Author: Lesley

Reader, baker, crafter, grower, crofter living on the Isle of Skye
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Highland Coos next door

In our village there lives a crofter called Angus who keeps Highland cows. These are small, long-horned, shaggy-coated cows of neolithic origin, the archetypal Scottish cow.

Hardy and good natured, as well as very intelligent, these cows are escape artists. Often the call goes out around the village that there is a cow in the road, and it’s invariably one belonging to Angus.

This week Angus has been grazing them in the top field which is adjacent to our croft. One morning we tugged back the curtains in the static to find three large cows staring back at us from a few metres away on the other side of the hedge.

They are curious beasts. As the day progressed, whenever they spotted us out on the croft they’d migrate towards us, shaggy heads shaking and mooing, in anticipation of a feed, I suspect.

I’m very taken by them. Much more so than with the sheep.

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Chilly morning routines

As winter bites, we are settling into a kind of routine for survival in the caravan.

Our lovely but ancient spaniel was very confused and disorientated by the move to the croft. It’s not surprising really, as he was essentially an urban dog.

Here he forgot his house training and when he did go out, he’d stand in the wind and rain, ears streaming out behind him, rooted to the spot, seemingly not knowing where to go or what to do. He’d taken to leaving puddles on the carpet during the night. Not good.

Husband has been getting up in the wee small hours to let him out, which seems to be working. Bertie (!) is settling into new routines gradually and has even been seen bounding around in the horizontal rain as he accepts this new “normal”.

The mornings are the most challenging of times here. The static is cold from several hours overnight with no heating, often only a few degrees centigrade in temperature, and the bed is at its warmest and most comfortable.

When I can avoid it no longer, I get up. I layer up as swiftly as I can and wrestle myself into a warm robe, trying to expose as little skin as possible. Then it’s through to the tiny kitchen to put the kettle on for a pot of hot coffee to nudge us into consciousness.

Breakfast is my domain.

It’s usually a bowl of porridge with banana and maple syrup, or eggs and toast, or if we have good fresh bread, a butty with local cheddar (that’s a sandwich for those readers not from these shores).

It takes us a few mugs of coffee to get going enough to enjoy joined-up words together and be able to plan the day. By now the temperature is usually up to around twelve to sixteen degrees Celsius and it’s feeling less arctic.

We watch the weather and sip our coffee, chatting about build plans or deliveries for the day. We read the news online but at the moment are more absorbed by our own new, little world as we work together to start to establish our place in it.

It may be like living in the cold wash, fast spin cycle of a washing machine at the moment, but with every day it feels a bit more like home.

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Snowy hills & soul food

The weather turned very cold last night, down to an overnight temperature of a few degrees. We awoke to snow on the high peaks around us and an internal caravan temperature of four degrees C.

To say that getting out of the warmth of the quilt was a struggle this morning would be an understatement..

Slowly building supplies are arriving for the next stage of the house build.

We need to block gaps and start the insulating foil on the walls before we start the underfloor heating, but we await more foil, staples and other materials. With any luck everything will arrive in the next week and we can get started.

In the meantime, without a working oven, I’m relying on our local stores to bake delicious, savoury, carb-rich loveliness to keep us motivated in the form of bacon and cheese scones.

We need extra energy in this cold to stay warm and working. I don’t feel guilty at all for the large bowl of tomato soup and two of these beauties warmed and spread with butter for supper.

Soul food.

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Irres Cran

We love good bread. We eat a lot of it, especially seeded, malted grain bread.

So it was with great excitement that whilst shopping in our local Co Op on the island I spotted that they’d just put out a selection of speciality breads.

I read the ingredients. Irres Cran, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds. What the heck was irres cran?

Intrigued, but assuming that it was some sort of ancient Scottish grain, like Emmer wheat, I popped it in the trolley and brought it home.

I tried googling irres cran but nothing came up. There was nothing left but to try it.

It was cranberry bread.. 😂.

The bread range is called Irresistible and they’d clearly abbreviated the label to fit all the ingredients on.

Irresistible Cranberry. Irres Cran.

Priceless.

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Eating our local deer

The news spread that the local village store had some estate venison for sale this week, so I hot-footed it over to see what was available.

I picked up a 500g pack of diced venison (no haunch of venison for us as we have no way of roasting it right now 😕) and decided to make a venison ragu for dinner in the slow cooker.

Deer are a problem here on the island. They no longer have any natural predators and as such their numbers are out of control. There is talk of reintroducing lynx to the Highlands after many hundreds of years of extinction through over hunting, but nothing has yet come of it because of farmers concerns for their sheep.

What there is in place is a selective culling programme across most estates, and when that happens Clan Venison appears in the local outlets.

It’s cheaper than Highland beef, totally free range and organic, almost fat-free and very tasty. And every deer we eat is one less to eat our baby trees when we plant them next year. What’s not to love?

I cooked the venison with red wine, red onions, chopped tomatoes, peppers, garlic, juniper berries and a sloosh of balsamic vinegar. Four hours in the slow cooker. I forgot to add the chestnut mushrooms that I’d bought.

Divine.

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The stone

Ever since we first walked the croft two years ago and and fell in love with it, we’ve been intrigued with the small, bare outcrop of stone that we have on the southern slope.

We’ve always wondered what it is. We are built mainly on shale, which appears all over the croft. But this isn’t like shale, which is a layered, crumbly rock.

It’s a very hard, smooth rock and with a slightly crystaline structure.

Local geology maps show that we are sited on an outcrop of Lewissian Gneiss, one of the world’s oldest rocks. But it doesn’t quite look like the stripy gneiss that I’ve seen elsewhere in images.

A helpful islander (thank you Julian!) who is also a geologist offered to come and have a closer look for us when he was in the area and confirm what it was. He explained it could be granite, or gneiss – it was difficult to identify from a picture.

He popped over a few days ago and we had a socially distanced chat. He’s confirmed that it’s definitely gneiss. I would have been happy with any diagnosis, but I really happy that it’s what we thought it was.

There’s something comforting in knowing that your land contains some of the oldest rock in the world.

As old as the beginnings. As old as the legends.

That’s just so cool somehow. 😎

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Hurrah for Hot Water!

This is a very short post to mark the momentous occasion, after two weeks of caravan life, of the connection of hot water.

Going for a weekly hot shower in Kyle was fine, but a 25 mile round trip meant it wasn’t really feasible much more frequently than that.

And with the wind and rain whipping around us daily, we get muddier and dirtier than I thought possible.

Husband connected up the pipes and installed a new boiler over the last few days, and after a break in the weather this morning completed the last bits of the connection.

We now have a working toilet, a shower and a hot water tap in the kitchen. Doing my happy dance.

Isn’t it amazing how we take things like this for granted.

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Storm Crows and the Raven

I’m sitting in the static watching the rain and wind bluster across the Sound.

It’s a wild one out there today and I’m happy to be wrapped up indoors and sheltered. Husband is busy installing the boiler (how excited am I for hot water one day soon that I don’t have to boil on the stove!) and the spaniel has assumed his prone position by the fire. It’s not a day to be working outdoors.

In the field looking east across the hillside there are a large number of crows, all wheeling and soaring together, an impressive sight. There must be at least thirty or forty of them, collectively called, I believe, a murder of crows. I’m convinced that they’re playing in the wind.

Occasionally one will take off and hover in almost motionless balance, trying to hold its own against the force of the wind before tipping its wings and allowing itself to be blown backwards and upwards across the hill. The others then do the same in sequence, like dancers in a ballet . It’s definitely a social activity of some sort!

We also have a raven. We may have more than one, as they’re often in pairs, but we definitely have at least one.

I heard it calling yesterday morning, a gutteral, deep sound quite unlike the crows. I’m so pleased to hear that it’s still here. We named the house Raven House because we spotted a couple of them overhead when we first visited the croft.

Such enigmatic, intelligent birds. They seem very at home here on these rainswept hillsides.

And according to legend, where I discovered that they are the symbol on the MacDonald Battle Flag, whose lands we are on, they’ve been here since time immemorial.

I like that.

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Once around the slow cooker

Two chicken breasts, a pepper, and a non-working oven? No problem as long as you have store cupboard staples and a slow cooker.

Spicy chicken with tomato and peppers cooked in the slow cooker for four hours with basmati rice to the rescue for dinner.

Husband brought in the box with my kitchen spices today for unpacking.

As I unpacked I added in a generous scoop of dried chilli flakes, a tin of chopped tomatoes, smoked paprika, onion, far too much garlic to be sociable, smoked salt flakes and a little sugar.

Luckily he didn’t bring in the canned goods box or I might have been tempted to chuck in some tinned pineapple. Maybe that would have been a step too far.. 😏 A tin of borlotti or butter beans would however have been a worthy addition.

The slow cooker did the rest.

Served with a spoonful of Greek yoghurt as a balm to the heat, it was one of those ‘once around the cupboard’ dinners that went down well after a long day.

I can’t wait to source some local venison to make a venison stew soon. I’m sure that there is a bottle of port in the boxes somewhere found at the back of one of the London kitchen cupboards before we moved. I’m thinking beef bourgignon but with venison. And mashed potatoes.

We are eating out of bowls most of the time now, like four year olds. It’s just easier.

Just don’t ask me for chicken dippers.

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Launderette Tales

I haven’t used a launderette for decades, so it was with some trepidation and a bag full of coins that we sallied forth to the Community Facilities at Kyle of Lochalsh to do our washing like the ex hippy teenagers that we are.

With no water in the caravan and having been on the road for ten days we’d both completely run out of clean clothes.

I’m amazed we lasted this long, to be honest. We used to do a clothes washing almost every day in London.

But that was in our old life. We’ve learned to embrace the muddier and scruffier side of being now.

The side benefit of this was a trip to the hot showers at the same place, designed for visiting yachtspeople, with plenty of space to hang wet outer clothes whilst getting clean.

And it would have been rude not to make a wee visit across the harbour carpark to Hector’s Bothy for lunch whilst the clothes were tumble drying.

We sat in a booth overlooking the sound, blinking in bright November sunshine and enjoying the sensation of being clean again, and ate our butties.

Today was a good day.