Step inside the Royal Family’s Scottish home, and a Fair Isle knitter needs your help
[TOURS]
In a historic move, His Majesty King Charles III has invited guests inside the Royal Family’s Scottish holiday home for the first time since Queen Victoria and Prince Albert bought the estate and laid the foundation stone in 1853, after having fallen in love with it a few years before.
This summer will see the first lucky visitors join guided tours that will go through “several beautiful rooms within Balmoral Castle.” Previously, the Ballroom was the only room open to tours. As expected, tours are sold out this year, but it’s worth keeping an eye on the website so you can be at the front of the queue next year. balmoralcastle.com
[HERITAGE]
A Fair Isle-based knitter and crofter is on a mission to document every Fair Isle pattern that has been produced on the island since the 1850s.
Rachel Challoner (above), who lives on Fair Isle with around 100 sheep, and who volunteers at the island’s local George Waterston Memorial Centre and Museum, wants to create a lasting Fair Isle knitting resource. The hope is that it will revive interest in the dying craft – the number of knitters on the island has dropped by a third in the last year alone.
As well as contacting UK museums and collections, Rachel is asking for people to send her photos of any knitted items they believe have been knitted on Fair Isle specifically (not Shetland) or indeed of any knitting taking place on the island, which could help teach and inspire future knitters.
“As a knitter myself I am passionate about not only preserving the knitting heritage of the isle,” Rachel says, “but also ensuring its lasting legacy and that its unique traditions are continued and practised here in years to come.”
If you have anything you think could be of interest to Rachel, email her at thefairisleproject@hotmail.com or go to www.bee-croft.co.uk/about-4
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Words by KIRSTEN HENTON
OPPOSITE: An aerial view of Easdale, one of the Slate Islands lying off the Argyll coast
Sometimes my wife Kristina and I teasingly say we’re going to get our passports, have a holiday, and go across to the island of Easdale.
On a Saturday in summer it feels like the beginning of an adventure, and we’re spoiled since it’s hardly far from our home on the neighbouring Isle of Seil, but in truth it’s an easy enough journey for anyone visiting the west coast and staying anywhere close to Oban: nor do you even need the comfort and ease of a car.
The little bus from opposite the railway station in Oban trundles down several times a day to cross the famous ‘Bridge over the Atlantic’ to Seil, before winding its way on to Ellenabeich, from where you catch the ferry to Easdale. The walk to the ferry from the bus stop is all of a hundred yards, and anyway, you’ve no use for a car on Easdale since it doesn’t have a single road.
Ferry is perhaps too grand a word for the small open boat that curls passengers to and from Easdale Island in around three minutes. They’re an exciting three minutes all the same as this channel of water running between the islands is rich in marine life.
If you were to ask Drew, one of the boatmen, if he’d ever seen an otter here, he’d most likely roll his eyes and tell you rather about the day he hadn’t seen an otter.
That may be something of an exaggeration, but it’s
Spend a leisurely day in Easdale, one of Scotland’s Slate Islands, best known today for its rather unusual annual competition
Words by KENNETH STEVENHow a Hollywood lm released 70 years ago made America fall in love with Scotland all over again
The legendary Brigadoon feature lm, starring Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse, was released in the US 70 years ago this year, in September 1954. This timeless Hollywood hit, a screen version of a Lerner and Loewe musical that had taken Broadway by storm, directed by Vincente Minnelli, propelled a romantic portrayal of Scotland into the limelight.
The movie features huge set pieces of Scottish music and dance, including the balletic Heather on the Hill; an epic wedding celebration; and a lively ‘chase’ sequence. Distinctly dubious Scottish accents, skirls of bagpipes, lashings of tartan, blooming heather and burly Highland cattle emote a rose-tinted vision of Scotland in bygone days.
The plot centres around Tommy Albright (played by Gene Kelly) leaving the buzz of New York and a glamorous yet unful lling relationship and lifestyle, to stumble upon pure love in the wilds of Scotland. This simple narrative arc remains popular today, as the recent Scottish-American A Castle for Christmas demonstrates.
Brigadoon’s Gene Kelly and Van Johnson play two American tourists who end up lost on a hunting trip in the Highlands. In the mist they discover a mysterious magical village, frozen in time, that only appears for one day every century. Here, Kelly falls for local lass Fiona Campbell, played by Cyd Charisse, and nds an authentic soulmate.
For many viewers the burning question remains; is Brigadoon a real place that can be visited today? Sadly, the village is ctional, but in Ayr it’s possible to cross the Brig o’ Doon, celebrated in Burns’ poem Tam o’ Shanter Screen legend Gene Kelly did visit Scotland in 1953 to location hunt for the movie, but weather and costs led to lming taking place in the US. However, it doesn’t change the fact that the lm’s romantic depiction of Scotland created a love affair with the nation that’s still going strong seven decades later. S
In the final part of our series, we examine the reign of King James VI, who reigned Scotland for many years before becoming King James I of England and Ireland