Month: August 2015

Geopark rock stop café and the Inchnadamph Bone Caves

August 25, 2015 / woodlife

We celebrated our 19^th anniversary with a trip down the scenic West Highland coast, to the North West Geopark rock stop café. The most impressively sited café we have encountered, a panorama of wonder. Cake, coffee, stunning scenery and education.

Check out the North west highland Geopark rockstop cafe

We then stopped at Ardvreck castle Calda house

Calda house on Loch Assynt

Ardvreck castle remains on Loch Assynt

Calda house on Loch Assynt

The last stop of was the Inchnadamph Bone Caves

Bone caves

Bone Caves

Bone caves

which engulfed the absolute best of the Highland geology history and complete wilderness. A great walk into the mountains passing waterfalls (and rock falls) along a river valley, passing the source of the river which was fascinating.

source of river

Back home, our beach has been a hive of activity recently with wildlife.

cows

Horses

We are very happy to report that the Seals are back, they had been pretty scarce over the last few weeks and we really missed them. We currently have a group Of 5 and a group of 7 which haul out in front of the croft on the sandbanks. We have been calling these groups “pods” . I have just researched this as we guessed we were grabbing at straws and our thesaurus says “rookery collective noun”

We wouldn’t have guessed that!

seals

The Garden had a new visitor this week,

Sparrowhawk

A sparrow hawk – we have a lot of sparrows in the garden…

The mountains have been hidden as much as visible recently, a strange pinky haze has accompanied the hot weather with a sea haar sitting all along the Kyle sometimes, bringing the visibility right down to within the garden walls.

Sea Haar heading along The Kyle

Sea Haar eaten our mountain view

Swallows and Sing-a-long’s

August 15, 2015 / woodlife / 0 Comments

The Swallow

Although over the years I have spent many a day and night rescuing wild birds and animals, this was my first Swallow experience.

Swallow

We are glad to say that it flew away perfectly unscathed after what I am sure was a terrifying ordeal flying in through the window and landing on the dogs bed. A short recovery was all that was needed.

The sing-a-long’s

Carrying on with our holiday shenanigans, family and friends abound.

Our musically themed evening’s have included Name that tune on kazoo, which we fought to the bitter end and still ended equall! Either we all totally rock at the kazoo or we don’t??

Also a Dorset pirate evening with the landing of an adventuring crewmate of The Black Wreck.

There be Pirates on them there beaches

A new discovery on this evening – peanuts and singing should be kept separate! We can support this statement with recorded evidence, probably best not though!

On the croft

Some of my favourite wildflower names on the croft this morning.

Mouse-ear Hawkweed

Mouse-ear-Hawkweed

Devils bit scabious

Devils-bit-scabious

Achillea ptarmica sneezewort

Mimulus monkey flower

Bog myrtle

Just as an afterthought, a small thing that has made a big difference to us.

Due to some ingenious de-plumbing we now have a fully functional bath, with hot water for the first time since we have lived here! This is great news, as before this, we had to grab a shower on our guest changeovers or have practically cold baths, which would have been even less fun come winter.

There is also a sign in page now that someone far cleverer than me has added a captcha to weed out the robot sign ins. Thank you.

Busy doing nothing…

August 10, 2015 / woodlife / 0 Comments

Being closed for bed and breakfasts our time is our own? We can holiday, sit back look at the view, play guitar, bird-watch, paint pictures, do some knitting, write some songs, go for walks without rushing back? – not yet……

We have however,

On the croft – started to build a dry walkway through the bog at the top of the croft, pulled a little ragwort, cut some of the dangerously broken trodden down trip hazard stock fencing.

In the garden – weeded the herb garden, cut the grass around the patches of Orchids, clover and buttercup, built a seat bench, cut some wood.

In the house – re-painted the handrails down the stairs, the skirting boards, doorframes, some doors, 2 walls, the fire place in the front room, touched up some grubby hallways, put up a few hooks, re-organized most storage areas and even been shopping.

We have now also welcomed our first family holiday guests, which include some surprise guests for our first guests (which had been kept secret for a few months with great difficulty). There has been a celebratory drink or 2, some of which seems to have sparked off a less than desirable start to the holiday festivities and a painful and prolonged recovery.

All seems to be settling now though and hopefully today will be the first of many wonderful, memorable (for all the right reasons) family holiday jollineess, with merriment abound.

The first of our good and greatly missed friends arrive tomorrow and the weather seems to be playing ball at last. Hopefully the climate will allow for the spill of people into the garden to spread the area of accommodation and dog throwing! (for want of better literacy and grammer) saves me writing ball, frisby, rope toy, rubber duck etc…. or not!

We have scheduled in our first Highland BBQ’s for this break and look forward to a warm, insect free, slightly breezy evening, all running smoothly, with a few guitars, the B’s and maybe a few neighbouring locals popping in to join us, with seals on the sandbanks, Golden Eagles flying overhead, a few Red deer on the horizon, and a fantastic sunset to top it all off, …. We will write about how it actually went down in our next installment.

Month: August 2015

Geopark rock stop café and the Inchnadamph Bone Caves

Swallows and Sing-a-long’s

Busy doing nothing…

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