Ravencroft Skye

We love living here. And we truly love our life together. We have so much to be grateful for. But we can’t help it, we’re only human, and we have down days too.

Usually it only affects one of us at a time. But today we both coincided.

It was just one of those days. For no apparent reason we both felt low and with no energy or enthusiasm for anything.

A steak and salad dinner, a glass of wine and an evening of watching Ross Noble and Kevin Bridges (fabulous Geordie and Glaswegian comedians respectively) raised our spirits and revived us.

Sometimes a good dose of insanity and laughter is just what you need to take you out of yourself, and tonight that really helped.

Thanks guys.

They’re growing like weeds, our two new additions to the family, and I feel the need to capture them as much as possible at this stage whilst they’re still small.

They’re just back from their second round of vaccinations at the local vets, and they’re now twelve weeks of age. We need to keep them indoors for a few more weeks yet. Then, watch out world!

Both are growing fast. Fergus has gone from 1kg to 1.5kg in the last four weeks, and Freya from 800g to almost 1.2kg. They’re thriving.

Life is good as a kitten at this age. It’s a constant round of eating, sleeping, exploration and play fighting. As the vet agreed ruefully, play for kittens is “robust”. They’re constantly clawing, pouncing, biting and doing the wild-eyed racing up-and-down-after-each-other-thing at the moment.

They often sleep on us now after they’ve exhausted theirselves with their mischief and exertion. It’s very sweet watching them collapse into furry puddles of purring fluff before they drift into sleep.

They’re into everything. They’re big enough to get onto the bookcase now, and leap from the back of the sofa into the rows of books with great glee.

Having them is exhausting, but lovely. They make us laugh every day and despite the scarred arms from kitten bites or claws, the constant inability to sit alone and the continual removal from lamps, bookcases and laundry baskets, we wouldn’t be without them now.

The extreme heat of the last month has dissipated at last, and the weather has returned to our normal cool, wet days. With daily sunshine at some point, of course. But we now have 15° rather than 30° and I for one am heartily relieved.

The plants in the polycrub have suffered the most. We tried to keep them all watered, but at those temperatures most bolted in the heat.

The lettuces are bolting, as are the coriander, parsley, rocket and dill. The nasturtiums are everywhere. The beetroot have gone mad seemingly overnight. The kale and broccoli are all flowering like crazy outside too.

I’ve re-sown where I can and hopefully we’ll have a much more steady sumner of growth from this point forwards.

We’ve cropped our first few pots of potatoes. The yield in the pots has been small, but I think that’s because I put too many potatoes in each pot. There are plenty to come from the outdoor croft beds.

Casablanca, pilot and red rooster varieties have done well. Fir Apple needs another four weeks to reach a reasonable size.

The spring onions have gone a bit mad and I needed their pots so I’ve harvested a few pots of them on the small side.

I chop and freeze many of them in ice cube containers along with the herbs like chives, coriander and parsley so that I can add them to curries and casseroles when they’re difficult to get hold of.

All in all, apart from the fact that most things are about a month too soon, crops are good.

Over the last week or so wasps have built a nest inside the polycrub. I have no idea how we didn’t notice it until a few days ago, by which time it was well on the way to becoming the buzzing Fortress of Doom.

The nest is a remarkable feat of engineering, but sadly it had to go. It was right inside the entrance to the polycrub, over the door, meaning that every time you walked in or out you were walking directly underneath it and the wasps swarmed out defensively. It was only a matter of time before one of us got badly stung.

Hugh was going to remove, bag and dispose of it yesterday, and donned protective gear and a face net to see to them, but the wasps were very aggressive and swarmed out in their multitudes whenever he approached. He beat a tactical retreat.

He decided that being balanced up a rather rickety ladder was not the best place to be whilst being dive-bombed by dozens of them. Because just in those few days the bomber squad had clearly hatched and was raring to go.

Simple removal was not going to be an option, so sadly, we had to use a chemical spray to poison them just to get close enough to dispose of them. Both of us felt guilty at having to kill them like this just for building in the wrong place, but it had to be done.

Croft life isn’t all flowers and kittens. We don’t kill indiscriminately, or ever without serious consideration of the alternatives, but sometimes it’s the only way.

The kittens are ten weeks old now, and are much more at home and active than a few weeks ago. And they’re growing fast.

Having the two of them means that although they largely entertain each other, they’re on the go constantly.

As soon as one starts to nod off they’re awakened by their tail being chewed by the other. And so the cycle starts again with zoomies and play fights until they’ve totally exhausted each other.

We try to interact with them as much as we can so that they get accustomed to being handled. They come over now for strokes, purring loudly. And sometimes they fall asleep on us, never for long, but very sweet.

Fergus is quite a bit heavier than Freya and generally ends up wrestling Freya to a standstill. She squeals in protest when she’s had enough. Having said that, both claw and bite each other with similar ferocity, so it’s certainly not all one-sided.

They’re slowly learning to retract their claws when playing with us. To start with we were just lacerated. Now, if we squeak, we get patted with kitty soft paws.

Progress of a sort.

I awoke at some point during the night aware of an unfamiliar sound. It was the sound of rain on the glass of the open bedroom windows.

In the wee small hours the coolness that it brought was a palpable relief.

I struggled through my sleepiness over to the windows to pull them closed.

Even in my half awake state I recall the sense of relief that the heatwave had broken at last.

The swallows start their chatter perched on the guttering just outside the window at sunrise at 3.30 am. It’s the only time of the day that it feels relatively cool.

As the sun moves up and around the morning sky the heat rises. Most days over the last three weeks it’s been 29°C -30°C here, and it’s been almost a month since the island had rain. This isn’t normal.

We’ve moved to an Extreme Warning state of wildfire hazard, with the heather and bracken in the hills tinder dry. The croft backs onto the hills directly here, and living in a timber-clad house makes us especially nervous and vigilant.

It was only a few weeks ago that we watched a huge wildfire engulf the gorse and heather clad hills above the port of Mallaig on the mainland. We watched in horror as the fire raged for three days above the town, extinguished only after being battled by several fire crews.

There seems to be no respite from this strange heat. We’re promised rain this weekend and next week, but whether it will come isn’t certain.

The plants out in the croft beds are all struggling in the heat. We are watering them most nights to save them, and need to mulch to keep in what moisture we do have, but they’re bolting and going to seed already, as plants do when heat stressed.

We had a friend over for supper a few nights ago who lives in Ord, a tiny township of about thirty people on the western side of the Sleat peninsula. They’re not connected to mains water due to their remote location, getting their supply from a bore hole in the village. It’s almost run completely dry and they’re days away from having no drinking water.

We were astonished to hear this. I’ve never heard of such a thing on the island, one of the wettest places on the planet.

We must get our rainwater collection system on the shed up and running this year. We always planned this. The guttering is in place – we just need to divert the down pipes into big water butts.

We’re also looking into external window shutters for the huge windows on the south facing side of the house to cut down the solar gain and keep us cooler. European houses have external shutters as standard, but few homes in Britain do.

We need to continue to adapt and become more self sufficient. I fear that things will continue to be challenging with climate change.

That sounds raunchier than it is, believe me.

We’re into week three of a heatwave here in the normally frozen wastes of 57°N. When summer temperatures here normally average around 14-16C°, the onslaught of a protracted run of 26-29C° days is a bit of a shock to the system.

It’s worst at night. It’s hot, we don’t have air-conditioning, we don’t have shutters (we’re looking at that) and we can’t open the windows as we’re being plagued by midges without a breath of wind. It’s making us hot, tired and irritable.

We need to get some midge net frames made up for the windows so that we can ventilate. I thought that the MVHR system that we’d installed allowed us to fit a cooling system to it, but Hugh has re-checked and it appears that this particular model doesn’t have that ability. Due to supply issues during the pandemic this was swapped out from the original model that we’d chosen. So window ventilation it is, then. We must get this sorted.

I really didn’t expect this to be a problem in the highlands of Scotland, but with climate change causing ever greater volatility I’m guessing that these extreme weather conditions are only likely to get more frequent.

The kittens grow daily. The “no kittens in the bedroom” rule lasted precisely three days and after they’ve eaten breakfast they bound upstairs to play with the bedclothes. If Hugh or I are in the bed, all the more fun and opportunity for hunting stray limbs.

Things will be much easier once we can let them out. They’re very active now. They’re booked in for their first set of injections at the local vets tomorrow, at their nine week stage, and their second set will be at twelve weeks of age. After that I think we can tentatively swing open the doors and introduce them to the croft.

In the meantime, we’ve cracked open our old London fans for airflow, resurrected the slightly rusty but still useful firepit for outdoor cooking, stocked the fridge with cold beers, gathered the ardirondack chairs around the front of the house, and are making the very best of it.

The kittens are settling into their new home nicely. Lots of exploration, a bit of fear at the big spaces (totally understandable after living in a rescue cage for the first eight weeks of their tiny lives) and much play.

They are just adorable.

I’m so glad that we took two siblings. They sleep curled up together, and keep each other entertained and comforted.

You can see them practicing those vole hunting skills ! Leaping, scratching and pouncing on anything that moves.

Which is a damn good thing, because the voles in the polycrub have moved onto the cucumbers, so I’m afraid it’s officially war. And these are the best weapons that we’ve got..

As the days have progressed they’ve slowly become more confident, and more relaxed with us. We try to hold them and interact with them as much as we can until they’re used to us. We already get occasional purrs and cat licks.

They know where the cat food pouches are stored and come and sit on your feet vibrating loudly until you feed them..

We’re training them up for fieldwork!

We shall soon see if they’ve got the potential for Hunter-Killer class. Intensive practice sessions started for the squad yesterday.

Yes, we have a way to go …