Preparations

Farmer is well and truly into the winter feeding regime now.  The bull is in the cattle shed with a young stirk (bullock) and our oldest cow No 63 to keep him company, and the rest of the cows are still out enjoying the roughage in the Black Park and a bite of 'cake' in the mornings. The hoggs are in the park near the cattle shed, and are mostly coming to the food now. Disappointingly there are about 15 out of the 100 who have not got the message about the 'tup tup tup' call accompanied by a rattling bag and so Farmer is going to get them in again and see if they will learn.  It is likely that they are eating the hay so they are not losing condition, it is just useful to know they will eat ewe nuts if they ever have to come into the shed at any time. 

We are busy getting everything ready for Christmas and New Year visitors, the first of whom arrive in a day or two's time. Neil has been busy painting in West, Middle and East and now he is finishing off a wee job in Duill kitchen and helping me order the right amount of materials for the new bathroom, which we are doing in January. 

The builders have been putting the plasterboard on in the Studio, the new window upstairs caused a bit of hassle but it is finished now, and floods the gallery bedroom with westerly light and views of the Point and the sea.  (I will be ordering thermal blackout blinds soon!). I will post some photographs when I have some record of the progress.

We have had some good dry frosty mornings with ice on the puddles, and pockets of frost staying white all day, but the wind is getting up tonight bringing some warmer wilder weather overnight.  Today was another of those beautiful still bright days so I stole an hour to go and look at the cheviots and enjoy the golden orange sunlight on the bay.  The tide was very low. 

Fuchsia growing through our garden wall.

A sculpture given to us by our friend and artist Matt Baker.

The Cheviots and Zwarties are grazing the field below the house.  There is still plenty of grass for them. The tups have been out for 4 weeks now so Farmer would expect the majority of the ewes to have been served by now, but this tup was showing an interest in the ewe, so just as well they are all still together. The tups will come out at the beginning of January, and will come in through the fank to get some health care before they go back to the hill. The tups are then kept separate from the ewes and the hoggs until the same time next year!

You can see the second turbine on the skyline in the photograph above.  It would appear that I have been reading the meters correctly. Having in the last post noted a 30% difference between the new and old turbines I thought I must have made an error so now  I am re-reading them every few days just to see what happens, and on the latest comparison, the new turbine was still generating more than the older one, and this time by about 50%. It will be interesting to see if that continues or not.

We have the Energy Savings Trust coming to do an energy audit in January. I am hoping that I will get some hints as to how we can reduce our reliance on electricity for heating down at Haunn. Being the largest cottage at Haunn, Toechtamhor is the largest user and we are working on reducing the amount of electricity we use. The cavity wall insulation installed last year should have helped as should the new windows going in in February, but I am hoping the EST auditor will come up with something really radical to help reduce energy use even more!

I think you could call this 'extensive' grazing. At this time of year it can feel so wild, and so sparse compared to the abundance of summer, when the fields are carpeted with wild flowers and herbage.

It is getting close to the solstice, and lovely to have this rich sunshine which lengthens the daylight preciously at this time of year when the days are so short. I sat a while and looked at the view out to sea, it was so quiet and peaceful. No sound from the sheep, almost no movement from the sea, occasional gulls flying past soundlessly, and again I was reminded of how lucky I am to have this on my doorstep.

The dark pool in the foreground of this picture is the Treshnish 'swimming pool'. It is often filled with kelp fronds but today I could see its sandy bottom.  There is another pool at Haunn on the beach where Donald Sutherland gets shot in the last dramatic scene of the 'Eye of the Needle' which was filmed here (and at Cameron Farm, Loch Buie) in 1981. East, Middle and West were used as the dressing rooms, and there was a lighthouse built on the Dun at Haunn.

Thank you to all the new faces we have met at Treshnish over the past year, and to the more familiar ones who keep coming back - you are an important part of what makes Treshnish hum.

I will leave you with a photograph of Iona to wish you all a lovely Christmas/winter solstice and a Happy New Year. 

Winter feeding and energy planning.

It is always a bit daunting when winter feeding starts. It is not a job that you can not  stop once you have started - until the weather improves in the spring and the grass starts coming again. But the cows are in good condition and Farmer doesn't want them to lose condition as winter gets underway.  

So earlier in the week, the cows got their first feed of the winter - a bag of Hill Cow Cobs.  This means they can be fed on the ground, in a different place each day, no need for the troughs (better for Farmer's back) and with the ability to move the feeding spot each day there is less chance of poaching the ground when it is wet underfoot. 

They run for the bag!

Time to stand back and check how they all are.  

This cow was very ill as a heifer, and didn't go to the bull until she was a year older than the other heifers.  Since then though, she has had successful calvings every time. She is very calm and having been so ill, she is quite used to being at close quarters with humans.

Coming to have a look.

The weather has dried up after a week of fairly grim wet weather.  It has been lovely the last few days, and particularly good sunsets.  Calgary Tearoom was open this weekend for a Christmas sale, so we headed down there for tea and cake - and a walk at sunset on the beach.

This view of Treshnish Point is at the corner just beyond Calgary tearoom, before the road drops down to sea level.  When we first moved here, my stomach would turn over as we caught sight of it, in a sort of ' oh god what have we done?' way.  It still catches me now, 18 years later - no regrets at all - but still moved by the headland's powerful shape and drama.

The sunset. 

Calgary headland.

And Treshnish headland again.

The moon and the T LEC CAB sign.

Lichens at Haunn.

Another view we cannot tire of.

I went to a Visit Scotland energy saving event at the Tourist Office in Craignure earlier in the week.  I took leaflets from the Green Business Tourism Scheme to hand out to anyone who was interested in joining.  It was a horrendously wet day and not very many people ventured out, even though Brian from Energy Saving Trust was there with lots of information.  He and I know each other from the school closure threat days, so we chatted and he gave me some very useful advice about interest free loans for businesses (including farmers).  This was good to know as the last time we tried to get one we couldn't because we farmed.   More form filling though.  We are going to have one of their energy audits done. This will give us a chance to apply for the interest free loan. We will be especially looking at Toechtamhor which is a higher user of energy, being bigger and of a different construction than the other Haunn cottages.    We have plans to put better windows in, using the same airtight method as we used in the farmhouse - and possibly an air to air source heat pump to reduce electricity consumption.

Studio is already for the builders to arrive to do some eco-improvements in the living room and downstairs bedroom - we are increasing the wall insulation and putting in a wood burning stove as well as a window in the north wall of the bedroom.

We have had kindling supplied for the last 10 or more years by a sawmiller from Salen.  Unfortunately he has just told us that the next 10 bags (for our Christmas and New Year guests) will be his last delivery.  This is because of the difficulty he is having in sourcing dry wood.  So now we are looking into what we can do instead.  If the community woodland supplied them we could buy them from there, but I don't think they do them either.  So if we cannot source them on the island - what to do? Do we stop supplying kindling altogther, and get guests to bring their own? Do we supply firelighters instead? You can get eco ones, but we are having problems finding out where they are made and where they come from.  Do we provide an axe and allow guests to chop their own kindling?  

The hoggs are doing well on learning how to feed, and they will be able to go out again soon.  The field in this photograph is one of the fields Farmer is finding it difficult to put the hoggs in - because of the brambles. Hoggs will often get 'caught' in the brambles and whereas the stronger ewes can pull themselves out of them, hoggs tend to get stuck. This is a side effect of our environmental management agreement which prevents us from grazing cattle at certain times when the brambles are growing. In areas where the cows can graze during high summer, the brambles are kept in check.   So the Black Park is one of the fields where the brambles are spreading, so there is an increased risk if the hoggs are in there.  Even with daily checking. 

Farmer has been out checking the tups.  The blackface ewes and tups are on the Point - so he goes with Jan and walks quietly through them, spying through his binoculars to make sure every one of them is present and correct. 

Farmer used his new livestock trailer this week. He took some left over lambs and cast ewes to the sale in Oban.  We managed to get an all-time record price for one lamb - but not in a good way - £2.  This would not have even covered the cost of getting it to market. 

We had 3 nights this week when there was no one staying at Treshnish apart from us. This is the first time since early March.  It feels very different when there is no one here, but this weekend some regulars have come across from Edinburgh for a long weekend, having seen the weather forecast (good here for the next few days) and other regulars are staying in West Cottage for a week - they only ever come in the winter!