Category: scotland

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Snow flurries and hot, spiced apple juice

Storm Bella took hold last night. Winds of up to 70 mph, and driving hail and sleet for most of the night.

We didn’t get much sleep with the caravan rocking violently in the wind, but we awoke this morning to find the storm blown out and to a light scattering of snow on the croft.

When it’s windy the caravan is especially cold.

It’s not well insulated and the windows and doors are badly fitted and allow a gale to blow through them. We’ve done what we can with insulating tape and thermal curtains, but we can’t avoid the wind up here on the top of the hill.

After breakfast, which was taken sitting in a blanket in front of the fire, I made hot, spiced apple juice to warm us up.

Full of cinnamon, nutmeg, cranberries, juniper berries and slices of clementines, it’s definitely helping with our Vitamin C intake as well as being comforting and delicious.

We’ve run out of apple juice now until I brave the shops again so from here on in it’s going to have to be hot, spiced cider… 😊

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Gaelic singers, fires and venison

Our first island Christmas.

Last night we attended an outdoor meal with friends around a fire, with local musicians and Gaelic singers. They sang traditional carols but also songs that we didn’t know, hauntingly beautiful in the open air and the darkness of the night.

It was a cold night but we honestly didn’t feel it. Such a lovely introduction to Christmas here.

We returned home smelling of woodsmoke and with heads full of new melodies and happy memories.

This morning, Christmas Day, and it was a day alone for us. The wind howled around the caravan and we sat in front of the fire with big socks on and shared a zoom call with the boys in Manchester.

We ate venison and drank red wine and enjoyed the feeling of peacefulness and nothing that we absolutely had to do.

It’s been a very unusal and quiet Christmas, but a good one for all that. It’s made us remember what’s important and has made us look forward to next year’s celebration with family (and a proper kitchen!) all the more.

Merry Christmas to you all. From the fireside of the caravan on the windswept hillside of the croft I’m sending you all good wishes for health and happiness, wherever you are.

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A spiky start

With the house build we’ve had little time for the croft tree plans or vegetable bed preparation beyond the most basic of plans for zoning and starting to think about grant applications for the trees and deer fencing.

Having said all of that, whilst our days are taken up with working in the house I’ve started on the croft in the smallest of ways. It just felt necessary to do something.

We’re planning for a berry bed, and also edible hedges.

To this end I’ve just received the first dozen or so cuttings of japanese red gooseberry, jostaberry and green currants, and have stuck them in a barrel of soil positioned next to the caravan to root up ready to be planted out into beds late next year.

If the deer don’t eat them (and you’d think that the thorns on the gooseberries would be enough of a deterrent, or am I deluding myself?) this should give them a bit of an early start.

These will be followed with raspberry, honeyberry, cloudberry, black currants, blueberry and strawberries early next year. And maybe the start of herb pots in the spring for the herb beds. Once we have some windbreaks in place.

We have also picked up some willow whips from a neighbours’ prunings, and as an experiment we’re going to plant them in the exposed boggy bottom of the croft over the next few days.

We’re treating these as sacrificial trees, as a test. We’ve had conflicting local reports about the need for and the effectiveness of deer fencing. It will be interesting to see whether these young trees get decimated and whether we have to wait for a further year to fully deer fence the croft before we can attempt sensibly to plant any young trees further at all.

A slow and spiky start. But it’s a start.

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Atholl Brose

It’s that time of year again. I’ve made homemade Atholl Brose.

A wee glass of this in the evening to warm us up is a necessity, I think.

Whisky, honey, oats and cream. Lasts for a week in the fridge – if you can make it last that long 😊.

Recipe here for anyone that fancies giving it a go. Note I only use a half bottle of whisky, just a blended one too, and it’s delicious.

https://foodanddrink.scotsman.com/drink/how-to-make-your-very-own-atholl-brose/

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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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When it rains…

When it rains here, it really rains.

The croft feels like a giant sponge, the grass squelchy underfoot as it tries its best to absorb the huge quantity of water being thrown at it from the sky.

Yes, that’s horizontal rain.

When it’s like this, no waterproofs that I’ve ever come across will keep you dry for long. It’s best to retreat indoors for a cup of tea and wait it out.

We have pools of rainwater everywhere. The burn, which normally trickles gently through the hills at the back of the croft, has become a foaming torrent of water tumbling its way to the sea.

This is an older video from September, with the burn in medium flow. Now it’s about twice as full, I just haven’t been brave enough to make my way down there for a more recent picture.

Wish I could send you some, Green Goddess 🌿.

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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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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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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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Autumn in the Highlands

We drove the last part of our journey today up to the Isle of Skye. Our trip today took us from the borders of Scotland up through the Trossocks, Glencoe and Fort William across to Kyle of Localsh and over the bridge onto the island.

It was a blustery autumn day in the Highlands, but the wind kept the rain clouds moving, and each outbreak of rain was interspersed with the most amazing light and colour.

The leaves, bracken and heathers were a carpet of russet and golds.

My phone camera couldn’t do them justice at all, especially through the glass of a smeary car window, but I hope these snaps will give you a pale glimpse of the glory that is the Highlands at this time of the year.

We were exhausted when we eventually reached the island, but as there was still a bit of light before the sun set, we couldn’t resist dropping in on the croft to let Bertie stretch his legs and take his first introductory sniffs of the land.

He seemed to like it 😊.

Next a quick supper, a hot bath and a good night’s sleep ready for the work to start tomorrow.

We’re weary but happy. It still feels a bit unreal.

We made it.