Glen House,Peeblesshire, Scotland
A Stately Home and Film Location
Part of the film 'Hallam Foe' was shot at Glen House, Peeblesshire, one of Scotland's historic homes
Hallam Foe
For those ‘set-jetters’ who are drawn to Scotland to discover where their favourite films were shot, the Glen House estate in Peeblesshire, although available for filming, but no longer open to the public, can be seen to great effect in Hallam Foe, starring Jamie Bell and Sophia Myles. In March of 2006 the entire cast and crew arrived at Glen House for three weeks of filming, which saw the estate’s buttery being converted into a makeshift editing suite. Hallam Foe opens this year’s 61st Edinburgh International Film Festival and goes on general release on 31 August 2007.
Sir Charles Tennant
In 1853 Sir Charles Tennant (1823—1906), one of the richest men in Victorian Britain, paid £33,140 for Glen, a 4,000-acre estate near Innerleithen. However, dissatisfied with the modest house set on a valley floor and flanked by wooded hills and heathered moorland, he commissioned a leading Scottish architect, David Bryce, to build him a fantasy castle complete with towers, turrets and gargoyles, and it was completed in 1858.
Voice of the Past
But this secluded, neo-Gothic castle is more than the fairy-tale expression of a rich man’s fantasy. The true magic of Glen House is in the fact that one encounters, and almost hears, the voice of the past. Carlyle wrote that history is the essence of innumerable biographies, and the social and political history of the early 20th century contains few biographies of influential figures from that period in which Glen House does not feature.
Glenconner
Sir Charles Tennant, known to his family as ‘the Bart’ after he was made a baronet in 1885, inherited and built upon the family fortune established by his grandfather, also Charles (1768—1838), who left the poverty-stricken family farm at Glenconner in Ayrshire to become an apprentice weaver in Kilbarchan, a few miles south-west of Glasgow.
Bleaching
In 1799, in collaboration with Charles Macintosh, who went on to invent waterproofing (including the ‘mackintosh’, with its errant ‘k’), Tennant patented a formula for manufacturing ‘bleaching salt’, a development that shortened from months to hours the laborious process of whitening linen by boiling it, exposing it to the sun and soaking it in sour milk. He subsequently built a factory at St Rollox in Glasgow that eventually became Europe’s largest chemical works. His flourishing business was captured by Sir Walter Scott in a post-office scene in The Antiquary: ‘“Eh preserve us, Sirs!” said the butcher’s wife, “there’s ten, eleven, twal letters to Tennant & Co. — Thae folk do mair business than a’ the rest of the burgh.”’
Pollution
However, the Glasgow factories were also among Europe’s most polluting, and the factory chimney named Tennant’s Stalk was built to send the highly toxic fumes from bleach manufacturing further afield. So it is ironic that The Hon. Tessa Tennant, who married Sir Charles’s great-great-grandson Henry and now manages Glen, is an ardent environmental campaigner.
Margot Tennant
Of the sixteen children sired by Sir Charles from his two marriages, the most famous of his offspring was his eleventh, Margot Tennant, born on 2 February 1864, who would later marry Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, and who described herself as ‘self-willed, excessively passionate, disconcertingly truthful, bold as well as fearless and always against convention, I was no doubt, extremely difficult to bring up.’
