The garden is really coming on in force now. We’ve been away for under 48 hours on a trip to London and there have been so many changes in that time I can hardly believe it. In the cultivated formal garden to the front of the house, the two magnolia trees are out. The pieris […]
We’ve just been off to London for a day to attend a conference. Rather than get up at 4am to catch the ‘red-eye’ flight – we decided to catch the sleeper train from Arrochar. It took us 20 minutes to get to the station in time to catch the 22:45 ‘Caledonia Sleeper’ to Euston. By […]
Today R and I finally went for a look at Castle Carrick which is over at the other side of the loch. He has not been keen on the idea because he was concerned that the single track road would be really busy with traffic for the holiday camp – in the end it wasn’t […]
I finally got a bit sick of the website setup I had. Basically the main (non-blog) site started off with me hand coding it just to show off a few photos. And the blog started as my personal site which was hosted on wordpress.com. Then I amalgamated them and discovered that it was very difficult […]
We’ve been wanting to climb the ‘mountain in our back garden’ since we moved in – but between the bad weather and general business, we have always seemed to be putting it off. This Friday we finally remedied this and got up there – we had a fantastic day and I’m actually glad we waited. […]
Right in the middle of the road outside – what should there be but a newt. They are supposed to be nocturnal and shy, but this fellow was up and about in the middle of the day and didn’t seem very scared of us. I was concerned that he might get run over so I […]
Well that is the vegetable plots dug and the deer fencing up around them. I don’t think much to the instructions that came with the cage – it just said ‘make a 14″ deep hole for each pole and hammer it in to the ground’. Well that may be all very well in some gardens, […]
Another big night for wildlife here. Firstly – we finally saw our friend the pine marten in the flesh for the first time. He seems to have been visiting the feeder much earlier – around 9pm rather than 2am, and last night I just glanced out of the window and there he was – this […]
I tried an experiment for my Dad’s (84th) birthday and made a traditional Scottish ‘High Tea’. For non-natives – this is a sort of combination between afternoon tea and dinner. You have a simple but filling cooked dish, followed by a variety of baked things (largely of the sweet variety). It is eaten about 6pm […]
The sheep have returned. Two of them this time – and although we have gently shoed them a few times (cats are scared of them and they keep eying up the plants) they keep coming back. We have a fragment of wall that belonged to the former house which burned down (we think immediately post-war), […]
