I finally have a Thursday Door to share – yay!
Blue Hostel Door
Tag: Thursday Doors
Nash’s Restaurant
Finally I have some doors to share for Dan’s Thursday Doors!
These are the lovely heavy old glass doors of Nash’s Restaurant in Broussard, Louisiana, where we ate a very enjoyable lunch – I had beef lasagne, and it was just gorgeous 🙂
Monochrome Dresser
Cee and Dan have joined forces this week for a Cee’s Black and White Challenge: Doors and Drawers and Thursday Doors combination, so here is my contribution in the shape of our vintage up-cycled Ercol oak dresser with its two drawers and two cupboard doors.
Incidentally, our dresser has a really simple catch to open/ close the doors – the little elongated knob in the middle moves side to side just a small amount (inset within its own little groove), just enough to allow each door to open (one at a time), and when in its central position it holds both doors neatly closed – no metalwork or magnets or anything more than a beautifully carved wooden catch, proudly visible for everyone to see.
See images below for details 🙂
Sea Lock Gates
It’s called a lock gate, but to all intents and purposes it’s a solid metal door – or actually a pair of doors – holding back the waters of the Caledonian Canal at the point it joins up with the Beauly Firth in Inverness. When the tide is in, the water levels are pretty much equal both behind and in front of the lock gates, but when the tide is out the water behind in the canal remains high while in front the sea level ebbs and flows.
Tomnahurich Swing Bridge in Action
There are three very similar swing bridges over the Caledonian Canal here in Inverness – two road bridges and one railway bridge, all working on the same principle and constructed around the same time. Yesterday I was passing by just as the bridge at Tomnahurich opened, so stopped to capture the scene on camera .
The road crosses over from left to right of the picture (or right to left, depending on the direction of travel) and the bridge sits really low on the water so boats travelling the canal cannot pass underneath without the bridge moving out of the way. The traffic is temporarily stopped on either side and the entire bridge swings open sideways on a pivot and wheel (very much like a giant heavy door opening) until it sits at right angles to the road. The boat sails on through, the bridge closes again immediately, and the waiting traffic is free to pass over once more.
During the summer months this process takes place multiple times a day, and it never ceases to fascinate me – I really love the clever engineering involved! There is a warning siren that sounds continuously to let people know the bridge is opening and closing, but amazingly the mechanical operation of the bridge itself is silent and smooth and surprisingly speedy – it only takes a few minutes. This particular metal bridge has been in situ since 1938, a replacement for a previous wooden bridge that apparently worked on an entirely different principle.
I know this is a long and boring gallery if you’re not interested in seeing a series of static images of a bridge opening and closing again, but the fault is mine for not thinking to video it in action instead – duh! Anyway, I’m hoping my swing bridge opening and closing can count as an honorary canal door for today’s Thursday Doors – I know Dan loves bridges as well as doors, so fingers crossed I might just get away with it! 🙂
A Doorway But No Door
I found this overgrown stone doorway within the old Chapel Yard Cemetery in Inverness, but sadly no door to go with it, only an iron gate. Oh well! Hopefully I can still use some artistic license and count it as a door though?
Although most of the surviving (or at least readable) gravestones are from the late 18th to 19th Centuries, apparently there has been a graveyard of some sort on this site since the 12th Century. This is the grandest example but these open air walled ‘rooms’ dotted around seem to be old family enclosures or mausoleums belonging mainly to all the ‘big’ names of the town, although there are plenty of ordinary grave markers here too 🙂
Bricked-Up Beauty!
While walking along a quiet side-street in Inverness yesterday I found this open-air room sitting immediately behind a building that appeared still to be in use at the front – but this long-disused room now has no roof, only two full walls standing, a third wall partially in place and the external wall on the street removed entirely. The rotting floor joists are still in situ but with only a few wooden floorboards left in place, and on the main retaining wall there is an oddly-bricked-up fireplace and internal door to nowhere.
Weirdly enough it appears that it’s not that the building itself is falling down, more that this now-external room seems to have been deliberately cut off from whatever is on the other side of its party wall, with the roof and street wall being fully removed leaving it all open to the elements. So it sits all vulnerable and exposed with its inside now outside, left being neither one thing nor the other. And I’ve never seen a door bricked up with the bricks lying on their side instead of being laid flat – how strange!
So sadly this week’s Thursday Door is no longer even a proper door – I can’t help but wonder what story lies behind this abandoned unloved space? Maybe this would be a good door for me to use for next week’s brand new Thursday Door Writing Challenge… 🙂
Thursday Doors: Thistle Inn
I came across the back of this unusually-shaped public house while out for a wander locally, and wondered what kind of exciting front door would go with such a quirky building – disappointingly it turned out to be plain and brown and about as boring as you can get…
And of course like all pubs here in Scotland it’s still closed for at least the next couple of weeks due to current Covid restrictions so I have no idea what it looks like inside… Oh well, I suppose you can’t win them all! 🙂
Thursday Doors: Four in One
When I walked past this residential building this afternoon I thought – cool, what interesting stonework around these doors, I’ll get two doors in one shot. But on closer inspection each stone recess actually has two doors inset at an angle – even more cool, I’ve got four doors in one shot! 🙂
Thursday Doors: King St
I have no idea what this building is/ was used for, but it has a lovely large door and a pretty window grille. The building itself is located on King St, Inverness and is clearly in need of some tlc but I just liked the look of it 🙂
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