Category Archives: Life-enhancing experiences

Life-enhancing Leadenham

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Leadenham House, Lincolnshire

Leadenham House, Lincolnshire

As you drive eastwards along the A17 from Newark-on-Trent, it’s difficult to miss seeing a splendid Georgian house sitting on the top of the escarpment.  This is Leadenham House.  Despite its prominent position, it was virtually invisible when the main road clambered up the slope to Leadenham village;  since the by-pass opened in 1995 it’s become an attractive landmark for travellers.

Built for William Reeve by Christopher Staveley of Melton Mowbray in 1792-6, the house has a cantilevered staircase said to be the work of John Adam, oldest of the three famous Adam brothers.  It was extended by Lewis Vulliamy in the 1820s, and the morning room, originally the kitchen, was decorated with antique Japanese rice-paper panels discovered by Detmar Blow in 1904

Leadenham House is open to visitors on a limited basis:  William Reeve’s descendant, Mr Peter Reeve, uses visitors’ fees to support the Lincolnshire Old Churches Trust.

Opening arrangements can be found at http://www.stately-homes.com/leadenham-house which cheerfully advises prospective visitors to “ring the front door bell, as they aren’t open in any sort of commercial sense and all the money they receive from visitors goes to a village charity, so there is nobody waiting expectantly for anyone to arrive”.

There is a fulsome description of the house and its owners at http://www.lincolnshirelife.co.uk/uploads/files/homes_and_gardens/homes-0106.pdf.

The other reason to visit Leadenham is much more freely open.  The George Hotel is my favourite pit-stop on journeys along the A17, whether for morning coffee or a sandwich lunch.  The pub prides itself on using beef from Lincoln Red cattle.

It also has a world-beating collection of seven hundred malt whiskies, collected since 1970.  Just think:  if you lived within walking distance you could go to the George for what Denis Thatcher referred to as a “tincture” every night for two years without repetition.  Ranged round the walls of the bar is a positive library of malt whisky.

The only down-side is that the prices of a single single malt range from £2.10 to £350.

The George website [http://www.thegeorgeatleadenham.co.uk] recommends the malt liqueur Drunkeld Atholl Brose [sic] which you can sip on its own or with fresh cream floated on top.

Denis Thatcher would have been appalled: he avoided ice because, as he said, it dilutes the alcohol.

(Drunkeld Atholl Brose – it seems – is really spelled Dunkeld: http://www.royalmilewhiskies.com/product.asp?pf_id=10000000000819.)

 

Streetcar survivors

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Market Street, San Francisco: streetcar 1055

Market Street, San Francisco: PCC streetcar 1055

San Francisco’s historic streetcars, which ply between Castro and Fisherman’s Wharf along Market Street and the Embarcadero, are an ironic survival.

Most San Francisco streetcar lines gave place to trolleybuses and motor buses after the Second World War.  A small number of routes survived because they used tunnels that couldn’t be adapted to non-guided vehicles.  By 1982 the transport authority, Muni, converted the remaining streetcar routes to light-rail and built a twin-level subway along Market Street with light-rail on the upper deck and the inter-bay, heavy-rail BART line below.

In that same year, the utterly worn-out cable-car system shut down for complete rebuilding over a two-year period.  In an attempt to maintain tourist interest, Muni, in conjunction with the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, ran some of the surviving streetcars along the Market Street surface tracks as a summertime tourist attraction.

These Historic Trolley Festivals were so successful that they were retained after the cable-cars returned in 1984, and from 1987 the Market Street lines were relaid and a fresh fleet bought second-hand from Philadelphia and Newark, New Jersey.

When the Embarcadero Freeway was demolished after the 1989 earthquake, opening up the harbour piers to the city centre, streetcar tracks were laid all the way from the Ferry Terminal, the focal point of the original cable-car and streetcar systems, past Pier 39 to Fisherman’s Wharf.

The current F-Market & Wharves line is a fully functioning component of the city’s public transport, serving the suburb of Castro as well as the tourist honeypots downtown.  A further E-Embarcadero line south from the Ferry Terminal reopened in 2015 but has remained suspended, initially because of pandemic restrictions, since 2020.

Most of the vehicles are the ubiquitous PCC cars, designed in the early 1930s and mass-produced until the 1950s, spacious, comfortable cars with impressive acceleration, painted in liveries from a range of American cities.  There are also some older vehicles, Peter Witt cars, originally designed for Cleveland and successfully exported to Europe.  These exceptionally noisy vehicles are from Milan, and still contain charming Italian notices inside – Vietato fumare, Vietato sputare, Uscita.  And, on special occasions, a historic fleet is wheeled out, including a 1934 Blackpool open “Boat” tram.

It’s ironic that, while San Francisco’s two successive light-rail fleets have been plagued by technical faults and remain far from popular with passengers, the seventy-year-old PCC cars and their older Peter Witt cousins trundle back and forth smoothly, fairly quietly and efficiently.

For practical information about the F-Market & Wharves streetcar service, see https://www.sfmta.com/routes/f-market-wharves or to indulge your inner anorak look up the cars at http://www.streetcar.org/streetcars.  The latter site belongs to the San Francisco Railway Museum, which is about streetcars, not railways, and is to all practical purposes a shop:  http://www.streetcar.org/museum/.

Halfway to the stars

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San Francisco cable car 6

San Francisco cable car 6

San Francisco is the city where “cable cars climb halfway to the stars”, and if you stand in the right place at night, they really do.

That the cable cars are indelibly linked with the visitor’s image of San Francisco is the cause of, but not the reason for, their survival.

The very first cable-hauled streetcars in the world, they were developed by a wire-rope manufacturer, Andrew Smith Hallidie (1836-1900), as an alternative to the inefficient and cruel horse-drawn streetcars that simply couldn’t cope with the city’s precipitous inclines.  His first line, on Clay Street, opened in 1873.  On the first run, the original gripman, a steam-locomotive driver (or – in American English – engineer) called Hewitt, lost his nerve at the brow of the hill, and resigned on the spot:  the first car was driven by Hallidie himself.

By 1894, 103 miles of cable-car track were in operation with a combined fleet of about five hundred cars.  In the recovery from the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fire, several cable-car lines were converted to electric operation.  Even so, electric streetcars were unequal to the 10% grades that cable-cars took in their slow but inexorable stride.  Only rubber-tyred trolleybuses eventually stood a chance of competing.

After the Second World War city politicians, supported by a powerful lobby of oil, rubber and motor-vehicle interests, aimed to close down the five surviving lines, but were ultimately defeated by the sheer weight of public-opinion.  In 1956 three remaining routes, comprising nine track-miles, gained legal protection by popular demand.  The system was designated a National Landmark in November 1964, and when it finally wore out was completely rebuilt in 1982-4.

To a modern eye the cars look absurd, but when you climb aboard they immediately make sense.  Because they attach to an underground cable running at a constant speed of 9½ miles per hour, they tackle the steepest inclines with as much equanimity as dead level, and crawl downgrade as steadily.

Riding the cable cars is an experience for the early morning:  after about 9.30am the crush is such that all you see sitting inside is buttocks.  Outside your view is often blocked by passengers standing on the running board.

There is a practical alternative to being crushed on a cable car.  San Francisco is festooned with trolleybus routes, operated by surprisingly noisy single-deck vehicles, some of them articulated.  They’re spacious, speedy, and effective as urban transport.  I learned years ago, when I bought a plastic salad spinner to dry lettuce, that the moaning sound I remember Sheffield trams making when I was a kid, which is also distinctive of the London Underground, is not in fact the electric motors but the gears.

The single-deck San Francisco trolleybuses, with their long trolley booms, also make a distinctive slapping noise overhead as they progress through junctions.  They’re nowhere near as noisy as the cable cars, though.  And totally clean, unlike their diesel cousins.

See http://www.sfmta.com/cms/mfares/passports.htm for further details of fares and visitor passes on Muni services.

Eat your way round San Francisco

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San Francisco Ferry Terminal

San Francisco Ferry Terminal

There’s no shortage of good food in San Francisco.  All you need do is avoid obvious tourist traps and eat where the locals eat.

If you ride the F-line all the way to its Castro terminus, you more or less fall into Orphan Andy’s, within yards of the streetcar terminus, where I ate a classic burger and fries for a little over $10, including a properly made pot of English Teatime tea.

Another time I tried the memorably named and nearby Squat & Gobble [http://www.squatandgobble.com] which offered good food (corned beef toasted sandwich) at a very reasonable price served with wit and panache.  If I lived in Castro I’d go there for brunch.

I ate Kobe (having first had to ask what it was) at the Market Bar [http://www.marketbar.com], at the magnificent Ferry Terminal on the Embarcadero.  Kobe, so Juan Carlo the waiter told me, is a special breed of cattle which the Japanese raise in idle luxury so that the animal does not develop much muscle:  apparently, they also massage the animal’s buttocks (while it’s still alive).  Once dead it is indeed exceptionally tender.

Wikipedia tells me [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobe_beef] that Kobe beef is from the black Tajima-ushi breed of Wagyu cattle, though in the USA it is usually crossbred with Angus to suit the American taste for darker meat.

Market Bar is a splendid lunch venue for people-watching and listening, in my case to a ball-busting lady executive laying into a male colleague in high-pitched staccato:  when she left it was, as my Yorkshire friends say, “like t’mill stoppin'”.  The restrooms are a long walk across the food hall, however:  when I nipped out to take precautions during a kitchen delay, an over-zealous waiter cleared my table and had to lay it again, to his embarrassment.

I also fancied, but did not have time to try, Butterfly [http://www.butterflysf.com] at Pier 33 on the Embarcadero, right next to the Alcatraz Cruise terminal.  This is not a recommendation, but a suggested alternative to the perfunctory, cheap and cheerful Alcatraz Landing Café, where I dined with a persistent pigeon that resisted the waitress’s attempts to drive it out with a water-pistol.

My adviser about Italian food in San Francisco, John Rozatti, recommended I eat at the Molinari Delicatessen [http://maps.google.ca/maps/place?oe=UTF-8&ie=UTF8&q=molinari+deli+san+francisco&fb=1&gl=ca&hq=molinari+deli&hnear=San+Francisco,+CA,+USA&cid=15255183613653254552&z=14] on Columbus Avenue.  When I went looking for it, after dark, I missed it because it closes at 5.30pm and I ended up instead people-watching in the front window of Pinocchio [http://www.trattoriapinocchio.com/about.html], eating an excellent fettucine con salmone with a glass of Montepulciano, an attractive red wine I hadn’t previously heard of.

John would no doubt still vote for Molinari:  he says, “order a number 8 (Renzo’s Special – request imported meat).  You will leave there (1) content and (2) full.”  I trust John:  he has Italian ancestry and a sister who lives in San Francisco.

Palimpsest of the Peak 1

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Chatsworth House, Derbyshire

Chatsworth House, Derbyshire

About fifteen years ago Andrew, 11th Duke of Devonshire, commissioned an extensive archaeological survey of the Chatsworth estate, a summary of which was published as John Barnatt & Tom Williamson, Chatsworth:  a landscape history (Windgather 2005).

It’s a revelation.

Chatsworth has, of course, been repeatedly written up, ever since the Bachelor 6th Duke produced his privately printed Handbook of Chatsworth and Hardwick in 1845.  The recent survey pulls together a full review of the archaeology and the estate’s enormous archive, backed by the evidence of maps, illustrations and modern photography.

This reveals a layered chronology of a significant area of the upland Derbyshire Peak back to prehistoric times.  In particular, since the mid-eighteenth century much of the landscape has been undisturbed, leaving evidence of prehistoric, medieval and early modern agriculture and industry that has been obliterated elsewhere in the county.

The shadowy presence of the great landscape designer, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, who is mentioned only once in the entire Chatsworth archive, is made clearer because almost all payments in the estate accounts were addressed to his “foreman” or contractor, Michael Millican.  Their work in creating the naturalistic landscape that stretches from Chatsworth House to the horizon began in 1759, financed to a great extent by the 4th Duke’s lucrative copper mine at Ecton in Staffordshire.

Another recent discovery is the complexity of the patterns of drives and roads around the estate.  It seems that the eighteenth-century landscape was primarily designed to be seen from and near the house, and largely enjoyed on foot, rather like the characters’ explorations of Mr Rushworth’s Sotherton property in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814).

During the early Victorian period, the time of the Bachelor Duke, the park was crisscrossed with wide drives, carefully contrived to give advantageous views.  Many of these have since been grassed over and largely forgotten.  It seems that in the Bachelor’s time visitors were encouraged to enjoy the mature landscape in the comfort of a carriage.

When I take groups to Chatsworth, particularly visitors from outside the UK, I make a point as the coach climbs the steep road (realigned in the early nineteenth century) from Beeley Bridge (1759) of explaining that everything within sight – buildings, grass, trees, water – is in fact contrived by man.  And you wouldn’t get planning permission for it now.  Especially as it lies in a National Park.

The portal for information about visiting Chatsworth is http://www.chatsworth.org.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Last resort in Norfolk

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Former Grand Hotel, Mundesley, Norfolk

Former Grand Hotel, Mundesley, Norfolk

As you drive along the tortuous coast road through the Poppyland area of north Norfolk, after passing through Overstrand, Sidestrand and Trimingham you may notice on the horizon two large Victorian hotels looming incongruously over the landscape.

This is Mundesley, a former fishing village that was aggrandised into a resort in the mid-1890s as the railway at last penetrated to this remote corner.  The station opened as the terminus of a line from North Walsham in 1898.  In 1908 it was extended through to Cromer Beach.  Its three platforms, each six hundred feet long, were never remotely necessary.  It closed in 1964 and is now virtually obliterated.

The East Coast Estates Company was established in the 1890s by an architect with the unfortunate name of Mr Silley.  Streets were laid out on the West Cliff and given the name Cliftonville.  Two brickworks opened.  The Clarence Hotel (1891), which is now a care home, and the Grand Hotel (Herbert John Green 1897), which is apparently being converted to apartments, stare out to sea, grandiose statements of opulence and unfulfilled ambition.  The Manor Hotel, built around an earlier dwelling to a design by John Bond Pearce in 1900, remains in business – http://www.manorhotelmundesley.co.uk.

Indeed, the most successful enterprise in Mundesley was the Sanatorium, opened in 1899 with an initial capacity of twelve patients, a fine timber prefabricated building by the Norwich architects Boulton & Paul.  This became the Diana Princess of Wales Treatment Centre for Drug and Alcohol Problems in 1997 and closed in 2009:  see http://www.derelictplaces.co.uk/main/showthread.php?t=18049, which links to http://www.derelictplaces.co.uk/main/showthread.php?p=182326#post182326.

One of its early patients was the golfer Harry Vardon (1870-1937), who laid out the Mundesley Golf Club [http://www.mundesleygolfclub.com] in 1901.  He was treated for tuberculosis in the Mundesley Sanatorium in 1903-4, during which time he achieved the only hole-in-one in his entire career.

Of the holiday towns along the Norfolk coast, Mundesley really is the last resort.  Though the population of this quiet place has continued to grow through the twentieth century, the visitors were always thin on the ground.  That’s its unique selling point.  It has a beautiful beach, beach huts, a quiet village atmosphere.  It’s the ideal place for an away-from-it-all British seaside holiday.  No tat.  No razzamatazz.  The real thing.  Enjoy!

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

Taking the train for tea

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Isle of Man Railway, Port St Mary Station: loco no 12 Hutchinson

Isle of Man Railway, Port St Mary Station: loco no 12 Hutchinson

My Isle of Man host John and I watched the Royal Wedding, toasted the happy couple in Sauvignon Blanc (because the island – or at least the island’s co-op – had apparently run out of champagne) and wondered what else to do for the afternoon, rather than watch Huw Edwards busking while waiting for something to happen.

We caught the steam train one stop, from Port St Mary to the end of the line at Port Erin, and went for tea at the utterly seaside Cosy Nook Café [http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g616277-d1863309-Reviews-Cosy_nook_cafe-Port_Erin_Isle_of_Man.html], walked back up the hill and took the same train back an hour later.  For £4.00 return, rather than £3.20 on the bus.

It is of course a delight to travel, even for a few minutes, in a wooden railway compartment with windows that let down on leather straps.

Even more, it’s satisfying to be able to use a Victorian heritage line as practical transport.

As we watched the red locomotive and carriages chug off towards Douglas, I remarked that this railway wasn’t designed to be cute.

When it opened in the 1870s this was practical modern transport, scaled down to the geography of the island.  It opened up towns like Port St Mary and Port Erin, and enabled people to travel across the island quickly and relatively cheaply for the first time.

The system of four lines, run by two companies, survived because it worked, and because the manager between the wars surreptitiously subsidised the steam trains from the revenues of the bus routes.

The routes to Peel and Ramsey eventually expired in the 1960s, and the remaining Douglas-Port Erin line was in effect nationalised in 1977.

It’s now heavily marketed as a tourist attraction, which rivals the bus-service in speed though not in frequency.  When the TT annually blocks the island’s road-system, it provides a much-needed commuter service.

Meanwhile the Peel and Ramsey trackbeds remain substantially intact as footpaths [see Walking the Manx Northern Railway].

Details of the Isle of Man Railway services services appear at http://www.iombusandrail.info/imr-steamrailway.html.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

No mushrooms – ever

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Grindleford Station Café, Derbyshire

Grindleford Station Café, Derbyshire

One of the finest, and simplest, eating experiences in Derbyshire is the full breakfast at the Grindleford Station Café.

Grindleford is the first station westwards on the Hope Valley Line, which carries passenger services between Sheffield and Manchester.  This line between Dore and Chinley was a late link in the Midland Railway network, opened in 1894.  The station building, like others on the line, is a standard design, built in timber with stone footings and chimneys.

Its interior has been altered, and for well over thirty years it has housed one of the truly great hikers’ pit-stops.  Whether you walk, cycle, motor-cycle or drive it’s a rest-and-be-thankful port-in-a-storm.  You can of course reach it by train with no more effort than walking the ramp up from the platform to the bridge;  if you’re really decadent you can arrive by car.  (The station is a mile north of the village of Grindleford, on the B6521 road to Fox House.)

It was founded and driven by Philip Eastwood, a man who affected a truculence which would have been noticeable in the grumpiest eateries of Lower Manhattan.  His notices are legendary:  “Don’t even think of asking for mushrooms”, “Unaccompanied children will be sold into slavery”, “This is a serving hatch, not a gawping hatch” and “If you want to be a fire guard, join the fire brigade”.

Inevitably, some innocent customers took exception to this, but astute reviewers recognise that nobody builds a successful business by hating customers.  Review comments on http://russelldavies.typepad.com/eggbaconchipsandbeans/2004/07/grindleford_sta.html describe the service as “charmingly grumpy”, “curt but helpful”, “so awful it was wonderful”.  The place is so special its Wikipedia entry contains irony: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grindleford.

Philip Eastwood Snr died in 2007 at the age of 63, dancing at a party, and his son, also Phillip, then aged nineteen, promptly gave up his business-management degree-course and his plans for an athletic career to take on the family legacy, much to the relief of the rambling community.

The café continues, and Phillip Jnr has added to the notices, but long-standing visitors will sense that the new management has a gentler temperament, and some of the heart has gone out of the truculence.  A Sheffield Telegraph writer [‘Station café still on track’, January 13th 2009] even spotted one that ended with the words “Thank you”.

For cholesterol-on-a-plate breakfasts and lunches with chips piled high there is nowhere finer anywhere in the Peak District.  Don’t use the loo without making a purchase, and if you want to check if the hair-dryer’s still working, ask for mushrooms.

Update:  Phillip and Kulbir Eastwood celebrated the forty-fifth anniversary of the Grindleford Station Café on October 27th 2018:  https://www.thestar.co.uk/news/how-much-loved-grindleford-station-cafe-has-survived-for-45-years-1-9410432.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

No sign of Mrs Rochester

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North Lees Hall, Derbyshire

North Lees Hall, Derbyshire

North Lees Hall, near Hathersage in Derbyshire, is a highly significant building, built for the Jessop family of Broom Hall who belonged to the sphere of influence of George, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, custodian of the captive Mary, Queen of Scots and long-suffering husband of Bess of Hardwick.

Many of the Earl’s associates built “high houses”, with tall turrets, gridiron mullioned windows and skied chambers and galleries.  The plasterwork at North Lees Hall includes the arms of the Rodes family of Barlborough Hall;  other families with Shrewsbury links and comparable houses included the Sandfords of Thorpe Salvin Hall and the Hewitts of Shireoaks Hall.

Because North Lees Hall was more or less continuously let from the mid-seventeenth century until after the Second World War it was hardly altered, but at times unoccupied.  Sometime before 1792 the tenancy came to one Thomas Eyre, whose descendants stayed here until 1882. Their occupation had an interesting effect:  a whole procession of scholarly visitors assumed a quite spurious connection with the ancient and prolific Catholic family of Eyre.  The resulting legends are extremely attractive.

A more famous connection came from the 1845 visit of Charlotte Brontë, who is often assumed to have based Thornfield Hall at least partly on North Lees in writing the novel she entitled Jane Eyre – “…three stories high, of proportions not vast, though considerable…battlements round the top gave it a picturesque look. Its grey front stood out well from the background of a rookery.”  She may have taken her heroine’s family name from the occupants, and named the nearby fictional village Morton after the actual landlord of the George Inn, Hathersage.

After the Second World War the house was neglected, and at one stage was used for storing grain.  It was converted it into holiday accommodation by Lt-Col Hugh Beach.  It was purchased by the Peak Park Planning Board in 1971, and in 1987 it was leased to the Vivat Trust, who restored and reopened it as self-catering holiday apartments in 1989.  A further restoration took place in 2002, and it is now let as a residence.

Other sites associated with Jane Eyre are described and illustrated at http://walk2read.com/books/jane_eyre.html.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Living in a pineapple

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The Pineapple, Dunmore Park, Scotland

The Pineapple, Dunmore Park, Scotland

Some time ago, I stayed with some mates for a week in the Dunmore Pineapple, near Stirling, one of the most appealing of the many delightful holiday experiences provided by the Landmark Trust [http://www.landmarktrust.org.uk/].

I don’t like the pseudo-architectural term “folly”, because the builders of strange buildings usually had (indeed, have) their own reasons for spending their money as they wish, but the Pineapple is most certainly one of the oddest architectural statements in the whole of the British Isles.

The Pineapple marks the entrance to the south-facing 6½-acre kitchen garden of Dunmore Park.  The sixteen-foot-high brick retaining wall on the north side incorporated furnaces to heat glasshouses to grow expensive, exotic and highly prized fruit which marked the wealth and status of an aristocratic host.

The lower part of the structure, incorporating a scrupulously correct Palladian archway entrance, was built in 1761 for John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore (1732-1809).

He became the last, contentious royal governor of Virginia between 1771 and 1776, and ultimately returned to Scotland, having lost control of the colony.

Because the two halves of the structure, the garden entrance and the pineapple, are built from exactly the same stone and there is a 1761 date-stone, some historians have assumed that is the date of the whole structure.  Atop the cool classicism of the entrance, the octagonal gazebo segues into the pointy doors and windows of eighteenth-century Gothick, and then simply sprouts into a forty-five-foot-high pineapple.

It’s likely that, in conformity with the sailors’ custom of placing a pineapple on the gatepost on returning home from the tropics, Lord Dunmore had the elaborate and skilfully constructed pineapple gazebo built above the entrance to his kitchen garden sometime after his return in 1777.

The pineapple itself is a superb piece of craftsmanship, with each of its leaves individually drained to prevent frost-damage.  Folly it certainly isn’t.

It’s a diverting place to stay, even though you have to step outside to get from bed to breakfast, and the foxes tend to grab their breakfast from the dustbin.  The interior of the octagonal gazebo is entirely circular in plan, which my guitar-playing mate proved has resonant acoustics.  You could probably hear his eighteenth-century amplification a mile down the road in Airth.