Posts for February, 2023

Do you want something fixed? ♻️

Boat of Garten’s Repair Café runs monthly at the Hall and works with volunteers to help fix household items.

If you would like to volunteer, please contact repaircafe@boathall.org.uk

Oh… and there’s a café too – so you can have a cuppa while you wait…

Due to phenomenal demand Ed Byrne has decided to stick around our lovely area and do a 2nd show with us on Sunday 26th March at 7pm!

If you didnt manage to get tickets for his Saturday show, now is your chance!
A TV household name, in the past year Ed has appeared on Live At The Apollo (Host, BBC), Mock The Week (BBC), The Pilgrimage (BBC), Top Gear (BBC) and QI (BBC).

May contain strong language and adult material!

Join Curlew LIFE for an evening of fascinating talks, nature inspired arts and crafts, and musical tunes to celebrate waders as they return to Strathspey and Badenoch to breed.

Local landowners, authors, politicians and other members of the public with an interest in waders and the wider countryside will be leading the conversations, and everybody is welcome!

Strathspey and Badenoch is currently a hotspot for these ground nesting birds, but even here their future is not secured. This evening will be the perfect opportunity to learn more about the threats these birds face in our area and what opportunities are available for us to support them.

Doors from 6pm, Boathouse Restaurant: Complementary welcome drink and appetisers with wader arts, crafts and posters.

Seats 7pm, Ptarmigan Dome: Presentations and music, with a licensed bar available throughout the evening.
Free, but booking is essential – please email insh@rspb.org.uk to secure your place.

Guests will also be welcome to claim 10% off a meal at the Boathouse Restaurant’s curry night before the event, from 5pm. Please contact them directly to reserve a table.

St Margaret’s plays host to Scotland’s Makar, our national poet, for a daytime ‘in conversation’ event just days after Burns Night.

Kathleen Jamie, poet and essayist, was born in 1962. Her work concerns nature, travel and culture, Her non-fiction includes the Findings trilogy (Findings, Sightlines and Surfacing) all regarded as important contributions to the ‘new nature writing’.

Kathleen’s prize-winning poetry collections have been gathered into a recent Selected Poems (Picador 2019).

She was raised in Currie, Midlothian and has what Robert Louis Stevenson called ‘a strong Scots accent of the mind’.

Her poems have appeared on the Underground systems of London, New York and Shanghai and, closer to home, one of her poems was chosen by the public to be carved on a huge wooden beam on the national monument at Bannockburn.

Kathleen was for many years a tutor of creative writing at the universities of St Andrew’s and Stirling, and now freelances, having made a recent foray into editing with Antlers of Water, Scottish Writing on Nature and the Environment.

Fiona Kennedy OBE DL is one of Scotland’s best known singer-songwriters and broadcasters. She has produced a variety of shows for stage and television over the years and is a tireless volunteer and ambassador for a number of charities, not least as a Trustee of St Margaret’s Braemar.

Her musical accomplishments are incredibly varied and include singing for Her late Majesty The Queen on several occasions, performing at Edinburgh Castle during the G8 Summit, shows at Celtic Connections and the BBC’s Transatlantic Sessions and touring with Runrig.

She has hosted television programmes for PBS in America, narrated Peter and the Wolf and The Snowman alongside the RSNO and acted in a number of roles including Alfie in the West End and in the 1973 cult classic film The Wicker Man.

Each year Fiona brings some of the world’s biggest names in Country and Americana to the St Margaret’s stage in a pan-celtic celebration of music called Transatlantic Connections, with performances from Beth Nielsen Chapman, Mary Gauthier and Verlon Thompson in recent years. In January 2022, she interviewed poet, writer and former Makar Jackie Kay on her life and work in literature.

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This hour-long lunchtime event will delve into Kathleen Jamie’s influences and her journey from being brought up in a non-literary, ordinary Scottish family to becoming Scotland’s Makar, penning new works for national occasions —the opening of The Scottish Parliament and most recently following the death of Her Majesty the Queen.

Following the event, a selection of Kathleen’s books and collections will be available to purchase and the author will be available to sign these.

Teas, coffees, snacks and soft-drinks will be available.

This event is delivered in partnership with The Fife Arms.

Join Cairngorms Astronomy Club and TGDT in The Square, Tomintoul for a moon viewing session.

We’ll have the Celestron telescope and a smartphone bracket that will allow you to take the moon home in your pocket!

We’re recruiting for a number of positions across the estate and are hosting a fair for you to come and visit the castle and meet some of our team.

Come along to have a coffee, a chat and find out more about our vacancies.

No need to book, free to attend.

Telescopes can be daunting if you’re just starting out and this workshop will help you to get to grips with your equipment. We’ll be using the hall and the porch to set up and learn all about different types of telescopes.

During this workshop we will focus on:

Using your telescope

Types of telescope

Observing deep sky objects

We encourage you to bring your own equipment, as our team will be on hand to help with all your telescope needs.

Discover the magic of the outdoors after dark in the Cairngorms National Park with our star-gazing experience. Loch Insh is a great dark skies area being just outside the local village.

The emphasis is on naked-eye observation, but we will also teach you how to use your smart phones (make sure they are fully charged) and you could bring binoculars if you have them.

Wrap yourself up well as we will spend a good hour outdoors weather permitting. Bring a low light torch to make walking in the woodland trails easier. Our guides will lead you to some magical local places to capture some cool night photos on your smart phone or camera. The dark trees provide a dramatic contrast to the night sky.

In Scotland, cloudy skies are a fact of life, but we do get some clear skies to and even the Northern lights. You just never know what you’re going to get.

We’ll do everything we can to create a memorable experience for you and your loved ones. You’ll leave knowing a great deal more about stargazing than the majority of people.

In a new series of richly entertaining, and free of charge, dramatised podcasts, Fire Works, award-winning Firebrand Theatre Company will take to the Pitlochry Festival Theatre Sound Stage to guide you on an audio journey through the life and work of the multi-talented novelist, poet, teacher and nature writer Nan Shepherd.

In three 30 minute podcasts, Nan Makes History, Nan In Love and Urban Nan, Firebrand will use Nan’s ground-breaking novels, letters and poems, along with entertaining dramatised scenes, to experience the unconventional author in all her natural and, at times lesser-known, habitats, while trying to explain the mystery of why her greatest work languished forgotten in a drawer for over thirty years.

The Geminid meteor shower is one of the last of major meteor showers of the year, and can usually be relied on to put on a good display. Join Cairngorms Astronomy Club and TGDT in the Square, Tomintoul to experience this special celestial phenomena. The meteors of the Geminid shower are very bright, moderately fast, and are unusual in being multi-coloured – mainly white, some yellow and a few green, red and blue. These colours are partly caused by the presence of traces of metals like sodium and calcium, the same effect that is used to make fireworks colourful. Everyone welcome.

If the skies aren’t clear on Tuesday the 13th of December, another chance to view them will be offered at the same time on the 14th of December.