Facelift puts Disney castle in the pink

Published on Saturday 10 October 2009 19:58

THE pink castle that inspired a Walt Disney fantasy has been restored to its former glory after two years under wraps.

Craigievar, in Aberdeenshire, has been obscured by scaffolding while its owners replaced a 30-year-old harl that had made it distinctly off-colour.

The replacement harl, made with traditional lime mortar tinted by natural earth pigments, has now returned the 17th-century A-listed structure to its former eye-catching pink.

Disney, the feted American film-maker, is believed to have based his design for his famous fairytale castles on Craigievar after seeing pictures of the Scottish building. The design has now been reproduced in Disneylands around the world.

The scaffolding of the real castle, five miles south of Alford, was finally removed last week and the structure will reopen to the public next spring.

Daphne Rose, the property manager at Craigievar for the National Trust for Scotland, said the restoration project has been a "fascinating and rewarding experience".

"I believe a project such as this represents the essence of conservation, at once preserving the building and restoring its harl to what would historically have been used," she said.

"The work makes it more likely that future generations will be able to respect and enjoy Craigievar more or less exactly as it looks today."

The new-look Craigievar has seen the removal of cement-based harling applied during the castle's last facelift in the 1970s. While this harl was thought to be best for the job at the time, it is now known that covering a building with cement acts to trap water inside its walls increasing the dampness and humidity of the interior.

The 500,000 reharling project began in November 2007, closing the famous castle to the public for two seasons. Free-standing scaffolding had to be erected, with supporting poles encased in concrete blocks reinforced with buttressing, so the castle exterior would not be damaged.

During the painstaking operation cement harl was removed by hammer and chisel, with mechanical tools restricted to reduce vibration damage to the plaster ceilings. Several thin layers of lime harl were then applied to the walls, which were draped in tarpaulins and hessian to prevent them from drying out too quickly.

Additional repair work saw some missing decorative stonework replaced, while other repairs were made to the roof and the windows. Internally, the castle's collection was stored, photographed and assessed.

The fresh lime gives Craigievar a different look. While the previous harl gave the building a reddish orange appearance, the new outer coat means the castle is now noticeably pinker and nearer to the colour of the last lime harl in the mid 19th century.

One discovery made during the refurbishment is that the 17th-century castle actually has a 16th-century tower house lurking inside.

The earlier structure was built by the Catholic Mortimer family, but the castle took its familiar, iconic shape after being bought in 1610 and built on by William Forbes, whose family was devoutly Calvinist.

Forbes not only added an extra storey and many of the building's ornamental sculptures, but also demolished the castle's chapel.

The castle-within-a-castle was mapped by archaeologists, who took advantage of the scaffolding to scan the castle with lasers to create a 3-D model.

Shannon Fraser, the National Trust for Scotland north-east regional archaeologist, said tradition had it that the Mortimers had started to build a castle at the end of the 16th century and sold it unfinished to Forbes.

But the team discovered that the earlier building, from around the 1570s, was a substantial castle, which makes up most of the current structure, and which Forbes prettified with "wedding cake" stonework.

"What Forbes seemed to do was take down the upper part of the 16th-century building and knitted in very carefully and with great craftsmanship the frilly, fancy fairytale bits on top. It was very difficult to see the joins," she said.

The archaeologists are now looking for evidence of another building, the lordly residence of the Mortimers of Craigievar, which pre-dates the 1570s castle.

"It opens up the question of where is the lordly residence and why they decided to change. One of the possibilities is that it was nearer the parish church."