bed and there is only one other known version in the UK and that is in the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Queen’s Room – so called because when the Queen came to dine they thought that she might be going to stay the night, so hurriedly prepared this room for her! – contains a large four-poster bed that Andie made himself; and in the bathroom of one of the other rooms are some original William de Morgan tiles (he was a contemporary of William Morris of the Arts & Crafts movement). That is what I like about this house – although there are many precious and irreplaceable items, they are all still in daily use.

On Thursday we took delivery of a lorry load of provisions for the weekend but, unfortunately, they failed to deliver the chicken that we were supposed to be having on Friday evening, so Andie got out of the freezer the fifteen pound salmon that he had just put in there. It had been caught in the river and could not be put back, as they normally are, because it had swallowed the hook and would definitely have died. This fish was too large to fit into a normal fish kettle, so they pressed into service a turbot fish kettle which is rounder than a normal one, and the salmon sat in that curled round on itself and was poached gently across two burners on the gas stove. I contributed to the meal by making an enormous amount of mayonnaise. Twenty four people sat down to this meal and there was still enough salmon left over to make kedgeree later in the week and some lunchtime sandwiches.

There was a barbeque on the Saturday evening followed by an informal concert. The BBQ was in the marquee and just after the two oil drum BBQs were lit, the heavens opened and monsoon-like rain fell for about forty five minutes – I have never seen rain so heavy for such a prolonged period of time – every time we thought it couldn’t get any heavier – it did. I was very glad that traditionally BBQs are a man thing – Andie was outside, well partially under the cover of a gazebo, holding an umbrella over himself and the BBQ with one hand and cooking with the other. Amazingly, the meal for 50 people was a great success and we then all trouped indoors for the concert at which several children played piano and violin and Andie sang and Amanda performed a Highland Fling (she learned Scottish Dancing in Alberta!) whilst accompanied by Nicky’s and Andie’s son, Charlie, on the bagpipes.

After everyone had gone home on the Sunday, we all went in the estate Land Rover, to the River Feugh, a tributary of the Dee, to watch the salmon leaping. The river was in spate after all the rain we have had and was a dark brown peaty colour, and we watched for about half an hour as several salmon attempted, and failed, to scale the rocky barrier at this point on the river. Andie told me that they could and did wait until the river dropped to a more manageable level if they couldn’t get up it at the moment.

I have been made very welcome by this family and Andie is a great raconteur, but you know you are moving in elevated circles when, in one evening, Andie received a phone call from the Lord Chamberlain inviting him to some ‘do’ with Prince Charles (a fairly regular occurrence from what I can gather) and another phone call from a local landowner inviting him to come for a day of grouse shooting. We were also watching High Society on DVD the other evening when they dropped into the conversation that they had once met Grace Kelly, when she was Princess Grace of Monaco, at a party!

On our last Saturday here, we went to the Banchory Farmers’ Market with Nicky because, as well as all her other jobs, she runs Kincardine Castle Kitchen with another lady, producing homemade preserves and biscuits that are sold in local shops as well as at the market. The Shortbread Biscuits are amazing as is the rather interesting Champagne Rhubarb Chutney – not only made from the rhubarb variety called Champagne, but containing champagne, too! After the market finished, Amanda, Owen and I continued on to Aberdeen in my little car and went to see the final Harry Potter film in 3D – a fantastic film with lots of really good special effects.

I think my tour of Scottish stately homes is coming to an end now as tomorrow I head off to another Walled Garden but it is leased from the large estate, and I will be staying in much humbler surroundings.

The week after Jeni left was a sad and pretty unproductive one. I spent nearly all of Sunday and the greater part of Monday in bed feeling very sorry for myself as I snivelled and coughed and used up most of my supply of tissues. It is very embarrassing to be ill in someone’s house when you are there to work for your keep! Luckily, Mary and Terry were lovely people and very understanding (Mary felt guilty for giving me the cold in the first place). Once I was up and about again Terry went down with mysterious stomach pains and had to retire to bed for several days so I was pretty much left to my own devices. I planted some more seeds and repotted the cucumbers before weeding the flower beds and planting out some tobacco plant seedlings, which promptly nearly all succumbed to the pounding rain and the onslaught of slugs! I also did some interior painting of a window frame and door on the days when it was too persistently wet to even venture outside – the weather has been atrocious for all but two days of my stay. When Terry was feeling better and the weather was a bit drier, we spent a day with the digger and some large straps moving huge rocks from a pile to put along the side of the stream which only flows intermittently in wet spells. It took all day to manoeuvre these stones into place and backfill behind them and we thought we’d done a pretty good job – until the rain came back. It rained torrentially for twenty four hours and when I went outside on my last morning it was a scene of utter devastation – the burn had moved two of the biggest stones into the stream bed, it had then overflowed its banks and filled the still-to-be-finished pond, and had completely destroyed the area we were about to turn into a little waterfall. I couldn’t believe how a tiny trickle had suddenly become big enough to do all that damage, but we had had an awful lot of rain.

On one of my last evenings there, a group of friends turned up with wine and instruments and we had an impromptu concert in the kitchen – there was one guy on guitar, one girl on fiddle and another guy played piano accordion. His name was Pete and he is using one of the barns at the house to store his old showman’s wagon while he does it up as he’s lived in it for fifteen years but it now leaks like a sieve and needs a new roof. He’s a professional musician and plays in a band called Moyshe’s Bagel who are performing at this year’s Priddy Folk Festival, if any of you are thinking of going. It was a great evening but I left them to it at about 11.30 and went off to bed – apparently they continued playing until about 2.00am!

I left Tynron on 23rd June and drove for literally five minutes down the road to my next WWOOF host – no need to factor in the usual twenty-minute-getting-lost margin that I usually include! I turned in by the Lodge and drove over the balustrade bridge over the river and up the half mile driveway, finally arriving at the gravel sweep in front of a huge pink sandstone stately home! Maggie’s email had merely described it as a large Victorian house and garden and that she required help with hedge-trimming and topiary. Maggie met me at the front door and decided to take me for a stroll around the gardens first to calm the dogs down: two black (thank Heavens!) Labradors and a young black cocker spaniel puppy. Later she showed me to my room which is on the third floor. It is really pretty with high ceilings, plaster cornice, yellow striped wallpaper and a Victorian half-tester bed (basically it has a wooden canopy that extends over half the bed and side curtains). I’ve never stayed in a stately home before! There are stuffed birds in display cases all the way up one staircase and stuffed and mounted deer heads on nearly every wall, plus lots of family portraits. The magnificent wooden staircase that ascends to my room is at least 10’ wide and the family kitchen could easily house my entire cottage floor plan.

Once I’d brought my bags inside and carried them up the fifty stairs to my room, we went outside via the impressive Orangery to start work on the box hedges in the Italian Garden. Between us we managed to trim all of the box hedges, using an incredible electric hedgetrimmer/hoover device, in two days as opposed to the two weeks that it normally takes Maggie – she was very impressed and I scored numerous Brownie points.
At the weekend, Robert wanted me to help him with some jobs so I agreed to have a day off on Tuesday, so on Saturday we went off to clear bracken. This involved walking for what seemed miles through the forest plantations to where some new oak trees had been planted and then cutting down the bracken within a metre of each tree with a hand sickle. The day was very hot and humid and I worked in a cloud of constantly buzzing flies and was soon extremely damp – from drizzle and sweat! Between us we managed to clear the bracken from around 300 young trees in an afternoon, and then we had to walk back again. They own 2000 acres of land; some farmland but most is down to woodland and I felt like I’d walked through all of it!

On Sunday I was coerced into attending a religious service in a marquee to celebrate the start of the annual Gala Week in the village. Maggie was playing piano and her daughter was playing the cello, so I felt I should go along and support them in their endeavours. After lunch, Catie and I were persuaded by her Granny to go and ride her ponies – it was sort of assumed that I could ride. I did try to explain that I hadn’t ridden anything for years and I had never been a competent or confident rider but these excuses were just ignored and I soon found myself mounted on Nutty, an Exmoor pony. It was only as I nervously set off down the road that Granny pointed out that she was not insured for me to ride her pony and, more importantly, it was not unusual for Nutty to buck unexpectedly and then take off at a canter! Before I could dismount I found myself in a field of just-cut silage and luckily, Nutty was far more interested in grabbing huge mouthfuls of lush green grass than with tanking off with me aboard. Phew! That was a narrow escape – I had visions of trying to drive my car or carry on wwoofing with a broken arm or leg.

On my day off I went to Wanlockhead which is the highest village in Scotland at 1,531 feet above sea level, and home to a Leadmining Museum. Part of the experience was donning a hard hat and being guided into an old drift mine to see how the miners had worked and then touring some old cottages that were furnished in the periods of 1750, 1850 and 1900. It was all very interesting and the guide was excellent. I had lunch there and then drove to Drumlanrig Castle, home of the Dukes of Buccleugh. It actually felt a bit silly going round a stately home, albeit on a bigger scale, when I was already staying in one, but it passed the time.

Quite a lot of the rest of my time at Capenoch was spent in the walled garden, part of which is rented by a lady who lives in the old gardener’s cottage and runs a plant nursery business, but part is used by the family to grow vegetables. The main job was to try and cut back and weed the box hedges that surround these beds and this took a couple of days of back-breaking work and then I completely rearranged and rebuilt their compost bins, thereby creating Jan’s Compost Corner!

I was Maggie’s first official WWOOFer as she only signed up this year and I told her I’d set the Gold Standard for other WWOOFers to aspire to. She has two French students coming at the end of July and I shall be quite intrigued to find out how they got on.

Yesterday I drove over two hundred miles North East to a village about half-an-hour from Aberdeen, but I’ll tell you about that another time. I really missed my little navigator on the journey but she is still recuperating at my Mum’s. The doctor has diagnosed Costochondritis which is damage to the cartilages connecting the ribs to the sternum (probably caused by the over-enthusiastic mucking out of the goat stable in Cumbria). It can be excruciatingly painful and the only treatment is painkillers and rest, and it can take a few months to sort out completely, so I shall be without her for the foreseeable future. Thank you to everyone who got in touch by email after my last blog – it was much appreciated.