#HowtoRestoreACastle: Beware Your First #MidgeEncounter. Ours was truly awful!

If you do not live in a temperate, coastal location with high rainfall, you may not know about the midge. You see, the midge is a wee blood-thirsty beastie which rises in late May and spends the next three to four months feeding on any piece of exposed flesh available to it.*

*Please note: Midges occasionally drive their victims to using bad language, and this post is no exception.

The midge bite is small but persistent, itching out of all proportion to the size of the mandibles which cause it. Or at least this is the case for the first three years of exposure – which is no use to visitors of course, but explains why West Coasters born-and-bred barely bat an eyelid under the onslaught of these multitudinous airborne pests. Because, while the bites are an incessant irritant after the fact, the initial onslaught can be truly excruciating.

Imagine an early summer evening, when the light is limpid and louche, falling toward a gentle, welcoming darkness – soft in the virtually tactile way that only the ocean ward coast of Scotland can produce.

Imagine that you are coming home to your newly finished, glorified garden shed after a weekend away with friends. It’s just the two of you, content to come home after a long journey full of conversation, insight and laughter.

You turn your battered soft top Vitara into the drive and allow gravity to take you down to the bridge. You want to keep the car’s progress slow because the unfinished drive rocks the short-wheelbase of the four-by-four such that your already sore backs will be further jarred (the Vitara was never a comfortable ride), and you note as you cross the bridge that the castle is looking particularly pretty, the tops of the chimneys are caught in the last light of the setting sun, and the foot of the ruin seems to accentuate this by being sunk in a deeper, darker shadow than you’d expect. Both of you glance at the stand of tall trees across the ravine from the castle to see if they account for the visual contrast, but nothing unusual strikes you.

The slight rise to the last corner wakes the bassets who immediately become animated with home fever. You glance at one another and smile, anticipating much low-slung and hilarious scooting around by the doe-eyed duo as they reacquaint their patch with them. The drive levels out, and you slip quietly down the avenue of, on one side, overgrown Leylandii and on the other five gargantuan exotics – led by what has come to be known as the ‘Harry Potter’ tree – although I am sure it looks nothing like the Whomping Willow. It’s nearly fully dark under the trees and you put on the headlights. They meet a thick veil of insects which move in mildly hypnotic wave delineating the full beam of the lights to their utmost extent 200 yards away to the foot of the castle. You glance at one another not quite understanding (a) how such insect-life could have arisen in the 72 hours you have been away and (b) amazement at the fecundity of nature even in these hills where the ground is notoriously poor, water-logged and inimical to anything other than pine, rhododendron and rashes.

Imagine that despite your wonder at this sudden irruption of natural phenomena into your life at Dunans, you allow your car to coast at approximately 2 metres per second down the drive and into the gravelled embrasure on which the red shed stands. The quality of the light improves and you see that the entire foliage delimited quadrangle is thick with a floating mass of insect-life fluctuating to an altitude of about 8 feet. It is at this stage, when you slow the car to the point that it will roll at, maybe, half-a-metre a second to its place before the shed, that two things become apparent. First, the canopy of the soft-topped car, which covers boot, rear seat and ceiling above really isn’t airtight, and second that driving so slowly means that this wondrous, slowly and softly dynamic layer of insect-life is in fact able to find admission into our coolly comfortable capsule of car air.

The time between the slowing and the screaming was perhaps all of 5 seconds.

When the red mist of midge rage descends rational thought becomes absolutely impossible.

The bastards bite.

The bastards get into your ears.

Into your nose.

Up your nose.

Into your eyes.

The creases at the corners of your eyes.

You scream. You run. You swear. You slam doors.

You open doors to let the dogs in.

You remember your baggage. You remember the shopping. The milk which needs the fridge.

You swear. Find a balaclava. Run out to the car. Get the shopping bags.

The milk bag splits. The cartons spill over the drive.

You swear. You cry.

You pray to God that the Balaclava is working. It isn’t. You throw it off.

You scrabble for the milk.

You weep.

You run in.

Throw milk at your wife.

Return outside for the bags.

You are hollering like Rambo. And choking on midges.

And still running.

Doors slam more.

There’s the tinkling of glass.

You run in. Slam the door.

Drop the bags.

Look at your wife who is scrabbling at one of the windows.

The windows.

They are covered in midges.

Billions of them.

We can’t see out.

And some of them, some of these bastards are on the bastarding inside.

An hour later we find ourselves sitting in the dark, in close proximity to two floor standing fans and one desktop fan in the centre of the red shed. We are trying really, really hard not to scratch ourselves. I am trying not to weep. My lovely wife is holding her head her hands, her jaw set. I can see she is calculating our next move. I cannot hold my head because my hands are covered in a mixture of silicone sealant and midges. I have a cut across one of my hands where the scissors slipped as I cut organza fabric, and at my feet are several thousand unused staples, an industrial staple gun and all the plasters we own. We know we have to venture into the bedroom to fight the midge invasion, and we also know that because of the variable level of the foundations, there is a big (bastarding) gap between wall and window bottom in that room. We look at one another and ask simultaneously, “What the hell have we done?”

That first year, in the hut with single-glazed windows of approximate fit, without airlock (AKA porch) for the shaking out of insect-life from hair, clothes and dog, without any through-breeze onsite of any kind, the midges were sanity-threatening awful. If I have subsequently called the castle a glorified mouse-breeding box, then the rash-filled paddock next to the red shed, with its sundry hollows, its deeply scored quad bike tracks, the miscellaneous divots and other depressions, all causing the retention of water to the point walking in it required waders, was similarly termed the midge-breeding box. We identified this area as the main problem and that was where we focussed our attention, to begin with.

To wage a successful war against the midge one needs to remember two things: first, this is a long-term campaign and second, there are no short-term solutions. You’ll also need to remember two further things: first, as alluded to in our very first swarming encounter, midges cannot withstanding a breeze of more than one point five metres per second, they are literally blown away, and second, they are crepuscular.

You can walk a swarm off – they literally cannot keep up. If you spot several Scots in a field having an agricultural chat, they’ll not be leaning on a five-bar gate (mostly because three of the five are rotten and the top is so patched with scraps of kindling that its actually quite uncomfortable to lean against) they’ll be walking in an ever-increasing spiral. Obviously, you’ll not want a decreasing spiral because the Pygmy flies will then end of concentrating in the correct space. Also, these voluble West Coast farmers, because, believe me, they can be very voluble, will avoid their livestock. Livestock generally have their own domestic swarm, a colony of midges, who for the summer describe a cloud or halo around their chosen beast.

Now concerning the crepuscular element of the equation (while ensuring we reference the Fire Sermon as the only reason I had any notion as to what this poly-syllabic term meant before the advent of midges into my life) the reasons midges are dusk and dawn-favouring are two-fold, first, the lack of sun. They, like moles, mice and marmots do not like direct sunlight. Well, mice might, but they prefer cover from marauding predators than full sunlit exposure. Not having researched the subject, I am not sure why midges don’t like sunlight, but (vast) experience shows this to be the case. Second, at dusk and dawn, any air movement generally falls away. There may of course be a third reason. Midges feed on blood. Any blood. They are not fussy. Human, deer, coo, sheep, dog, cat. At dawn and dusk these creatures are not wont to rush about madly, they slow, they prepare for the onset of night or begin the process of waking. The midge prey are therefore not moving at more than 1.5 metres per second, and therefore are available.

How is it you may ask that such tiny creatures can find their prey with such alacrity? Midges are attracted initially to the carbon dioxide their prey emits, then by movement, colour and odour. Finally, once a midge finds prey it emits a pheromone which attracts other midges.

It may be the pheromone which finally persuaded us that midge magnets weren’t for us. Either that, or the thought of using a can of gas every couple of months to produce a constant stream of carbon dioxide to clear a quarter acre of ground. While we awaited the effect of the changes we began soon after that tortured evening of the soul, we invested in a midge magnet. Now, quite apart from my inability to

(a) remember to check the gas canister on a regular basis

(b) empty the nets of midges as they neared full

(c ) light the magnet (once I’d managed to remember to check the canister, see that it’d been empty for some time – given the deliquescence of midges in midge-net – get to Strachur to replace the canister, order a canister because I was the only person using that particular type, forget to remember to return the following week once the gas co. had delivered said preferred type, remember a further week later to get the last canister of the preferred type given that four other households “ …. were giving these midge magnet thingies a try”).

No, midge magnets weren’t the solution, not at Dunans, not with our infestation, not with my record of replenishment and maintenance. There is a far flung corner of a shed where several hundred-pounds-worth of kit moulders paying tribute to our commitment to rid ourselves of midges and also, to our eventual success.

Note to those who visit midge-infested areas only infrequently: Do not – I repeat – do not sit around a midge magnet. It’s a magnet. Midges, seeking the carbon dioxide exhaled by animals are attracted to it – as if its a …magnet. By sitting there you’re creating a HUGE target for midges, even those outside the quarter acre of midge-free atmosphere. It’ll not be pretty. You’ll spill your beer, knock the prosecco for six, throw down your burgers in panic, trample small children – all the time swearing, “Bloody-bastarding-thing doesn’t bastarding work. You said they worked! Only reason I agreed to come here. Right, I have had enough Mildred, WE ARE LEAVING!” You will then jump into your seven year-Old Volvo and never return, even to retrieve the youngest’s purple unicorn pillow called Tilly, which a week later a family wanting respite from a midge infested patch of grounds near a castle not 20 miles away, finds in the porch, hanging rather forlornly on a coat-hook.

Over three or four years following, we reduced the incidence of midge deluges markedly, such that now, it is only of passing interest when we have a bad day. My paltry efforts, along with mighty shifts by folk like VBF, Chris, Stuart, Min and Tino, have led to policies in which it is possible to picnic, or to barbecue, in comparative comfort with only an occasional surfeit of airborne bitery. We do still dress our open windows in organza, practice a lights-out policy during late-May, June and July, as well as utilise floor and desk-mounted fans day and night.

#LatestNews from #DunansCastle in #December #video from #theLairdHimself

Including a tour of the cleared castle and news on the ongoing works for the restoration.

Dunans Castle Clearance Continues in Kitchen & Library: More Images

The clearance of the back two compartments of the castle has taken much longer than the others, simply because they aren’t accessible by the minidigger and there’s not enough room for more than a couple of workers. Our luck continues with the floors, which are all concrete, making clearance much much easier than suspended floors.

If you want to help with castle or bridge we have two volunteer fortnights in May 2020 and September 2020 – available here.

Congratulations to the ScottishLaird Team: #DunansCastle is a Groupon Local Star in Poland!

This is really testament to the hard work and good humour of our ScottishLaird team, big congratulations to Jean Donaldson (Powanmedia) and Colin Steedman who work tirelessly to make our promotions to Europe and beyond the success they are!

Watch out for new Scottish Laird promotions for Groupon UK and Ireland before the month is out!

In the meantime, we’ll let the email we just received speak for itself(!):

localstarpoland

 

Double-Double Yolker! Two eggs, four yolks …

Working lunch today at ScottishLaird was delicious and amazing at the same time.

Highly appropriate given that my dear old Grandfather was chairman of the Egg Board during the “Go to Work on an Egg” campaign in the 70s.

Cracking story to make a meal of, eh?*

*all jokes thanks to Jean

 

A Valentines Day Gift: Chocolates from ScottishLaird

Not sure we need to say much more, except that our sensational selection of six Scottish chocolates were made as a special commission for us by the excellent Caramiche Chocolatiers who can be found in Dunoon in a gorgeous haze of chocolateness … Chocolates helping restore a castle in Scotland – wonderful!

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There’s the Dunans Dram, the Castle Cranachan, Wild River Raspberry, Highland Honeybee, the Laird’s Retreat and the Lady’s Secret …

Now at our website, ScottishLaird.com, but hurry, we have only very limited stocks!

 

New Products on ScottishLaird: In time for Christmas, Caps, Waistcoats, Ladies Kilts and Sashes

We had a lot of fun putting together our Dunans Rising tartan range this year, and here’s the final batch – all available at the revamped ScottishLaird.com in time for Christmas!!

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Waistcoat for Ladies and Gentlemen

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Ladies kilt

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The fringes of our Dunans Rising Sash

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Adding Festive Baubles: Our ScottishLaird.com site gets a refresh for the sheer merriness of it!

A good day today for a lot of reasons, not least the creation of three picture baubles for the Scottish Laird website. Also, watch out on the 10th December for new offers both from the site and Groupon UK.

With the top page of the slightly restructured website I had thought about a background of a Christmas tree with the baubles hanging from it, but it all got a little unnecessary visually! This very calm, bauble adorned front page provides a really clear route to the titles, our tartans and our accessories. We also refreshed the title circles which were looking a little retired. They’re now sharp sharp.

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I particularly like these three picture baubles, utilising photography both from myself (the deed) and Jean Donaldson (teddy and tartan). The interaction of fonts (helvetica neue and zapfino) and image are particularly chocolatey (and yes that is a technical graphic design term… )

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Refining the Special Sauce: A pinch of SQL, a peck of PHP, a dash of CSS. Delicious.

Silence on this blog over the last day or so, as I have been refining our production process – the Special Sauce of the title – by tinkering with the mix of PHP / MySQL / CSS which form the basis for the websites we run. That and using applescripts and folder actions to automagically print jobs saved from orders – a mouth-watering topping if you will.

If this sounds like unpalatable gobbledegook, then saying collation is my next challenge, and after that some insecure headers,  might make you think  I have lost it – either that or  I am making headway with improving Scottish Laird’s online infrastructure. In any event, it is certain to ensure the business copes with the oncoming Christmas tsunami more elegantly than it did with the last …

And once all of these technical considerations have been broiled into an elegant soupçon, I’ll be heating up the latest iteration of our business plan for serving in a week or so to HIE – a very slow-cooked dish indeed!

Now, time for supper.

ScottishLaird: The Story So Far … A New Sign for the Castle

The third sign in our growing collection of lectern interpretation tells the story of how ScottishLaird has developed from a small idea into a castle-saving enterprise. The draft sign, pictured below – and in part, above – will be printed at the end of the week, once I have properly proofed the whole design.

I’ve also included the text of the sign as its a great summary of how the Scottish Laird project has developed …

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DRAFT TEXT
Please note that this text is subject to change, not only because we will be editing it for the first printing of the sign, but because as we develop our ideas with regard to both the end use of the castle and the method we’ll use to effect the restoration, the narrative will perforce change. Not only that, over the next year or two we’ll encounter some pretty big decision points which may affect both absolute progress and our timetable.

The Scottish Laird Project
Since 1st December 2007, when the Scottish Laird Project began, over 100,000 Lairds and Ladies have taken up the offer to support the project to restore Dunans Castle, the bridge and grounds. The project has Lairds and Ladies from all over the world, including countries where Scots have emigated to, like the US, Canada and Australia, as well as regions which evidently feels kinship through climate, location and topography, like Norway, Sweden and Denmark. All are welcome, both to enjoy our decorative titles, but also, and most importantly to visit Dunans, in person or via the internet, and learn about the restoration.

The intention was always to create a community of interest around the castle, while also providing a fun and original gift idea. We hope we have been successful in the latter, but know from our tours and feedback online, that the community is a thriving, engaged and above all, interested stakeholder in what we do at Dunans.

By necessity the Lairds and Ladies contributions were small to begin with. The maintenance of paths, the creation of signage, the planting of trees and the management of the policies in general. With contributions from the project in the first 4 years we’ve improved steps, created benches, repaired the worst of nature’s depredations and ensured that year round we can work on improving our visitor experience.

Harrods, WHSmith et al.
One of our early successes in getting the project to a larger audience was our involvement with Gift Republic, a distributor with connections across the globe, and in particular, in high streets across the US and the UK. We immediately saw a significant hike in folks becoming involved in the project, particularly with the introduction of titles to the likes of Harrods and WHSmith. Gift Republic also helped us make our tours a regular fixture during the summer, with 2011 bringing over a thousand Lairds and Ladies to Dunans.

A Great Leap Forward
In early 2012 the project took another great leap forward with the first of our many offers via Groupon. That year, while providing tours for over two and a half thousand people, we were able to invest in a more thorough-going grounds management policy, investing both in plant and drainage.

It was at this stage we realised that the project needed its own office space, and moved everything to our specially-built, but temporary, green shed (you’ll have seen it as you arrived, partially screened by Rhododendron and Rowan). Since late 2012 this has been centre of operations for Scottish Laird.

Creating a Conservation Plan
By the end of that year it became obvious that our increasing success meant we were going to be in a position to move the project forward in more definite terms for both castle and bridge. We started looking for an architect to help us. By the middle of 2013 we’d found architect and conservation specialist Robin Kent, and since then he has been working with us to realise plans which will encapsulate both our vision for Dunans, and that expressed to us by the Lairds and Ladies when they visited.

Our first task was to create a structure around which we could create a timescale and a budget for the renovations, one which would also answer to the method we’d use. Robin therefore began work on a Conservation Plan for Dunans, and over the winter of 2013/14 produced a document with which we could base our planning and listed building consents. The plan was published in April 2014 as a book for consultation with our Lairds and Ladies.

Preparing the Ground
To date this work – the creation of the Conservation Plan, the professional input from Structural Engineer and Quantity Surveyor, the ongoing meetings with planners, the clearing of the castle wall-tops and much else besides – has been paid for by the project.

In a similar way in the second half of 2014 the Laird project with be financing two major preparatory works: firstly, the bridge will be subject to a detailed examination with trial pits being dug to ascertain the level of intervention the structure requires; and secondly, we will be engaging a team of clearance experts to take all the detritus from the castle. Like the trial pits for the bridge, clearing the castle is an essential prerequisite – in this case for the detailed surveys we will need to create the drawings for applications to the local planning department as well as Historic Scotland.

The Bridge’s Birthday Party
During 2015, its bicentennial, the bridge will be restored, but because it is an A-listed structure, we hope to obtain full funding from Historic Scotland and the Heritage Lottery Fund. Includingwithin the £1M total funding package will be a 5% contribution from Scottish Laird to enable a complete record of the works to be made, as well as a programme of celebrations and events around the restoration of the structure. Local Schools, History and Archaeology Groups, Lairds and Ladies will all be involved in what will prove to be a really significant moment in the life of the site and the project.

With the funding in place for the restoration of the bridge (and it is by no means certain) we will then be in a position to start the works on the castle by early 2016. And it is this work which the ScottishLaird Project will have been most instrumental in funding.

Restoring the Castle
As the Conservation Plan for Dunans shows the indicative budget for a restoration of the castle into a mixed-use visitor attraction and accommodation venue is £4M. This figure would not have been achievable without the credibility the Scottish Laird project lends the site. We anticipate that given good financial results for the year 2014-15, and continuing success in marketing both our titles and the associated merchandise, we will be able to borrow the £2.5M we will need to complete the project.

The programme of works, as the timeline above indicates, will take approximately 3 years, and finish around April 2019 – all things having occurred as envisaged. In that time, we’ll have worked on the castle in two distinct phases: first, the recovery and second, the renovation.

The Recovery
In the recovery phase, beginning with the preparatory works already mentioned, the castle will be cleared, the walls, gables, chimneys and wall-tops will be consolidated. The structure will then be roofed. We did consider a temporary roof, but we felt that this was an added and needless expense. Once roofed the castle would be fenestrated and then left for c. 18 months to dry out. It may be that during this time it will be necessary to create floors in the space. Of course once roofed and drying it may be possible to hold events in the structure.

The Restoration
Taking approximately a year, the restoration will bring in services, first and second fix, all the appurtenances of a modern visitor attraction, as well as the facilities on the first and second storeys to cater for guests. We will of course include sustainable energy sources where possible – microhydro and photovoltaics being favoured at the time of writing.

Once completed, our Lairds and Ladies will be able to stay in one of three gorgeous self-catering apartments in the Castle, and enjoy visitor facilities, like a restaurant/cafe, an archive room, a Castle shop and, of course, the lovely grounds. By the time the project is completed we will have created together a sustainable castle which will maintain itself for generations to come.

CSDS, July 2014 

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