Fairytale castle with a story to tell, and picking the last sweet rose of summer

The Doyenne and I are back from a short break on the Balnagown estate near Tain. Kind friends had taken a cottage on the estate for a week and invited us to join them. We were blessed with fine weather, which can’t be relied on at this time of year, and were able to get out for several good walks.

It’s a part of the country we have known off and on for many years but had never ventured on to Balnagown itself, which is gated and guarantees great privacy.

The estate is owned by the Al Fayed family who over the past 40 years have improved the estate and restored Balnagown Castle which had fallen into poor repair.

The pink-harled stronghold, seat of Clan Ross, has over the years been transformed from the original 15th Century tower house into a fairytale castle with pepperpot towers, turrets, parapets and crenellations. Slits and gun loops on the ground floor are part of the original defences.

The castle sits on a bend of the Balnagown River in a naturally defensive position with high cliffs on two sides. In the haugh below, landscaped gardens are open for the holiday cottage occupants to enjoy and there is a network of tracks throughout the extensive woodlands and to the stocked fishing lochs. Hill Cottage, you’ll not be surprised to learn, sits at the top of a hill and has marvellous views overlooking the Cromarty Firth.

A week later and the autumn colours would have been another memory. But there’s still a great deal of pleasure walking among near bare trees which are fast losing their leaves. Trees on an old estate like Balnagown, many of them 200, 300 or more years old and shaped by the elements, give a sense of permanence and antiquity.

The cottage looks down on the Black Isle, one of those off-the-beaten-track parts of Scotland that I reproach people for racing past in their haste to get somewhere else. The peninsula isn’t an island but, surrounded by the waters of the Cromarty Firth, Beauly Firth and the Moray Firth, there’s so much water on three sides you can be forgiven for thinking it is.

It has a temperate micro-climate of its own and is one of Scotland’s breadbaskets. Some say the name reflects the rich, black fertile land of the peninsula, others that when the rest of the country is snowbound the Black Isle escapes the winter weather and its black earth stands out against the white.

Views from the cottage are mainly south, down towards Invergordon and the deep water harbour and anchorage which was

an important wartime base for the Royal Navy in the Second World War. The district round about is flat and wartime air bases were established at Alness and Tain.

The Fleet Air Arm was in on the act too. They identified their airfields with the names of well-known birds. So HMS Fieldfare was established at Evanton, similar to Royal Naval Air Station East Haven, at Hatton Farm, just south of Arbroath, which was commissioned as HMS Peewit, a reference to the flocks of the birds that overwintered there. It was a training unit for aircraft-carrier flying. I don’t know whether it can still be seen but the shape of a carrier’s landing deck was at one time outlined on the tarmac runway to train pilots how to land.

● We’ve picked the last rose of summer – a pink rose which flowered unexpectedly and sits in pride of place in a single stem vase where we can enjoy it. There will be

no more now for cutting to bring into the house, but a white patio rose which has flowered heavily since midsummer looks as though it will flower until Christmas.

● Regular readers of this column know of my enthusiasm for Scottish vernacular poetry. It wasn’t always so and my introduction to poetry was at school in the 1950s when Scottish poetry hardly appeared in Scottish schools’ curriculums. The English classical poets and their poems

such as Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray and Sea Fever by John Masefield were considered more suitable. Long narrative poems such as Horatius by Lord Macaulay, the three-verse The Lake Isle Of Innisfree by WB Yeats and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Lamplighter were what I grew up on.

I mention all this because I recently bought a book online called Old Chestnuts Warmed Up by John R Murray, which I

thought was going to be comic verse but surprisingly turned out to be an anthology of so many familiar poems from my school days.

It’s been a marvellous read and I recommend it to readers who, like myself, experienced classical poetry before they stumbled across the wealth of poetry that makes up the Scottish tradition.

So many familiar poems from my school days in the 1950s

FLOWING: The Balnagown River winds its way through tree-lined banks down to the Cromarty Firth. Picture by Angus Whitson.