Merry Christmas

My Husband and I would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone out there a very Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2008.

I would like to thank those of you who do spend a little time reading my ramblings.
But I also get great pleasure out of reading back some of the things I have jotted down, it is like a diary for me, only a diary that has no secrets.

To all of our friends old and new who have taken time to read and comment.
Merry Christmas may you all have Good Health, Peace & Harmony.
We hope good fortune shines upon you all for the coming year ahead.

Kindest Regards

Anne & Hughie Creag Mhor

Boiling Pots & Dolly Tubs

Well it's that time of year again, no not Christmas although it soon will be.
No that time of year when the weather is cold enough to freeze the crown jewels off a monkey.
We have had such a cold snap since Tuesday our water to the house has frozen solid.
We are back to the old ways of fetching and carrying water from the burn until it thaws.
We installed a 62mm Dia plastic pipe three years ago so we would not have this problem again we hoped.
But like all things that are sent to try us, it failed!!!

I have never known it to be so cold so fast, we used to have a few hours in the morning of frozen pipes until the heat of the now turned sun would thaw things a little bit, but not this year.

So we are back to the old ways of "Boiling Pots & Dolly Tubs " Boiling water to wash everything, including ourselves in the Dolly tub in the kitchen, it reminds me of the days as a child sitting in front of the open fire in the old tin bath on a Sunday night, in those days we used to bathe once a week in the bath and then have a good old wash down in the evenings in the kitchen pot sink.

I forget how much we take things for granted, then suddenly we are hindered by the slightest thing, because we are not joined up to the village mains water.
Our water comes from the burn, which I might say taste absolutely beautiful, even more so when it is freezing cold.

Well it is one of life's oh so small burdens for us, as we can buy water from the shops, not so for the poor souls in the countries where they could not even find clean water any where to drink let alone wash in.
So I will not grumble about our loss, I'll just keep boiling Pots and washing in the Dolly Tub for now.

Double Trouble

Well as usual you set your stall out to do something and sods law steps in and turns everything upside down. Bonny one of the cows that was due to calve went into labour in the early evening. We sat with her until 2:30am as I wanted to video the birth for those of you who had never seen a calf being born.

We decided to take a break and go for a cup of tea, as she looked as though she was going to be a little while yet.
Low and behold there he was on the floor of the calving stall when we went back 20 minutes later. She decided she did not want an audience, well he is beautiful we called him Cocoa as he is a deep chocolate colour, his father is a Limousin called Ronwick Hawk.
Well we thought we would wait for the second calf to be born a couple of days later and try again, but Dolly decided to go it alone and showed no signs of calving, when we went in to the Byre the morning after, my husband thought it was Cocoa laying in the parlour, but then he saw Cocoa having his morning drink, he realised it was Dolly's calf, we called her Pal as she is the double of an old cow we used to have but she die 3 years ago at the ripe old age of 20,
she used to be the leader.
Maybe Pal two will take that roll on when she gets older?
Pal's father is a Simmental called Dernean Jacob.
So videos unfortunately will have to wait for the next one later this month.

But I have a couple of pictures.

Cocoa .........................Pal

They have become best buddies, Cocoa follows Pal around everywhere, where there is one you are usually sure to find the other.
They have taken it upon them selves to investigate the feed store in the mornings especially if your back is turned.
Pal is like quick draw MacGraw, she fires her back legs out so quick if you blink you will miss it, She does it in a playful kind of way, like a child that does not like being told what to do.
At the moment they think it is great fun to annoy the Jack Russell, who does not take kindly to being sniffed and jumped around, so the skulks off swearing away to him self.
The Collie on the other hand loves the attention, he can be found quite often licking their faces, particularly after they have had a drink of milk.
I love watching them charging around the Byre, when they are outside everything is new to them, each day brings a new adventure for them something else to discover.
They are both fit and healthy.
God bless mother nature for the miracle of life and our double troubles.

Not enough hours in the day

Sometimes I wonder where the days go?
Since the clocks went back it has been none stop.
We both work full time and run the croft as well.
So other things have to take a back seat in the Winter months because there are not enough daylight hours to do the jobs you want to do in the evening.
So for us most weekends are used as catch up days.
Unfortunately for us this has been impossible too as we have for the past three weekends been at our work.
My husband is a full time Fencing Contractor and at the moment he is busy until way after Christmas in the local vicinity thank heavens, this would cause even more work if he was away from home at the moment.
I on the other hand work in Fort William which is a good 35 miles from home, my stores department is going through a refit so I am having to work weekends to get it into shape.

The cattle are all in through the night they started coming in about a fortnight ago.

My husbands father used to have an old saying "better a dry back than a full belly", which I think is so true, they thrive a lot better indoors when the weather is like this.

We have been getting up at 5:30 in the morning to feed the cattle and clean them out, my husband lets them out before he goes to work, he is back home before me in the evening and feeds them in their stalls when they come back in, by the time we have fed the cows, sheep & dogs it is between 8:30 & 9:00pm before we sit down to feed ourselves.

For the past few weeks we have seen nothing but rain and wind, this week has been really kind of mild for the year.

Last week our burns and fields flooded because the water could not get away quick enough, we had Geese and Ducks floating around in what was supposed to be our fields.

But last night it was really cold, my fingers where stinging they felt like frozen sausages.

Well the cows are loving it indoors on a night the calves think they are on holiday.
We have a young calf we called rump ramp romp, he is always last in and last out, he will not go out until he gets his bucket of nuts on a morning, he spends most of the day on his own, although I have noticed that he has started to play about with a much younger calf of late.
Friendship at last from one of his own kind.
His mother does not seem to bother with him, that is until her udder is full, but she can call as much as she likes, he makes her come to him, after all she does not bother with him the rest of the time, it's probably his way of getting revenge on her for ignoring him the rest of the time.

The lambs are getting used to us being around them, the tup craigy is so demanding, when you go in the byre he starts butting the gate and clambering up on the rails to get a scratch on the chin, Poppit one of the Ewe lambs has started taking food from my hand, she stamps her feet on the ground to let you know she is waiting for you to give her a titbit.
The other two lambs are still a bit nervous, but they will come around, they always do.

We are waiting for two calves to be born, one was due on the 20th the other 22nd but as usual they will come when you are really busy or least expect it.
The old crofters used to say the cows usually go with the full moon, if that is the case we should have action stations tonight, I will keep you posted.
I have just purchased a new camera that does movies, if I can manage to figure it out and it is not to dark I am going to try and film the birth and post it for those of you who have not seen a calf being born. fingers crossed.
Anyway must crack on there is not enough hours in the day to sit playing on this all day.

Updates

It's been a while since I last put anything on the blog.

We have been so busy over the last few months.

We have managed to finish our new hay shed just in time for the winter hay delivery.

Once again the weather was with us when the hay arrived.

The two hay men are from Stirling and the hay smells absolutely wonderful.

This was the hay we saw being bailed a few weeks before in the fields.

I love the smell of fresh hay, it conjours up all sorts of memories from my childhood.

The hay men stayed for lunch, and we had what they call in the Highlands a good old cheildh (natter or gossip to the outside world).

The weather on the west coast has been a bit hit and miss, sometimes it is glorious other times the heavens open and it pours it down for days on end.

This is a great hindrance when you are trying to do anything.

We have kept two heifers back this year to add to the herd as some of the older cows will have to go away, we also put the young calf in with them who lost his mother a few months ago.

We called him Tefal, I thought he had a big head but he turned out to be a rather nice calf as did they all.

He cried for his mother for days on end, but the heifers soon settled him down.

We are going to winter him, so he will have a good life while he is here after his turbulent start.

He can be quite cheeky when he wants he looks at you with those large doleful eyes and my heart just melts.

The heifers have been good to him and looked after him, usually they can be bullies with the younger calves but I must say all three have been really quiet easily handled calves.

We called the heifers Joanna and Beauty.

Joanna has a striking resemblance to a cow we used to have except she is soft natured her name sake used to be rather crabby.

She is a lovely Red colour, Beauty is jet black and she also is soft natured.

They like nothing more than a good brush, they would stand there all day and let you brush them if you let them.

Love is in the Air

Myran


Claire & Sharon
Time waits for no man and things will move on even if you are ready or not.
Well it's that time of year again, and our Cheviot's are in the mood for love.
We have managed to acquire a beautiful ram who we have called Raf.
He is a two shear and stands well, he has a great set of horns which is sometimes unusual in a Cheviot ram.
He has been chosen to serve our Cheviot's this year.
He is quite a handsome chap and I hope they feel the same way too.

Already Claire has been served so that is one down two to go.
To some it may be a bit of a laugh as we only have three in the foundation flock but last years ewe lambs have come on in leaps and bounds, they are the next generation and anyway we love them all.
The Tup Ram who we called Creag Mhor has already started to show great potential.
He is really friendly and loves nothing more than a good old chin scratch.
We will miss him when he has to go away, but we are not letting him go anywhere for the present.
Poppit, Babs & Teeny the ewe lambs are still a little timid but they are all little beauties.

They were all rather noisy when we seperated them from their mothers, but that was only to be expected, just like any child would cry when they are taken away from their parent.

The Highlands & the Islands

Where to start.
Lets start with the Highlands.
We have been so busy this past couple of months time seems to have slipped past us so quickly.

The country has been hit with foot & mouth restrictions again, which is devastating in it's self, but for those of us who rely on the cattle & sheep sales at this time of year it is absolutely sole destroying.
Our livestock sales at this time of year help to support our winter months feed bills and such, so like everyone else in the country we will all be feeling the pinch at the moment, you can only pull your belts in so far.
A lot of the farming industry like ourselves will be feeding livestock already as the grass is scares due to the torrential rain we have been having of late in the east and west of Scotland.
Our fields are holding water which is making it impossible to even put round bales out with the tractor.
I suppose the festival goers would love all that mud, but not our animals or us.
Some farmers cannot even move animals across the road to fresh pastures because of the restrictions, so they have been feeding earlier than ever this year.
Lets hope the industry can get back from this without to much hardship.

On the Croft.
We have been busy trying to complete an extension on the Byre for feed storage, it has been slow going because of the weather, but we are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel, most of the hold ups are due to deliveries of materials, because we are in such a remote area the suppliers cannot guarantee when we will receive anything, this is because they like to try and fill their delivery wagons up for one big run rather than a half loaded wagon.
Then again they cannot fill the wagons to much as we have three small bridges on the road to Arisaig which all have height restrictions on them.
At the moment there is a new road widening project on the go for about ten miles of the single track road, we were told originally that the three bridges would be altered to take the new European standard wagons, but for some reason this has been put on the back burner, so we will get a wider road but we still will not get a good full sized hay delivery because of the bridge heights, well we live in hope that this will all change sooner rather than later.

The Islands
A couple of weeks ago my husband and I went out to Eriskay a beautiful island off the west coast of Scotland.
My husband had a job to do for a friend out there.
The weather was warm but not hot, which was better as if it had been to hot we would not of got to much done.
We took a ferry from Mallaig to Armadale on Skye, then from Uig on the other side of Skye to Lochmaddy on Uist.
The sea crossing was calm on both occasions and the scenery was beautiful.
We did not arrive into Eriskay until late so it was to dark to see much.
The next day we cracked on with the fence that my husband was out there to do, the ground is mostly rock in some places but once he found the sweet spots as they say he was on a roll.
We went out for a meal in the evening to the Pallahar Inn in South Uist it was delicious and we certainly had worked up an appetite.
My husband took me to meet some of his relatives on the island, his mother was from Eriskay originally before she settled on the mainland, so there are still quite a lot of relations still out there.
The people on the island are so warm and welcoming nothing is a bother to them, they all made me feel welcome too as it was my first visit to the islands, they were all pleased to see him as it had been 11 years since he was last out there.
We went to see my husbands Aunt Margaret and her son Iain, who gave us some of his home grown organic Maris Piper potatoes, he gathered the seaweed for fertilizer from the beach himself.
I can say they were the best potatoes I have tasted in a long while, not like the supermarket potatoes that are all battered and bruised by the time they reach the shop.
Iain's mother was in fine form, a woman of 85 years of age who to me seems as though she had a hard but rewarding life, nothing will come easy working and living on the outer isles even back in her younger days there will have been great struggles in life, it was nice to meet them both, in such a warm and relaxing atmosphere.
We also went to visit my husbands other cousin Joe and his Wife Marie ann.
He was not expecting us as we had told no one that we were going out to the islands, so it was a surprise for him to see us standing on his door step.
We spent quite a time there as they had a lot of catching up to do, but a thoroughly enjoyable evening mostly talking about the "good old days"
I myself would like to say thank you to all of the people we met and who made us welcome, let's hope the next visit is not as short as the last, but not so long till we are back.

Make Hay whilst the Sun shines

Well the weather has been a bit hit and miss during the past couple of weeks in Arisaig
Some days have been absolutely glorious and others, well you would think Autumn was coming in early.
As the weather was good my husband and I went down to Stirling last week to see the chap who we purchase our hay from.
Both himself and his wife were furiously making hay whilst the sun shone.
His wife was driving the tractor & hay bailer, whilst he was driving a loadall machine with a telescopic arm that could pick up eight square bales of hay at a time and stack them on top of one another.
We could see well covered haystacks all over the land.
His wife continued on whilst we had our trailer loaded up by her husband.
There is nothing that beats the smell of freshly cut hay.
They had been working none stop to gather the hay before the bad weather set in, if I might say so they were doing a fine job.
It is a long time since I sat and watched a square hay bailer in action.
In those days not so long ago the square bails dropped into a bed all higgledy piggledy, now the bed on the back of the bailer sorts them out into a kind of shoot once the eight shoots are full the back door opens and they are left behind in a nice neat squre.
The loadall comes along with the special grab that fits over the top of the bails collecting all eight bales in one go, which are then stacked on top of each other.
I think they were five rows high I could not be sure as I was busy trying to keep the dogs away from a prospective lamp post as you might say.
In the past men worked on the pile of bails stacking them by hand, I remember my father coming home with husks stuck in his back from lifting the bails and stacking them, my mother used to spend half the night taking the husks out of his skin.
Them days always seemed to be long hot and dry, these days we seem to have to race more against the weather.
We sat for a while our host had a flask of tea and home baking in a picnic basket, which in true Highland tradition we delightfully excepted, we were talking about the price of feed and the demands already being made for it, all the while we were watching the hay bailer, tractor and his wife working away in perfect harmony.
I could have sat and watched all day but unfortunately we did not have the time and we did not want to hold back the workers when they are trying to beat the weather.
The animal feed will be in short supply this year what with the flooding down South and the East coast not growing well either because of the wet climate.
We got home not to late and unloaded the trailer, the next day we put some of the bails out for the cattle and sheep it smells beautiful.
As they say the proof is in the pudding, our animals are fussy and will not eat just anything, they never left a bit so looks like they have given the Creag Mhor seal of approval.

Screaming out load

Where do I start today?
I have been walking around in limbo since Saturday morning.
It all started in the early hours but we were unaware of a problem until we got up at 6:30am.
We have been rebuilding our feed store as the old one was getting past it's sell by date and has more leaks than Wales.
So we were keen to get going as soon as the light came in.
My husband got up to make a cup of tea then came running in to the bedroom saying he thought the old cow was dead as he can see a cow laying on her back with legs in the air.
We rushed to get dressed and jumped in the car, our road is an old dirt track road with large pot holes on it so we would probably have been faster running.
On the way down we passed the old cow a white Charolais called Snowy chewing the cud on the road side.
As we drove through the heard our minds were rushing trying to place which cow was missing.
Then I saw the orphan, his name is Tefal he is coming up for five months old, he was stood on the side of the road with his head hanging and calling every so often with a mournful heart breaking sound for his mother.
It was Pearl our three year old Simmental cow white and golden orange coloured patched.
She was laid in the middle of the dirt track with her legs in the air.
Her calf was running up and down the road calling all the time for his mother.
We ran to call the vet, he said he would come up as soon as possible, it is an eighty mile round trip for him to get to us.
Meanwhile we went back down and covered her with a tarpaulin.
The vet arrived later in the day, my husband called in on our neighbour and asked if he would bury her for us, he kindly said yes, his son came down with the digger.
In Scotland in certain places we are still allowed to bury our cattle because of the difficulty removing them from the peat bogs and so forth, so I was quite relieved when we were told we could bury her at home.
The vet thought that she had an eptopic pregnancy which burst one of her main blood vessels, she would not have felt a thing as she seemed to drop where she stood with out a struggle.
I could not take it all in she came up to me at the fence the previous night with her mother for a scratch behind the ear, she did not show any signs of illness or that anything was wrong, I wanted someone to explain to me why my young cow had died, without seeing anything.
The vet said we would not have been able to do anything for her it was so sudden.
My husband said he supposed it is like humans some are born to live to a great age some are born to die with out reason.
Our neighbour started to dig the hole after the vet had taken samples from Pearl.
He said he was sorry for us as he knows how much we care about our animals and left.
I could not stand to watch our young cow being put into a hole in the ground.
I walked away and left my husband and neighbour to do the dark deed.
As I was walking back up the track towards the house Tefal came running down the road again calling for his mother, I could not help it I broke down into floods of tears my heart was wrenched by this pitiful baby without his mother.
I heard myself screaming out load until I could not scream any longer what a waste what a sad sad waste.
He is still mourning for his mother this morning poor soul, but he will be spoiled by me his surrogate mother, I will watch out for him.
All of the heard went out on to the common grazing's by Pearls grave last night they lay down around about it, it's funny how they do that for a while like they are saying good bye then after a couple of days they leave.
It will take a little time to get over the shock of loosing Pearl but I will have her calf to keep me busy and occupied.
We never got much done in the end on Saturday as neither of us could concentrate on the job, I ended up hitting my thumb with the hammer so hard I nearly fainted, instead I let it all out the pain the loss the heartbreak, the deep scream from within, my husband grabbed me and hugged me, it does not mend anything but it makes you feel someone is there to catch you when you fall.

Waiting with baited breath

We heard this weekend that there has been an outbreak of the deadly disease Foot & Mouth again.
It appears to have broken out in the Guilford area in Surrey England.
We were supposed to be attending the Agricultural show in Lorn near Oban on Saturday the 4th Aug but we received a call from one of the organisers late on Friday evening telling us that there has been a movement restriction put on all Cattle, Sheep & Pigs because of a suspected outbreak.
Well we watched the news bulletins all through the night to find out what we could, I know we are a long way from Surrey but this disease can spread so quickly if not controlled straight away.
This time all movements were banned as soon as the outbreak was confirmed not like last time when shows and sales were still going on.
Millions of animals were slaughtered needlessly because of panic by the government agencies.
Hopefully it will have been stopped in it's tracks.
I think all the Agricultural sector at this time will be waiting with baited breath to see what happens in the next 10 - 14 days.
I don't think many more of us could stomach another catastrophe like the last one.
It will be even harder this time if it does get out as we are going into the Autumn quarter of the year soon and the animals will require feed and if movements are still suspended that means we will be feeding surplus animals through the winter because we cannot sell them until the movement bans are lifted.
We have been told by the press agencies that the outbreak is suspected to have come from a Government testing laboratory 3-4 miles away from the outbreak.
Isn't that ironic, we are penalised and jumped on from a great height if our quality procedures are not adhered to in any way and the government let the most vicious of bacteria escape from their laboratories who will penalise them I ask myself?
So we are all praying that this is a one off incident and no more outbreaks will show up, but god help us if it gets hold.
I worry about people traveling up on holiday over the border from the south this disease is an airborne virus and can travel for miles.
It all has a knock on effect even to tourism which parts of our area depend on.
In our area most of the livestock is on small farms and crofts, this would mean devastation for our area if it broke out here.
We just seemed to get back on to an even keel and import, exports on the go again when bang we are dropped from a great plateu into darkness again.
If this is our governments fault they will have a lot to answer for by the agricultural industry.