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.