Nearly there!

A quick update:

This will be the last time for sometime that the barn will be completely empty. Hanging is about to commence.

The floor, painted in ‘Sulky Plum’ or perhaps it is ‘Grumpy Grape’ actually works very well.  It has a velvety quality to it and I think looks rather elegant against the white walls.

The panels of hessian are to give textural background for pieces standing or hung in front of it, that may get lost against the stone walls.

We left the tack peg rails in situ ~ you can see the harness block here ~ and added shelves for craft work along this wall.

The Studio Barn's red door will be opening for visitors very soon.

Watch this space!

The Floor .......

One is of course indebted to ones daughter for her sterling efforts vis a vis the evacuation of the barns contents and the subsequent hosing down; all tasks well within the competence of said daughter. But when it comes to painting, the competence falls away. She is not alone in my family for an unerring ability to deposit an equal amount on her own person as well as the surface being addressed.


Don’t get me wrong, I have tremendous admiration for female painters. Michelle d’Angelo, who is perhaps more famous for her plumbing improvements to the Cistern Chapel than for her ceiling painting, is none the less a redoubtable dauber. Leonora Da Vinci is another distinguished female painter, who also invented the flying clothes airer, the wind driven mincer and the auto grater amongst many others. You will probably find their modern day equivalents in your kitchen drawer or sink tidy. Of course I have no way of knowing how much paint they got on themselves.

The Barn floor is currently receiving an experimental coat of paint. The experiment is in the colour rather than the application which is the traditional brush and slop method. Whilst in Mr Jewsons Builders Supplies Emporium upon other business, I had cause to remember the need for floor paint and was instrumental in having a 5 litre tin of “Drum Beat”, a colour chosen for its depth and warmth, a sort of dark mulberry, mixed expressly for me.

Imagine my dismay upon returning home and opening the tin to discover a bright pinky vermillion, quite repellent in any circumstances, and wholly unsuited to painting a floor. Being a resourceful man I duly added black emulsion, a variety of earth colour powders and waterblack dye. The resultant mix is now off any known colour chart. I am undecided about the result, which is either “Sullen Plum” or “Sulky Grape”. Applied to the floor it sucks up light and gives ones feet migraine. BUT we have percy-veered and painted about a quarter of the floor. Despite returning time and again to peer at it, it fails to gladden the heart. I think the technical term for this procedure is undercoat! though given the cost of paint it may well have to be the final colour. As a result of the various additional ingredients I now have a surplus amount of paint of a subtle and intriguing if sombre hue, any one wishing to paint out their lair is very welcome to the remainder, only carriage being charged.

We daren't publish a photograph just now in case it offends the eye!

Making Progress

Although I haven’t been very good at reporting on the barns converting recently, work on the barn has been going on a pace. Having done all the grotty stuff dad has taken over the reigns to do the stuff that needs a little more care and attention.

Some of the wooden walls and stalls and mangers have been removed to open up the space.

Then it began to go white, walls, stalls and the ceiling

painstakingly sprayed white. It has to be said that if I had been involved with this bit the floor would likely be sprayed white too!

The hebe at the back has been cut back – hard – so that the light can now come in through this back window and the bars smartly blackened.

It’s really beginning to take shape.

The electricity has been reconnected and three strip lights and umpteen plug sockets installed.

Dad oiled up the enormous gate and has re hung that, so that the gallery retains it’s barn-ness and enables us to change the interior space from time to time.

Panels have been hung on the far wall to make hanging pictures easier but they leave the wall exposed in between as you can see.

The stalls at the other end have had new tops to the partitions that echo the central one that you can see in the previous picture. The tethering chains have been blackened and re hung.

Through the square window

The barn has a smart new front door and over the next couple of days the floor will be painted. With just two weeks to go before we open it has been all hands on deck and I spent yesterday afternoon strimming (or ‘scalping’) the yard so that it looks tidy and mum has been potting up plants and arranging flower pots and tubs along the wall.

But the first visitors arrived ……..

.... And were promptly shooed back out again! There are other barns for nesting in, perhaps they can join the maternity (we’re still awaiting the new arrivals) ward in the Green barn. These large, and getting larger, ladies could do with some entertainment.

Leac na Barns

The oldest barn, now a tumbledown, dates from the late18th cent. and was part of a development that became North Leac na Ban (Lecknaban, Leachnaban,etc) of which the rent rolls say “These houses new built not very good” but they are still here in one guise or another.

It was a drying barn and has the distinctive triangular windows common to this part of Argyll (Arichonan, Kilmory Oib, and somewhere in the hinterland of Kilmartin) There is a central door on both sides, with the threshing floor in between to allow the prevailing wind to take out the chaff. The farm also has the remains of a drying kiln, so Argyll was wet then!.

Coming north to south the next barn is Angus’s barn called after a former tenant. It is a rebuild on the site of a house, and like the drying barn incorporates enormous stones at a height that suggests a massive ingestion of porridge.

The barn still has its cobbled floor and one end contains a bothy for the seasonal shepherd. It is also DRY and will be housing yet more STUFF when we run out of space in the others

Next to Angus’s barn is our oldest tree, a 250 year old Beech, sadly, suffering from honey fungus.

Then comes the drying kiln behind which is the “Fear Mor”, a colossal recumbent monolith weighing in at 14/16 tons.(the usual way!) Then the fank, built on the same plan as a house, and currently being snuggled up to by a derelict landrover (any anoraks, please contact),then

The Tractor Barn, is in what was South Leac na Ban and was originally a house with the end wall removed to provide access, it is in close association with the Green Barn, so called because of tin roof, also a house base, with the walls reduced to 3ft for use as an inby fank, the stone may well have gone into the Victorian Barn. We re-roofed it using an A frame that sits on the lowered walls.

This barn is currently being used as a maternity ward for our Herdwick ladies.

And so to the Victorian Barn, the subject of this blog, so called because of the proportions and the use of dressed stone in the facings, it may have been an improvement by the Poltalloch Estate, which was very keen on improving the lot of its tenants, not a course of action always appreciated by them.

Judging from the original fixtures it was a stable adapted to house cattle as well as a horse.

 At the turn of the last century there were three working horses.