Here it is https://castlebank.org

Drawing Room

Silver collection

Victorian ladies

A stair ornament

China cabinet

Guest bedroom with no bed as yet!

Rory’s room with bed under construction

My room and inherited real mink coat

Dining room chaos

The cats of Castlebank – we have named the statues Tora and Schrodi

More photos of basement to follow shortly.

All lives have their ups and downs, but broadly I can say that we have enjoyed living here.  Walking, wildlife, peace and quiet and probably more than anything else, the ability to go entirely your own way and live outside the rules of normal society.  By this, I don’t mean that I have been pushing tourists into the loch, but only that I have ignored official instructions on everything from Covid to bonfires.  No neighbours, no rules, no one to tell you what to do, where to go or what to say. Rare commodities in this day and age.

Still, all good things come to an end, and trying to analyse my feelings about leaving here, I feel a bit sad, but mostly excited about having new challenges ahead (there are going to be many of these).

So today the house was cleared.  Saphy was all ready to go (or thought she was – little does she suspect the three hour box journey which lies ahead for tomorrow)

Amber skulked around the house wondering where all the sleeping places had vanished to.

And then the removal men had gone, and all is emptiness and silence at Donich Lodge (well not really because R is staying here for a couple of weeks with Lucky until the buyers move in).

At the other side of the country, our car pulls up at Castlebank House.

This is the view from my new bedroom window.

So goodbye to the banks of the Donich from M and R plus Saphy and Amber. Best wishes to the new owners and to Lucky who is staying on with them.

My new blog will be at www.castlebank.org, and will detail our attempts to restore a grand Victorian property to its former glory. Watch this space.

With it having been so long since I saw the house, I had started to get nervous that it wouldn’t be as great as I had remembered.  But not to worry, it was every bit as good as I had thought back in February.

This is part of the walled garden.

On the bandstand in the park across the road we found this plaque.

The inscription reads that the bandstand was donated to the town of Cupar by Alice Black of Castlebank House in 1924.  This lady was the granddaughter of Alexander Black who commissioned and lived in our house.

We start moving out of Donich Lodge on Monday.

J was with me and had a little sit on Jack’s bench in the community garden.

But at the moment, I have to admit that my favourite and most beloved cat is our ex-stray Lucky.  When he turned up at our house two years ago he was starving, covered in ticks and almost completely wild.  Now he is a big soft mutt who rolls over on his back for tickles and loves his food so much that at certain times he looks a bit rotund.  But Lucky is wild at heart, and Lochgoilhead is his kingdom.  When the sun shines we are fortunate if we are graced with his presence for five minutes a day – he is off all over the village, mooching at tourist cottages and scaring dogs and out in the forests and hills.

So we are going to a huge house (4000+ square feet) with a huge walled garden.  It is all most cats could dream of, and I am sure the girls will be very happy there.  But to cut to the chase, it is still in a town, and there is a busy road about 150m away.  R and I have been over and over it in our minds, and with the greatest sadness we have to concede that if we take Lucky with us, there is every chance he will be killed on the road because he has never seen traffic.  Additionally, there is no wilderness for him to roam; he would just not be happy there.

But in spite of this, we had decided to take him, because we simply had no other choice.  And then we had the most extraordinary piece of luck – the lady who is buying Donich Lodge mentioned that not only did they have two cats already, but they were looking for a third.  So Lucky is keeping his home here, and getting a new set of friends to look after him.

So leaving him is going to break my heart, but at the same time, we know that we are doing the very best for him.

I will really, really miss him – he is some cat.

In the meantime, we are all up to our eyes in packing and everything looks as though a bomb has hit it.  It is hard to believe that when I came back to Scotland over thirty years ago, I had one backpack, and now I have a whole house full of stuff.  Even after giving away/recycling/scrapping loads of stuff, still it keeps on coming.  But we will doubtless get there.

The weather that was great for over a month, has now broken – the very day before the Lochgoilhead Gala day which was a bit of a pity.  The plants are pleased though.

Now all the ornaments are packed, Saphy has discovered the mantlepiece, and like everything else in the house she now has a packing label.

Anyway we went to the local Lidl to get our lunch (or I did because J is insisting on living on a diet of “things that must go before I move”.  I hope he doesn’t get either food poisoning or beriberi).  It is a real treat to go into a real shop and look at real food before you buy it, and Lidl has a great in store bakery and green grocery department.  I bought some strawberries, and apart from the fact that they are in a plastic box they are everything a perfect strawberry should be.  Ripe, sweet and delicious.

It just goes to show the benefits of eating seasonal and local – these came from Fife and tasted a million percent better than imported and air freighted ones from Morocco in January.  Some things are best when they are a treat at the right time of year from them.

She also had a mouse overnight and left it artistically posed on the kitchen floor.  In this respect she is better than Lucky who consumes parts of them and leaves the other parts in strategic parts of the lounge to be trodden on.

But they are back to some degree now.  First R saw a female out of his window.

And then a nice little stag.

I’m broadly glad to see them back.  I know their numbers can’t be let to grow out of control (and we eat quite a lot of venison as a result), but I think this last cull overdid it.  Anyway, they already destroyed my pear tree, and I don’t have any others small enough to be vulnerable to them.