Category: evening

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Summer days and endless light

Sometimes the Scottish Highlands simply take your breath away.

Blue skies and an old hawthorn tree

After months of cold and rain, all of a sudden summer is here. Warm days, blue skies and intense sunsets. Memories of cold, wet winter days dissolve in the brilliant light.

We are only three weeks away from the midsummer solstice, and the light is incredible. It doesn’t really get dark at all. Sunset is around 10.30pm but the skies retain a half light until the dawn breaks again at about 4.30am with the return of pink skies.

The sunset just starting

The sunsets have been spectacular over the last few nights.

Sun dipping behind the back of the croft

These dry days also mean that daily life is easier. Drying clothes on racks in the house is difficult at the moment as there is plaster and building dust everywhere. The caravan often resembles a Chinese laundry.

But we’ve been able to line dry our clothes again now that the air temperatures are sitting at a very nice 18-22C. There’s something nostalgic for me about pegging out washing, and the scent of clean, wind-dried clothes is one that takes me right back to my childhood, and is a smell that I love.

Drying washing on the croft

We sat over lunch today out on the croft, listening to the birds squabbling in the hedgerows and watching the swallows swoop over the roof of the house, and laughed with the pleasure of it all.

View over Knoydart from the front of the house

We feel very lucky to be here.

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A profusion of mackerel

Friends from the village gave us a bag of freshly caught mackerel from Armadale Bay yesterday.

They arrived, shining, still smelling of the sea. I always think they’re such lovely looking fish.

Husband heroically gutted them all in the tiny caravan kitchen sink and we decided to cook them over the barbecue whilst they were at their best.

Mackerel

There is nothing quite like freshly chargrilled mackerel. They were moist, sweet and slightly smoky from the fire, their skins blackened and crispy. We ate them whilst the sun went down with good bread, dill-pickled cucumber and some fresh salad.

There was enough left over to make mackerel pate this morning. The meat was flaked off into a bowl with cream cheese, lemon juice and zest, a lime, sea salt and cracked black pepper.

Mackerel pate

A pot has gone into the fridge to eat later with sourdough toast, and a bowl has been wrapped as a thankyou gift for the neighbours who brought us the fish.

Later on toasted sourdough

I was just musing that the last time we ate mackerel pate was an expensive pot bought from a London deli. And here we are a year on, eating the same, but probably fresher and more flavoursome than anything bought from a shop.

Eaten with thanks as part of our new life here in Scotland.

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Live music is back!

One of the things that used to be a huge part of our lives and which we’ve missed since lockdown began has been live music.

Being on the Isle of Skye doesn’t mean that gigs stop. Far from it. The nature of them is a little different (we’re unlikely to be seeing the Foo Fighters in the tent at Armadale any time soon), but we are rich in local musicians and there is a very active music scene here.

I’ve always preferred small venue music anyway – the intimacy and immediacy of a band or singer just a few metres away is, to my way of thinking, a much more real experience than being part of a crowd so big that the best view is via the video stream screens.

Innes Watson and Ross Ainslie

This summer SEALL was able to restart its festival programme, albeit with social distancing and other Covid protection measures in place. Established in 1991, the name means Look or See in Gaelic and is pronounced “Shall”. It celebrates the wealth of home grown musical talent in the area.

The first of the events we attended a few nights ago was an evening concert held outdoors in the grounds of Armadale Castle. Innes Watson and Ross Ainslie, two very talented young musicians. It was so good. I love that we celebrate Gaelic culture in its music and that the next generation fuse it so seamlessly with their own creations. We have a few more concerts booked in for July.

Open Air at Armadale Castle

We also watched Skye Live via livestream feed a few nights back. An amazing fusion of traditional and electronica performed and filmed in the Mountains in Skye. I’ve copied a YouTube link to it for those of you that would like to have a taster. https://youtu.be/596iVkMGj-g

Niteworks on the Quiraing

I’m so happy that live music is back.

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Hot, hot, hot

The weather here on the island has been very hot over the past week. The caravan has suddenly transformed from fridge to oven..

The temperature gauge inside recorded 26 degrees centigrade yesterday, and that’s uncomfortably warm for us. Especially when opening windows to try and catch a breeze results in swarms of midges coming in off the croft…reminder to self, we must get some midge netting fitted to the windows.

The seedlings however are loving it. Uncle Bert’s Kale is growing madly, the potato plants are all greening up nicely and I have my first bean on my borlotti bean plant!

It was too hot to cook indoors yesterday and we were too tired to summon up a BBQ, so we headed down to Camuscross early to try and get a table for a cold drink and some supper. It’s so good to be able to do that again now that lockdown has eased.

There are worse places to be on a hot June evening… This time last year we were in London… I know where I’d rather be.

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We have warmth!

Ha ha! Happy faces! The sun has returned! The air and the soil have warmed up and as I speak we have blue skies and a soft, warm breeze.

It will be the midges soon, but I’m hoping that being at the top of a hill with more wind than most that we’ll escape the worst of them. We’re prepared, just in case – I’ve bought midge hats and nets so that if we do get bombarded we have a fighting chance of avoiding being eaten alive whilst we run back to the caravan.

Impromptu BBQ

We had an impromptu barbecue last night to celebrate the lovely evening. These shots were taken at about 7pm. As the sun dipped behind the hill at the back of the croft at around 10pm it started to get colder, and we wrapped up in blankets and added a bit more wood to the fire.

The birds are singing, the sun is shining, and husband has thrown open all the doors and windows in the house whilst he is working so that it cools down.

I don’t want to count my chickens, but it seems like summer has come at last…

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First meal outdoors

It was a long, hard day after a heavy week of work on the build and the croft. We decided to add a fifth vegetable bed to the growing area (remind me I said we’d start small this year? 😳) so that I could plant up my globe artichoke seedlings.

These perennials grow huge, so they ideally needed a bed of their own, which I wanted to site perpendicular to the rest to add a kind of windbreak effect.

New veg bed

For speed, and cost (the price of wood is crazy right now) we decided to use what we had on the croft and make another hugelkutur bed. The existing ones are working well for us, and we still have lots of rushes and soil that we can reuse.

Countless wheelbarrow loads of cardboard, rushes, soil, compost and woodchip later we had another bed ready for planting. It takes us about  four hours to build one of these, and it’s heavy, manual work.

We decided that we deserved a bit of relaxation and supper outside after all that exertion. We carried out some chairs and a fold-up table and positioned them amongst the building rubbish.

We’d recently bought a firepit BBQ which needed testing, so we fired her up and cooked supper on it. There’s nothing quite like the taste of real charcoal grilled Scottish steaks eaten outdoors… Everything tastes better in the open air, I think.

It was lovely to relax together eating, drinking and watching the incredible vista of sea and sky in front of us.

We added some building wood scraps to the fire to make a bit of a blaze after the charcoal had died down, and sat toasting our toes with a small glass of whisky, watching the rain and rainbows sweep across the Knoydart peninsula.

Such incredible natural beauty. Feeling very lucky to be here.

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Croft Christmas Tree

It’s a blustery, cold winters day here on the island right now.

Whilst husband is working in the house, preparing the walls for foil, I’m keeping busy in the caravan until I can be helpful, cooking, staying warm by the fire and listening to a Ted Hughes audio book.

We have no room in the caravan for a Christmas tree, but I couldn’t contemplate any kind of Christmas without one.

I ordered a very small, rooted tree from a nursery on the island, and it arrived yesterday. It’s now potted up in an old whisky barrel planter just outside the caravan. We can see it from the sitting area window. We can plant it on the croft in the New Year as it’s a native fir.

Conscious that I didn’t want battery lights or to add any more electrical load to the caravan, I’d bought solar tree lights.

This was a bit of a leap of faith, to be honest. We only get approximately six hours daylight at our northern latitude at this, the darkest time of the year. It was always a bit of a lottery as to whether this would be enough to power the tree lights for an evening or whether the whole thing would be a washout.

But it worked. Despite it being a totally grey, overcast day, as soon as the light dimmed at 4pm the solar lights came on. Our wee Croft Christmas tree is twinkling away in the darkness, probably entertaining the deer and definitely adding a bit of festive cheer to the building site.

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Wintering

It snowed last night.

When we awoke it was to sleet and snow pounding the roof and windows of the caravan, and it had settled on the hills. The morning was very cold. It took all of our willpower to leave the warmth of our bed and stagger through to the kitchen to make hot coffee.

We ate breakfast watching the snow swirl around the caravan, and both decided it might not be a bad idea to head out to do our weekly food shop now in case it got any worse.

We already have food stocks of oatmeal, pasta, tinned goods and flour, even within the very limited storage capacity we have within the static. I think it’s just prudent to keep long-life food available in case roads become impassable or we got ill. You never know. And whilst the weather is doing this it just reinforces the stocking up instinct further.

Whilst husband is working in the house filling gaps between the SIP panels in our desire to have the house as close to passive house standards as possible, I’m doing most of the food preparation. It’s just what we can both best do to contribute to pushing this build forward at this point in time.

Food has become reduced to simple homemade soups, curries, stews and occasional bakes. Tonight, for example, I’m making a cottage pie. Yesterday was bean and vegetable soup. Nothing fancy, just home made food that fills us up and is filled with nourishing ingredients.

I’m also making Athol Brose this evening. A small, sweet, creamy whisky based treat that we’ll take a glass of before bed each night.

Absolutely essential preparation for wintering in my book. 😊

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Evening light

The sun sets early on the croft at this time of the year. 1545 yesterday, to be precise. We’re approaching the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.

Almost as if to make up for the long hours of darkness that are about to come, nature puts on a dazzling show of light before it dies.

The skies become suffused with a golden light and all the colours of the hedgerow glow with an incredible intensity.

That’s every evening, even on days without a remarkable sunset.

Facing SSE, we get more sunrises than sunsets on this part of the island. The sun dips behind the mountains behind us and we often just see the residual rosy glow in the sky, whereas those on the west coast enjoy its full splendour.

Still, it’s beautiful. A camera never seems to do it justice.