A walk through the woods - facing facts

Sucessive storms and marauding red deer, who jump the burn and pick their path through terrain which is not fence-able, have ravaged the woods but as we found yesterday there are sunny moments in the darkness.

Skies and seas, eggs and sheep

The Easter holidays bring a welcome release from rigid time-keeping, especially with friends staying with us, and the cottages full of families on holiday. Last week, we had a full pre-Easter week - the true start to the season - and it was lovely to have some of our seasonal regulars around the place, as well as some new faces who have fallen in love with the place too. One 'new' couple to Treshnish came from Edinburgh on public transport and 'survived' (loved.... thrived....?) in this isolated place without a car. Sometimes I am asked whether it is possible to be here without a car, and it is always difficult to know how to answer - because it so depends on what people want from their holiday and how they view remoteness. It was great to see that these two had made the right choice as they had a fantastic time apparently - AND saw sea eagles, golden eagles, short eared owls..

Feedback from guests is important to us - good or bad. We never assume we will always get it right. It was wonderful to open up the Twitter feed at the weekend, and find these great tweets! Hearing how much our guests enjoy the place is a sincerely good feeling for us. So thank you all - you know who you are - it made my Easter!

I'd tell you to check out @treshnish but I'd rather have a chance of getting a booking every year for the rest of my life. #bestkeptsecrets

@Treshnish 140 characters could never do justice to the farm and Haunn in particular. Most perfect place I've ever spent time on all fronts!

@treshnish Thank you so much for a fab week; so many kind, wonderful folks. I can't put into words how good the place felt. So sad to leave.

Lovely to find this threesome. Wood anemone, Celandine and Violet. Lots more violets now and celandine littering the fields below the house, they seem to enjoy the same ground as the bluebells come to later on, sheltered by the dead bracken - it is good for something then?

A bit of colour for an Easter weekend. We have windswept hyacinths in the garden and the daffodils all too quickly are going over, not helped by the cold wind or the damp weather.

An Easter egg hunt in the garden, for the 2 girls almost, but not quite, too old for such childish things. Or perhaps they kidded on to keep the aging parents happy. It has been a few years since Farmer was spotted wearing 'bunny ears'!! The kitchen filled with too much chocolate! Some egg decorating and rolling too. Above is 'Dad', and below some beach rubbish, down at the boathouse.

I saw my first kingcup about 3 - 4 weeks ago - there are lots more of them around now. And we saw our first sea-thrift today too, just coming into flower. I did take some photographs to prove it and will upload them with the next blog.

West Cottage guests had a great otter sighting near the cattle shed. They were walking along the track with Badger (one of Jan's puppies from last year), and an otter trotted across the road in front of them, went across the field above Shian and Duill, over the stone wall, and towards the lochan. We restored the lochan about 6 years ago, and has had increasing variety of wildlife on it, but this is the first time anyone has mentioned an otter being seen anywhere near it.

Sheep have been in this field quite recently so the primroses are just beginning to recover a bit. Particularly where sheltered by brambles or bracken, or out of reach.

The beginning of a flush of new grass coming now. The cattle are ranging on the hill, still being fed a bit of silage but they are finding some roughage on the hill now too. We are looking at the grazing regime plan to make sure we keep the right fields locked up for the right time. It will be interesting to see how the flowers are this year compared to last year.

We are not sure what this white marking in some of the rock pools is, but it was present down by the boathouse this afternoon. It almost looks like salt marks but it was below the tide mark. In 2008, when we had a very hot May, we collected sea salt from the pools further up the tideline.

The pre-lambing gathers were completed earlier in the week. Farmer went to see John in Dervaig to see if he would be able to give us a hand with the gathering as it is easier with 3 people. John knows his way around our hill, and it was really nice to have him back giving us a hand. The gather went fine, it was cold and the ewes were slow, but then they are heavily in lamb - and it is a good few miles for those furthest away. The last time Farmer handled these ewes was after tupping, before they went back to the hill at the beginning of January. Putting them through the fank now was a good chance to sift out any who looked as if they needed a bit of extra nutrition. Condition scoring is a useful method of assessing their condition throughout the year, so you can adapt treatments/feed et cetera if you need to. Farmer was worried to see that some of our ewes have not come out of the wet and relentless winter as well as they usually do. He kept those ones back for extra feeding. This is where the training they get as hoggs helps, as sheep do not naturally know to eat the delicious ewe nut or 'cake' that comes in a shiny sack - they dont naturally know about hay either. These ewes are 6 or 7 years old now and will not have needed supplementary feeding until now. So to begin with, they look puzzled as Farmer pours out the feed into the troughs, but slowly they start to eat it. The rest of the flock are back on the hill again having received their annual wormer (still following the system we used when organically certified) and the next time they come in through the fank will be with their lambs at foot.

Skies were changeable today as they have been all week. Blue skies in the morning, and then threatening rains and hail, and then sun again. By the time we got back to the house, we had been soaked by yet another downpour though.

Hail and shine

Lambs lie together in old tyre tracks or shallow dried up burns, catching the warm of the sun but out of the wind which is bitter today.  (This is Brownie, above) The sun is so bright but it is still very cold.   

In our corner of the island everything is a little behind, so a trip out today in the car to Dervaig and our fantastic village Post Office to post some parcels and do some shopping, was a good way of seeing how spring is progressing elsewhere.  The beech woods at Calgary are almost luminous with the sun casting its contrast between the dark shadows and the brightness of fresh young leaves unfurling.  

This can seem like a cruel time of year - the sun is shining but the grass is still slow to grow.   At a time when the ewes need to recover their strength after a winter pregnancy and provide a good supply of milk for their lambs, there is still a way to go before we reach the abundant grass stage!

Resting fields allows it to recover and we do that here and there in accordance with our 'open grazed grassland' management, this enables the grass to grow and along with it the flourishing of herb rich flowers, and provides a safe haven for ground nesting birds at the same time.

Sunset from farmhouse garden, through sycamore leaves.

The cows seem to have settled into their new groups and found their new order.   Soon the large group of cows and their calves, along with the bull, will come into the 'Field beyond Haunn' and graze the fresh spring grass we have been saving for them.  This means for anyone wanting to walk a dog along the coast path, they will meet a sign reminding them that it is not permitted to walk a dog through young stock, and that they should find an alternative route.  (in this case it means skirting along the outside of the field, going through the deer gate by the cottages, walking above the deer fence and coming back to the track or path on the other side of the field).  

Some regular guests of ours sent us a lovely email yesterday about how much they had enjoyed the 2 different holidays they had had at Haunn recently (one at Easter and the second just last week).  They usually expect to see otters at Port Haunn but on their last visit they didn't see them there. However they did have a wonderful sighting at Calgary.  In AB's words:  "On our visit at Easter we spent well over an hour watching 2 otters (mum and teenage cub?) in Calgary Bay.  One was busy catching fish while the other rolled about in the water, floated on its back and generally messed about, suggesting teenager to me!  They eventually climbed out of the water, groomed each other for about ten minutes then curled up under a rock and went to sleep." What a memorable sight.

Brownie and Brian now have a trough in their pen with some lamb nuts in it - time to tempt them onto

solid food. As it is whenever he gets the chance Brian tries to eat stones. They are growing, becoming more adventurous.

And the trees continue to burst forth in so many hues of spring colour - not all of them green. Pictured 

above, oaks on the road between Treshnish and Torloisk - and below, near the Eas Fors waterfall - ash 

tree flowers. A shower of hail as I took this photograph!

For more photos of the light and the trees look at http://headlandoftrees.wordpress.com

A new flock of sheep

After the bird and flower friendly summer grazing regime (Holding back some fields for ground nesting birds, allowing flowers to set seed before cutting silage) the in-bye fields can be in need of some harder grazing to clean up the pasture which creates a better habitat for the huge diversity of wild flowers to flower again abundantly next year.

For this reason, a few years ago, we began keeping a small flock of 'cast ewes' over the winter on the fields. 'Cast ewes' are the older sheep who need a bit more comfort than they would get out on the hill. Usually they are sold off Isle of Mull hill farms onto 'softer' mainland farms where they graze turnips and raise their lambs in more sheltered fields. But some island farms keep them back and lamb them on their better ground as we have been doing.

Traditionally the winter grazing of sheep on arable and dairy field rotations is called 'the golden hoof' principle - they fertilise neatly as they go! But our gold hooved 'cast ewes' can be alot of work to look after as they are not so used to the fields and perhaps need more shelter than we can give them. So for their sake and for ours, we decided to start a new flock - so we will sell the older ewes through Oban Market and we have bought 40 Cheviot Hoggs from a neighbouring Farm and a Croft in Dervaig.

As we are still organic we had to get a Derogation from SOPA to enable us to buy non-organic breeding stock. (You have to have a good reason. In our case, we had looked for organic Cheviot Hoggs and couldn't find any, not even in a small number such as this.) And it has to be better buying local.

If you decide to come and stay in one of the cosy Treshnish and Haunn Cottages over the winter you may well encounter our new flock of sheep when out walking below the Treshnish holiday cottages, perhaps when looking for the resident otter along the rocky shoreline near the ruin of the 'old boathouse'.