Haven’t seen it around for days now, and a lady in the village told me that it is a feral that has been in the area for several years. So on balance we are not going to try to trap it as it would be cruel to take it away from the life it knows. […]

I’ve always wanted to learn Scots Gaelic. I find it very sad that whilst a hundred years ago nearly everyone in Argyll would have spoken it, the language was systematically and deliberately eradicated from the area and now is not widely spoken outside the Western Isles. So I’ve tried to start learning it from a […]

Oh dear – we seem to have acquired a stray cat in our garden. We saw it a few times on the webcam over night, and then yesterday it appeared in the daylight and had to be shooed away three times. It is quite scrawny and scruffy and no one in the village seems to […]

The weather of late has been unusual to say the least. It has been bright, sunny and moderately cold although today it started snowing again! There is snow on Beinn Bheula at about 500m this afternoon. R did some more clever technical work and integrated the Solar/PowerWall system into a dashboard which works with the […]

We’ve had lovely weather over the last few days. Good for us but not so fine for the poor frog spawn. We noticed last week that as usual the frogs had been out in force – but this morning a lot of the eggs were white – meaning that frost had got to them. Having […]

R has been very brave and has cut down a tree which has been obscuring my view for the last year with his new battery powered electric chainsaw. I felt a bit bad about it but it was going to have to go before it got even bigger and risked falling over in a storm […]

I just had an email from Cats’ Protection wanting me to email my MP about extending a law for having a specific law about dog theft to also include cats. I am not going to do this for a number of reasons. a) This is a useless piece of legislation for a load of reasons. […]

At least three martens have been in the garden over the last 24 hours. First during the night there was what looked like a mature female and a much smaller male (perhaps a yearling). The reason I say “male” is that it was definitely trying to mount the female (with no success I will say). […]

Out on our walk yesterday R and I heard several woodpeckers. There are at least two herons visiting our pond. Down the side of the roads the daffodils are starting coming up, there are catkins on the trees and buds on the honeysuckle. So we are well on the way towards spring – though according […]

When I was a child my favourite food was my mother’s casserole. It was essentially a beef stew with carrots and onions, topped with potatoes and slow cooked in the oven. My only problem with it as a child was that I could never get enough – for some reason Mum never made enough for […]