Category Archives: China

The Tilted Teapot replaces East Redstone Antiques

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Last year East Redstone Antiques, one of the tearooms in my little guidebook, had to close.

For a while the premises they had occupied, near Coupar Angus in Perthshire, lay empty, but earlier this year a new tearoom popped up to take its place – The Tilted Teapot:


The other day the delightful assistants and I tootled along there to partake of a little luncheon.


Soup of the day was tomato and we all chose to have it:

I must say, it was jolly tasty.

After the soup, delightful assistant no.1 and myself opted to dive straight in to the sweet treats, while delightful assistant no.2 continued with the savouries.

He chose a tuna mayonnaise roll, which came with salad, crisps and coleslaw and a wonderfully soft and fluffy white roll. He was very pleased with everything on the plate and ate it all up like a good boy:

While he was eating that, delightful assistant no.1 and I browsed the cake cabinet:

And found something you don’t normally see on a tearoom menu:

After some indecision, I went for a piece of carrot cake:

Which I washed down with a very smooth and enjoyable cup of decaf coffee:

Delightful assistant no.1 went for a rhubarb tart, which was liberally decorated with icing sugar and had a little air hole in the top that made me think of Inuit fishing through the Arctic ice:

Both assistants opted for tea, which came in a large teapot covered with a very impressive knitted teacosy:

The teacups were vast, holding about the same as a reasonably large mug might hold:

Although the antiques that previously filled this tearoom had gone, there were some locally crafted items for sale in the area we walked through to get to the tearoom:

My favourite things were the small and colourful knitteds, made by a local lady who can’t see to read knitting patterns any more and so created these without any guidance:

I wished I knew a baby who would fit into this delightful little mauve number:

Steptoe’s Yard

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Yesterday my delightful assistant and I visited a haven of second hand goods called Steptoe’s Yard, a few miles north of Montrose in the county of Angus.

I was on the hunt for vintage china. My sister (who had been before) had warned me that this place was incredible, but I wasn’t quite prepared for what hit me on arrival. This was the corner for garden implements, brushes, buckets, etc.:

Most of the china was housed inside sheds, but we didn’t realise that at first, and spent some time rummaging through baskets of it on trestle tables in the yard. Outside, everything was a bit wet and grubby, and much of it had green stuff growing on it:

Inside, it was much better:

I restricted myself to 14 teacups, saucers and tea plates (6 of one and 8 of another design), and one china plate. I’m collecting this sort of thing in order to sell it at Perthshire’s Birnam Fayre (run by Exclusively Highlands) in October, where I’m having a stall selling my Tearoom Delights books.

I booked the stall originally for just selling the book, but then I thought that a stall selling nothing but multitudinous copies of one small book might look a bit odd,  hence padding it out with some teatime accessories. These are the teacups, saucers and plates I bought:

They’re in excellent condition but, as you can see, they need a little tender loving care and cleaning:

That’s my job for this afternoon.

Steptoe’s Yard is so large that we didn’t actually explore all of it, so I think another visit may be in order before the fayre.