Category: static caravan

Posted on

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. 😊

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Deciding what’s essential

Moving into this caravan has taught me again how privileged I am and how I had no real idea about the minimum level of basics needed to be comfortable.

As I unpack each box and the tiny kitchen fills up I hold my head in my hands and ask myself why I thought I really needed that item over and over again.

For example, I packed four wooden chopping boards. Four. What on earth did I think I was going to be preparing? There isn’t enough worktop space to lay them out for use let alone enough space to stack them.

I have one drawer in the caravan kitchen which I’ve filled with all our knives, cutlery and utensils. It’s over full. I seem to have thought that several wooden spoons were essential. The list goes on.

Now, of course I can get more creative with ways of storing things, I know. I’d bought some macrami hanging baskets which I’ve hung to hold apples, vegetables that don’t need refrigeration and other bits. They don’t hold much weight so it’s light things only.

I’ve got hooks up for mugs and hanging storage for other things to keep them off the work surface. Walls, however flimsy, I’ve discovered, are my friend.

But the key thing here is less stuff rather than more ways to cram extra in. I will pare this back over the coming weeks to what I really use so that it’s more comfortable.

We’ve discovered that the oven doesn’t work, so my old slow cooker has already proved its weight in gold whilst my ever resourceful husband gets time to work out what’s wrong. I made a lamb and vegetable stew with dumplings in it a few days ago, and a rice pudding. It’s so comforting after a cold day of hard work to come into a caravan warm and fragrant with the smell of dinner cooking.

We still have no water. The pipes in the caravan had been cut when they were removed previously for transportation which we didn’t notice until we came to install them.

This meant that new pipes and connectors had to be ordered, which won’t arrive until next week. So no running water or usable toilet… We are filling containers from the one tap in the house. I won’t go into the mechanics of the toilet arrangements for my more delicate readers, but it’s led to many moments of hilarity and a more intimate knowledge of the croft than we had been expecting..

A camping portaloo should arrive any day now… 😊

PS. we do have a comfortable bed that we managed to crowbar into the tiny bedroom. It’s my bliss at the moment.

Posted on

The First Snows

The weather changes every fifteen minutes here on the island. Squally hail showers is what we’re getting now, although they do blow themselves out and we are left with bright, clear air that makes everything seem scrubbed and very intense.

Work on connecting water and power to the caravan has meant husband has had to dash out between the showers and work as best he can until the next flurry of rain or hail hits.

We noticed the first snow on the high mountains of Knoydart today. Winter is with us.

Heating the caravan to try and dry out the dampness is starting to work. We managed to get the inside temperature to 19 degrees centigrade from a standing start of 4 degrees this morning, and the dampness/humidity levels reduced from 80% to a much more comfortable 50%.

The caravan is single glazed and has no real insulation, which is going to make a Highland winter interesting. I think a couple of thermal lined door curtains, thick socks and our super warm quilt are going to be necessities as snowy days approach..