turned into an amusement hall, for which purpose the entire interior was demolished. The amusement hall closed in 2004 and the building stood as an empty shell for several years. In 2009 it was bought by the "Friends of the Birks" with a grant from the Scottish Government's Town Centre Regeneration Fund with plans to refurbish and reopen as a new 92-seat cinema and café-bar. The Friends are now a formal company limited by guarantee and registered as a charity. In spring 2011, the Birks project was awarded £658,520 by the Scotland Rural Development Programme - half the sum needed to carry out the building work. Match funding for the SRDP grant has now been raised - notably through a Big Lottery grant of £539,950 announced on 9 February 2012. Building work began in April 2012 and opened in Spring 2013. The patron of the project is the actor Alan Cumming, who was born in the town. Aberfeldy is the location of the poem "The Birks of Aberfeldy" by Robert Burns: In 2001, the author J.K. Rowling purchased the nearby 19th-century Killiechassie House, on the banks of the River Tay. Baryte mining The Precambrian Dalradian geological formations in the Highlands north of Aberfeldy contain substantial deposits of the mineral baryte, which is mostly used as a weighting agent for drilling fluids to prevent blow-outs in oil and gas exploration wells. There are three locations with exploitable quantities of it. The Foss Mine, some NW of Aberfeldy at has been operational since 1984 and production averages 50,000 tonnes per annum. So far some 525,000 tonnes have been extracted there by M-I SWACO. In 1990, a locally based company began opencast extraction near the summit of Ben Eagach, due north of Aberfeldy. Approximately 25,000 tonnes were mined from a series of small pits which have now been abandoned. The largest formation, containing a 7.5-million-tonne reserve is at Duntanlich, some due north of Aberfeldy, south of Loch Tummel. In 1994, an application by MI Great Britain Ltd for an underground operation to mine the deposits was turned down. In 2000, M I Drilling Fluids UK unfolded new plans to establish a mine at Duntanlich to take six million tonnes from the deposit over the next 50 years and began preliminary talks with Perth & Kinross Council and Scottish Natural Heritage. However, it was decided at that time not to take these proposals forward.