5 minute read
Notes from the isles
Our writer realises living in a small community comes with both advantages and (occasional) disadvantages…
Words by KATE FRANCIS
ABOVE:
Kate and Cronie, her faithful Border Terrier
TOP RIGHT:
The village of Avoch on the Black Isle
BOTTOM RIGHT:
Kate has become an ‘agricultural student’ based at her home on the Black Isle One of the many advantages of island life is the prevailing community spirit. Being fortunate enough to divide my time between our family base in the Outer Hebrides, and my home on the Black (almost) Isle, I am part of two close-knit communities and have recently had reason to realise what that means.
Stupidly, I lifted an extremely heavy sack of rubble into the boot of my car, and then up into a dustbin. This resulted in a trapped nerve in my chest, which was so screamingly painful that I couldn’t sleep and was a moaning wreck.
Word of my misfortune spread round our community like a pandemic. While I was trying to get through to our surgery on the telephone to ask for advice, a neighbour marched into my kitchen, grabbed Cronie and took her for a walk. Another neighbour drove up to the back door, heaved the remaining seven sacks of rubble into his trailer and carted them down to the dump. And Maggie, next door, arrived and insisted on going to the surgery for me to collect the prescribed medicines. Since then, people drop in every day to check up on me and see what they can do to lighten my load, and my family take turns to come and boss me about, each one on their way to and from our Hebridean home. Even my fellow dog walkers seem to be in on the game and stop me constantly to ask what they can do to help.
There is one slight drawback to this close-knit mesh of instinctive kindness: local gossip. Recently, I had a handsome man in his late 60s to stay for a week, to recover from the death of his mother, Sue, who had been one of my dearest friends.
Roddy has always been like an extra son to me, and I am like a loving aunt to him. A landscape gardener and tree surgeon, he insisted on singing for his supper by labouring in my wild garden – chopping and hacking and digging, in full sight of all passers-by along the track.
It was a happy week and we spent hours reminiscing about the good old days when he was a boy, and his father was my Douglas’s commanding of cer. In 1961, after the amalgamation of the Cameron Highlanders with the Seaforth Highlanders, to become the Queen’s Own Highlanders, the new regiment was posted to Singapore to settle down together and become a properly merged regimental family.
My oldest daughter, Mary, was born that year and Sue, with four sons, became my mentor and guide in baby care. Roddy and I relived those days with much teasing laughter and I think he enjoyed his visit as much as I did.
But then I noticed a few raised eyebrows among my neighbours and some references to my “good looking visitor” and I realised that word of a “toy boy up at the old farmhouse” could be spreading rapidly, so I made a point of stopping to chat with any neighbour I passed, dropping the subject of my guest into the conversation, “.... the son of one of my oldest
friends.” I think it did the trick because I didn’t notice any more raised eyebrows. There was no malice in the implied suspicions, but I couldn’t bear anybody thinking I could ever possibly find a replacement for Douglas – my beloved rock.
I have become an agricultural student. Surrounded as I am by farmland, both arable and livestock, I usually encounter one of the farmers who rent the local fields, on my walks, and I learn something new every time. For instance: sugar rises in the leaves of grass in the morning, dropping back down in the afternoon, so harvesting for hay must be done in the mornings when the grass is at its most lush.
If the hay is baled with too much moisture in it, the bales can cook up a huge heat and burst into flames. Also, wool is no longer profitable except when of a very specialised quality, so sheep shearing has become a bore and the fleeces are left to rot.
My most recent discovery is that ploughing is bad for the environment, sending up all sorts of pollutants into the ecosystem, so now the seeds of the next crop are sown immediately after harvest, onto the stubble of what has just been cut. This year, our recently harvested fields were barley and I’ve already discovered the seedlings of next year’s rape, growing profusely through the stubble.
The next lesson I wish to learn is from the cattle farmer whose cows are in the two fields below my house. I’d like to know how much longer it will be safe to leave the grumpy old bull among the flock, surrounded as he is by quite a few of his unneutered sons, who are extremely macho and spend their days trying to mount their placid mothers who are all members of his harem.
Foraging has been good this year and I could almost live off the land. The wild raspberries and blueberries are now over, blackberries and rowans are in full flood, elderberries are nearly ripe, watercress is choking the burn near my house and there are masses of chestnuts waiting to fall.
The good news is that Lord Fandango, the errant peacock I mentioned in my last column, has been re-housed. Having decided that my neighbours’ cottage garden wasn’t adequate for his requirements, he had taken up residence in the gardens of six adjacent cottages down along the shore.
Although everyone liked him, he was very destructive when it came to flower beds and his abundant peacock poo was not pleasant underfoot. His owners managed to capture him, and he is now blissfully happy on the estate of Darnaway Castle in Morayshire, the ancestral home of the Earls of Moray. The huge, impressive castle, built in the early 1800s, is on the site of a much earlier castle and the grandeur of it is truly fitting for Lord Fandango, not least because there are lots of semi-feral peacocks and peahens already living there and he will be able to establish and rule over a happy harem. S
