cybercrofter

The croft - turret

2012-02-12T20:30:00.000Z

There's a patch of ground at the top of the croft which belongs to me, and on it a proper house was planned. For a while. As part of the plan, an access track was put in, and while the digger was there it was supposed to dig some test holes to check where the bedrock was for the structural engineer. It dug and dug, finding only a seam of fracturing rock, until I cried about the devastation and called a halt. The result is a big hole, which is now a pond, and the house plan on indefinite hold. Since then, recession and caution on the part of mortgage lenders means that it's unlikely I could ever get the finance together to build, and anyway, who needs a house when you've got a caravan on the shore, several sheds, and a turret?

The turret is actually a B&Q potting shed, at the top of a wooded crag, with a stunning view of the mountains and the sea. It's my private writing place. It used to have a wood-burning stove in it, but the chimney leaked and the stove was rubbish, so I've ripped it out. It's in an implausibly exposed position, but it's tied down to its foundations with lorry straps but even so part of the roofing came off in a recent storm. It's repaired again now, and dry once more.

I always loved Rapunzel. Now I too can let down my hair.

The croft - downstairs toilet

2012-02-06T19:10:00.002Z

The little caravan down on the shore of Loch Roe needed a toilet and this is what we came up with. A good use for an old, holed boat. It blows down every now and again in big gales, but it's been there now for 10 years.

Almost but not quite visible is the toilet itself - a standard sawdust composting bucket with a normal toilet seat. The view is out over Loch Roe, and the tree shelter makes it feel quite private, especially in summer when all the birches are in full leaf.

It was such a glorious day today that we had a picnic down at the shore, on the decking in front of the caravan, basking in sunshine. The loch was flat calm, so the shoreline, the buoys and every island were all mirrored in the water. Also basking were about a dozen seals, and as the sun warmed them, they steamed. It was quite magical - each seal perfectly reflected, complete with its little cloud.

Happy New Year

2012-01-07T17:45:00.001Z

Hibernation's over. It was lovely to spend a couple of weeks disconnected from cyberspace and hiding from civilisation. We walked every day, and in all that time met three people to talk to. I spoke to my family on the phone and otherwise was completely reclusive. Sometimes it is good to let the chatter subside.

As part of the 'views from the croft' series, this is the east-facing view from the highest point on the croft. From the left, the mountains are Canisp, Suilven, Cul Mor and Cul Beg, all now owned by Assynt Foundation, one of our many community organisations.The eastward view from the studio here is roughly the left hand half of this view. (And yes, this picture is unseasonally green... but it's nice to be reminded what it can look like. For much of the past few weeks the mountains, along with the rest of us, have been in cloud.)

Part of my post-hibernation rude awakening is going to involve trying to fix the storm damage. The turret roof has lost half its felt and my top garden fence is down again, having just been mended after marauding deer bust through it and devoured all the brassicas. I add these to the list of outdoor jobs - there's seaweed to be brought up from the shore, tree pruning to be done around the garden and digging - if we ever get a dry day. 2011 was the wettest year in Scotland ever recorded, and we had twice the average rainfall for December. The croft squodgometer confirms this.

The croft - shed and polytunnel

2011-12-16T19:34:00.000Z

Here's another shot of another key corner of our exploded abode - winter headquarters ('the great hall') on one side, bath shed (formerly known as 'the lounge', as it used to house a sofabed as well as the bath, so one could lounge, wet or dry...) on the other. In between them, the polytunnel.

What did we ever do without the polytunnel? Quite apart from salad production all year round, getting plants started in spring, tomatoes in summer etc, at this time of year it's a vital dry store of wood with chopping block for kindling production, and I store my willow in it for basket making, make felt in it, in fact I do everything vaguely messy in it, especially on wet days.

The croft - studio

2011-12-12T12:32:00.000Z

Continuing with a picture of the croft, for those of you curious about our 'exploded house' of scattered sheds. This is the industrious corner, with our studio (designed and built by Bernard Planterose of Northwoods on Loch Broom) and the shed behind it, which used to be our office until we built the studio, and which goes by the somewhat grandiose name of 'the library' (yes, it is full of books).

On the right of the picture you can see the power supply. We also have a solar panel, about which I cannot speak warmly enough. Heating is by wood, and sunshine.

There, now you know where I'm sending this stuff from.

The croft - moving in...

2011-12-09T17:14:00.000Z

I've been asked by a few folk to put some pictures of the croft on here. So I've had a rummage and over the next wee while I'll post up some shots of our various sheds and caravans to try to give a visual impression of life here.

This seems as good a place to begin as any - this is the arrival, in 2001, of our 12-foot caravan in which we spend spring, summer and autumn. It landed a bit to the left of this picture, on the shore of Loch Roe, and we have since painted it a sort of russety purple colour so it blends in with the birch trees a bit.

We got lucky that day. The helicopter was passing over Assynt on his way back to Inverness from Lewis, where it had been shifting electricity poles. We had the caravan stropped up ready at Achmelvich beach, and the whole operation from pick up to drop off took less than 10 minutes and cost us £75 - one of life's best ever bargains. Sadly the pilot wouldn't let me ride in it, because if it had started swinging, he'd have had to drop it. The skill of the pilot in lowering it into position was completely breathtaking.

One of the amusing things, ever since, has been watching people who come to visit scratching their heads beside the caravan, and eventually saying, 'How on earth did you get this here?'

Is twitter the new oral tradition?

2011-12-07T19:42:00.000Z

It has started to dawn on me, as I spend several hours each afternoon and evening tweeting about trees, that twitter is a new form of an old thing.

As part of the A-B-Tree project, at dusk each day I'm creating what several folk have now described as a 'forest of tweets' about a tree - one tree per day, taking them in alphabetical order, according to the Gaelic tree alphabet. Today it was oak. Yesterday it was hawthorn. Tomorrow it will be holly.

I normally begin with nomenclature and botanical facts, move onto practical uses and then gravitate to snippets of folklore. I throw in links to poems from time to time, and most days I have finished with a poem.

I'm enjoying this process, although it feels a bit strange to be sitting in my shed in the dark, throwing out titbits into cyberspace to see if anything bites. But increasingly, it seems, people nibble.

The poet, former librarian of the Botanic Gardens, Colin Will (@colindwill) is hugely knowledgeable about trees and chips in most days with fascinating gems. Environmental archaeologist specialising in trees, Coralie Mills (@dendrochronicle) has shared knowledge too. I'm delighted when people ask me for sources or for clarification, or start to speculate what something might be about. It's great when people pick up on something and retweet it to their followers because they think it's interesting, or weird.

I've been corrected about several points, which is fab. For example cricket stumps are unlikely in ancient times to represent the Triple Goddess because there were only two of them until 1775, though isn't it interesting that they're called wickets (echoes of wicker and wicca...)

Then there are the jokes - and I love the banter around some of the stranger magic spells I've put up, or the just plain silly responses. I'm being heckled! Go cybercrofter!!

But most pleasing is the realisation that a lot of the stories and traditions, taboos and warnings, rhymes and spells, go right back to the oral tradition of storytelling and the bardic culture. Although this project started out as all about writing, the content of much of this stuff predates written communication and was passed on around firesides, in songs and tales. And twitter is a bit like a giant, global fireside at a giant global crofthouse, where people can drop in, listen for a bit, throw in an idea, nod or laugh or take the piss, and wander out again. I like that.

Tomorrow at dusk, thig a-steach (come away in), pull up a stool and we'll give holly a chewing over @cybercrofter. Slainte!

Panda voyeurism in Edinburgh should make us ashamed

2011-12-04T20:30:00.000Z

I seem to be in a small minority of people who are dismayed about the arrival of two pandas at Edinburgh Zoo today.

Some of those expressing disquiet are upset about the underlying politics, and the diplomatic and trade ramifications of this deal between China and Scotland. There are also financial concerns about the cost of renting the pandas and paying to maintain them versus how much income the zoo will make through increased visits, and even if they pay for their keep, what any surplus will be used for. I find of these arguments against keeping pandas in Edinburgh convincing. But that's not what really upsets me.

The zoo argues that it is helping the conservation of pandas. In his book Way of the Panda, and a recent blogpost, Henry Nicholls questions the connection between keeping pandas in captivity and helping them in the wild. He concludes 'there is little, if any, overlap between the lives of captive and wild pandas'. No panda raised in captivity has ever been successfully released into the wild, so the captive breeding programme that Edinburgh will take part in will merely rear another generation of imprisoned animals. There's no convincing evidence that keeping pandas in zoos does anything to address the practical problems facing wild pandas, particularly habitat loss and poaching.

What saddens me most is what bringing the pandas to Edinburgh is going to do to people in Scotland. It will strengthen a culture of acceptance of keeping large animals as captives, on display. Children and adults will pay to experience animals behind bars, within concrete enclosures, unable to forage for food, undergoing controlled mating and with no interaction with other species except humans.

But a wild male panda has a territory of more than 10 square kilometers of habitat dense with bamboo. No bear should have to live in a small, sloping concrete enclosure without any of its natural food source. No civilised society should allow this, let alone use it as a voyeuristic form of entertainment, encouraging people to pay to look on and laugh.

The zoo's message will be that being boxed in and controlled is somehow safe, protective, even special (because pandas are so cute and rare). What's worse, they will try to pass this exploitation off as something to do with 'nature conservation'.

Bringing pandas to Edinburgh not only completely misses the point about what actually needs to be done to prevent them from becoming extinct (tackling the problem of poaching and strengthening the reserves of their natural habitat in China), but by bolstering tolerance in Scotland for keeping intelligent creatures in captivity it also chips away at our appreciation of nature and wildness and freedom.

What Scotland really needs is not caged animals from the other side of the world. We need more wild places, and more opportunities for people to experience the myriad wonders of life that exists here in its natural habitat. For every day a child spends at Edinburgh Zoo peering at bears behind bars, that's one day they haven't spent out in the woods, playing, exploring and having a real experience of nature. That's what makes me sad.

We can, and should, watch pandas on video, in the wild, not in some latter day circus on Corstorphine Hill.

A-B-Tree phase 2

2011-12-02T19:02:00.002Z

I have now completed 18 creative writing events, one for each tree associated with a letter of the Gaelic alphabet. The last one was willow, at Timespan Museum in Helmsdale, and as it was disgusting weather we stayed indoors - restricting our experience of the tree to some twigs I had brought, and some baskets. But the participants seemed to enjoy themselves nonetheless, and we had a fascinating discussion about the folklore of willow, including some pretty weird ritual practices associated with it - good for a laugh.

So that's phase 1 of the project complete, and now I'm getting under way with phase 2, which is to gather all of the information I have collected about the trees and write it up. Quite what form that writing will take is still pretty fluid, and I'm open to suggestions.The plan so far is...

Poems. I have now written a poem about each tree. I had some already but it's been an interesting challenge to complete the set. Once they're polished, they might form a pamphlet.
More poems. There are loads of really gorgeous poems about trees out there and it has been one of the pleasures of phase 1 to find these and share them at events, using them as inspiration for new writing. I realised last week, having spent a day in the Scottish Poetry Library, that there is a lack of a poetry anthology about trees. Trees Be Company was produced as part of a trilogy by Green Books about a decade ago, but it misses many wonderful poems. It would be great to work with a publisher to produce a new poe-tree anthology.
Tweets. One of the things people have enjoyed most about the A-B-Tree sessions are the snippets and titbits I brought along of ecological and practical facts and folklore. At many of the sessions I handed these out on bits of paper and we all took turns to read them out. I realised that these snippets are all roughly tweet sized, so I decided to tweet some of them, taking a tree a day and going through them in alphabetical order. I started yesterday with birch. Today it was rowan. And I'll carry on until 18 December. As I go, I'll put them up on a page on the website. Birch and Rowan now have their pages. Follow @cybercrofter on twitter, and tune in at dusk each day to catch them.
A report. The project has been supported by Forestry Commission Scotland and Hi-Arts, and I'll be writing them a report about the events.
School materials. I've had some discussions with teachers, and I'd welcome more, about producing some of the information about the trees in a form that would be useful for children to learn from. One suggestion has been to make laminated cards for each tree, with images, facts and activity suggestions. I rather like this idea.
A book? Is there a book in all of this? Let's see how it goes.

Retreat! Retreat!

2011-11-18T15:30:00.001Z

We all had such a magical time on Tanera Mor in September (see my previous blog post about our week in September) that I've decided to do it again in September 2012.

A writing retreat is a special time. It's a chance to really get your teeth into a new project, to get some pages of that novel under your belt, to draft some new poems, or just to sit back, relax, wander and wonder and recharge your creative batteries.

I've been running retreats since 2006 and I've come to the conclusion that what works well is a loose, mostly unstructured week. There will be a 'creative warm-up' session, writing together for an hour in the morning, a couple of walks out and the odd other mini-workshop to stir up ideas. All activities are optional and your time is your own. I'm always happy to read work in progress and give feedback in confidence, and there'll be lots of opportunities to share your writing with others, especially around the fire in the evenings.

In terms of practicalities, the retreat will be based in one (or more, depending on numbers) of the cottages on the island. The kitchen will be stocked for us to help ourselves to breakfast and lunch and we'll have dinner cooked for us. The price includes the boat trip to and from the island and a cruise around the Summer Isles. There are different prices for different sizes of rooms.

It will be the week of 1-7 September 2012. Contact Lizzie to book or for more details see the Summer Isles website.

Hope to see you in Tanera next year. I'm looking forward to it already!

Fourth and final tiny poetry film - Two Boats

2011-11-17T15:44:00.000Z

Here's the fourth and last of the four little Loch Roe films Bill has made out of my poems. It started life as a concrete poem called 'Invisible', but nobody seemed to get it, so I changed the name to Two Boats, so you can guess what it's about.

They're both Bill's boats. The dinghy is called Ripples. The big one is his fishing boat, Vigilance (side on, she's just like a Chinese boot). Although his days of making his living in Vigilance are over, he lavishes most of each summer fixing her up to get through the winter. She's an old tender to the lighthouse supply ship, the Pole Star.

two boats from Bill Ritchie on Vimeo.

Zen gardener

2011-11-16T12:05:00.000Z

Another tiny poem video in honour of the loch.

zen gardener from Bill Ritchie on Vimeo.

And now, given what an utterly glorious day it is, I shall go and do a little mindful gardening myself.

We had the first real frost of the year last night, and woke to a peach cloudless sky over a starched white world. The morning walk took me past the veggie beds, and it's satisfying to see the dug soil crackling with frost. I got the last of the tatties out just in time.

Unfortunately a deer has broken through the fence and devoured the brassicas. So there's net-mending to tbe done. I shall endeavour to remain serene.

Foam

2011-11-15T15:28:00.002Z

Another video-poem in celebration of the good times to be had beside Loch Roe.

foam from Bill Ritchie on Vimeo.

Seals

2011-11-14T12:13:00.000Z

On a calm, warm morning like this there is nothing better in the world than to sit on the deck by the caravan at the shore and watch the loch. The season for living there is over, but we miss it, Fortunately it's just a stroll away. We put Kelly kettle in the bag, gathering some dry heather on the way down, then settle in for tea and wait to see who's about.

A curious face bobs up, then glides towards us. Snub nosed, soft eyed and alert, there's no doubt it is coming right in to give us its full attention. It feels like a greeting. It's a common seal. It reaches its body out of the water to scrutinise us. We gaze right back.

The seal sinks below the surface. Circles of ripples radiate out, glistening with sunshine. Its sleek body emerges out of the water with a porpoise's curve, then slices back in. Under the surface it must be powering along. It leaps again, another arc, right out of the water this time, before plunging back under. Then again, with another tremendous surge, as if trying to take flight. By now it's right across the loch beside the skerry. Surfacing, it splooshes into the seaweed. Playing now - a splashing backflip. Then a cruise (panting, surely), head up looking in our direction.

We clap and call 'bravo!' It sets off again, throwing itself up in virtuoso bounds back towards the shore. Its final lunge takes it up onto the bow, cushioned by bladderwrack, where it squiggles up onto the top. There it lies, back-bending into a banana-shape, scratching, flicking its flippers and twisting its tail.

It's a perfect morning for basking, but this young seal is too restless to slouch today. Perhaps it is waiting for another seal to play with, or to squabble about who will get the perfect rock spot for a low-tide snooze.

I've spent endless hours enthralled by these animals, and inevitably a few poems about them have emerged. Here is a tiny one, the first of four of my mini poems which Bill has set to film.

seals from Bill Ritchie on Vimeo.

I'll post the others up here in due course.

Neolithic, Iron Age and Clearance-period poems

2011-11-13T19:06:00.001Z

I read these poems at the ceilidh in Drumbeg last night, and was asked to post them here.

Over recent years I have written stacks of poems and stories inspired by the stone remains of past inhabitants of Assynt. Last night was the grand finale of the Life and Death in Assynt's Past project (see the project diary here), and it seemed appropriate to read last night one from each of the three periods we have been looking at in this project.

Here they are. The first is about a neolithic chambered cairn I am credited with finding, and it's now known as Mandy's Cairn (or Carn a' Mhandy!) - very exciting indeed to have made an archaeological discovery! The second came from a walk to a possible Iron Age round house in Glenleraig with a very old wall, likely to be a cattle enclosure. The third was inspired by a huge fin whale washed up on Raffin beach, and the pre-clearance township ruins on the south side of Loch Druim Suardhalain.

Chambered Cairn (NC 24051450)

A shrine tumbles up from 5000 years or so ago
into this breezy secular present.

Stones offer a threshold
where dead and living crossover

a territory edge to wonder
where understanding might begin.

Trying to trick nature
to slough below the surface
asking if body-mind is divisible from spirit

I climb inside the neolithic cairn
enter a portal
allow cogs to turn.

I will re-emerge from this tomb
a ghost from the future
in an ancient time.

Were the dead known then?
Was then closer to now then?
Do these doors open?

Proof of iron age cheese

A tumbled line of dyke may tell which side is inside:-
    a wall’s steep face shows where livestock stayed;
    even faces mean winter in but summer out.

Mossy stones:-
    cattle mooing,
    grassy breath and hairy hides…

                crowdie.

Around the lost

circumambulate the washed-up whale
make a circuit of a Clearance ruin

encircle a mystery
pay out a little awe

recognise a sofa-sized tongue
wonder at its song

reach arms out to an angel tail
to people long ago

before these houses tumbled
when trees grew not inside the walls

these heaved-together stones
like that giant baleen

still speak of home
of lives lived where we cannot go

Who goes there? Mink or otter?

2011-11-11T17:38:00.001Z

Great excitement this morning when we checked the footprint trap - a paw mark! Mink or otter?

This afternoon we went back with ruler, camera and mammal book. We're pretty confident it's an otter print - 7cm would be the Big Foot of the mink race. Phew!

Otters are of course very welcome and we're very grateful that one has taken an interest in what we're up to!

How poor were the people here before the clearances?

2011-11-08T22:51:00.001Z

I was on the telly yesterday (on BBC Alba, speaking English on the Gaelic news, at 13.30 minutes through the programme here). I am talking about the surprise of discovering fine pottery and wine bottles and other 'high status' objects in the dig of a 200 year old house here in Assynt.

There's a stereotype that the people who were cleared from the glens in the Highland Clearances were destitute, poverty-stricken folk who went off to find a better life in distant lands. But perhaps there's more truth in other stories, about good lives brought to an abrupt end by landlords who simply wanted to use the lands exclusively for their own ends.

The people who lived in the Glenleraig house we recently excavated seem to have had disposable income - cash to spend on luxuries like fine china, good boots and wine. The archaeologists are surprised by the wealth of the finds. Perhaps these people weren't being 'helped out of their poverty' by being made to leave their homes.

Today I spent the afternoon at Ledbeg exploring a stone that someone tripped over a few weeks ago, which was thought perhaps to be a fallen neolithic standing stone. Today a bunch of us dug back the turf to see what it looks like. It's much bigger than we expected: 3 metres long, deeper than it is wide and, to my mind, looking like a huge goddess statue. I wonder what the archaeologists will make of this?

A slow film from Bill

2011-11-07T20:03:00.000Z

a splash of colour from Bill Ritchie on Vimeo.

Mink patrol

2011-11-06T17:38:00.003Z

It was supposed to be wall-to-wall sunshine this morning, were the Met Office to be believed, which of course they're not. But it was dry, so we set off anyway to circumnavigate the loch system and move one of the mink traps, which had washed out completely during the big rains recently. These are just footprint traps - covered boxes of clay which are supposed to appeal to a curious mink who will enter and leave their tell-tale signature paw marks.

We have no mink here in Assynt. Or not yet. The odd sighting has been made too close for comfort, however, and animals have been caught in Loch Broom. We don't want mink. They might look cute but they don't belong here and cause havoc to fresh water ecosystems. This corner of Scotland is the last bastion of the water vole, the national population of which has reduced by 90% since mink arrived. See the Scottish Mink Initiative for more information, and thanks to them for the picture below.

We've been monitoring two mink traps for a year now and this is the time of year when young animals will be migrating and seeking their own territories, so we need to be vigilant.

One of the traps is a floating raft, and we check it most weeks. We have never seen a footprint in it, which at one level is really good news, though a water vole footprint or two or even a frog visiting would have been nice!

The trap that was swamped is a tunnel, dug into the bank. We rescued it and carried it through the lochside woods to a safer place close to a weir where the water flows down into a brackish loch. We dug a new pit for it right next to an otter run and filled it with fresh clay, then covered it up with bracken. An otter is theoretically too big to get in, but we frequently see young otters and they could presumably check it out.

Unfortunately the spot we chose is over on the other side of the weir from here, so that's going to mean a regular trip across it to check the trap. There's a big gap in the middle of the weir where you have to jump across, from one rickety gabian to another, over the water in full flow, so winter's walks will now include a weekly scary teeter and leap - good for the soul perhaps? I hope the water voles appreciate what we're doing for them!

A plug for a bit of paganism

2011-11-05T18:54:00.000Z

This is the bonfire created by Stewart Yates at Torbreck last night. He also produced a spectacular fireworks show, but it was the bonfire that made the evening for me. There's nothing quite like a burning effigy and this was something else - the actual bonfire was built as a monster, was lit by a rocket and then squatted, with blazing eyes and mouth belching flames, looking for all the world as if it would soon take to its feet and start running rampage. Fantastic. (Thanks to Helen Lockhart, who took the photo).

For thousands of years people have celebrated this time of year with fire ceremonies. Traditionally this is when the sun god Lugh dies and the earth goddess takes on the form of the crone, or Cailleach, who will protect us all through the winter. Lighting a bonfire to mark this passage was a signal to warn off evil spirits, and to burn up the final fragments of the old year.

Now all the plants have finished their season and have made their seeds and nuts. Now is the dormant time, the long slow germination of new life. Traditionally, in the old Celtic and Wiccan view of the world, this was the start of the year. I like the idea that winter comes first, that we can begin with sleep, with rest and quietness, now that the harvest is in.

The wonders of wool

2011-11-05T18:25:00.000Z

Just spent a very happy day learning to make felt. Thanks to Pat Robertson for good teaching and lots of lovely coloured fleece...

Woodwords again

2011-10-24T16:15:00.001+01:00

On Wednesday I set off on a massive trek around Scotland, with an A-B-Tree event each day for six days, as follows:

Ivy - Wednesday 26, 7.30pm, Forres Carlton Hotel, Moray
Ash - Thursday 27, morning, Alyth Primary School, Perthshire
Oak - Friday 28, Dawyk Botanic Gardens, near Peebles, Borders
Birch - Saturday 29, Benmore Botanic Gardens, near Dunoon, Argyll
Hawthorn - Sunday 30, Edinburgh Botanic Gardens
Willow - Monday 31, Logan Botanic Gardens, near Stranraer

All of the Botanic Gardens ones are at 2pm, and all but the Alyth session are open to anyone to come along. Bring a pencil and a notebook. It'll be about an hour and a half, of sharing titbits of knowledge about the ecology, practical uses and folklore of trees, plus some nice pieces of writing and a chance to find out how you and others respond to a tree.

I've just put the following press release out, which spells out what it's all about.

A-B-TREE: CELEBRATING SCOTLAND’S LITERARY TREE TRADITION

Sutherland-based writer Mandy Haggith is leading a national project which celebrates the traditional Scottish link between trees and writing. Known as the Tree Ogham, or Tree Alphabet, each letter of the Gaelic alphabet has an associated tree or shrub.

To celebrate this ancient connection, Mandy is organising a series of creative writing events in woods and gardens around Scotland, one for each letter and species. The events are happening during autumn 2011, as part of the International Year of Forests.

Mandy said, ‘I love trees and I find them a great inspiration for writing, not least because of all the legends about them and the amazing facts about their historical uses. This project is a way for me to encourage other people to connect with the rich tradition rooted in the Gaelic tree alphabet, pick up a pencil and paper (both of which come from trees) and let their imaginations run riot.’

The Gaelic alphabet has 18 letters, so there will be 18 events. These blend folklore, practical uses and ecology of trees while being playful with words during a walk in the woods. Most of the events are public and they are being hosted by schools, community woodland groups and environmental organisations around Scotland, from Borgie to Stranraer and from Skye to Angus, including the four Royal Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh, the Borders, Argyll and Dumfries. The project is made possible by funding from Forestry Commission Scotland and Hi-Arts.

Events so far have included an afternoon with Stoer and Lochinver Primary Schools, a morning with some mental health service users from Inverness, a session in the woods on Skye with children from Shetland, Orkney, Argyll and the Western Isles. There have also been public events with the Woodland Trust, Trees for Life and the Falkland Centre for Stewardship. The final six events are coming up between now and the end of October.

Mandy said, ‘I’ve been delighted so far by all the leafy words sprouting from participants’ pencils!’

ABOUT MANDY HAGGITH:

Mandy is a writer who lives on a coastal woodland croft in Assynt. She has published dozens of nature poems in literary magazines, has two poetry collections (letting light in and Castings) and her novel, The Last Bear, won the Robin Jenkins Literary Award for environmental writing in 2009. This novel is structured around the Ogham: each of its chapters is called after a tree and draws on the Celtic tree lore for that species.

Mandy has been a forest researcher and activist for the past fourteen years, prior to which she was an academic specialising in computer tools to support environmental decisions. She has worked on forest issues for many organisations, including the Centre for International Forestry Research, WWF, Greenpeace, the Taiga Rescue Network, Culag Woods and Assynt Foundation. She was the co-ordinator of the European Environmental Paper Network from 2005-2009.

Mandy is an experienced facilitator of writing events, she has led many creative writing retreat weeks and poetry courses, as well as evening classes, guided writing walks and workshops.

For more information contact Mandy Haggith on 01571 844020 or mobile 07734 235704.

Email: hag@worldforests.org, Website: http://mandyhaggith.worldforests.org/a-b-tree.asp

Migration time

2011-10-23T16:34:00.000+01:00

One evening too many sitting in the caravan with no heating, granny blanket across our knees, reading with gloves on... It's winter, and that means the great move up from the shore into the woods.

First of all come the bears, bedding and books, the porridge pan, the spirtle. A little ceremony is required, some small rituals. It is the passing of the seasons. We walk up through the woods to the cabin, scuffing through birch, aspen and oak leaves. The bracken is collapsing with a fanfare of bronze.

Then there is a second journey, to gather perishable food, music and creature comforts that have brightened our summer. Things we have duplicates of and those that will not hurt over winter can stay in the caravan.

Shifting up is a simple thing to do, at one level, but at another level it is the most profound thing we have done since spring. There's a deep satisfaction in acknowledging that the season has moved on, and so must we. The cycle has gone around. The year wanes. The tide of light is ebbing and we must withdraw into the shelter of trees.

Storms will lash the shore in the darkness. The crag will be treacherous with ice. The lochside will freeze and thaw. We will be tucked up in the cabin, safe from it all.

The moon is waning too, a mere sliver rose in the night as Orion strode the sky. It is time to pause. To light the winter fire, and go gently until the tide of light comes in again.

This time every year I always remember the autumn fortnight we spent camping on the shore of Heaven Lake in the Tian Shan mountains in northwest China, as Kazakh people migrated down from their high summer pastures to their desert wintering lands. They took everything, shifting their yurts and herding their flocks down the lakeside. They built a raft for a tractor and set it off to drift down the lake with a gentle breeze - it took all day to reach the other side. Their motion, in perfect tune with the season's changing, was relaxed, unhurried, yet inexorable. We watched and learned.

Now, every autumn, we nod our respects to them, with rucksacks on our backs, padding up from the shore towards winter.

Tomatoes

2011-10-22T16:31:00.000+01:00

The polytunnel is woefully cold, and the tomato plants look dreadfully sad, with mouldering tops and green fruit hanging there, wistful. Is it time to admit that they are not going to ripen after all?

Perhaps if I were able to be more ruthless and drag plants out before they fall over, I'd suffer less fungus in the tunnel. And of course, if I got them going earlier in the year, as I do manage sometimes, I'd already have had a good crop of sweet red things and would be content to move on. But this year I have had so few salads graced by home-grown tomatoes I'm reluctant to admit the season's over.

OK, I've talked myself into it. Winter is upon us. Time to get the green tomato chutney pan bubbling...

Fruit for free

2011-10-09T16:11:00.000+01:00

I love brambles, just can't resist them, and one of the best things about the rewilding of the croft is how many more brambles there are than in the past. I love the way they fruit over a period of a couple of months, providing new ripe fruit for wandering bears or passing people.

They're pioneers, growing into sunny spaces on the fringes of the woods and scrambling up into the branches of young trees. Then as the trees grow and shade deepens, the brambles move on out into open land, They're a part of the first scrub layer that takes over from the grass and herbs and bracken. Their tangle helps to protect young trees from deer, though they are themselves vulnerable to browsing.

On Tuesday, I'll be doing an A-B-Tree event about bramble, the tenth of 18 events (for more details of which see the A-B-Tree webpage). It'll be at Comrie Croft, near Crieff, Perthshire at 5pm on 11 October, and I shall look forward to sharing tasty morsels of ecology, folklore and practical uses of the plant, as well as munching on some berries.

My favourite bit of folklore about bramble is the story that Jesus carried a bramble switch for riding his donkey and he used it to drive the moneylenders from the temple. Good on him. My opinion of the money-lending trade is pretty much unprintable, and I often find myself wondering how the world would be if usury was illegal and our economies ran on credit, barter and trust, instead of debt. I am puzzled by the inconsistency of the political rhetoric, from both right and left wing parties, bemoaning the fact that we are up to our oxters in debt, whilst at the same time urging banks to lend more in order to 'stimulate growth'. David Cameron's embarrassment to be caught nearly suggesting that everyone should pay off their credit card debts is typical of political double-speak about debt. We live in a society that depends on people spending money they don't have to perpetuate growth that we can't sustain. This debt sustains the richest members of our communities through extortion of interest from the poorest. It's a morally, as well as financially, bankrupt situation.

Meanwhile the brambles, like many of the best things in life, are free.

The Chicken Race

2011-09-25T20:05:00.000+01:00

Yesterday was Chicken Day in Elphin, the most easterly of Assynt's crofting townships. I was there attempting to simulate how neolithic people might have fired pottery, which soon turned out to be an exercise in discovery of novel ways to make perfectly innocent-looking ceramics explode on an open fire. There's more about that on Historic Assynt's diary page here.

But I thought it was worth a note here about the Chicken Day itself. Some of it was a conventional country fair - cake stall, raffle, that kind of thing. But everything had a poultry flavour and, as the day went on, it became more and more surreal. The biggest stall was the one selling bird food. Entry to the beautiful pet show was restricted to fowl. In the treasure hunt all the treasure was eggs. The pictures on display were all, you're getting the drift here, of hens. There was an egg and spoon race, naturally.

But the highlight of the day was the Chicken Race. The Elphin folk had been advertising for anyone who wanted to bring their hens and take on the local birds and several birders from north Assynt, Achiltibuie and even Ullapool took up the challenge. There was an Irish bookie running a tote and betting was hot. Even I put a couple of quid on Bluebell the bird from Stoer, and I'm really not the betting sort.

At 4pm, the field consisted of ten hens. Confused Duck had been hot favourite but in the end was too confused to make it to the starting line. The birds were held in check by their owners. There was a breathless silence.

Then the race began. The hens were released onto the course and the watching crowd erupted into shouts of encouragement.

The birds set off up the track, to whoops and bellows from the crowd. A couple of hens kept close to the fence and edged their way along in the right direction. The crowd went wild.

The rest of the hens just wandered about. Some of them started to peck at the grass. Shouting began to dissolve into snorts. Encouragement descended to insult. The hens appeared unconcerned. They didn't get the race thing and the grass was rather good.Was it possible that some of them had a faint blush of shame? No, they made it quite plain - they just weren't into that competitive stuff.

One rather handsome black bird, however, seemed to understand the point of the exercise and, in a leisurely but determined manner, strutted her way to the finishing line. A subset of the crowd brayed with glee. The rest of us were too busy laughing at the remaining birds to worry. Especially once the humans started trying to catch their chickens. Then they showed they could run! The winning chicken, just to outshine them all, found a gap in the fence and was well away out into the peat and rushes before being eventually brought to a standstill and restored to her jubilant, and no doubt greatly enriched, owner.

A fine way to spend an afternoon. Really, I can't wait for next year. I might even have to get a chicken.

In Memory of a Good Man

2011-09-23T12:59:00.002+01:00

On Wednesday 21 September, I did a special A-B-Tree event. Here's my log of it.

At 5.10pm it’s raining, but I’m going for it anyway. The plan’s too good to miss. The rowan tree is my totem tree and today is International Peace Day and also International Day of Struggle against Plantations, a day of protest set up by Ricardo Carrere of the World Rainforest Movement, who died just a month ago. Today, all over the world, people are gathering to remember Ricardo, an inspiring Uruguayan leader of a global movement of people given by him the courage to challenge the huge industrial super-powers who take vast tracts of land to use for monoculture tree crops without regard to the people affected by them.

I met Ricardo 14 years at a United Nations meeting on forests in New York. I was a newly fledged activist campaigning for the rights of forest peoples, and he was a veteran of political negotiations and a man of resolute principle, untemptable by compromise and immune to flattery or coercion. With Bill my partner, I’ve spent many hours with Ricardo, plotting tactics on back steps or courtyards or wherever the smokers had to go. I learned so much from his discourses on the failures to respect the basic human rights of poor people, indigenous tribes, forest-dwellers, peasants and anyone else who stood in the way of corporate resource exploitation.

Ricardo was a key intellectual force behind a United Nations process to reveal the Underlying Causes of Deforestation and Forest Degradation. The Underlying Causes dialogue took place on every continent and resulted in a trenchant analysis of the economic instruments, financial institutions, corporate culture and social trends that underpin the global catastrophe of forest destruction. For those of us who were disillusioned by the futility of trying to stop deforestation by lying down in front of bulldozers on forest roads and forwarders on logging sites, Ricardo offered a clear big picture of who the real targets of our campaigns should be. It’s not loggers who destroy forests, they are just the tools of the World Bank, pulp corporation executives, DIY store managers and paper buyers in catalogue companies.

I’m particularly grateful for the help Ricardo gave me in understanding the pulp and paper industry and its impacts on land and people. When I was writing Paper Trails, Ricardo’s comments on the plantation chapter of the book made it a much stronger text, while also giving me huge encouragement to carry on trying to spell out the whole story of the true costs of paper.

When I was co-ordinating a campaign to reduce paper use in Europe (called Shrink: Addressing the Madness of Over-Consumption of Paper) I was bolstered by Ricardo’s support, knowing that the campaign was right to address one of the most powerful underlying causes of forest loss – excessive consumption by people in rich powerful societies, mostly in northern countries, of resources appropriated from poor and powerless communities, mostly in southern countries.

So, never mind the rain, I go to talk to a rowan tree about Ricardo. It’s an ancient giant, its trunk almost completely rotten, but where it has tumbled its branches have taken root, and new shoots are sprouting from its boll. It is a tree that refuses to die, or having died, will live on anyway - a fitting tribute to Ricardo.

And then, as the rain eases, a family come along to join me. We talk about red deer’s predilection for rowan, its amazing link to juniper through a rust fungus, and the fondness of redwings and fieldfares for its berries, which brings them here all the way from Scandinavia. They will be disappointed this year, as it’s been a poor year for fruit.

No tree is richer in magical powers than rowan, if the old stories are to be believed. It grows outside most old houses in these parts, and is still planted close to new ones, because of the belief that it keeps away evil spirits. Every self-respecting white witch has a rowan wand, and although cutting or burning the wood is bad luck unless it is done with due ceremony, it has a host of uses, all supposed to result in protection, whether of cradles or carts, houses or barns, cows, sheep or people.

I am glad to have had some people to share some of the stories with, like the boy on Arran who untied the rowan twig from the cow’s tail and the origin myth that has rowan made of eagle feathers and drops of blood. And I was delighted when the boys went off and adopted some trees and wrote about their magical powers. One, if you kiss it, will bring you good luck. Another, when it grows a bit bigger, will become a witch's broom.One is going to produce a special tea that, when drunk by military leaders, will bring about world peace.

I’m sure Ricardo would be pleased. Home, and dry, I raise a glass of rowan wine to his memory.

Going Potty

2011-09-14T16:23:00.000+01:00

If you've followed this blog for a while you'll know that I'm more than a bit partial to pots, and fascinated by how ceramics uses all the elements - earth mixed with water, dried in air then fired. Now, all of a sudden, life seems to be full of interesting pottery events and people.

I've recently had the good fortune to interview Lotte Glob, stunning ceramic artist based on a croft a bit north of me, and the result is here. Lotte's own website, full of glorious images of her work, is here.

At An Talla Solais, the gallery in Ullapool, there is currently a gorgeous exhibition of ceramics and associated art, and my review is on the Northings website.

And next week, I am getting very excited about the prospect of helping to build a neolithic-style pit to fire pots, which Brenda, one of the project officers for the Life and Death in Assynt's Past project, has been encouraging people to make (see here, for example). It's going to be fun!

A-B-Tree

2011-09-13T18:06:00.000+01:00

September and October see the trees blush with colour and swell with fruit, and I am going to be celebrating their wonders with the A-B-Tree project - 18 creative writing events around Scotland exploring the connections between trees and writing, one for each tree associated with a letter of the Gaelic alphabet. My website has a page with more information about the project here. Come along to an event near you, or if there isn't one and you'd like one, please get in touch. I might well not be able to stop at 18 events!

Thanks to the Forestry Commission and Hi-Arts for financial support to make this project possible - and I'm proud to be taking part in the International Year of Forests.

Home from the Summer Isles

2011-09-12T15:45:00.000+01:00

Tanera Mòr is a tardis island. I've looked at it from the mainland for many years, thinking it a wee smidgin of a thing. Earlier this year, I visited for a day trip, allowing myself time to chat with Lizzie and Rich Williams about a creative writing week we were plotting, leaving myself the luxury of a couple of hours to look around.

We chatted so pleasingly, my island-scoping time was squeezed a bit, but in an hour and a half I still managed to sprint up to the high point above the northerly pier and stroll around the east side of the island to the jetty at the south. I reckoned I'd seen most of the place and I was delighted by the woods, the ruined herring factory with its beautiful stone pier and the fabulous views out to the west to the other Summer Isles. I was pleased that I had left myself something of the island to explore when I came back for a week in September.

That week has just come to an end. It was one of those special times in life that dart past like a dragonfly.

On arrival, I sauntered up to the high point to survey my domain for the week. To my surprise, a proper look at the map revealed that the big lump down the south end of the island was in fact a hill considerably larger than the one I was standing on. Rather more of the island remained to explore than I had expected.

On my first full day, the weather was warm and calm. A paddle around the island was in order. I set off on a kayak across the sheltered bay, which gained Tanera its Viking name meaning 'big haven'. And big it turned out to be. At the far side of the bay, I returned, the shoreline of the island having stretched beyond my reach.

My walk up to the real high point and on down to the beach beyond revealed just how far the south and west sides of the island extend. After several hours of scrambling, numerous bays and craggy cliffs, bogs and thick heathery knolls were stalwartly untrodden.

A walk in the woods tuned me into the scrubby tree regeneration happening all over the island - on all sides many more patches of woodland burgeoned, unscrutinised.

Out on Patricia for a cruise around the island, surely this time to achieve a complete circumnavigation, the rough open water to the south forced us back through the channel between the island and its little sibling, Tanera Beag. The south shore is still to be revealed.

We saw common and grey seals, gannets and kestrels, butterflies and toads, and a friendly Highland bull, but the otters and dolphins eluded us. We had all possible weather: sunshine and rain, calm and wind; still, I couldn't help wondering what it is like in spring or in snow. We were dazzled by phosphorescent plankton, rainbows, a spectacular moonrise and Jupiter over the mountains, yet just imagine it under the northern lights!

By the end of the week, the little dot on the map had expanded to a whole world, complete with everything a world should have: woods, moors, freshwater lochs and streams, pebbly beaches, ocean crashing at the feet of cliffs, a sheltered bay, a walled garden and a tidal island promontory (not forgetting warm baths, log fires, fairly traded and organic food and excellent company) along with none of life's troubles in the form of cars, phones or constant internet. It's a uniquely peaceful world, and I've barely scratched its surface.

Thanks very much to Lizzie and Rich, Lesley May, Rachel and Jeanne, for inspiring and creative company in the tardis.

Going back in time

2011-07-31T20:02:00.000+01:00

For the next month or so I am going to be blogging about Historic Assynt's project to explore 'Life and Death in Assynt's past', at three sites, one 6000 years old, another 2000 years old and a third from 200 years ago. There will be a team of archaeologists digging at Clachtoll Broch, a neolithic chambered cairn at Ledmore and a pre-Clearance long house in Glenleraig and I will be supplying entries for a 'dig diary'. The first of these is now up here, and I hope to be adding to them regularly. Please take a look. The dig at Clachtoll begins on 8 August.

Surreal Achmelvich Video

2011-07-01T19:11:00.002+01:00

Bill has been making increasingly weird and wonderful videos. Here's the latest.

Achmelvich bay through a looking glass from Bill Ritchie on Vimeo.

Weird clouds over Suilven

2011-06-29T15:24:00.003+01:00

These weird clouds appeared over the summit of Suilven on Monday 27 June at sunset.

Shame

2011-06-20T12:16:00.003+01:00

I recently read a crime novel, The Sea Detective, by Mark Douglas-Home, and it has set me pondering about shame. There are three crimes in the book, all deeply shameful, and one of the plausible things about the book is the way these are portrayed as generating deceitful behaviour on the part of their perpetrators and other people in some way implicated, including people who knew, but turned a blind eye. As time passes, their shame leads not only to hiding of the truth but also to self-deception.

I wonder if this is generally the case. Does shame always lead people to hide (from) the truth, and to lie, even to themselves?

If so, this draws into question one of the most common strategies of environmental and human rights campaigners - to 'name and shame' the perpetrators of wrong-doing, in the hope that this will drive them towards better behaviour. But if shame leads people to self-deception, then this strategy is bound to fail.

I think in particular about the climate change campaigns, which have set out to shame all of us jet-setters, drivers of gas-guzzling cars and general wasters for our enormous carbon footprints. But if shame leads to deceit, rather than guiding us to better behaviour, the result of this campaign will be wide-spread denial. Which we see.

I think of some of the campaigning I have done concerning the paper industry, and some of the defensive, under-the-carpet responses to well-documented finger-pointing exercises. It now seems obvious to me what was going on: we made our target companies feel ashamed and they reacted accordingly.

I think about educational situations, and why it is that we learn from some mistakes, but only if they are not pointed out to us in ways that make us feel ashamed for them. If we feel shame, we duck down and hide, and that dishonesty prevents us learning.

Maybe it seems obvious to you - but it took a good bit of detective fiction to help me see the importance of shame, what a powerful role it plays in our society and how much of a barrier it is to honesty. The accidental or deliberate causing of shame is, I now believe, a fundamental flaw in many campaign strategies aiming to change behaviour.

Huts and happiness

2011-06-18T12:48:00.007+01:00

I spent Wednesday this week in Edinburgh at the launch of a campaign for huts - see the very lively facebook debate. This is a Reforesting Scotland campaign to generate enthusiasm for huts, particularly in woods, in Scotland. Some people want somewhere quiet, rustic, simple and affordable to retreat to from urban life for weekends and holidays. Some want a full-time life away from the rat-race. They all want huts. A thousand huts. Or more.

I was invited on Wednesday to speak about what it is like to live in the woods, in huts (sheds and caravans and upturned boats) which I've been doing happily for 12 years. Happily being the operative word. I used to be a moody, temperamental urban-dweller with a job, mortgage and most of the other trappings of urban life. Since I got out of the box and into the woods, I am much happier. I live a simpler life without a proper job, mains electricity or a flush toilet. I am less secure and much freer. I am constantly exposed to nature and the other species with whom I share this place. I am aware of the weather, the phase of the moon and tides. I am alert and responsive to the rhythms of the changing seasons. I am more alive. Hut life has made me happy.

As well as being good for me, living in the woods has also been good for the woods. Trees flourish around us and the woods are regenerating, thanks to the disturbance we cause to deer, the nuts and seeds we sow and the compost we create. This is in marked contrast to the effect of the clearance of people from most of rural Scotland over the past two centuries, which has resulted in monocultural industrial landscapes of Sitka spruce trees or wet deserts grazed and eroded by sheep and deer. Anyone coming to a crofting area cannot fail to see that where people were allowed to stay (here it is around the coast), there is a diverse mosaic of woodlands and species-rich gardens, fields and pastures, whereas where the people were cleared for sheep ranches and sporting estates the woods have died on their feet through overgrazing and burning. This is, I believe, a reversible process, but only by letting people back onto the land.

We need some radical ways to give thousands of people access to land in Scotland. The Scottish Crofting Federation has called on the new SNP government to create ten thousand new crofts and bring a quarter of Scottish land into crofting tenure. This is a great vision. Many of these could be woodland crofts, particularly as the nation's biggest land holding is the national forest estate. If we can combine a move to create access to pieces of land, with a permissive approach to how people build on them, we could be onto something good.

There is quite rightly a national obsession with the shortage of affordable housing. One of the most obvious solutions is to allow people to build their own, cheap, simple dwellings, in other words, to encourage huts. This is a challenge to the current planning and building standards regime, but surely not insurmountable. My suggestion would be that local authorities could create zones where there is a derogation on planning and building standards, and let's see what happens for a while there. If we can create a situation where lots of people can get access to rural land and build huts, we will, I am sure, create a situation where rural economies and biodiversity will flourish.

It's normal in places like Scandinavia, Russia, Germany and Canada, for people to have a wee, rustic place in the forest, and in Scotland there used to be a much stronger tradition of hutting. Unfortunately very few people nowadays have livelihoods that involve seasonal hut-dwelling - the herders and charcoal makers are long gone - and most of the informal hut sites where people from the central belt could go for a cheap country holiday have been emptied of their residents. The Barry Downs hutters are the most recent to lose their fight against eviction. It's time to reverse that trend.

The Carbeth hutters have, after a 14 year rent strike, embarked on the process of buying out their land, and good luck to them in raising the money. Gerry Loose, one of the Carbeth hutters and an inspirational writer, was also speaking at the event on Wednesday. He posted this great quote from Frank Fraser Darling, from about 1933, on the Facebook site and it's worth repeating:

“It is remarkable how much more work is made as soon as you have a house of stone and lime with doorsteps and fireplaces and several windows, and when you have begun to collect furniture. We have reached the conclusion that the cure for the chronic state of monetary poverty in which we find ourselves while we insist on doing research which it pleases us to do . . . is to simplify needs. Face up to the fact that much of the furniture and fittings, and therefore of indoor space, is quite unnecessary for comfort. Pare down continuously and avoid junk like the plague: be careful to see that such labour-saving devices as you install are not in fact labour-makers. We have never been more happy than in these wooden-hut days . . ."

I second that emotion.

On reviewing

2011-06-01T18:06:00.003+01:00

Last night I went to see a play - and I was working. The review is already up on Northings, here, by one of those miracles of ezine-publishing. Increasingly I seem to be going to arts events with my reviewer hat on. I wondered if it would reduce my enjoyment of such events, but I'm reaching the conclusion that mostly, it enhances the experience. Because I know I am going to have to communicate about it afterwards, I really pay attention, and as a result I think I notice a broader range of what is happening. I am tuned to think about how the art is being presented. To put it bluntly, I make more of an effort. Instead of waiting for it to wash over me, I go to it, I reach into the performance and tug what I can from it. And, surprise, surprise, I'm getting more out of these experiences than I used to.

I review as a lay person who can write. I am not a professional theatre person. I am certainly not a visual artist, yet I've reviewed a few art exhibitions recently (for example, here and here) and found it deeply rewarding. Having to respond in words to a wordless artform is a challenge, and it's enriching. (It needs to be, it's not exactly well-paid!)

Reviewing books is, of course, a bit closer to home territory. Here I am quite conscious that I would like to do unto others as I'd like people to do to me. I know what it feels like to have a reviewer fail to understand the text I have slaved over for years. I consider it my duty to look for what is admirable, what is there to be appreciated, what the writer does best.

The bottom line is that I love getting involved in conversations about the arts and I revel in having the opportunity to enthuse, in public, about the pleasure I have found in an exhibition or a book or an event. I guess that makes me a rubbish critic. Tough. I don't want to be negative reviewer. I'll point out a weakness if I think it stands out and I'll question something if it really furrows my brow. But on the whole, I am more interested in appreciative enquiry than criticism. I have no time for slagging things off. If something is so awful there's nothing good to say, I won't review it. I won't waste my time, or yours.

A-B-Tree

2011-05-30T18:36:00.004+01:00

To celebrate the International Year of Forests, I am organising a series of creative writing events in woods around Scotland. The project is inspired by the Tree Ogham, otherwise known as the Gaelic Tree Alphabet, an ancient linkage between the letters of the alphabet and particular tree or shrub species. I love the fact that in our cultural heritage there is a strong connection between trees and writing.

The A-B-Tree project will take people for a walk in the woods, share folklore and ecological knowledge about trees and encourage them to get playful with words. I'll be running 18 events, one for each letter of the Gaelic alphabet. Some of the events will be run with schools, environmental and community groups, writing groups and mental health projects.

If you know of a community group that would like to hold one of these fun, creative events, in a woodland venue, do get in touch.

A perfect depression

2011-05-23T17:40:00.007+01:00

This perfect depression was responsible for blowing umbrellas outside in in Glasgow and increased the sales of 'KWELLS' in Oban and Ullapool today!

Beware trees?

2011-05-23T16:00:00.002+01:00

Now I know the world has gone truly mad. There is an article in the Environmental Transport Association's website here, reporting on the Automobile Association's accusation that trees are dangerous road hazards and should be cut down beside all roads. Apparently over recent years, smash barriers, lamp-posts and road signs have become squashable on impact, whereas trees have not shown any corresponding inclination to evolve softer trunks. To address this inconsiderate oversight on the part of the trees, researchers are developing special genetically modified roadside elm trees with squishy wood.

Goodness knows what might happen to the forests of the world if these genetic modifications spread. It could give the term 'softwood' a whole new meaning. If you're worried, support the Global Justice Ecology's Stop GE Trees campaign.

Meanwhile researchers in Canada (according to the Daily Mail, here) have found that the Bt toxins incorporated into GM corn to deter pests are showing up in blood tests of pregnant women, although the industry claimed that they would be broken down in the gut and pass harmlessly out of the body. These genetic engineers seem liable to make mistakes.

New campaign slogan free to the first taker - Cut speed, not trees...

Wood energy - is a crisis coming?

2011-05-19T18:09:00.002+01:00

I have an article in this week's Press and Journal special supplement on renewable energy. It discusses the pressure that one energy plant is putting on wood supplies and prices in the north. The Balcas plant, in Invergordon, creates wood pellets, which opens up opportunities for people who want to heat their buildings with wood but don't want, for whatever reason, to use logs. Which seems like a good thing - it will help people who currently heat with fossil fuels to shift to a renewable alternative.

But the plant also uses wood to generate electricity, or to adopt the jargon, it's a 'wood-to-wire' scheme, and there are serious criticisms of the very idea of using wood to feed something as inefficient as the national grid. We have a small, and finite, supply of wood and most of it is already used by existing sawmills and wood processors, yet there are proposals for new bioenergy plants that will create a demand that can't be met by the existing wood supply. Couple this with subsidies from the UK government for electricity generation and a situation is rapidly evolving where existing timber users, including those of us who heat our homes with logs, could find wood becoming expensive and in short supply.

The Scottish government has been pretty outspoken about the fact that the electricity subsidy regime and the promotion of wood-to-wire as a way to cut climate emissions are in fact perverse. They will stress an important part of our rural economy and, as the UK doesn't produce enough timber to meet the projected demand, they will further increase our footprint on other people's forests. We have so few productive forests that the UK already imports about 85% of our wood - if we extend our demands to burning wood to generate electricity, we will be responsible for even more deforestation and land-use-change to create plantations in other parts of the world.

I'm not the only one worried about this - there's a very active campaign being run by Biofuelwatch. One of the companies expressing concern about the effects of subsidies is Norbord - here's their statement. This week's article just begins to scratch the surface of a topic that I'd like to explore much more deeply in future.

Poetry Tombola

2011-04-22T19:53:00.002+01:00

I spent today at the 'Made in Assynt' craft fair in Lochinver, having decided that the craft of writing deserved to take a stall. I am pleased with the result, having sold plenty of books, more than I expected, with The Last Bear, my novel, being particularly popular. I also sold quite a few of my new hand-made pamphlets, called Earth Wonderings (also available from my website, here).

The most pleasing thing was that I decided to have a bit of fun by running a poetry tombola - just like a standard tombola, except that every ticket was 50p and was guaranteed to win a prize. All the prizes were poems, on cards, and tickets with round numbers won something special - a book or a pamphlet. I gradually worked out that saying to people 'I bet you've never done poetry tombola' proved almost irresistable, and those who gave it a go seemed to like their prize a lot. Maybe the problem with poetry is just that it's not random enough, and doesn't come in small enough packages. Poetry tombola players of Assynt, I salute you!

I was also offering instant poetry, but no-one took up the challenge of paying me to write a poem for them, there and then. I shall offer it again next time, just in case...

Handiwork

2011-04-11T12:09:00.002+01:00

Just in time for the end of winter... Wool locally dyed the colour of asphodel flowers, by Ripplescrafts, and technical stuff - twisted rib, double moss stitch and lots of fiddly fingery bits - mastered thanks to Helen Lockhart's knitting lessons.

Seventh time lucky!

2011-04-07T13:34:00.003+01:00

This blog post is for people who write poems. I have just had a poem accepted for publication in a magazine I've wanted to get into for a while (pause for a moment of celebration...)

I know I'm not alone in sending poems out regularly to magazines (not regularly enough, there are still heaps waiting to be shown the light of day, but I try to send some out most months). The key moment in the process is receiving those self-addressed envelopes back in the post. There's a moment of resistance when I don't want to know if the answer is yes or no and leave the envelope unopened. But of course in the end wanting to know wins, and I pull back the sticky leaf and drag out the contents. More often than not, the answer is no. The editor's not reading at the moment, the poems don't work for them, they don't fit the issue, they just don't like them quite enough. Sometimes they say which ones nearly made it in. Sometimes they say please send more.

And sometimes they say, I'm taking one (or two). Yes.

When I get poems rejected, the only thing that eases the sense that it is ME that is being rejected (which is not a nice feeling, no matter how elegant and tactful the editor's style, and there is a tremendous range of editorial rebuff, and kind rejections are really very much, very very much appreciated...) the only thing to ease the hurt is to send more poems out. I've learned this the hard way over years. Licking the wound does not work. But putting more poems out in the post does. Trying again, kicking the poetry ball back into the field, works for me.

So, when a rejection comes in, send poems out. But which poems? The same ones, to a different place? Different ones to the same place? No. I pick a magazine from the list of magazines I want to get into (every poet has to have one of those...). I don't know how I choose which one, I just use some kind of instinct of which one I want to try today. Then I try to send poems that might fit the style of the magazine (though that can be a hard call, it is hard to judge an editor's taste). It takes four times as long as I think it will to make that choice.

I use a spreadsheet to keep track of which poems have gone to which magazines and how they have fared. It helps me to judge which poems not to bother sending where and which ones might go down OK. It ensures I don't send poems out simultaneously to different magazines or repeat pitches. And, it means that I have a rationale for chucking poems out onto the compost heap.

If a poem is rejected over and over, it's usually because there's something not nice about it and eventually, like a wounded tomato, it just needs to be put somewhere it can rot down out of sight. I call that place the compost heap.

So (and thanks for reading this far, as I'm about to get to the point) how many times does a poem need to be rejected before it goes on the compost heap? I used to say 5 times. My poem 'Rahayu' was rejected four times before I sent it to Island, back in 2003. Julie Johnstone, the editor, liked it so much she asked to see more of my work and the result was that she published my first collection, letting light in. So I reckoned that a poem needs at least 5 outings before I chuck it.

But what if it gets 6 rejections? Keep trying. The poem that has just been accepted has been rejected by 6 other editors. It was its seventh try. I've always rather liked it myself. I'm glad I persisted.

Retreat from the retreat

2011-04-04T13:11:00.005+01:00

I spent the last week at Glencanisp Lodge, running a creative retreat. I have led thirteen of these over the past 5 years, since my local community bought the house in 2005. For the first few years I did it on my own, and then a year ago I helped to form a community interest company, called Top Left Corner, to run the retreats and do other community arts projects. Last week was the last of the weeks that will be held at Glencanisp Lodge, at least for the foreseeable future.

Top Left Corner has had to fold - the costs (particularly the cost of renting the lodge) are too high and customer numbers too low to enable us to make sufficient profit on retreats to cover the basic costs of running a company (insurance, accountancy, administration, marketing etc). I have spent a year on an immensely steep learning curve, at the top of which I can see I have acquired an understanding of lots of business concepts, though I am still as ignorant as I ever was about how to 'succeed in business'.

What I do know, however, is how to run a retreat, and this last week was a delightful pleasure - a lovely one to end on. There are three phases to a good retreat week.

There's the start, which begins for me with preparation, and when the participants start to arrive I'm already tired from shopping and getting the lodge set up ready to be a retreat venue (installing a library, putting writing tables in every room etc). But as the house fills up with people, I revive. Last week it was a mixture of friends, acquaintances and unknowns. My job is to make everyone feel welcome, to help them to find their space, and to stir the pot of people until they blend into a whole. This can take a few days. This last week it seemed to happen within a few hours. It was a fairly small group (9 of us altogether) of mature artists and writers and everyone had clear reasons for being there and mostly pretty clear goals for the week. I urge everyone to identify treats they will indulge in during the week.

After the soup of creators has blended, my job is to disappear or at least not to get in anyone's way, but to be there to help the creative work to go on. I do a daily session in the morning, called a 'creative warm-up', which allows people to come and check in, get a boost in their work if they need it, check their direction, or simply spend time with the others. I offer a gentle activity, a walk or a talk, on most days. We went to Achmelvich to read Norman MacCaig poems together. We walked to Suileag bothy to discuss our creative processes.

An important part of this middle of the week is listening to my guests' ideas and urges and helping them to give themselves the treats that they deserve. I encourage people to go to the bookshop at Inverkirkaig, or to walk the river circuit and buy a pie on the way. I link them up to local artists. I point them in the direction of Fergus Stewart's ceramics studio and to Highland Stoneware in Lochinver, to Barbara Macleod's jewellery workshop or to the soap and candle shop in Drumbeg. I called Helen Lockhart to come to the lodge to sell her yarns - she filled the sofas in the living room with irresistable colour one afternoon. Agnes Dickson came to sing Gaelic songs. My partner Bill came to talk land revolution. My aim in all of this is for my guests to feel how alive this community is, and to feel that they have touched its pulse and made real, human and artistic contact with this special place.

Then there is the end. It begins before anyone starts saying 'only a day to go'. It's a subtle shift, but I always feel it. It's when I start to check if everyone is finishing what they set out to do, asking, hopefully not too pointed questions, about progress, completion. On the morning of the final day I run a session about beginnings and endings and this always helps to focus creative minds on the last push towards closure. I start to think about how to empty the fridge. I pack up my own things in my room. I have winding-up thoughts. Creative work pulses to conclusions. We share what we have done.

And then, on Saturday morning, we wake up, bundle our hangovers into our bags and go home. I empty the lodge of our presence: books, music and food. I return to the quiet solitude of the croft. I rest and reflect.

It was a wonderful week of art: paintings, textiles, words and friendships forged and strengthened. Glencanisp Lodge is a wonderful venue for creativity, and I gain a subversive pleasure from inhabiting what was once (and still sometimes is) a venue for killing (fishing and hunting) and using it for creating new and beautiful artworks. And as always, it is wonderful to be home.

On the morning after, I woke to the first skein of geese of the year, flying over, on their way north to distant summering grounds. It is, now, time to move on.

The balance has tipped

2011-03-22T12:47:00.003Z

We celebrated the equinox on Sunday night with a ceremonial fire in the woods, crouched next to a ruin out of the wildest blasts of wind. As the full moon struggled to shoulder its way through the cloud-crowd, the bonfire roared 'enough' to winter.

This morning, I strolled towards the gate thinking how mild and calm it was and noticed the sound of kissing - lots of rapid squeaky little pecky kisses - and something like purring. Up in the highest branches of a rowan tree perched two long-tailed tits, like furry lollypops - balls of fluff on long stick-tails. One made a show of a twig in its beak, then fluttered off, nestwards. The other followed.

Love is in the air.

It's spring

2011-03-18T10:50:00.002Z

It's now, officially, spring on Braighlinne. The first flower to open is a primrose, as always. And as always it is under the slowest trees to come into leaf, aspens, down close to the shore of Loch Roe in the cove we call Kelvin Grove, because of the Kelvin engine from a long abandoned fishing boat which squats there, below the high tide mark.

Some legendary boat, nesting
behind this old shore dyke,

sheltered by this aspen grove,

left behind, like a golden egg,

this Kelvin engine, rusting.

As if they have seen the primroses too, blackbirds have begun to sing their glorious improvisatory songs. Late in the afternoon, I stand transfixed by a high-wire performance: the bird sits in beak-lifted sillhouette, its back to the sunset, facing the moon in the eastern sky, and pours out one witty trickle of tune after another. Its tone is to a flute as primrose yellow is to gold. I wonder if its dowdy partner, hiding in the birches, is as impressed by its song as I am?

Earth Wondering

2011-03-14T20:01:00.003Z

Since about November 2008 I've developed a habit of writing a daily 'wondering'. These are short bits of text, usually about something on the croft, if I'm here, or the natural world elsewhere, if I'm not. Some of the wonderings are variants on the theme of 'wow, look at that, isn't that incredible/great/beautiful/splendid/perplexing'. Many are questions, blurts about something that makes me scratch my head and furrow my brows, or mysteries I wish I understood.

For example, here's one of the former variety, from Summer: 'A cormorant surfaces with a fish in its beak, and the mirror-calm loch rolls into a spiral of ripples, widening until the water is a huge vinyl disc, ready to play cormorant waltzes. A tern dips like the diamond-tipped needle – let the music begin.'

From winter, one of the questioning ones: 'A woodcock, invisible until almost trodden on, batters away through a thicket of hazel. How does it not smash into the trees?'

I scratch them down in a notebook, and gradually the pages have mounted up. Last year I took a selection of wonderings I wanted to share, organised them into four sets, one for each season, and created four booklets illustrated with some of Bill Ritchie's wonderful close-up photographs. I gave them as gifts to a few people, who seemed to enjoy them. They are handmade, printed on 100% recycled paper and bound with string.

Now they're for sale, on my website, for £5.50 each or £19.50 for the set. Or you can get them for rather less than that direct from me.

Re-hibernating

2011-03-10T10:15:00.003Z

It is not spring. Not yet. The lack of primroses and the hail and snow force this conclusion, not to mention cold nose, cold fingers, cold toes.

At the weekend, we moved down to the shore of Loch Roe, but we've been forced to admit we were premature, and now we're back in the woods again.

Those of you who've been reading this blog for a while, or who have read 'Wildlife on Braighlinne' in the wonderful Wilder Vein anthology, will know that my partner Bill and I life a nomadic life within the 11 hectares of our home. It's a kind of transhumance, similar in spirit to that of herders, hunter-gatherers and other peoples who still live close to nature. We spend the winter in a cabin in the woods, sheltered from the worst storms. In spring we move down to our little caravan on the shore of the sea loch. In summer, when the midgies make cooking inside a steamy caravan unpleasant we take to cooking and eating in another caravan up on the breezy heights of the croft, then wend our way back down to the shore to sleep. In autumn we revert to our spring quarters, until the path down the crag to the shore becomes too icy to navigate by torchlight as the nights draw in, when we retreat to the woods.

The seasons don't obey calendars. Spring on Braighlinne is defined by the opening of the first primrose. Summer comes with the first midgies, or the arrival of the terns from Antartica, whichever come first. When the terns leave, that's autumn. And winter announces itself by the first hard frost.

So what were we doing heading for the shore before the first primrose, you may well ask. Bill had one of those significant birthdays, and his chosen venue was the shore. Over the past 10 years, five of his birthdays have been after the first primrose, and five before. This year, once again, his birthday came early.

Last night we were back in the cosy cabin, fire glowing in the stove, a warming lentil stew on, and snow on the ground outside. It's the seasonal equivalent of having got up, thought better of it and snuggled back into bed for another snooze.

Wake me when the primroses are open.

The language of the land

2011-03-07T19:50:00.003Z

This landscape is written all over in Gaelic. Every stream, slope and hollow is named in the language, and many of those names are rich descriptions, with hints about the trees that grew here, the animals that frequented the spot or the uses that people made of the land. Some of these are still pertinent: our croft Braighlinne, the slope above the pool, will always be aptly named, and Baddidarach still has lots of oak trees. But the wolves have gone from Gleannan a' Mhadaidh, and Creag Dharaich was devoid of trees until oaks were planted as part of a reforestation project in the 1990s.

Yet the names can guide us in how to restore the land to ecological health, they can inspire us about what the landscape might be like for future generations and they can help us to connect to this place as a lived-in ecosystem, one with cultural as well as natural heritage. The tragedy is that not only have the woods and wildlife been decimated over past generations, so too the very language that spoke about them has been almost completely lost.

I am proud to be part of a movement to try to prevent the total collapse of the Gaelic language here in Assynt, and thanks to the Ulpan teaching system, I'm one of a group of people determined to help bring about its revival. In December I took part in a teacher-training programme that means we now have three fully trained tutors in the parish, and another one just north in Scourie. My part was to be a 'guinea-pig student' for the tutors to practice on, and I learned more Gaelic in the process than I have by struggling with self-study for I don't know how long. There were eleven of us and seven of us are now continuing with twice-weekly Gaelic language classes. Ulpan is a brilliant system, and I'll write more about it here in future. For now, you can read my piece about it in the Bratach, here.

Another crucial part of sustaining Gaelic is all the associated culture. The language is fuel, but the heat and light are what matter: stories, songs and poetry; tunes, dances and games. The Feis and Mod movements are keeping these alive, and it was inspiring to see the tiny village of Scourie run their first Feis last month.

In Assynt, the song tradition has remained strong and many people were taught songs by family members who did not otherwise speak Gaelic to them. One of these is James Graham, who has become one of the country's most lauded Gaelic singers, and who put years of study into becoming a fluent Gaelic speaker. There's an interview I did with him a while back on the Northings website. He is now one of our trained Gaelic tutors and an excellent teacher, when his job with the Mod doesn't take him away from us. For the wider cause, I suppose I should be glad that someone with his talents is involved in the Mod, but we'd rather we had him here, helping to get Gaelic back onto our lips.

Why am I, an incomer, bothered about Gaelic? As well as wanting to understand the names on the maps, it's the poetry. All the song lyrics and all the poems of this place, prior to Norman MacCaig's visiting eye, were in Gaelic. Just across and down the Minch, people are still writing in Gaelic. I want to be able to read it in the original, not with all the music and nuance washed out of it in translation. I live in the woods, and the trees here formed the original alphabet, called Ogham, when the Gaelic language was first written down. There's a depth of association with this place that I am sure can only be best expressed in Gaelic.

In my mission to deepen my connection to the nature of this land, I can but try to speak its native tongue.

An island retreat

2011-02-19T19:21:00.005Z

For the past five years I have run writing and creative retreats at Glencanisp Lodge. This is the big house the community of Assynt bought in the massive buyout of 44,000 acres of land, including the mountains of Suilven, Canisp, Cul Mor and Cul Beg, back in 2005. It has been an act of delicious subversion to book the house that was for so many years the private summer hunting lodge of the Vestey family, and fill it with creative people - writers, artists, photographers, musicians. We have had some fantastic weeks there, 12 of them altogether.

Unfortunately the Lodge is now so expensive to rent that it is no longer feasible to book it out for this purpose and sadly it is once again the preserve of the rich to holiday there. One day I hope a different situation will develop, but for now, I have had to look elsewhere for a retreat venue.

The good news is that I have found one, and it may turn out to be even more magical than the house up the glen in Assynt. In September (3-9 September, to be exact) I'll be running a retreat on Tanera Mor in the Summer Isles. Lizzie on Tanera is now taking bookings - to find out more see here. I look forward to welcoming you to the island!

Seaweed season

2011-02-13T19:22:00.003Z

In the last few days, the winter has started to seem to be on the wane. It must be the growing daylength: the extra light in the morning kick-starting the day with a bit more energy, the loitering dusk allowing me to let a little bit more get done each afternoon. The garden beckons.

Yesterday was seaweed day: fifteen loads of it onto the vegetable and soft fruit beds. The big tides at new moon combined with gales have meant that vast amounts of wrack have been thrown high up on the shore of Loch Roe. Since then we've had plenty of rain so I'm pretty confident the salt will have washed out. And yesterday was sunny and when you're working hard it doesn't matter that it isn't warm. So, the mucky sacks were unearthed from their hiding place, the creel was emptied and hooped around my forehead, and off I set down to the shore to get mucky.

I like getting mucky. I love the smell of seaweed. I adore watching ripples and the curious faces of seals. I sing back when birds twitter at me. I stuffed the sacks and my basket, experiencing a profound connection to this place and to all the generations of women since ages past who have done this job at this time of year. By the time the wrack-sacks had all performed that pleasing slither and slump as they emptied onto soil, I was ready for my tea. What a satisfying way to spend an afternoon.

Forests for sale?

2011-02-07T13:47:00.006Z

I have four articles in the current issue of Bratach, one of which concerns the hullaballoo that has broken out in England concerning the proposals by the government to divest itself of the state forests. Having read the consultation document, which is here, and thought about the proposals within it, I conclude that folks in England could learn a lot from the Scottish experience of land reform. As most people who may be interested probably can't get hold of Bratach, here's the article, in a slightly fuller form than Bratach had space for.

The UK government is planning to rid itself of the state forests in England and its consultation on the idea shows every sign that its plans are modelled on experiences from Scotland.

Campaigners in England have reacted with horror to the suggestion that ancient woodlands like the New Forest may be privatised. Hundreds of thousands of people have signed a petition raised by 38 Degrees, with the strapline ‘Save our forests - don't sell them off to the highest bidder’. A public letter signed by a hundred famous people, including the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, Judy Dench, Annie Lennox, Tony Juniper and Ranulph Fiennes, made front page headlines in the national newspapers, decrying the plan as ‘unconscionable’.

In fact the Forestry Commission’s consultation document does not propose a wholesale sell-off of all its English forests to the highest bidder. The method it outlines for shedding its forests has three parts.

Firstly, heritage forests, which are those with high levels of biodiversity or other social value, like the New Forest, are to be offered to charitable organisations for either full ownership or management arrangements, to secure their public benefits into the future. This could include existing bodies such as the Woodland Trust or National Trust, or new charities set up for the purpose of taking over woods.

Secondly, local communities will be given a first option to buy or lease any state forest that is put up for lease. This is similar to the current arrangement in Scotland under the National Forest Land Scheme. Communities in England will also be able to register an interest in any forest that is important to them and if that forest comes on the market they will have a first option to buy, rather like the Scottish Land Reform Act community right to buy.

Thirdly, commercial forestry operators will be invited to take long-term leases on productive forests, such as the huge Kielder forest in Northumberland, the largest in the country.

These three measures contain a mixture of threats and opportunities. The main threat is the third part. Although the privatisation of commercial forests would not transfer ownership titles to private companies, the leases are likely to be as long as 150 years, locking the land away for many generations.

A similar suggestion was made by the government in Scotland when Mike Russell was Environment Minister. His proposal was to transfer a quarter of Scotland’s forests to private companies on a 99 year lease, in order to generate revenue for climate change protection measures. The idea was met by huge opposition and in March 2009, the proposal was dropped. A similar outcry is now being heard in England.

Scottish land reform commentator Andy Wightman has responded by asking ‘Is the outcry focused on the right target?’ His view is that if people in England are really concerned to secure the future of ‘their’ forests, they need to be worried about the current situation of ownership by the government ministers and seek to transfer ownership to bodies that have more local and community accountability. The second measure in the proposal will enable this to happen.

However, experience in Scotland shows that unless a right in law for communities to take ownership (or to lease for long periods) is coupled with funding, nothing will change. While the Scottish Land Fund existed, a series of significant community land buyouts, like those in Assynt and on the Hebrides, were possible.

When the National Forest Land Scheme began, several communities, such as Mull and Kilfinnan in Argyll, bought forests to pursue important housing and rural development projects, thanks to available funding. However, since the Heritage Lottery decided not to make any grants towards the purchase of state land, the National Forest Land Scheme has ground to a halt, and now a number of communities who have been granted permission to buy state land have failed to do so because of lack of money. The closest of these to us is Embo, in East Sutherland. The community had ambitious plans to buy the Fourpenny Plantation in order to reverse the clearances there and create woodland crofts for local people to live on. Their application for the land was approved by the Forestry Commission in July 2009, but when the Lottery turned down the grant application for £370,000, the purchase was scuppered.

Community and environmental campaigners in England should learn from Scottish experience of what works, and what blocks progress, in responding to the government’s proposals.

Draining the bog

2011-02-04T13:27:00.005Z

Wind a bit on the wild side last night, and a dramatic thunderstorm to stir the spirit. Our new cabin, aka 'The Great Hall', is so well-insulated we had to open the windows to hear the gale roaring in the trees. After 12 years of living in a caravan we haven't got used to being safe inside, separated from the elements.

I spent last weekend digging ditches to the south of the cabin in the hope of draining the great squodgy sog of wetness around it, which we've been steadily plodging into a mudbath since the cabin was habitable in December. There's nothing quite so satisfying as digging up from the stream, turf by turf, getting muddier and muddier, and eventually taking out the final divot.

One last heave of the spade and the backed-up water gushed through, torrenting down into the stream and away. The ditches ran with water for days, and now after the downpours of last night, they're running again. It's gratifying to see, and I await spring with interest, hoping that as the grass grows in, the ground might turn out to be a bit less marshy than before.

When I lead creative workshops, one of the main metaphors that I use is the idea (which I first encountered from Julia Cameron) that our creativity is like water. Inside each of us we have the potential for a vast reservoir from which art can flow, and we should feed that reservoir at least weekly and preferably more often, with good things - treats, sensuous experiences, play, fun, excitement and beauty. The creative process happens when this water flows from the reservoir down our stream of consciousness. But this stream can easily get blocked up with detritus, with doubts and fear, with boredom and overwork, with demands and failure to be understood. To make creativity feel easier we need to work to keep the stream of consciousness free-flowing. Scribbling long-hand in a notebook daily is my preferred method. Perhaps there are others that also work - meditations of other kinds or physical labour where the mind can run free.

Digging the ditches, I pondered the metaphor. There was something happening, as I dug, that was connected to my own creative process. The ditches form a herringbone of short canals, an extension to the existing stream. This wasn't unblocking the main channel, but it was about seeing another area where I was bogged down, and freeing it up. It required pretty serious structural change. It caused a short-term flooding torrent. And it has created an as yet unknown potential.

It's no coincidence, surely, that Top Left Corner, the community arts company I helped to set up last year, is winding up. I've been feeling overwhelmed (bogged down) for months, by the work that the company required. And now, the company will end (structural change), there is a flood of final activity and who knows what the future will bring. Meanwhile, creatively, I'm feeling more energy than I've felt for ages - a sense of new creative areas opening up, a huge sense of relief.

There are risks, of course. The problem with the drains that I've dug is that they cut through a highly organic, peaty soil. We are not supposed to drain peatland as it stores carbon when wet and when it dries out the fibres in the peat can decompose, releasing the carbon they contain into the atmosphere with all the attendant climate change risks that means. Plus we don't like making interventions like this on the croft, which we are trying to manage in as light-touch a manner as we can, to help woodland regeneration and ecological restoration. Was this too heavy-handed an intervention? Will planting some trees make up for the damage? How do we tell?

Likewise what may I have lost by the death of Top Left Corner? What's the price of freedom? Quite aside from the financial risk to myself of being once again completely freelance, what will the knock-on impacts be on the cultural climate in these parts?

Is there more stormy weather in the forecast?

All fired up

2011-01-30T18:14:00.000Z

Over the past year or so I have interviewed lots of artists and craft makers (mostly but not all from Assynt) and written profiles of them. I love getting the chance to visit their work place (whether that's a studio, shed or living room), hear their life story and find out about their creative process. Meeting someone who makes their livelihood from creativity is always an inspiration. In return the artist gets some publicity, a bit of exposure, a chance to explain what's behind their work, and often this leads to more sales of their work. The magazines, ezines or papers who publish the pieces I write about these encounters get some reader-friendly copy about an interesting person, usually with great visual content, and so they're happy too. Readers get inspiration and a behind-the-scenes view of an artist at work. Everybody wins. It's an ideal day's work.

One of my recent profiles was of Fergus Stewart, a potter based in Assynt who makes beautiful and functional ceramic mugs, teapots, drinking cups, vases, crock pots, bird feeders, all sorts. He's also a passionate advocate for how the arts can play an important role in rural economies. He is a community-minded man as well as a highly talented artist and it has been a pleasure to win a commission to write about him in Ceramic Review, the prestigious and beautifully designed ceramics magazine. An earlier, shorter piece was published on Northings, the ezine for Hi-arts.

What most excited me about finding out about Fergus' work was his process of firing pots. The clay bit is kind of interesting, particularly the skill involved in creating elegant forms with such a maleable substance, and I am sure that glazes could fascinate me if I found out more. But the kiln is a total thrill. It is magic. It is a dragon. Fergus becomes a wizard when he fires his pots, feeding the belly of the beast with fuel for its blaze, creating not just a hot box with pots inside, but a fluid cascade of fire, like a recreation of the heart of the earth. Within the kiln, white ghostly shapes of clay are transformed to glittering stone. It is pure creation.

I ask most artists I interview how their environment influences their work. As a nature poet, I think of my natural environment as the primary source of inspiration. Fergus is fascinating on this topic. For example, he has started making bird-feeders because of wanting to give something back to the natural world, and he designs them to offer not only food but protection from predators and competitors, with each feeder designed for specific sizes of birds. He thinks ecologically. He sources wood for his kiln from sustainable sources and it matters to him that burning with wood means that he is using a renewable fuel. This kind of thinking really gets me excited. There is so much more to learn and say about how the arts and the environmental movement can complement each other and work together.

I have lots of Fergus' pots at home - a teapot, drinking cups that are so elegantly shaped to fit the hand you can't believe it until you've tried them, and several bowls. I eat breakfast, soup at lunchtime and salads for dinner, and drink tea and wine out of vessels made by a real person, close to home. It's so satisfying to know that the money I spent is supporting someone nearby to be creative. Fergus teaches too, and I've bought pots made by his students, glowing with pleasure to be supporting the handing on of an ancient craft. This is, I believe, genuinely sustainable consumption.

Erratics

2011-01-29T16:24:00.000Z

Over the past couple of years I have been doing a project called 'Assynt: Fire, Ice and Stone'. It began thanks to a Scottish Arts Council writer's bursary, which enabled me to get off the environmental campaign trail, stay at home in Assynt and devote myself to writing. The general plan was to walk to all the many piles of stones in the area that are remnants of buildings or signs of human occupation, and then write about them, while thinking about the big elemental forces (particularly fire and ice) that have shaped the landscape and the lives of people who have lived here for millennia.

There are also stones that are nothing to do with human activity, but still tell intriguing stories, particularly the boulders that were picked up by glaciers during the last ice age and dropped again, often in incongruous places. There are bits of Canisp on our croft, for example, about 10 miles from where they 'belong'. These enigmatic stones are called Erratics and I have a very, very short story of this title in the new edition of From Glasgow to Saturn - scroll down to the bottom of the page, mine is the last and least story on the fiction page. I'll be interested in any feedback.

Losing focus

2011-01-24T20:10:00.000Z

I have just discovered that I am an ENTP personality-type, according to the Myers-Briggs system of psychological character analysis. This means I am an Extrovert-iNtuitive-Thinking-Perceiving kind of person. Apparantly this means that I am 'quick, ingenious, good at many things....' and 'apt to turn to one new interest after another.' Spot on.

This is, I realise the diagnosis of why I have faltered when it comes to writing this blog. What's it about? What's the focus? I am interested in so many things - which of them should this blog be about?

I spent the weekend with a bunch of writers, one of whom blogs a lot, and she encouraged me to stop worrying about what the focus is, and just write what makes me buzz. So perhaps cybercrofter will broaden out a bit and, hopefully, the result will be that I'll post a bit more frequently in future.

Hibernation

2010-11-24T12:13:00.000Z

It's that time of year. Long, long nights, and during the day the sun is low over the horizon. Even the hazels have given up any attempt to photosynthesise. It's time to stop, take stock, rest.

letting light in

under the lichen-garlanded hazel
there is space to lie back and look up

through the lattice of buds and branches

waiting their long winter wait

pausing before they erupt into catkins

taking time out letting light in

being between ending and beginning

Pigs

2009-09-01T17:03:00.000+01:00

One of the neighbouring crofters keeps pigs. They are wild boar crossed with something more domestic and are free to roam a huge area of regenerating woodland, where they rootle around, turning over the ground, creating good seed beds for new trees. I like pigs. I like meeting them in the woods. I enjoy watching them down at the shore of the loch, munching on seaweed. Their sounds make me laugh.

A couple of days ago we heard that the pigs had broken through their fence and were loose. They're not quite so funny when they stick their snouts and trotters where they're not welcome: a pig can make its presence felt pretty quickly in a garden as those stubby noses are the closest animal equivalent there is to a plough. So we've been keeping our eyes peeled.

A couple of days ago, one big sow was spotted on the road, leaning on her snout, dazed and docile. We wondered if she was ill, but the verdict was that she was just tripping on mushrooms. It's that time of year; fly agarics are popping up all over the place.

The next day we were sitting eating at the picnic table when we heard that tell-tale snuffly grunt-grunt-grunt. The big sow and a piglet were heading towards us along the path, ears flapping, tails twirling, eyes twinkling. They had no doubt smelled lunch. We managed to stop her in her tracks, persuade her to turn round and return down the path. I sprinted ahead and opened the gate for her and she obligingly trotted through, joining two more piglets and another sow on the road. Presumably she promptly told them all about the munchies to be had on our croft. We left them where they were to go and phone their owners and finish our lunch. By the time we returned they had scarpered.

They showed themselves to the sound of a bucket of pigfood, and no, they didn't look at all sheepish. They were at the top of the croft, which has now been well and truly ploughed. It will be interesting to see if the tree regeneration benefits from their intervention. We discovered later where else on the croft the sow had been before she came for lunch: a lovely old aspen grove, which used to have a particularly beautiful understory of mosses and herbs, looks like someone has been in there with a rotovator. We have returfed where we could and it will recover in time. I am thankful they didn't make it to either of my garden plots, neither of which have pig-proof fences, at least not when it comes to pigs with determination, which these definitely have. (Something else with big feet has been in one patch, but it wasn't a pig).

We've often pondered whether we should deliberately bring some pigs onto the croft, to see if they could make some inroad into the huge areas of bracken that limit tree regeneration. They didn't touch that area in their brief visit, and it is interesting to observe how little impact they have made on the bracken on their home croft. As long as there is vegetation to plough into within the shelter of woods, they seem to prefer that to digging on open ground, and they seem to prefer turf to bracken. I would too, if I were a pig. Digging bracken must be hard on the snout. This all makes me understand that if we want pigs to tackle the bracken zone, they would need to be fenced in. Some other time, maybe.

The pigs have returned home and the hole in the fence is mended. For now.

Trimming trees

2009-08-03T17:42:00.000+01:00

In 2001 we shifted our old caravan into its current position and since then it has become completely engulfed by trees. A hazel has grown up right in front of the big window and birches overhang it on all sides. It is marvellously sheltered from all winds but at this time of year the trees are weighed down with foliage and after heavy rain branches drape wetly across paths. With the arrival of visitors imminent, yesterday, we realised that they might not appreciate a soaking every time they stepped out of the door, so we asked politely if the trees would mind shedding a bit of greenery, then set about trimming them with secateurs and loppers. It grieves me to cut living vegetation from trees; dead branches or even dormant wood in winter is far easier to prune.

Around the croft spaces are appearing under trees that have now grown high enough to form a canopy above head height. At first regenerating birches, willows and hazels form thickets of leafy twigs that occupy all the space they can, presumably to try to shade out all competition, but once they achieve sufficient height the birches at least seem to give up on lower branches, letting them go leafless and then be blown off in storms, so chambers of unoccupied space begin to appear and it becomes possible to walk among the young trees. This space seems to be offered by the trees to undergrowth and fungi and it feels welcoming to animals like us. I wonder if something similar is happening beneath the ground. Has a thicket of roots deepened, and are underground spaces opening out, similarly inviting to subterranean life?

Midsummer gooseberries

2009-06-29T13:27:00.000+01:00

It's steamy today - great growing weather. A windless deluge of rain this morning after 10 dry days and now the woods are awash with scent - valerian, fragrant orchids, honeysuckle, clover.

There seem to be more slow worms around than normal this year. I nearly trod on one in the garden while picking gooseberries. There is a bumper crop this year, despite almost complete defoliation by saw-fly larvae, and I have discovered that gooseberry pancakes are an excellent hangover cure. Just like the character in the Chekhov story called 'Gooseberries', I am obscenely proud of my gooseberry bushes. I strive to remember, every time I eat their fruit, that almost everyone is less fortunate than me. I wonder what it is about these tart, pale, stubbly spheres that imbues we gooseberry-growers with such disgusting smugness?

Eyes at tea-time

2008-11-22T18:03:00.000Z

Now the night comes in so early, making a cup of tea at 5 involves walking by torchlight across the croft from the studio to the caravan and back. The studio is wood-stove snuggly, but today it has barely edged above freezing outside and last night's fall of hail and snow hasn't melted at all.

The caravan is at ambient temperature, so I keep my coat and gloves on to fill the kettle and as it boils the steam billows like an old locomotive chimney. I stew the tea in the pot then pour it into a thermos flask and head back to the studio. I realise some people would find this lifestyle uncomfortable, but it has its magic.

On the way to the caravan, something rustled in the rushes close to the path and scampered away. I swept arcs with my torch until I hooked a pair of glints, a pair of eyes reflecting the light. They seemed low to the ground but I couldn't tell at that distance what was looking back at me through the vegetation. I murmured to it and it held my gaze. I swang the beam around and picked out two more pairs of twinkles, then walked on.

On the way back to the studio, I hear another scuffle near to the old ruin and the swish of animals moving through long heather. I scan with the beam. Two eyes gleam. It's three roe deer, right there, two with their white rumps catching the light and the other one looking straight at me. The other two deer turn their heads and, for a moment, six little dishes of light shine in the dark. Then three reflective rumps mark their bouncing path as they bound away over the brae and into the lochside woods.

Back at the studio, I strip off the warm gear and sit down to a nice cup of Darjeeling, knowing just why I don't miss the convenience of being able simply to hit a switch in the kitchen when I want a cup of tea.

On rawness

2008-11-17T16:57:00.000Z

Winter arrived suddenly with a week of gales, a clatter of hail and a half-serious fall of snow. We retreated from the caravan at the shore to the shed in the woods. Then just as suddenly it backed off again, allowing us a couple more weeks of autumn, so we packed up and headed back down to the lochside for a few starry nights and a chance for a bonfire. Shoals of birch leaves rafted in and moored among the bladderwrack. The aspens fluttered their money-leaves for a few more days.

Now winter is back, the days are short and it's raw. Raw. 'Of weather: harshly cold and damp', the dictionary puts it. Harshly cold means just a few degrees above freezing, maybe 5 during the day, dropping to 1 or 2 at night. And damp? Well, after several days of torrential rain, damp seems an ludicrous understatement. This kind of wet cold feels much colder than a dry freeze; it is something about the way the air is saturated that draws any warmth from exposed skin. Plus there's the wind-chill factor: it is blowing due westerly, scouring up the loch from the sea at a steady force 5, gusting strongly enough to lash the rain inside the hood of your coat. Everything's chilly and wet to touch. There is no evaporation at all: nothing dries, the caravan windows are permanently steamed up and condensation pours and pours. The paths get soggier each day, like wet sponges, their peaty basis turning to the consistency of porridge. We squodge back and forth across the croft in wellies and full waterproofs, stripping down to come into the studio, or a shed, or caravan, leaving dripping rain gear to puddle outside, with no hope of it drying.

Having been told by a Siberian that there is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing, I have learned to focus my loathing onto the most egregious corners of my failing garments. I restrict my feelings about these weather conditions to hating the wet cuffs on my jacket and I occupy myself by imagining how a different design might miraculously wick this moisture away.

But the good thing about such a serious bout of dreich weather is that I'm driven indoors long enough to get round to this. If it goes on much longer, I might even manage my tax form. Now there's something that really will feel raw.

In praise of SPONG

2008-07-01T17:52:00.001+01:00

SPONG is the name of a device I found in a charity shop. It's a mincer that screws onto the table in the caravan. It's ancient, simple, robust and highly effective. You feed stuff into the vessel and wind the handle, which turns an Archimedes screw, forcing the stuff through a couple of metal discs with holes in, reducing it to mash. It has revolutionised my life. No more of the agony of trying to grind chickpeas in a mouli or herbs in a parsmint. These two tools have served my mashing needs for the past nine years, since living without electricity, but both the mouli and parsmint are plastic, bijou, feeble affairs, which leave me aching and cross after endeavouring to squish any serious volume of stuff. At this time of year, my garden is producing mint by the sackful. A parsmint just is not powerful enough. Now, with SPONG, mint sauce is just a few handle-turns away.

Geese

2008-04-10T19:30:00.000+01:00

The first geese flew over today, heading north for summer feeding and breeding. It feels as if it might really be spring. I love the song of the skein - honking and bantering with each other - and the way their formation makes letters of some runic alphabet, spelling out what? Blessings? A story? A joke? Does each skein have their own routine? Do they write the same text on the sky every year?

That sheep is back. Grrr...

Sheep

2008-04-06T13:43:00.001+01:00

I got back after a few days away yesterday to find a sheep on the croft. The give away signs were the stench and paths strewn with dung. Sheep are not welcome here, despite their conventional association with crofting life. Apart from the fact that they are smelly and stupid, they are a disaster when it comes to trying to grow trees as they eat anything they can get their ugly little teeth around. Because regenerating the woods is our aim for the land, sheep are banned. Most of the time the stock fence around the croft is adequate to keep them out, but at this time of year the grass grows better on this side of the fence, under the shelter of trees, largely ungrazed by hairy herbivores. The temptation is such that in spring we regularly have sheep breaking and entering, eyeing up vulnerable fence posts and squeezing their fat haunches between the wires.

We chased her around, up and down the path, out onto the rocky knoll, back down into the bog, across a marshy bit into the woods and then, finally, she tried to make a break past me between the ruin and a sheer drop. I tackled her as she went past and managed to hang on, with two hands in her fleece, to shouts of approval and jokes about the All Blacks.

Once caught, the ewe appeared to give up all resistance. We tied a bit of twine around her neck and front leg and tried to lead her out down the path to the gate. She was having none of it. She sat down. You can't drag a sheep with a bit of string and she was not going to co-operate. I fetched the wheelbarrow. We turned her onto her back, picked her up by her legs and heaved her into the barrow. She rolled her eyes and acted like a lamb in a doll's pram. I pushed her off the croft, trying not to look too closely at her tick-infested belly, and tipped her rather unceremoniously out of the barrow onto the road on the other side of the fence. She sat there, with that dumb sheep glaze on her face that has a great Scots word for it, invented for sheep and these days applied more often to drunks - glaikit. We said goodbye and she picked herself up onto her hoofs and trotted off up the brae to find her mates, or so we thought.

How foolish we were. This morning, setting off for a bumble in the woods, there she was, nibbling away on the path beside the ruin again. We have a well-rehearsed routine for this, I cut round the knoll to open the gate, staying out of eyeshot while the sheep is herded gently down the path. All was going swimmingly until I spooked her near to the gate and she sprinted off into the woods. Another chase began. It's not as if it was a nice spring morning. The snow was lying and the ground beneath it was soggy, slippery and, when you make a dive for a sheep, cold on the knees. The sheep duly submitted once again to our athletic prowess and was, once again, wheelbarrowed off the premises. No way were we letting her loose, though. This time she was tipped into the boot of the car and driven 5 miles up the road to her home township, precise location to remain secret, where we bundled her out of the back, untied her and left her to tell the other woolly maggots about her alien abduction experience.

Last trip in Ripples

2008-03-25T18:00:00.000Z

The wee boat's gunwhales are disintegrating, she has a hole in the thwart, and her benches are rotten. Ripples, as we call her, has just done her final journey. Her years of floating service are over. Early in the morning, at high tide, we swept the snow off the blue wooden benches and launched her for the last time. Her last duty was the tour to the caravan to pick up an empty calor gas bottle, up to the bridge at the head of the loch where it was swapped for a full one, back to the caravan to drop it off, and then into a crack on the shore where she will sit high and dry as the tides fall away now that the moon is waning again. Once she has dried out a bit, she will be perched up-ended to live out her days as a shelter, a place to go and sit out of the drizzle and contemplate ripples on the loch. It was sunny as we rowed her up and down the loch, but as soon as she was abandoned on the shore, a squalling blizzard swept in, like the close of a film, as if taking a boat out onto the loch will never ever be possible again.

Seaweed

2008-03-17T16:39:00.000Z

Each day for the past week I have been gathering seaweed from the shore of the loch. I have a big back basket that I made about 8 or 9 years ago, with help from a friend, at a weekend workshop in Helmsdale. It's a traditional creel made of hazel and willow, and when I strap it on my back I feel connected to generations of women before me who have trudged back up from the shore with seaweed for the garden. I am always amazed by how many strands of nylon rope and fragments of plastic are tangled up in it. I've now gathered 8 baskets full of bladderwrack - one for each vegetable bed, one to mulch the fruit trees and one to mulch the soft fruit bushes - probably enough for this year.

This morning it was low tide, and there was a film of ice on the weed. I watched it disintegrate in the sun, knowing that each sparkling crystal structure, the fractal coastline-pattern of each tiny window-pane, would last only a few minutes more - even if it survived the sunshine, the creeping tide would soon wash it into invisibility. One long, lingering, melting moment later, the ice was gone.

Beached

2008-03-10T17:25:00.001Z

The pontoons at the harbour are being extended so the big boat, Vigilance, which normally spends the whole winter safely tied up, has spent the last couple of weeks in a precarious position on the shore of the loch. Why not on her summer mooring? Because the running mooring for the little boat, Ripples, has snapped and the broken chain can't be replaced until we get some fine weather. To make matters worse, Ripples' gunwhales are finally giving way so her days of useful service on water are over. The replacement boat, as yet unnamed, is not yet ready for launching. We can't leave Vigilance hanging on a mooring in the middle of the loch with no wee boat to row out to reach her.

So Vigilance is tied up on the shore, enduring the storms. She floats at high tide, and is beached as it goes out. Yesterday, as the water level lowered, she toppled over too fast, onto a sharp stone. Water dripped from the resulting hole. This morning, the pressure was down to 960 and it was two days after new moon - the resulting spring tide was enormous. This, coupled with a south-easterly wind, had tugged one of the ropes free. It is nerve-wracking and I'm just an onlooker, not the one tying the knots and wrestling with tyres and fenders.

The tide's been right out and it's coming back in again now. She'll be floating again soon. How much water is she taking through that hole?

Hibernation almost over

2008-02-17T18:21:00.000Z

The normal signal here for end-of-hibernation is the first primrose. The diary over the past eight years shows this to be normally early-to-mid March, and occasionally late February. This year the first primrose was out on December 29th. Did someone say 'climate change?'

Despite what the primroses are doing it has still been determinedly wintry, but the days are lengthening fast now and the trees are jumping with birds. After a raw wet January and a snowy start to February, we have been blessed by a week of dry, bright weather. I have been digging over the ex-raspberry patch, getting the soil ready for (dare I say the word?) spring. Robins chase each other, competing for worms as they turn up on the spade. Early in the morning, they command the tree tops, leaving those long listening pauses between their trills.

The big thrill this week is the installation of a polytunnel. After a last minute change of plan for its site, it will nestle in the shelter of the woods beside the bath and winter bed shed we call 'the lounge'. It's a big job. Carting all the tubes, wood and fittings into position and plotting and staking out the ground took a morning. Then construction could begin. This involved first measuring out and hammering in two lines of five ground tubes. Then the hoops could be made up, complete with their surprisingly complicated complement of bolts and joints. The ridge tube, corner stablisers and cross-bars completed the metalwork. That was yesterday. Today we worked on timber door frames (one for each end) until the drill ran out of battery. I am impatient for completion, but there is still a lot to do: complete the door frames, make doors, dig trenches all around to bury the cover, acquire some suitable flooring. Then we will need a warm, calm day to wrap it in polythene. I can't wait to be Christy.

Poems, letters and birds

2007-11-30T17:39:00.000Z

I return from cyber silence with a burst of good news. First, what could be better than having a poem in the Scottish Poetry Library's choice of this year's twenty Best Scottish Poems? And then the post box delivered up three exciting brown envelopes: one containing the page proofs of my novel, The Last Bear, due out in March 08; one containing the signed contract for Paper Trails, my non-fiction book about the paper industry, due out in July 08; and one with a letter from the lawyer confirming that I am one step closer to registering legal title to the house site.

As if to warn me not to fly too blindly amid these thrills, when walking this morning I found a coal tit unconscious beside the road, still warm, presumably stunned by a collision with a vehicle. I carried it gently back to the croft and tried to keep it warm, but it has not come round.

Long house

2007-10-14T17:41:00.000+01:00

Having given up on buying the croft house, I am pleased to be able to report that there has recently been progress on the house site - the Crofters Commission has agreed to decroft the site and the land-owner's solicitor is drawing up the new title, so I will shortly be handing over the money and becoming the proud owner of a half hectare of paradise. The next step is to get a house design to put in for full planning permission. Every second day I find myself with a new sketch.

It must be small, very small. Partly because that's all I can afford, partly because the smaller it is the less energy it will consume but mostly because I love little spaces. Perhaps it's because as the youngest in the family I always had the smallest room. At college I had a succession of wee rooms and loved them all. I adore the intimacy of a tiny caravan. I am in ecstacy in the womb-like comfort of a tent. I wrote most of my first novel in a tiny bender I made myself, which I used to call my womb-room (sadly, it blew away in the 2005 hurricane). So I am set on what my architect friend calls a 'micro-house'.

But what shape should it be? For the past while I have been getting obsessed with the idea of making it a tiny version of a Viking long house, stove in the middle, throne bed at one end, perhaps five times as long as it is wide, but not much wider than a double bed. This is also the shape of one of my favourite buildings in the whole world, the Fasting Palace in Heaven Park in Beijing, which consists of five square rooms in a row: bedroom, study and three public rooms. The emperor would get up at one end of the building and work his way during the course of the day to the other end, then back again, spending some time in each room. He began and ended each day writing poems in his study. A lifestyle to aspire to, I feel. I fancy a miniature open-plan version of the same thing: bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, dining room, lounge, all arranged in one long thin space.

Stags

2007-10-09T19:38:00.000+01:00

There are red stags roaring for sex out there. All pumped up with testosterone, trying to gather a harem of hinds and prepared to fight off the competition to get them. Most of the time the stags just stand on the horizon, posturing to each other, but if necessary they'll try to nut each other into submission, if they don't get tangled up in each others antlers first.

It's a queer noise they make, much more of a groan than a roar, not unlike a cow in calf. It's as if when roaring was handed out, dogs and bears got the consonants, so they go 'rr...rr...', and the stags got the vowels, so they can only muster 'oa... oa...' The result sounds more wretched than fierce, but presumably to a hind it's as sexy as Tom Jones.

Wee beasties

2007-10-03T11:20:00.000+01:00

The midgie season is over and so those in the know have been visiting. There were 50 people on the croft on Sunday, all a bit of a shock. I'm not used to talking so much. They mostly seemed inspired by what one described as a 'subversive lifestyle', and another as 'proof of what's possible'. The big crowd was followed by a visit from my parents. Despite frantic cleaning of all the sheds, my mother still looks at me as if I'm defective. She wishes I would live a normal life, in a house, with a spare bedroom she could stay in. Shed-dom is just not good enough. It's abnormal. I can see it's embarrassing to her. What I see as freedom, she perceives as insecurity. I just don't know how to demonstrate to her that this 'extremely detached' 10 hectare house feels more like home than any other dwelling I've ever occupied.

Weather-wise all the visitors have had a treat - glorious sunny weather, calm and warm enough to stroll about in short sleeves, and then starry cold nights. The trees are getting a chance to blaze up - some of the rowans are going bright berry red and the aspens are goldening. Every time I step outside I'm brought up short by the colours. It never fails to make me smile. There is only one downside of this season: lots of little furry beasties are looking for somewhere warm, dry and snuggly to spend the winter. Sheds are just perfect. I came into the studio yesterday morning and someone, something, had scoffed all the winter salads growing in pots, chewed on my skype earphones, gnawed off the handle of my laptop bag and even, for goodness sake, excavated the lining of my furry slippers. A loathesome vole, a mischievous mouse or a maybe just a shivering shrew. But whoever the beastie is, it's not timorous enough by half.

Hedgehog mushrooms

2007-09-24T19:59:00.000+01:00

So-called because of their spines where most fungi have gills or sponge. White, firm, chewy flesh, and after a boil-up to remove initial bitterness, delicious.

It's calm today. The quiet of the woods is disarming after weeks of wind-rustling and storm-howling.

Power

2007-09-22T17:36:00.000+01:00

There is a bit of kit called a regulator that sits between the wind generator/solar panel and the battery bank which is supposed to ensure that the batteries don't boil when the wind blows like crazy for days on end, like it has done this week. Ours has been bust for ages, which has meant that when it's blowing a gale you have to leave all the lights on all night, boil kettles of water, anything to try to use the electricity as fast as it is generating. This morning we took the wind generator down and fitted a new regulator, then put the generator back up. It has a smart little monitor that shows the battery voltage at all times. Nice and healthy at 12.6 volts just now. It will be good not to have to 'waste' electricity, even though it was excess to our needs.

Trees

2007-09-21T16:48:00.000+01:00

Exactly a third of the hazel nuts I gathered yesterday sank like stones, so they're likely to grow (or be eaten). That's a much better ratio than some years. I'll sow most of them in a fish box made mouse-proof with the smallest wire mesh I can find over the top and rolled up plastic stuffed into the handle-holes. Some of them I shall distribute to bare land nearby, like The Man Who Planted Trees. This is my personal local action in support of today's International Day Against Monoculture Tree Plantations.

Happy Equinox.

Hazel nuts

2007-09-20T20:09:00.001+01:00

There have been steady, strong winds for the past few days and the hazel nuts are starting to be blown down from the trees. It's a race with the mice. I got a good haul this morning, from under the ancient lichen-garlanded hazel on the croft. Now they are in a bucket of water. The hazels here bear lots of nuts but a very low proportion have any flesh inside them. Whether they're for eating or sowing, it's best to sort out the viable nuts from the empty ones. Mice can presumably tell by picking them up - some must feel substantially heavier to a mouse. I'm too big and unsubtle to tell. But a bucket of water sorts them right out - the empty ones float, those with nuts inside the shell sink. Bingo. By tomorrow morning I'll know what proportion have a future.

seals

2007-09-19T17:36:00.000+01:00

Some people watch television. I watch the seals on the loch. Up to 18 common seals at a time rest up on the bows and skerries just off-shore and as the years have gone by and they have grown a bit more used to us, they even hang out on shore sometimes. They've been very active recently: charging across the loch, leaping out of the water like porpoises, splashing about and cavorting in pairs. This morning four of them were hunting near the mouth of the uidhe, surfacing with snorts and splashes, gazing at us as we walked along towards the bridge. Unlike the big grey seals, they don't keen and sing at low tide, but they do grunt, snuffle, cough, bark, gasp and sometimes sigh. Most of the time they lie out in what looks like perfect peace.

seals hunt and grunt
ignorant but blunt
no-one's instrument

The Perception of Poverty

2007-09-18T18:04:00.000+01:00

This croft is the shape of a doughnut - it is about 10 hectares of land, but at its centre is a half hectare that has been decrofted. This is where the cottage sits which used to be the crofthouse, where the previous crofter used to live. But when he died and the croft tenancy was transfered, the house and its site was taken out of the crofting legal system and sold off into the free market, to be traded as a commodity. The current owners live in London, not content to own just one home and rich enough to indulge their fancy. They visit for a couple of weeks a year. Most of the time the house stands empty. I walk past it several times a day, and I have to confess when the wind is force 7 or more and the rain is pelting down, like it is today, I wish that the buildling and land could be reunited, and I could look out over the croft from the house that was built for just that purpose.

Well, blow me down, if the owners haven't decided that they've had enough of it and have put it up for sale. Fantastic, I hear you shout. Slow down. It's a holiday home, one of many in these parts that are bought and sold by people who live, and earn, in the London economy. They are asking for offers over £180,000. There is no way I, or anyone else living on Highlands wage scales, could afford it. I've got some savings, and if I get my parents to advance me my inheritance, I could maybe pull together £60,000. Let's assume the sellers were to accept £180,000 (unlikely as houses here, which are increasing in value at about 20% per year, always go for way over the asking price). I'd need to raise a loan of £120,000. On my earnings - an average of about £15,000 a year - I could barely raise a residential mortgage of half that. To service a buy-to-let mortgage (in which case I couldn't live in it, so what's the point?), would cost about £1000 per month, and it isn't worth that in rental. The only business model that makes sense would be to run it as a commercial holiday rental property. With great marketing it might possibly be feasible to make enough income to cover the loan payments - £14,000 a year. That's a lot of holiday lets, though I could at least stay in it the weeks that it wasn't rented out. But with my low turnover and no track record, no bank will even look at lending to me on that basis .

I don't feel poor, normally. Quite the opposite. I have a daily wealth of sights, sounds and smells. I am priviledged to live in such a wild, beautiful place. I am healthy, fit and enriched by my environment. I am self-sufficient in chanterelles, mint sauce and onions. I make willow baskets from withies I grow myself. I drink water off the hill and get power from the wind and sun. But after a day being interrogated by a stream of financial advisors and mortgage consultants and being repeatedly rejected as having too low an income to be of interest, I begin to guess what it might feel like to be poor. I remember a friend in Nepal, Krishna, asking 'how much your boots cost?' I'd tell him, he'd shake his head. 'How much your bag?' Not much less. He'd shake his head again. 'How much the computer cost?' My laptop, that little slip of a machine, worth more than his three buffalo. More than a whole year's living. Now, walking past the house in the middle of the croft, I too shake my head. It costs more than I can hope to earn. It's the same all over the Highlands and Islands -wee cottages built by the previous generation of crofters, priced out of the reach of the current generation of caravan and council house dwellers.

Fortunately the rowan jelly set perfectly.

Rowan

2007-09-17T16:11:00.000+01:00

The geese going over has made me realise the birds will soon arrive from Scandinavia, and they will strip the trees. So between showers yesterday I gathered rowan berries, and inevitably got caught in a couple of heavy downpours. Still, I got a good bucketful of berries and then there was the long, meditative job of stripping them off their stalks before stewing them up with cooking apples - no hassle there, skins, cores and all. The bright red berries go pale peach and the apple fluffs to a paste. Overnight the fruit has been hanging in a straining bag in the tool shed, dripping slowly into a bowl. I like the fact that it makes you wait, takes its time. There's no rushing the rowan. When I've finished my cyberwork I'll go and boil it up with sugar and soak up the bitter-sweet flavour, watching it transform from opaque to clear as the colour blooms, blushing from pale pink to ruby. If I make enough I'll trying selling it through the Food Link. But I'll need enough to last the year. Traditionally you eat it with venison. It's great on toast and even better with cheese. But to really get the most out of it, have it with turnip or swede.

Rowing

2007-09-16T18:29:00.000+01:00

It's been a bright, blustery day with pelting showers. The sky is a pageant of clouds and when they part enough for the sun it sets the bracken to bronze. The birches are slowly giving up their leaves, one by one. With winds like this, as each leaf ripens to gold it is blown off, so the trees remain green overhead, thinning, with only the floor of the woods taking on autumn colour.

This morning the wind seemed light enough to row from the caravan at the shore to the bridge, which is its nearest road access. It's not far, maybe 300 metres. Two dead batteries needed shifting, and it was time to tackle that job. They're heavy. These two batteries were from the original set when the wind generator was installed 8 years ago. After they weakened about 3 years ago they were relegated to the caravan, where they have been fed by a solar panel and used to power the music and lights down there. They have finally given up the ghost. Battery technology is rubbish - they are the weak link in the off-grid system, predicted to fail in as few as 3 years and when they do they are full of toxic non-renewable chemicals so they are a pain to dispose of. We should be pretty pleased to get 8 years out of them. Compare the solar panel, which is guaranteed for 25 years, and the wind generator itself, which should last for decades, with the odd replacement bearing. We won't solve the planet's energy problems until we sort battery technology. Who's on that case?

The really smart solution is a battery system that uses the wind power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then a fuel cell to generate electricity from the hydrogen when you need it. That's what the PURE project does. Unfortunately it's still way out of our price range and not at our kind of scale. At least lead acid batteries are relatively cheap, though that's all they have going for them.

So, that's why I was rowing two big batteries up the loch this morning. The wind was surprisingly strong and kept blowing the boat sideways. At the uidhe - the 'throat' in Gaelic - where the loch narrows enough to bridge it, I was blown aground. Fortunately the tide was coming out so that acted as a counter-current to the wind and I managed eventually to get the boat up to the landing point and the batteries are now poised for recycling. On the way back to the caravan I was rowing against the wind. It felt like a lot further than 300 metres. Good exercise.

Geese

2007-09-15T19:05:00.000+01:00

Yesterday evening the first geese flew over, heading south from their summer homes in search of wintering areas. Two skeins at first: one with about 10 birds in a tight V formation, the other nearer 30 geese in a loose scrawl, its pattern changing as the lead birds fell back and were replaced with others - their U-shape turned into a W then A then N and they cackled and chattered, writing their mysterious script on the sky.

Later, as night fell, another big group flew by heading southeast. Their strange songs make me feel I too should be making a move in recognition of the changing season. It's haunting to think that the first frosts will have come already, up north there in the geese's arctic feeding areas, setting them to wing. I imagine the adults chivvying the new generation along, and wonder how it must feel for a goose to make its first long flight. The winter will follow them south to here eventually, but for now it is time to revel in the fruiting season - caravan crumble for pudding again!

Wet knees

2007-09-09T13:18:00.001+01:00

I spent the morning in bed writing a poem that was commissioned ages ago, has been stewing for months and is due this week. I have finally emerged to type it in, though it is one of those days when bed is really the best place to be. The wind is hard in from the west, the generator's hissing in spin and the lights are on full blast to stop the batteries boiling. And it's wet. There is wetness here that is deep and serious, the result of gale-blown drizzle that has persisted for 12 hours or more, when cloud has been at sea level for so long that land, sea and sky all merge into one great salty soak. For some reason I chose today to forget to carry my waterproof trousers. It is only a few hundred metres from the caravan to the studio, but the path is dense with heather, birch trees, bracken, willow and grass, uniformly drenched. Walking up it is like being slapped about by big wet paintbrushes all aiming for that patch between the bottom of the jacket and the top of the wellies.

At least it isn't cold. As the old crofter who lived here before would have said, if it weren't for the wind and the rain it would be a good day.

Electricity

2007-09-08T19:15:00.000+01:00

It's awkward, being off grid sometimes. I've just got a new laptop (to replace the one nicked at Faslane, same day as the welly went over the fence) and it does not have what is perversely called a 'car adapter', which I need to plug into our 12 volt DC system powered by the wind power generator and solar panel. It's ironic that to be fossil fuel free you need a 'car' adapter. The workaround is an inverter, which jacks up to 240 volts AC, and then the computer cable's smartbox shoves it back down to 12 volts DC, which is all very pointless but while I hunt the internet for an adapter it will make do. Unfortunately, I already have a stack of electrical devices (the printer and scanner) which need the inverter too, so it's a bit like musical chairs - I can only print when the computer is fully charged and so on. Plus the inverter makes the phone buzz so mystified callers hear me saying things like 'sorry, I can't hear you, I'll have to turn the unplug the printer'.

To make things just a bit more complex the laptop is not compatible with the old broadband connection, which meant that I spent much of the week disconnected from the internet. No bad thing perhaps. The solution has been to set up a wireless network. This puts even more pressure on the poor old inverter, but there is something delightful in having all singing all dancing wireless broadband - I am typing this surrounded by the scent of heather, and it is winging its way to you thanks to sunshine and a light westerly wind.

Weasel and worm

2007-09-06T19:16:00.000+01:00

This morning a weasel scampered right up to the caravan and sat on the decking looking in. How do I know it's a weasel? Because it's weasily distinguished from a stoat, which is stoatally different of course. For once, I could clearly see its tail, which was relatively short, with no black at the tip. Weasels specialise in eating voles, so it would be very welcome in my garden, where the loathesome voles eat every bean or pea I put in the ground. Apparantly weasels make great pets. I'm wondering how I can befriend it.

Lots of harvesting of herbs today, and a big haul of blackberries and late chanterelles. A slow worm spent much of the day keeping warm on top of the compost heap, making me unsure what to do with the weeds. I put them aside until it had gone, not wanting to disturb such a placid and beautiful creature, lying there like a gold necklace.

Save paper

2007-08-30T12:55:00.001+01:00

Kimberley Clark's American website claims that people use more than three and a half metres of toilet paper per 'event' (an average of 143 inches of toilet paper). It follows this staggering claim with the gleeful cry, 'That's equal to nearly 35 squares!' Get a grip, people. That's almost enough to wall-paper the cubicle.

What better proof that we need the guerrila stickers from These Come From Trees to post on napkin dispensers, toilet roll holders, printers, whatever you see causing paper gluttony. I just wish there was a metric version.

Tides

2007-08-29T18:57:00.000+01:00

It was full moon last night and one of those skies packed with clouds, so the moon had to jostle and elbow her way out between them. Whenever she did, she left the clouds around her the colour of bruises. Each time, they soon ganged up on her again and shut out the light. Today, they have taken their revenge and it has rained all day.

Big moon means big tides and with low pressure they are even bigger. Yesterday evening I watched the tide come in, up, up, up over the top of the seaweed, up over the rock where we light bonfires, up almost onto the grass.

The water level began to fall again as night fell, as if the tide was taking the light away as well as the sea. Night ebbed in. Why do we say night falls? Darkness rises. Shadows deepen at low levels first, under trees. The earth breathes blackness out and up into the sky, which is the last place to go dark.

As the water dropped, the bows and skerries re-emerged and the seals wriggled onto them to snooze. Low tide was sometime in the middle of the night. I slept long and woke to it right back in, almost lapping at the feet of the caravan. Tonight it will be even higher. I've never understood why the highest tide should be two days after the full and new moons, rather than on the same night. Why the time-lag?

Autumn smells

2007-08-28T12:41:00.000+01:00

This year I've dried enough mint to keep the whole parish in hot drinks for the forseeable future. The clothes pulley above the bath is hung with big bunches of lemon balm, for more tea, and tansy, which I hope will, once dry, help to deter the moths, mice and other vermin that seem intent on devouring our clothes. Cleaning the lounge involved shifting the onion, garlic and chanterelle harvest to the studio, so I am writing this accompanied by a somewhat pungent odour of future stews drying out under the window ready for the winter. On my desk there's a bowl of dried rose petals and a jam jar of sweet peas and honeysuckle. The place smells of romantic seventeenth century poetry.

Open the studio door and the fragrance takes a sharp lift. The heather and ling are at their peak. Pure purple perfume. And in the woods the autumn collapse has begun: bracken is bronzing, grass slumps, leaves drop and the great end of year rot is underway. The earth breathes out summer and smells magnificent. Autumn, the olfactory climax of the season. I love it.

Time for a walk, to follow my nose, aromatherapy for free.

Brambles/Caravan Crumble

2007-08-27T19:47:00.000+01:00

It's bramble time. Yee-hah. The best bit is this early season because the first blackberries to ripen are the ones at the tip of the spikes and they're the biggest, juiciest and most delicious. I made the mistake of going picking without a jacket and got well and truly tangled - long hair, woolly jumpers and bramble thorns are a dangerous combination. But it was worth it for those black glossy clusters of sunshine. Now for the best bit of the day - Caravan Crumble. You think you can't make crumble without an oven? Wrong. It's the best pudding I know. The recipe's a secret.

Oh all right then. Remove spiders and other wildlife from brambles. Tip them into a saucepan with a peeled, chopped cooking apple and a spoonful of sugar. Put a lid on and stew gently until it looks juicy and the apple has collapsed into squidge. Get one shallow pudding bowl each and share out the brambles. Crumble two digestive biscuits onto each bowl (it's an art worth learning). Grill until the biscuit starts to toast. Top with crumbled chocolate and yoghurt or cream. Yummy.

The bath

2007-08-26T17:49:00.000+01:00

I washed the bath this morning. Perhaps not worthy of a blog post, but it looked like it had been smoking 60 a day for the past few years. Now it at least looks like it's thinking about giving up. It will never be spotless, largely due to the fact that it spent an indeterminate number of years in a field as a cattle trough before being rescued, painted green and installed in a shed with a hot water supply. Quite what its earlier history was is lost in the distant mists.

In a fit of domestication I also swept the shed where the bath lives, known as 'the lounge', because as well as the bath it contains a sofa bed, so you can lounge wet or dry, and a sound system. OK, it's an old car radio. The spider population in the lounge gets a bit out of hand at this time of year. I think I managed to get about half the cobwebs. Another few bursts of sweeping, dusting, mopping etc will be needed before it counts as clean. Fortunately my mother's not due to visit for another couple of months.

Decrofting

2007-08-16T20:10:00.000+01:00

Today 'the man from the department', as he is known, came to the croft for a site visit. The owner of the original crofthouse was invited too, but he lives in London and I wouldn't recognise him if I passed him on the street. Not surprisingly, he didn't turn up. His father-in-law came, and that is all I will say on the matter, at least for today.

The topic of the site visit was our application to 'decroft' a wee patch of land, on which I want, one day, to build a house. Just a little house. Caravans and sheds are wonderful, but sometimes, when I've onned and offed waterproofs and wellies enough for one day, I think it might be nice to have a single roof under which bath, bed and biscuits can all be housed. As with most crofts, we don't own the land, but have a tenancy that is protected by a bulwark of law worthy of a Dickensian novel: a croft, so the saying goes, is a little patch of land surrounded by a large amount of legislation. Unfortunately such legal foundations do not impress capitalist institutions like banks, and so in order to even apply for a mortgage to pay to build a house, the land on which the house will sit must be taken out of crofting and bought from the landowner. (Fortunately one of those bits of law establishes the absolute right to buy the croft, at 15 times the annual rent, which in our case is less than £20 - it's an absolute bargain at least until the lawyers add their fee.)

So, about two and half months ago, we applied to decroft a house site. Since then we have exchanged formal, nit-picking letters with the Crofters Commission five times and at last, today, ' the man from the department' came to see the site. He was a cheerful character, and he had sensibly brought his wellies and waterproofs. Given the weather forecast, all four of us were dressed in full body armour, but we were lucky and the rain held off until the very end, which eased the detailed scrutiny of feu papers and maps needed to establish quite what exactly would cease to be croftland, should our application succeed. The department in question is what used to be called SEERAD, the Scottish Executive Environment and Rural Affairs Department, but what it is these days since we got the new government I am not sure. Anyway, the task for today was to assess whether there will be a loss to agriculture as a result of the land ceasing to be part of the croft. Since the land in question consists of bare rock, peatbog and a few scrubby birch trees, our man saw no problem, and promised to say so in his report to the Commission. Quite how long it will take them to make their decision is anyone's guess. I'm not holding my breath.

Otter

2007-08-14T10:39:00.000+01:00

An early rise is rewarded by an otter sighting. He is big, probably male, coursing his smooth gliding trail along the shore of the loch, heading out to sea, off to fish for breakfast. Whatever paddling must be going on is invisible beneath the water. There's just this brown cat's head intent on a certain direction. Today he is close enough to see his whiskers, but even at a distance you know it isn't a seal because of the pace and that dead straight certainty. If any doubt remains, it vanishes at the same time the otter does - first the face submerges, the head follows and there's a curve of fluid spine in perfect smooth rotation, and then the giveaway - the sleek rope-tail hooping after the body, one stroke behind the game.

The water smooths its brow. You have just seen an otter and now it's gone, hidden. The guileless surface parrots sky. Then, a little further along the shore, up comes that head again, zipping along, pulling the loch's jacket open behind it, laying everything bare.

Wedding day

2007-08-11T08:39:00.000+01:00

alto-cumulus

clouds in full breeding plumage

good day for a wedding

Painting the wee shed

2007-08-09T16:27:00.000+01:00

A sunny breezy day. The warmth has brought all kinds of wildlife out. A slow-worm basks on the path. Big bees bumble inside and batter themselves against the windows trying to get out. The ant colony under the heap of old corrugated iron roofing that blew off the ruin years back is swarming - winged ants are just everywhere. The spiders are having a field day.

I painted the smallest of the sheds this morning, the one sometimes known as 'the wine cellar', presumably because it stores a fair number of wine bottles, full and empty, and demijohns containing liquids of dubious quality. It also contains lots of tools, so sometimes it's called 'the tool shed', though as a rule we try to stick to more grandiose names for the rooms in this ten hectare house. There's a lean-to off the back with the compost toilet, willow for basket making and plantpots. The shed also houses a filing cabinet full of hats, gloves, scarves and various useful camping bits (filing cabinets are mouse-proof; we have several). The back wall acts as a kind of wardrobe for coats, fleeces, bags and so on. Not forgetting all the other things that don't have another home, like paint, stuff to go for recycling, Scottish Green Party banners and a big wicker trunk full of things I've long forgotten about. A visitor took one look and said, 'ah, the porch'. But that name didn't stick either. Most often it's just 'the wee shed'. Today it looks brand new.

Boats again

2007-08-08T12:31:00.000+01:00

It's impossible to believe it is the same month as yesterday. Cerulean blue with a bright breeze. Paradise returned.

Unfortunately this means that the speed boats are back out on the loch, roaring and storming around, scaring the seals off the skerries and bows, towing dry-suited water-skiers around like buzzing bluebottles. I try not to complain - they're on holiday - but it is hard to stifle the loathing these folk arouse. Do they not get enough noise in the city where they spend the other 50 weeks of the year? What exactly is the attraction of being tugged about in the fuming wake of an outboard motor?

As for boats, it's the official retirement of the fishing boat; her licence to catch tonnes of white fish that aren't there anyway has been sold to a Cornish fisher. She's an old, old boat, originally built to service the lighthouses back in the 1930s. She'll putter about for a few years yet, taking us out to dive, to watch the birds and spy for whales and dolphins. If the wind drops a bit, we may get out there later. Here's hoping.

Glad to have a boat

2007-08-07T11:50:00.000+01:00

Inches of torrential rain over the past couple of days, driven in on a cold north-westerly. The loch is a blizzard of cloud and spray.

My wellies are leaking. This is life-threatening, plodging about the croft, the paths turning to streams and the stream a roaring torrent. I'm reduced to my spare wellies, because I took my good ones with me when I went with our local peace group to Faslane military base to protest against Trident. In the fun and games, one of them inadvertently ended up on the other side of the fence. As they do. So I'm reduced to the wellies I got for Christmas, the ones with pink flowers on. They are very pretty but not built to withstand the rigours of croft life.

The library van came this morning. It's one of those odd rituals of life here: a precious dose of literature. I have still not perfected the skill of speed browsing, sore needed to make the most of the 10 minutes we get when the big buttercup van halts at the top of the brae. Each time I'm the last one on the bus and the driver/librarian tries not to be too obvious about me keeping him hanging on, as I scour the shelves greedily for that book I just might be missing, the one that certainly won't be there in three weeks time. It's now or never. Sometimes I spot it. Today it's The Cloudspotter's Guide by Gavin Prettor-Pinney, a meteorologically-fitting find. Last time it was Jay Griffith's Wild. Often the van splashes off down the road to Stoer with its hidden gem still secreted over the back wheel somewhere. The service, which used to be fortnightly, has been cut to once every three weeks, despite this being Highland Year of Culture. Much beating of chests and wailing of sorrow. Fortunately, there is the Scottish Poetry Library, which sends me treasure by post for a modest annual fee. Bless.

The post arrived at the same time as the library, and the wee strawberry red postie van squeezed with a smiling wave past the big library van. Our little blue boat bobbed on the loch. It's just like a kids' cartoon, only wetter. Much wetter. I wish someone would draw in the sun. Maybe the Cloudspotter's Guide will give a hint as to how long the rain will go on.

Sunday without the papers

2007-08-05T14:56:00.000+01:00

Traditionally, or at least since Christians held sway in these parts, not much is allowed to be done here on Sunday. No meetings are held except those run by one of the several Churches, political activity is frowned upon and few of the shops are open, though you can express obeisance to the press by cashing out for a truck-load of mashed trees in the form of a Sunday newspaper. I don't do that anymore.

I'm on a mission to use less paper and giving up the Sunday rag has been one of the simplest and most satisfying steps I have taken. I abandoned the daily paper years back; there is simply not enough time in the day to read it. But for a while I indulged in the Saturday Guardian (I love the Review, that's my excuse), or the Sunday Herald, both of which would take me all week to wade through. Even before I read it, I found myself calling the newspaper 'the rubbish'.

These days the caravan is no longer awash with unread paper and I have far fewer fights with the recycling bin, with its jaws of steel. Instead I rely on the radio, email bulletins and the web for news - there is plenty of the stuff out there - and I find myself with time for reading books.

Better stop, just in case the wee frees find out I'm blogging on a Sunday.

Reflection

2007-08-04T12:43:00.000+01:00

Wild, windy and sunny. White tops on the waves on the loch, trees bucking and rearing. It's a fairground.

Far too nice to be indoors, though I am supposed to be writing a land management plan for the community woods. Instead I've spent the morning feeding the garden with comfrey soup, weeding, picking herbs, sowing leaf beat, cutting bracken, pondering whether to cut down all the virus-infected raspberries or leave some to fruit next year while I establish a new patch somewhere else. There are no right answers to such questions, just as there's no right answer to the question of what should happen in the community woods. It is enough to decide what general direction we're trying to head in (strategic plan) and what immediate actions this coming year will move us on most helpfully (action plan). Or almost enough. The trick, and the bit we so often miss out, is to stop, look at what we have achieved (monitor) and think about it (reflect) before plunging into the next round of activity. Without monitoring and reflection, there is no opportunity to learn. Too often management cycles are dominated by planning and action, with monitoring and reflection given short shrift. I wonder why that is.

Going to town

2007-08-03T18:56:00.000+01:00

I started the day, as I generally do, with poetry and tea. I tend to read until a poem tempts me to read it out loud, or makes me read it again and again. Once fortified by a good one I can get out of bed. There is no better way to wake up. At the moment I am besotted by Mary Oliver, and this morning found her poem 'Going to Walden', which is actually about not going to Walden, Henry Thoreau's retreat, because what the place signifies is 'the slow and difficult trick of living, and finding it where you are'.

This afternoon I went to town. An eighty mile round trip and all afternoon to buy one ball of green wool and a stripey jumper from the charity shop, which I will unravel for my latest creative project (code-name 'Dreamcoat'). Before the bus home I had time to squeeze in a quick visit to the outlying branch of the Scottish Poetry Library. No Mary Oliver, but Wang Wei and Sorley Maclean will keep me going for the next few mornings.

Back in my own Walden, armed with wool and words, I am determined not to go anywhere for at least a week. I'll cook home-grown beans for supper tonight and fall asleep to the sounds of the loch and the rain. Thoreau was right. Mary Oliver even more so.

Blue flowers and midgies

2007-08-02T16:58:00.000+01:00

The devil's bit scabious is out, and so is the knapweed. The paths are full of red clover, self-heal and thyme. The croft is awash with purple pompoms.

It should also be, if things were normal, awash with midgies. Our standard pattern of behaviour in summer is to cook in the caravan in the woods, steam it up and and attract all the midgies there, and then after dinner make a run for it down to the caravan at the shore, which is cool and midge free. But this year there is no need. There aren't enough midgies to justify the shift. I don't understand why this is not headline news.