Walter Scott's Castle Secret Knowledge

It's not many young boys who can lay claim to their very own castle.

But when I was growing up in the Scottish Borders, this place

was my playground.

It was built by a man once known as the Wizard of the North,

and to me his shadowy creation certainly seemed enchanted.

It was only later I discovered it was magical as well.

I remember first visiting here when I was eight years old

and looking up at these two shields here -

one with my name, Stuart, emblazoned on it

and the other painted with the name of my younger brother Douglas.

I didn't realise then that they referred to Clan Douglas

and the House of Stuart, the Kings of Scotland until 1688.

For a small boy with a big imagination, it seemed as

if there was some kind of supernatural

connection between me and this house.

In fact, for many years after that I was convinced that one day

I would probably end up living here.

Of course it was all part of the fantasy.

But then fantasy is what makes this place.

Abbotsford House was built by Sir Walter Scott -

mythmaker, inventor of history,

and the 19th-century's bestselling author.

But I knew Abbotsford long before I knew Scott.

It is to my shame that I didn't read his novels, non-fiction

and poetry until my twenties.

Like many Scots of my generation, I think

I was slightly embarrassed by the shortbread tin stereotype,

the tartan-trimmed phoney Caledonia that I thought Scott had invented.

But when at last I finally did read his books,

I discovered something that completely changed my view,

not just of the man, but of this marvellous madcap house he built.

Abbotsford is reopening to the public after an extensive

refurbishment that returns the building

to how it was in Scott's lifetime.

13,000 treasures that Scott collected for his

"Conundrum Castle" are being unwrapped

and put back in place ready for the big day.

That work has revealed even more secrets about this house

built by books.

When I first came to Abbotsford, I cared more about Doctor Who

than 19th-century fiction.

And yet Abbotsford is a kind of crashed TARDIS where the past,

present and future are deliriously jumbled together.

It is just a few hectic weeks before the reopening of Abbotsford House

and one of its most evocative treasures is being unpacked...

..Scott's own writing desk.

It's just a small mahogany piece of furniture,

rather unprepossessing actually.

But it witnessed the birth of quite an extraordinary output.

This desk saw the creation of 12 volumes of poetry,

32 volumes of non-fiction, literally tens of thousands of letters,

and 48 volumes of novels including Waverley, Ivanhoe, Rob Roy,

and my personal favourite Redgauntlet.

Scott was the bestselling author of his day.

The 19th-century equivalent, if you like, of JK Rowling.

He was published everywhere from Edinburgh to London, India to

America, and translated into French, Swedish, Italian, even Mohawk.

Abbotsford was not just the crucible for this astonishing

outpouring of work, it was a work of art in its own right.

As Scott himself said, "It was a romance in stone and lime."

Abbotsford is a palace and a paradox.

It is the creative expression

of a distinctly Scottish split personality.

Born in Edinburgh in 1771,

Walter Scott was a man divided between two worlds.

At the end of the 18th century, the Scottish capital was fizzing

with new ideas, new philosophies, and a new sense of reason.

A trained lawyer, Scott was very much a man of the Enlightenment.

But he was also a romantic drawn to the old Gothic ballads

and ancient supernatural stories of the countryside

around the River Tweed where he spent much of his childhood

and where he eventually built Abbotsford.

During the recent renovation work on the building, the workmen made

an intriguing discovery.

If I just prise up this temporary cover, I can show you.

It's a well.

This is the last remnant of the original building which

stood on this site,

a set of dilapidated farm cottages known locally as "Clarty Hole" -

"clarty" meaning dirty.

When Scott bought the property in 1811,

he immediately renamed it Abbotsford.

Far more romantic than "Clarty Hole".

I think it's oddly moving there's this secret well

hidden at the heart of Abbotsford.

If Abbotsford is anything, it's a wellspring,

a place where the past continually bubbles up, where nothing can be

hidden forever, and it chimes exactly

with the kind of stories Scott told

in this place that he called his "flibbertigibbet of a house".

The past is always present in Abbotsford and in Scott's work.

This is a place where skulls are mantelpiece ornaments

and suits of armour are the decor of choice.

It's a box of yesterdays, a cabinet of curiosities,

a surrealist cut-up.

Scott didn't conceive of Abbotsford just as a home,

it was a museum, a reliquary where the glories of the past

were enshrined in the present.

This eccentric house was not just where the past came alive,

it was where the past stayed alive.

This is how crazy Abbotsford is as a house. It's the kind of place

you've got to go out of a window when you're trying to find a door.

This is the door of the old tollbooth prison, from Edinburgh.

Scott managed to salvage it when the building was being demolished.

It is a great example of how he literally incorporated

the past into Abbotsford.

And he did not just build it into his home,

he built it into his novels, too.

It is here in The Heart Of Midlothian,

the novel which takes its title from the nickname

for that notorious prison.

"That seems a very strong door," said Sir George.

"It is so, sir" said Butler,

"but it was my misfortune at one time

"to see it proved greatly too weak."

In his novels, Scott didn't just describe historical events,

he inhabited history as much as he did this house.

His characters are all formed by history -

history is the hidden character in all of his books.

It was this that inspired everyone from Dickens to Tolstoy

and which decisively shaped how his own home country imagined itself.

Scott invented Scotland,

from the ballads he collected that would otherwise have been lost,

through to the narrative poems when he described the Trossachs,

the Borders and the Isles,

to the novels, where he showed how the Act Of Union,

the Jacobite rebellion,

even the rise of spa towns changed what it meant to be Scottish.

O Caledonia, stern and wild Meet nurse for a poetic child

Land of brown heath and shaggy wood Land of the mountain and the flood

Land of my sires What mortal hand

Can e'er untie the filial band That knits me to thy rugged strand?

But it wasn't just Scotland, it's sometimes forgotten that

Scott wrote many novels set in England as well,

and it is in those books we get such famous

stories as Walter Raleigh putting down his cloak for Elizabeth

to cross a puddle, or Robin Hood splitting

the Sheriff of Nottingham's arrow in the centre of the bull's-eye.

Scott created a version of history where Jacobites

and Hanoverians or Cavaliers and Roundheads or

Saxons and Normans could clash and

out of that clash create something better.

Scott's most audacious piece of national mythmaking

came in 1822 when he stage-managed the visit of George IV to Edinburgh.

Scott even persuaded the King to wear a kilt for the occasion -

quite an irony given that within living memory rebellious highlanders

had tried to overthrow the Royal Family.

Satirists might have poked fun at the fat king,

but Scott's coup de theatre sparked a rage for all things Highland.

Scott created many of our national myths,

and he did so with a theatrical panache that proved wildly popular

not just in Britain, but abroad.

This is rare footage of the early silent film Ivanhoe,

one of two cinematic versions of the novel made in 1913,

and one of the first American movies to film on location in Britain.

Scott's action-packed historical extravaganzas were perfect

fodder for dramatic adaptation.

His works spawned over 4,000 movies, TV series, stage plays and operas.

Wander around Abbotsford

and you will discover similarly theatrical qualities.

Scott never meant Abbotsford to be a po-faced

and precise replica of a medieval castle.

He meant it to be a stage set. Nothing is quite as it seems.

Take, for example, this ceiling.

It looks like a carved medieval wooden ceiling, in fact, parts of

it are copied from Rosslyn Chapel, made so famous by The Da Vinci Code.

But it's not a genuine piece of the past.

It's made of wood pulp, plaster and glue,

moulded and painted to look like wood.

For Scott, the term "artificial" was the highest form of praise.

He may have been besotted with the past,

but that didn't mean it has to be pure or even authentic.

Despite, or maybe because of the larger-than-life

quality of Abbotsford, it had a huge influence on architectural style.

For his Victorian admirers,

Abbotsford provided a vision of a chivalric past, far removed

from the perplexing realities of the industrial present.

It spawned a whole host of imitators,

including that model of feudal nostalgia, Balmoral Castle.

But Abbotsford isn't all gleeful pastiche and phoney medievalism.

Scott enjoyed all the benefits of modern industry as well.

He had one eye fixed on the past,

but the other was looking to the future.

I love this, this is one of the pneumatic servants' bells

that Scott had installed.

Basically, you pushed it and somewhere in the bowels

of the building, the little pop gun would go off to summon a servant.

Abbotsford, when it was built,

was the most technologically sophisticated home in Scotland -

it was not just pneumatic servants' bells,

it had central heating, gas lighting and even flushing lavatories.

Abbotsford was steampunk before steampunk was invented -

a combination of nostalgia and cutting-edge technology.

The same features can be found in his novels.

In Tales Of The Crusaders,

he imagined a "steam powered novel writing loom" -

an automatic machine for producing fiction.

Whereas other poets at the time thought of the writer as a dreamer,

only Scott imagined him as a machine.

Abbotsford was part artwork and part creative factory.

Whenever Scott was depressed or creatively stuck,

he went out to plant trees or tend his flower and vegetable garden.

Scott never subscribed to the more egotistical notions about what

it meant to be a celebrity author.

"I pride myself more," he said, "on my composition for manure than

"any composition whatsoever to which I was ever an accessory."

What I have come to love most about Scott is what a paradox he was.

He seemed to thrive on contradiction.

He was an international celebrity who saw through the fame game,

a man of the city and a country squire,

a legal brain and a romantic poet.

Nothing illustrates Scott's omnivorous

interests as much as his library.

Over the past ten years, work has gone on to catalogue the huge

collection, revealing just how amazingly diverse it is.

I think the library is the unwritten biography of Scott.

We can see his huge range of interests in the contents,

ranging from popular culture

to very high serious tomes.

-It's not just Shakespeare and the classics, is it?

-Not at all.

It's very hard to find a subject that he doesn't have a book on.

You've actually got some of the library here,

which I feel in awe that we are getting to touch his books.

I have seen them so often behind the cages.

This is the first book of fairy stories published by the

Grimm brothers that Scott wrote and asked them to send him.

Scott then sent them books in return.

This is a letter from Jacob Grimm to Scott.

-He wrote in German and Scott wrote in English.

-That is astonishing.

Why was Scott obsessed with fairy stories?

It came, I would think, from his childhood when he was ill

and he went to the Borders and was brought up by his grandparents

who told him all the Borders stories,

which may be the very beginning of his life as a writer.

Although we think of him as an 18th-century man of reason,

he's fascinated by things like witchcraft.

That's right. He had a huge collection of witchcraft,

they were the few books that in his time he kept behind locked doors.

This is a manuscript, a Rosicrucian manuscript.

It was probably made so it could be circulated clandestinely,

because they were considered politically a bit dangerous.

It has all kinds of illustrations of esoteric things - there's

the Ark Of The Covenant with the two cherubs,

astrology and kabbalah and alchemy.

He was almost a precursor to Dan Brown in this way.

-Yes, Dan Brown would be at home here.

-What is this final book?

This is interesting,

this is the first book that was published in Tasmania.

It was about Michael Howe, who was a bushranger and outlaw.

I just love these headings.

"Narrative of the chief atrocities committed by this great murderer

"and his associates during a period of six years in Van Diemen's Land."

It's almost like the Sun, isn't it?

There are a lot of books like the Sun!

Scott has a huge collection of what he calls eccentric biographies.

He is very interested in highway women, in pirates,

in people who lived on the edge of life.

Scott's day job as a lawyer and sheriff

meant he was well acquainted

with the less respectable and even the violent side of life...

..and he had a sneaking sympathy with the perpetrators.

One poacher who turned up in his dock, Tom Purdie,

ended up as his factotum and gardener.

Violence and violent men always held a certain glamour for Scott.

If any contemporary author

had a collection of weapons like this in their home,

then I can imagine that they would be receiving a visit

from the local constabulary.

You have to wonder why Scott had such a collection.

Well, Scott suffered from polio as a child,

and his disability meant he never achieved his genuine ambition -

to be a soldier.

Nearly everywhere in Abbotsford,

you can sense its creator's frustrated desire

to be a man of action.

But there are one or two places where you get a glimpse

of an altogether more private and tender side to Scott's personality.

This is the drawing room, and it's absolutely exquisite.

The wallpaper was specially made in China.

I could spend hours looking at the crowded, colourful life it contains.

Scott, of course, had a taste for the exotic.

He wrote novels set in Palestine and India.

But if this room seems rather different from others in Abbotsford,

that's because this was the domain of Lady Scott.

Scott married French-born Charlotte Charpentier in 1797,

after a courtship that lasted only three weeks.

She was the love of his life.

Unlike Byron or Burns, Scott wasn't a ladies' man.

In fact, he was delightfully faithful.

After Charlotte's death, Scott said that he had been heartbroken

for two years - "my heart handsomely pieced together again,

"but the crack will remain to my dying day".

1826 was Scott's very own annus horribilis.

Haunted by Charlotte's death,

he sought solace in his beautiful gardens.

But this was the year another unexpected disaster struck.

Life at Abbotsford would never be the same again.

In 1826, Scott's London publisher lost a great deal of money

after having invested in hops for ale, of all things.

As the publisher tried to balance the books,

a dreadful secret was revealed -

the whole time, Scott had been a sleeping partner in the business

and the company had insufficient capital to cover its debts.

Scott found himself personally liable for £117,000.

That's the equivalent in today's money of 5.8 million.

Scott's business partners took the easy route and filed for bankruptcy.

But that was an option that Scott could not countenance.

If he filed for bankruptcy, he would lose Abbotsford.

Scott chose not to declare himself bankrupt.

Instead, he would write himself out of debt,

just as he had written himself into a fortune.

"My own right hand shall pay," he said -

anything to keep his most beloved creation, Abbotsford.

This secret staircase was originally a playful piece of stagecraft

allowing the Wizard of the North to magically disappear

from his study when unwelcome guests came to call.

But it now became a necessity.

Every morning before dawn, he would come quietly down these steps,

sparing his household the brutal the early start that his work

now demanded of him.

The man who had once imagined a steam-powered loom

for churning out novels now had to turn himself into a writing machine.

But not even a man of Scott's colossal energies

and vivid imagination could outrun his troubles.

In the early 1830s, he suffered a series of strokes

and was sent by his doctor to the Mediterranean

in the hope that the warmer climate would help him.

It didn't.

His final wish was to die at home.

Scott became more and more ill.

He was trepanned - a hole drilled into his skull.

A friend said he appeared "like a man mortally drunk".

At times, Scott hallucinated he was King Lear.

Abbotsford had been a museum, a stage set,

a showcase for new technology,

a stately pleasure dome for parties and conviviality.

Now, it was also a mausoleum.

Scott's bed was brought down here to the dining room,

so that in his dying moments,

he could gaze out over his beloved River Tweed.

Almost immediately after Scott's death in 1832,

Abbotsford became a literary shrine -

a place of pilgrimage.

Scott's castle attracted huge numbers of visitors,

including some of the greatest names of the day.

In here we've got Charles Dickens and his wife.

-At the bottom here.

-Here he is.

Charles Dickens, that's Charles Dickens, and just Mrs Dickens?

-And Mrs Dickens, yes.

-Wonderful.

And then in this other one, we have Oscar Wilde's signature.

-He came to visit the house here.

-There it is.

Oscar Wilde, London, between somebody from Copenhagen

-and somebody from Galashiels.

-Yes.

-It's a pity we don't get a comments section down the side as well.

-Yes.

So, Jeanette, your family has

a very long-standing connection with Abbotsford.

Yes. My family have been working here since 1900, actually.

My great-grandfather came here to work as a forester in 1900,

and there's been family worked here ever since,

including myself, for quite a considerable time.

So when you first started working here,

what kind of people were coming to Abbotsford?

People from all over the world - America, Canada, Australia -

but the surprise visitors we had were actually Russian trawlermen.

They had sailed into Ullapool

and then on their days off they made their way here to Abbotsford.

-From Ullapool? That must be a 500-mile round trip.

-It is indeed.

It really shows you how highly he was regarded

-outside of the British Isles.

-Definitely, yes.

It's the last few days before Abbotsford reopens to the public.

There's a real sense of excitement in the air.

This project isn't just about restoring Scott's home.

In a way, it's also about re-examining his legacy.

Whereas Walter Scott has remained popular

and widely read abroad, at home, critics have sought to demolish him.

He's decried as the inventor of twee Scottishness

and Celtified pageantry.

In some ways,

the Wizard of the North became a victim of his own success.

The spell he cast over Scottish history was so powerful

that it almost became a parody.

Just as Abbotsford started a craze for crow-stepped gables

and thistle-topped turrets, so it's argued that Scott's novels

and poems plundered the past to build a vision of Scotland

unblemished by modernity.

But for me, the real question is whether, without Scott,

we would have any national identity at all.

I think in some ways we are in danger of losing

Scott's most important message.

His books, and this building,

shows how you can own the past without being imprisoned by it.

After all, this is the man who transformed the mucky farmyard

of Clarty Hole into the playful fantasy of Abbotsford.

As he himself said, "There's nothing so easy to invent as a tradition."

I think we should be rather grateful to have had an inventor

of such imagination and such generosity.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd