The loch shows an infinite variety of faces as the light hits it on different days.

Lucky used to be a stray girl but has now found her new identity as a Donich Lodge boy (the vet discovered he was male when we took “her” to be spayed). He would ask you to respect his new pronouns.

The high mountain pass over the Rest and be Thankful is the main route out of the village. Here it is in winter.

Spring sky over the mountain tops.

Sunset from our front door step.

A misty moon over the mountains as darkness falls.

View over towards the loch from near the summit of Cnoc Coinnich.

A rainbow appears in a clear interval between showers.

Lochgoilhead in the distance on a clear spring morning.

As the year turns, the mountains are white on most days.

Looking across the loch from the village, clouds form a band across the hills.

Tora and Schrodi our snow Bengal brothers used to live here. RIP both of you

A dragonfly pauses for a rest by the side of our pond.

The weather here can be appalling. Here gales and torrential rain have blocked one of the village’s few roads.

The colours on the mountains fade to muted browns as autumn approaches.

The Donich Water in one of its kinder moods as it runs through our garden.

One of a myriad insects pollinating our heather.

A group of wild haggis have made a den down by the river.

Our new Highland Tiger Saphy prowling her territory. She is a demon for the wildlife with her specialized prey item being shrews. She is not adverse to mice, voles or birds however.

This is Amber aka as Bramble. She is big, black, rather podgy and a bit of a scaredy cat. We had her cloned shortly after she arrived.

Although we don’t get much snow at loch level, the higher mountains are covered for five months or so of the year

SERRANO - MINIMAL, CLEAN, FRESH

Expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms Purchase

Aug 9th, 2016

Read More

A family of thieves….

Three red deer have moved into our garden. I think they are a mother, her fawn of this year, and a yearling stag who is presumably her fawn from last year. I guess he will be leaving her to look for his own herd soon as his antlers are just coming through. All three of […]

Aug 7th, 2016

Read More

Birthday Cake

I made J a birthday cake – this was what the lemon curd was for, but I didn’t want to say in my article before because he reads this blog and I wanted the cake to be a surprise. J is a big fan of Qonqr – which is a location based mobile phone wargame […]

Aug 7th, 2016

Read More

The Making of Imperial Governor

Many years ago my friend J and I used to play a very good board game called Imperial Governor. We played it so much in fact that when J came across our single copy of the game a few weeks ago, it was literally dropping to pieces and not playable in its current state. So […]

Aug 4th, 2016

Read More

Not supposed to be like this…

We have a variety of foodstuffs out for the birds, one of which is a fat ball feeder which until recently was used only for its designated purpose of feeding the tits (we have blue tits, great tits and coal tits in great numbers). Not even the squirrels could manage to get to it – […]

Aug 3rd, 2016

Read More

Lemon Curd

I made some lemon curd today which is something I haven’t tried since I was a girl. I used the BBC recipe, and it was super easy to make and (even though I say so myself) super delicious – about as far as you get from the synthetic looking florescent yellow stuff that my father […]

Aug 1st, 2016

Read More

Cat out of the Bag

Actually Cats into the Bag… We have been having to fetch one of our two snow Bengals, Tora, back from the village at regular intervals (we think he has a lady friend down there). Most of the time we take the car because it is a pain trying to walk him back to the house […]

Jul 27th, 2016

Read More

Suddenly Chaffinches

Since early summer, the normally prolific chaffinches had virtually disappeared on our bird feeders, and had been supplanted by huge numbers of siskins. For some reason, although they are a larger bird, the chaffinches seem rather scared of the little siskins. Then this week, within the span of 48 hours, all the siskins have departed, […]

Jul 26th, 2016

Read More

Pies

I’ve been doing a lot of baking of late (getting ready for the new series of the Bake Off which starts shortly). I ventured into rough puff pastry for the first time recently, and as it proved so successful, I tried two new recipes with it. The first was from a book called “Cookery for […]

Jul 22nd, 2016

Read More

Night of the Bat

I know the picture isn’t a bat, but bear with me. A few months ago I said to R that the cats were a bit past their best and rather too old and slow to catch things any more. How wrong can anyone be; quite aside from Tora and his little expeditions to the village […]

Jul 20th, 2016

Read More

I would walk 1000 miles…

Indeed R and I just did… This was the View Ranger challenge to walk 1000 miles in 2016 completed – and considering we didn’t get started until end of Jan (because they didn’t announce it until then), placing at 41st was not too bad (although the guy that came first must be a real machine…). […]