Open doors

Backblip, Saturday
It was Open Doors today where lots of buildings throughout the country open their doors and let the Public in.We had seen that Cromarty House was one of them so we had emailed and reserved two tickets for a viewing at 11 o clock. We were a little early so had time to walk in the gardens.To be honest there was not much to see , a few statues .a flagpole where the castle used to stand and a couple of peacocks.We joined the rest of the party and Thomas , the son of the owner gave us an interesting tour . The house was built using parts of the castle and when the old owner wanted to ‘downsize ‘ in took up floors from the house to use in his new house leaving just the floor supports in some rooms until the current owners brought up planks of oak wood from Kent after the great storm / hurricane in 1987. The room shown here shows how black the rooms became from the sooty fires.The ceiling has been painted now, it had been completely blackened. The outline of previous paintings can be seen, behind which the wall paper was had an elegant golden pattern.The two doors either side of the room are false with just the wall behind them, a cheeky way of making it seem Grander and bigger than it actually is.Also there’s a tunnel between the rooms either side so that they could go between the two without seeing this soot covered room :)
A carved panel from the castle was in another room and you could see where people had carved their names and dates in to the windowpanes.
On to the Glass studios where Thomas’ Aunt creates a range of fused glass objects from place mats to splash backs.
We had a cup of tea in the garden of The Cheese Shop, in the sunshine and walked back past the harbour. Beautiful still water .We watched a huge ship manovouring some concrete, we were unaware that a hoopoe was probably right next to us !
We had lunch at Crofters in Rosemarkie, I had dressed crab and chips and very good it was too :)
In the evening we went to the Northern Meeting place in Inverness to see KT Tunstall, The Pretenders and Simple Minds, a great gig and even better as there is seating in the pavilion and shelter from the brief but heavy shower half way through.