Podcast

Transcript

Four speakers: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Celia Thornqvist [CT]; Robyne Calvert [RC]

[MV]
Love Scotland, brought to you from the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird.

[JB]
Hello. Today we’re stepping back to Edwardian Glasgow, when the second city of the Empire was a bustling centre of trade, commerce and innovation … and tea. Tea and lunch rooms for workers, for gentlemen and for ladies who needed somewhere respectable to dine unchaperoned, were becoming more popular. Competition was intense. You had to be inventive to lure customers who were spoiled for choice. Enter Kate Cranston, a tiny woman with big ideas.

Kate was a trailblazing entrepreneur. By the end of the 1800s she owned 3 tearooms, but as she launched her fourth – the Willow on bustling Sauchiehall Street – she wanted something special. The architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh already had a hand in the interiors of her previous business, but for the Willow, she gave Charles and his artist wife Margaret the opportunity to design the building inside and out.

The couple were at the peak of their talents, and they provided an establishment so striking it left its patrons gasping and the local newspaper raving about ‘a marvel of the art of the upholsterer and decorator’. Well, I can understand how those early visitors felt as I am taking tea right now in the Willow’s luxurious surroundings.

Early in 2024, Mackintosh at the Willow became part of the National Trust for Scotland’s portfolio of heritage properties, and it is a stunning addition. But the fact it’s still here is down to another trailblazing, no-less-determined entrepreneur – Celia Sinclair Thornqvist – who is one of my teatime companions today. Welcome, Celia.

[CT]
Thank you, Jackie.

[JB]
Now, we are a threesome. My other guest is a friend of the podcast, cultural historian Robyne Calvert, who was our guide through the life of Margaret Mackintosh in a previous episode. Hello again, Robyne.

[RC]
Hello, Jackie.

[JB]
I have to say, I feel we’re all decidedly underdressed today. We should be wearing hats. It’s that kind of place. Now, Celia, before I ask about your remarkable part in all of this, Robyne, as a Mackintosh specialist, can you describe the room we’re in right now?

[RC]
It’s a jewel box. It’s a lovely square jewel of a room. You enter through double doors. The doors are black and white stained glass on the outside, and you walk through to the colour interior. That stained glass pattern repeats around the room in mirrors, in purple leaded glass, and across a bay front window.

Inside we have a series of tables and chairs set, some of them brought together for larger groups as well. Beautifully set with, of course, blue and white Willow china.

[JB]
We are, of course, taking tea. I’ll just clank a little bit to prove it!

[RC]
Absolutely, you have to.

[JB]
What’s the room called? Is it Salon de Luxe [rhyming with books] or Lux [rhyming with lucks]?

[RC]
I say Salon Deluxe.

[JB]
Celia, you know.

[CT]
Salon Deluxe.

[JB]
There we go. And what was this room used for?

[RC]
It’s the slightly posher place to have tea. The whole entire tearoom is absolutely beautiful. Anywhere you sit is wonderful. But this place, elevated above the street level, was maybe where you might want to spend a little bit more, to get a slightly nicer atmosphere. I can’t recall though – was the menu actually different in the upstairs section than downstairs?

[CT]
It was, and tea was 1 pence more, which is equivalent to £7 nowadays.

[JB]
£7! Was this for women only upstairs?

[CT]
Yes, this was just for ladies. It was very early in the days where ladies would entertain outwith their home, and one of the reasons they were able to do so were that there were facilities for ladies here – ie a very nice powder room.

[JB]
Which was quite rare at the turn of the century, wasn’t it?

[CT]
It was extremely … it didn’t exist, actually, because it was a very male culture. But she did accommodate the men as well, because above here is a billiard room and the men had a smoking room. They had their own toilets. Every newspaper and magazine of the day was refreshed every day. But more importantly, what this entrepreneurial lady did was install a telephone. There were hardly any telephones in Glasgow at that time, so that enticed the business gentry in, to conduct business.

[JB]
She had the aesthetics and she had all mod-cons. What I’m going to do is I’m going to jump ahead in time and then we’ll go back in time, because the Willow opened in 1903 to huge fanfare. As the years passed and as demand for tearooms diminished, it was sold. It became part of a department store and then had various owners. And then later in the 20th century, despite its priceless design heritage, it fell into terrible disrepair. Now Celia, that is roughly when you became involved, or slightly later than that. Tell us what it was like when you came across the Willow and what was happening to it.

[CT]
Well, it was simply being traded as an investment on a commodity. An A-Listed building but nobody seemed to care about it. If one went to the top floor, you needed an umbrella if it was raining; rain was coming through the roof. Lots of dry rot; the plumbing and electrical was dangerous. We were all amazed that it hadn’t gone on fire. It had had a jewellery shop on the ground floor, and they had just boarded up fireplaces and all sorts of things just to create shelving and storerooms and so forth. It was a shadow of its former self.

[JB]
So why did you decide to become involved? You were a businesswoman.

[CT]
I think I’m a mad woman!

[JB]
You bought the building.

[CT]
I bought the building.

[JB]
Is it in the public domain how much you paid for it?

[CT]
Well, in all I have personally gifted £1.2 million into this [Crikey!] and to restore it. And the reason, as you say, yes I was a businesswoman, but I was also very interested – and am still very interested – in the arts. I was a trustee of the Glasgow Art Club and because of my business experience, I supervised the restoration of the art club.

The gallery, front doors and various other things in the art club were Mackintosh’s first bit of work when he was an apprentice with Keppie. But usual practice was that the partners would put their names on the drawings, so he doesn’t feature on the drawings. And it was then I heard that the Original Willow Tea Rooms were in deep trouble. If we hadn’t done what we did do, I think a lot of this would have been lost.

[JB]
OK, so very glad you decided to step in. I feel, Robyne, this is a tale of two periods, of course, and of two determined women. Celia, we have with us, and the shadow of Miss Cranston looms large. Can you tell me about our trailblazing entrepreneur?

[RC]
I’d be delighted. She was born in 1849 and grew up as part of a family that actually was already involved in catering in hotels. By the time she was born, her father owned a hotel in George Square and the cousins of her father were part of the Cranstons in Edinburgh, who ultimately started a chain of hotels, the Waverley Temperance Hotel.

A lot of this is already fundamentally tied into the Temperance movement, which of course helps us give boom to tea trade. She grows up in this family. She grows up seemingly supporting her father ultimately, because her mother dies when she’s 18. Supporting her father in the business, she clearly learns the business trade through being part of this family. And ultimately, one of her brothers goes off to start his tea business, Stuart Cranston’s, and she seems to be involved in that as well as that carries on.

He’s credited with starting the tearoom, generally speaking. The idea of going into a catering establishment, actually sitting down for a cup of tea, started when he started selling sample cups and offering pastries with it. Her father had owned a bakery previously. They grew up in, like I said, a family that was used to the catering establishment and working with the public.

[JB]
I know there’s some debate as to whether Glasgow was indeed the forerunner, because some people say it was … Perhaps outside London, I think it was. It had a big part of the tea movement. In fact, there is a book – it’s the definitive book about tea in that era – A Social History of Tea by Jane Pettigrew. Here’s a quote from it; well, this is from the 1903 Builders’ Journal and Architecture Record – get your copies here now. And it is:
‘Glasgow is a very Tokyo for tea rooms. Nowhere can one have so much for so little, and nowhere are such places more popular or frequented’.
So, there was a market there and the Cranstons grabbed it.

[RC]
Definitely. This is also, in the 1870s, when Stuart Cranston and all of these things are kicking off with tea, Glasgow becomes a great competitor for the tea trade with London. Her brother Stuart actually, I think, started off as a merchant for Twinings and Tetley originally. He establishes his business and also he becomes quite a tea connoisseur. Part of that tea sampling is about educating the public on different types of tea and things like that.

We don’t have loads of information about Catherine Cranston. She herself didn’t leave personal journals and everything, but luckily in her case she does become such a well-known figure in Glasgow and popular person, there are lots of accounts of her later on.

[JB]
I think what we do know is that she was a leader of trends, Celia, and second best would not do for her teams.

[CT]
No, absolutely not. I have a view that many women in that era were entrepreneurs and they were never written into history. 58% of all people in the whole of Scotland were employed by companies with less than 10 employees. It was a family business culture and I think that’s where she came from. And so when she set up her own businesses, she was very concerned to look after her staff. She trained them. Mind you, I think she was a hard taskmaster.

[RC]
She was a taskmaster.

[CT]
They had to show their nails were clean and so on.

[RC]
But fair. So many of the people who were interviewed later on really spoke very fondly of her, certainly, and several of them went off to start their own tea establishments. She mentored them in business. But I think something Celia said is really interesting. I’ve always thought there’s a real close connection with her as a woman entrepreneur and women artists of the time, because both of these are hidden histories. Both of these are, you know, if a woman got married, she’d stop being an artist and she might stop working as well, or she would work behind the scenes and not get that recognition. I think one of the really interesting things in the early part of her trading in the tearooms, she did do her business licences and even some of her menus as C Cranston.

[JB]
I think that was commercially advantageous. And we mustn’t forget, even though she billed herself Miss Cranston, she’d married in 1892 – she was 43 years old – to an engineer, eight years younger than she was.

[RC]
And she slightly fudged her age on things, a little bit. To be fair, it was only four years.

[CT]
So, she was very modern. She had a toy boy.

[RC]
A little bit, a little bit. But yes, you’re right! She did and the fact that she wasn’t going to change her name – her business is established, it’s her brand. It was already there.

[JB]
She dressed differently, didn’t she?

[RC]
Oh yes, she did. This is, of course, my favourite thing about her. She dressed – the way I always talk about this – she dressed in vintage clothing. Basically, the way in which we think about people who are a bit edgy now and they might wear something that’s from the 50s or something even from, I guess, the 80s and 90s now we’re getting to an age! She was wearing the clothing of her youth, really. The dresses that she wears are staunchly 1850s/1860s.

[CT]
Sounds like me!

[JB]
She was in high Victoriana.

[RC]
She was! She would wear a full hoop skirt with crinoline and a short jacket or top that came in a V at her waist. And this is 1850s/1860s. But what I think is really interesting about it, in the details, is that she was wearing vintage dresses, at this point about 20–30 years out of date. But she mixed it up, because she wore these really interesting hats like pillbox hats and hats with roses and even a bowler. She was described as wearing a bowler. The hats are a bit more bang on trend.

There’s a term we use in this side of things now called ‘history bounding’, where you’re borrowing things from the past but mixing it up in new ways to make your own sense of style. She was doing this in 1900, walking through the streets of Glasgow.

[JB]
Well, I can add to that because I have a quote from a letter from the architect Edwin Lutyens, who paid a visit in 1897, and it must have been to the Buchanan Street Tea Rooms, which had interiors by Mackintosh. Lutyens wrote: ‘It is very elaborately simple, on very new school, high art lines. The result is gorgeous and a wee bit vulgar. [How very dare you!] It is all quite good, just a little outré.’

But then he came back the following year and he met Kate, who was about 48 at the time. He said, ‘A dark, busy, fat wee body [Tell it like it is, Edwin, why don’t you?] with black, sparkly luminous eyes, wears a bonnet [There you go, Robyne] garnished with roses and has made a fortune by supplying cheap, clean foods and surroundings, prompted by the new Art School of Glasgow.’ It was in its first phase then, which is just a stone’s throw from here.

So, she was an opportunist. She realised that the Mackintosh style was on the up and she wanted to capitalise on it.

[RC]
I think this is really important too, because this idea of her dressing in a way where she’s mixing up vintage with the new, I think is absolutely in line with the way in which she spots Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style. Because in that work there’s a kind of historicism, but there’s also an exoticism and it’s turned out in a way that makes it incredibly unique and new.

I think her own aesthetic taste just very much is in line and marries up. And the fact that she basically does give Mackintosh free rein; I mean, she’s the ultimate client for him. She lets him go. I’d love to hear some of their conversations, but you sit in a room like this and you know his work, you know the work he was doing in partnership with Margaret, of which this room definitely I think her presence is felt here.

[CT]
But he didn’t like this Willow pattern.

[JB]
The Willow pattern tea set that we’re enjoying our tea in just now?

[CT]
That was a big argument, apparently. He wanted a more simple white with black art nouveau design on it, and he wanted to keep it very simple. If you look at the cutlery, that’s an exact replica of the original Mackintosh design cutlery.

[JB]
And that is his hallmark, isn’t it? He designed everything to the finest detail.

[CT]
But he was not allowed to have his way with the china.

[JB]
We have described this very determined woman. We have a man and his wife: two designers who are at the top of their game. Move on about 100 years and the tearoom is a wreck. We have to take a break soon. But before we do, Celia, one question to you. You came in here; you could have just given the place a facelift. You didn’t go down that route. You decided to do it impeccably, to the detail. Why did you do that?

[CT]
Well, that’s the sort of person I am; if you’re going to do something, do it absolutely properly. And I felt it was such an important project that I felt it had to be absolutely correct in every detail. Otherwise, perhaps the academics like Robyne here, and others, would say, why did she bother? It’s Mock-intosh; it’s not Mackintosh.

[JB]
Alright. Well, we’ll talk about the detail and the trials and tribulations of that incredible restoration in a moment, but we’ll take a break and we’ll be back soon.

[MV]
Scotland’s history. Think battlefields. Think castles. Think great glens and historic homes. But think tenements too. And townhouses and doocots, mills and humble cottages.
The National Trust for Scotland works hard all year round to safeguard the stories of all sorts of Scots for future generations to enjoy.
They do it for the love of Scotland and you can play your part too. Just head to nts.org.uk

[JB]
Welcome back. My guests today, with whom I’m taking tea, are cultural historian Robyne Calvert and saviour of the Willow Tea Room, Celia Sinclair Thornqvist. Celia, we’re talking now the restoration and how painstaking and detailed it was. You had teams of specialists, handmade furniture. Tell us a bit about that process. How many chairs, for example? We’re in a room today with about 25 chairs, but there’s a vast tearoom downstairs. How many chairs in all, for example?

[CT]
Almost 250.

[JB]
And for those familiar with the Charles Rennie Mackintosh style, it’s the very slim, high-backed, beautifully upholstered here in purple, chairs.

[RC]
Slightly uncomfortable!

[JB]
Slightly uncomfortable, yes, it has to be! But they were measured to the millimetre, keeping them correct.

[CT]
Yes, they were. We went out to tender throughout the United Kingdom, and once we got the tenders back, then a group were invited to the Glasgow School of Art and the Hunterian to view the chairs that they have, measure them, examine them and so forth, which they did. Some of them said it was like sitting a school examination! Then there was a blind review for the Salon de Luxe, where we are today. It was narrowed down to two firms.

The chairs that we’re sitting on at the moment, you think they’re silver but actually they were gold. It’s quite a process. They were lacquered; they were then lacquered in gold. And then the finish on these chairs is powdered aluminium and it was all powdered on like gold leaf, but it was aluminium.

[JB]
There’s a lovely story about the upholstery in terms of attention to detail.

[CT]
The colours here are really important because that’s what Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald were about: colours, design. Really important. So, we searched. I brought in most of the Mackintosh experts, and they formed a group that advised the Board of Trustees because there were two elements of this project. There was the actual construction and behind-the-scenes work, which was massive. I mean, this bow window that we’re looking at just now, we found that, in a well-intentioned but awful restoration in the early 70s, that window had been moved 9 inches in.

The outside of the building, Mackintosh had the design that it was smooth – there were no ledges, no gutters. That in itself was a big challenge for us with climate change and the amount of water coming down off the roof. But what we found was, for example, they had moved the window but there was no structure holding the rest of the building up. They’d taken the structure away and not replaced it. So, it was the glass that was holding up the upper floors.

So, we moved the window back out, reinstated the whole structural elements of the building so that the proportions were absolutely right. We did that with the shop front downstairs as well. We could tell; we had a loan of a chair from the Glasgow School of Art, and we sat it at the window. By comparing that to old photographs, we could tell that the measurements weren’t correct, that the window had actually been altered. That was all resolved. You don’t see it, but there’s one absolutely massive Douglas fir beam reset, holding the shop front downstairs, holding that in place.

[JB]
It has to be said that the cost of this was considerable, in addition to your own personal input, and it was thanks to a lot of grants from a lot of very generous trusts. You worked very hard to get that. Let’s move on to the upholstery.

[CT]
We were looking at the interior fabrics and we were sure from all descriptions it was purple. There’s a lot of different shades of purple!

[JB]
Because you only had a few black and white photographs to go on.

[CT]
We did! Whenever we had German visitors here, I used to thank them, because without them and their art magazines at the time – Dekorative Kunst and so on – we wouldn’t even have had the black and white photographs. But the colour, which was very, very important to us, we found that in the Hunterian Museum. Margaret Macdonald’s work box was there, with all its original bits and pieces in it. And we found a piece of the original purple velvet.

[JB]
In a museum, in Margaret Mackintosh’s workbook.

[RC]
That’s her little sewing box. I remember looking at that when I was first a student here. What’s really cool about it is there’s a heart cut out of it. There’s cut pieces. I remember sitting there trying to imagine what she’d made from that box years ago. And then when I found out that that was the colour and that’s how you found it, I loved it so much.

[CT]
We sent that cutting to an expert. We’ve used experts all over the world actually, and we identified the exact manufacturer of the velvet and it was Italian, and they still exist. All of this velvet that you’re sitting on and looking at today came from Italy from the original supplier.

[JB]
That’s extraordinary. And there’s another tale that you must tell about the glass. It’s a marker of Mackintosh, isn’t it? The glass, the use of colour, the refraction in his work.

[CT]
Yes, when we were restoring the glass, because much of the glass that you see here today is all original, and so there was a lot of conservation work. In the billiard room, which is quite masculine, we had one piece of central blue glass missing. Brian, our glass maker, said to me, ‘well, Mackintosh always ordered more material than he required, but he would only pay for what he used.’

[JB]
Canny Scot!

[CT]
And he said he was third or fourth generation and had inherited his grandfather’s workshop. He said, ‘I’m going to do a search’. And he walked in a couple of days later and said to me, ‘Look what I’ve got for you’. And it was a brown – sounds like one of the films – a brown paper package tied up with string! It was filthy and written across it was CRM. He put it down and he opened it, and there was one piece of the original blue glass for the billiard room, which Mackintosh had not used. And so, we were able to put that back and we were just so thrilled with that.

[RC]
What did you feel like when you opened that and saw it? That is just one of those dream moments.

[CT]
Yeah, it was. It was absolutely amazing. I still think it’s amazing. It’s something I’ll always remember because it brought all of us … remember, we’re working in dirt and we’re in work clothes and boots and so on .. and then to have these things and see them, it brought us really close to Mackintosh, to Miss Cranston. We did feel very much at one with them. We often said that we think he’s smiling down on us!

[JB]
Oh, that’s a nice thought.

[CT]
So, that was that. That was good.

[JB]
What became of Miss Cranston’s empire?

[RC]
Well, it did quite well for a while and in fact she carried on commissioning Mackintosh. When Mackintosh was struggling and they had left, in fact, Glasgow, he was still looking for work.

[JB]
So, we’re talking 19 …

[RC]
Around 1910/12, and then in 1914 he does designs for another room here, the Dugout, which was downstairs in the basement and it’s like jazz – it’s very, very forward-looking. It’s very colourful but it is called the Dugout because of the war. She tries to give him commissions here and there where she can, but there’s only so many rooms. She does remodel rooms in other of her tearooms and he gets those too, but there’s only so much you can do.

And then of course everyone is struggling. It’s an economic crisis in Britain. Building new buildings, there isn’t a lot of money for that. Also, I think Margaret Macdonald actually writes to their friends Hermann and Anna Muthesius, she says in a letter, she makes a joke about how Mackintosh tearooms are popping up all over town. That’s your Tokyo for tearooms. That would be the Mock-intosh popping up everywhere. So, it’s a struggle for him, but it just also shows the kind of proliferation that’s going on.

But the business is doing fairly well. They’ve done very well. When she marries John Cochrane, they move out to Barrhead. They have a very rich social life. He becomes Provost eventually. They’re very active, but they have a very close and loving relationship. He incidentally was a bit of a dandy and liked dressing up as well. He was known for this. They have a very rich life together. But he does die somewhat suddenly in 1917. He becomes ill. He gets a growth in his mouth – it sounds like it’s cancer. And he goes into care very rapidly in October and about 3 weeks later he’s gone, and she’s devastated. She does carry on wearing black, we think, for a lot of her life. Some people draw a lot of parallels between her and Victoria, actually, in that way. She starts selling off bits of her business a little at a time.

[JB]
It sounds like she didn’t have the heart for it after her husband died. She eventually died in 1934. She was aged 85, a very wealthy woman.

[RC]
Very wealthy. And she does live on for quite a while after him, but if you think about her age, I think about my age and relationship. She’s in her 40s when she starts doing the whole tearoom thing. Actually, she’s had a rich career and then she does it for quite a while and then she goes on and sells off the bits of business. She does move ultimately into a hotel again at George Square. So where she’s born, she goes back there.

[CT]
She had dementia, I think, sadly.

[RC]
That’s what I was going to say. Ultimately, she does end up having dementia. She moves into a flat in the Southside, ultimately.

[JB]
But what she does with her wealth is something that she is remembered for. She bequeathed two thirds of her fortune to Glasgow’s poor.

[CT]
Yes, and this has always puzzled me. Where did the money go? What was it used for? There’s no memorial. There’s nothing that records that. The only reason we know about this is because of the work we’ve done here, which prompted the research.

[RC]
I was just thinking about this last night, the exact thing that you said – where is her legacy? I mean, her legacy is obviously here. This is a beautiful monument to it. And one of the things I love about the work that Celia and this huge team has done, not only bringing the tearoom back to life absolutely brilliantly – and yes, as an academic, I fully approve of the approach.

[CT]
I’m pleased to hear it!

[RC]
But the story of Kate Cranston being told, of women’s history, of the power of that. Because, honestly, I want a statue of Kate and her dress somewhere in the city. I would love to do something like that.

[CT]
Yes, I do. I had wanted to start a fund …

[JB]
I think you’ve done enough! I think in terms of my input, I’m already thinking of the next podcast, which is the mystery of Kate Cranston’s missing millions. Where did they go? You talk, Celia, about the utter joy of finding the piece of glass. What do you think Kate Cranston would think of the place today, and of your work? The fact that more than 100 years on, it’s here, it’s a tearoom. You can come, you can enjoy the aesthetic, and you can take tea. Does that ever cross your mind?

[CT]
Oh, it does. I think she would be very, very pleased with it. I think she and Mackintosh would be extremely happy to know that what they’d created, the work was so valuable, beautiful, understood, that it had been taken on. This tearoom and this building has been so well restored. The restoration that you don’t see is behind the walls and then the roof. It’s here for another 100 years. Robyne, what is your view? Do you think that Charles Rennie Mackintosh would be as famous as he is now, had it not been for Miss Cranston?

[RC]
No, but a good comparison is we have a lot of really important buildings in the city which are neglected and not looked after by other architects. Some are in the National Trust property, like Thomson, which they’ve done a big work on. But people like James Salmon. Mackintosh might be another Thomson, another Salmon or something like that. It’s exactly what you said that in Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration and Dekorative Kunst and The Studio, the tearooms were reproduced. And it was not just the Willow, it was all the work he’d done at Ingram Street that went on to the Vienna Secession exhibition. This was all reproduced, as you say, in design magazines.

Now, those are niche to be honest with you. I don’t think these places were super-famous internationally at the time, but the legacy of them that’s been captured is what makes it important. And so, when we look at Mackintosh today, it is 100% the Tea Rooms that are a very critical piece of his work. I’d have to argue alongside the Glasgow School of Art, but definitely I think what’s really important about the Tea Rooms is, as we were saying before, I feel like it’s the one place – outside of the blue and white china – that he was really just given that rein and, it seems, without constraint of budget. I imagine there was some budgetary-like discussion, but he seemed to have so much freedom. She seemed to see some kind of artistically kindred spirit with him and Margaret Macdonald, to let them go where he was reined in in other places or maybe didn’t have that freedom.

[JB]
We had a fusion of a group of visionaries. We had Margaret and Charles who were ahead of their time in terms of design, and Miss Cranston, a female entrepreneur, likewise. And I think that’s a great note on which to end. Robyne, thank you very much for your artistic insight. And Celia, thank you for saving what is truly a national treasure. The Trust is so very grateful and we will look after it and it will be here, I can guarantee that, in 100 years from now.

And if you would like to step back in time and visit Mackintosh at the Willow and even take lunch or tea here, details and opening times are on the Trust website nts.org.uk

Here at the Salon de Luxe, hats aren’t mandatory but you might feel that you need one. This wonderful spectacle will be protected thanks to your membership. And if you would like to make a donation to help the Trust care for Scotland’s heritage and its wild places, just go to nts.org.uk/donate

Now, I must get my bonnet. My chauffeur is at the door. Until next time on Love Scotland, goodbye.

[MV]
Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions, on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird.
For show notes and more information, go to nts.org.uk and don’t forget to like, subscribe, review and share.