Category: access road

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Bumblebee food

We ordered heather plants a few weeks ago from a specialist heather nursery here in Scotland.

The idea is to plant them on the exposed soil banks on the sides of the access track on the croft to try and reduce the amount of soil erosion. We’d noticed that the winter rain had taken its toll before anything had a chance to establish, and needed to get something in as soon as possible.

Heather is a native plant here, hardy and resilient, and it’s roots help bind the soil well and minimise runoff.

As an extra benefit, the heather selection that we have covers a flowering period for all seasons, so there will always be some in flower at any given point. Great for nectar feeders.

The plants arrived via post in three large boxes, extremely well packed and with the plants still fresh and damp. Each small pot had been hand-wrapped in damp newspaper, separated by cardboard and paper padding.

I unpacked them and let them have some fresh air and a good, long drink after their travels.

Almost as soon as I’d done so, a few honeybees arrived, rapidly followed by about four white-tailed bumble bees. They all fed hungrily on the early flowering varieties in bloom. These were the first bees that I’d seen on the croft this spring with the really cold weather.

We won’t stop at heather, of course. We have plans for red clover, camomile, sedum, borage, hardy geraniums and others, but it felt good to provide an early meal for the bees.

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Snow on the croft

We awoke this morning to a white blanket of snow over everything again. The temperatures had fallen overnight and it had snowed for several hours.

Getting up and started is the hardest thing when it’s cold like this.

Breakfast was taken by the fire with both of us wrapped up in a blanket, bobble hats and fingerless gloves until the fire gradually warmed the room.

We watched as the light changed constantly around us, the skies moving from thunderous grey to bright blue and back again as the storm fronts raced across the sky.

The snow is properly deep now, and the access track to the croft is icy and compacted and probably impassable for the moment, unless it was an emergency.

This would of course happen as I was about to replenish food stores with my regular shop, but we have plenty of stores, and bread flour and yeast to make rolls. The small oven here would struggle with a big loaf but it manages rolls and smaller breads just fine.

I’ve been baking every day, and making soup, curries and stews to make sure that we stay warm.

I know that this would send some people absolutely stir crazy, but I quite like it. It’s quiet and cosy. We have the work on the house, our books, cooking and seed planning and planting to keep us busy.

Contentment.

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Ice ice baby

The snow may have stopped falling for now but it’s still cold and very icy out there.

The barrel containing my berry cuttings has frozen with a thick disc of ice.

The steep access track and drive have become an icy slope, and the pools of water on the gravel are solid ice.

I’m not going out until the sun has melted everything a little, but will sit here by the fire and try and stay warm here in the caravan.

I think it’s safe to say that we’re now properly into winter..

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Static Adventures

We had a busy three days on the island checking the progress on site, talking to the builders, getting the static caravan in place and meeting a few neighbours in a socially distanced manner. It was good.

We came home tired but happy.

The caravan arrived on Tuesday. Watching from the top of the croft I could see that the lorry transporting it had got part the way up the steep access road, but was losing traction on the hardcore surface of the track. It tried a few times, but rolled back in each instance. My heart sank for a few moments thinking that all our plans would come to nothing.

Luckily for us there was still a digger on the croft, and one of our enterprising builders used a tow rope to connect it to the front of the lorry and reversing, dragged it up the hill over the steep part of the track. Relief was not the word!

With help from a kind neighbour Donnie and his tractor, the static was manoevered into place behind the house, where we hoped it would benefit from some shelter from the prevailing South Westerlies.

It’s really exposed to the elements at the top of the croft there. There was a stiff 40km per hour breeze blowing on the day that we moved it, so we could guess what it would feel like in the more typical winter gales of 70-90km per hour….

Four one tonne bags of hardcore are being delivered to site today and friends have kindly arranged to strap the caravan down to them with lorry straps to anchor it until we get to site again at the end of October.

It needs proper stabilising on a base, some steps, a lick of paint, some small internal repairs and a good airing, but those things will have to wait until we’re there permanently now. Soon.

The builders have done a good job, and we were really pleased with the quality of the work. The cladding looks great and should be finished in the next week. The roof slating completed yesterday.

A few more weeks and the external elements of the build will be complete ready to hand over to us for the rest.

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House site excavations

The access road has now been excavated, drained, and levelled as far as possible. It’s received it’s base of crushed stone and can support the heavy plant that will be trundling up and down the croft over the coming months.

I still think it looks massive and am hoping that it will weather to a darker colour and blend a bit more into the landscape over time.

At the moment it looks as if aliens visiting Skye could easily sight this from space and use it as a landing strip…and yes, maybe this thought was prompted by the re-runs of the X Files that we’ve been watching in lockdown..😬

The house site excavation at the top of the croft has also started, with poles being laid out for alignment.

So, it’s moving! There may be some delays sourcing concrete for the foundations, but the local hospital rightly takes precedence for these supplies and we are happy to wait our turn in these difficult times.

We are on our way.

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The track begins

And so it begins. The builder has been sending us photos and videos of the emerging access track whilst it’s being excavated. Very exciting. It looks wide enough to be a motorway in this picture! Sadly building regs dictate that it has to be wide enough for a fire truck to get up to the house, so it does seem wide, but it’s the minimum width we can get away with…

As we suspected, the gradient is very steep in places. The builder has excavated a borrow pit on the croft for extra soil and rock for infill and will try and smooth out the most extreme parts of the slope, although it’s always going to be a steep climb up to the house.

As we also suspected, the boggy bottom of the croft at the base of the hill is actually almost a lake once the soil has been removed. You can see the water level clearly in this photo, right where the entrance bellmouth will be connecting to the communal village road. The video from the digger shows this clearly too.

There will be drainage into both the culvert and back onto the land so that we can remove enough water to make the road viable, but also further along in the process we can perhaps dig a wildlife pond in this area. That plus willow and alder planting and we hope that it will dry out enough to be useable. If not, it’ll be a big natural wetland area, which I’m sure will do wonders for the croft’s natural diversity!

The builders seem to have managed to circumnavigate the two big granite outcrops at the top of the croft and run the road between them. Which is good. Rock blasting and removal is another expense that we are heartily glad not to incur on an already massively expensive road.

But it’s progress! We are so cheered to see this. At last, for the first time after all these months of planning, specification and permissions, it actually seems real.