Small Birds' Winter

Looking back to last July, when this picture was taken, gives a reminder of what a grim time our small birds have through the winter. When seed is put out on the front wall now, we see four or five coming at a time, yet in this picture there are no less than twenty-one birds and seven species represented.

It hasn't been a particularly cold winter, but the rain, gales, and activities of a sparrow hawk have all taken their toll.

Chaffinches, as in the top picture, still dominate those that come for seed and peanuts - there are probably as many chaffinches as there are all the other birds puts together. The only species which can outnumber them is the goldfinch, when a 'charm' of them arrives and takes over the peanut feeders; but they don't stay long.

The dunnocks, which take seed only, have survived well. Most of them seem to spend their day in the bramble patch the other side of our boundary wall. They're usually first on the scene in the early morning, and are learning to be very tame.

We've had an unusually large number of robins spend the winter with us. They're usually very argumentative birds, chasing off any rivals, but the four that we see must have signed a truce, perhaps as a strategy to survive the winter. One of them has a very distinctive white flash on his wings.

We have a small group of resident blackbirds, perhaps those that are left of the family which nested with us last summer, the occasional greenfinch, a few house sparrows, and a passing pair of yellowhammers. The blue tits and great tits have survived quite well.

It's been a bad year for two of our favourite species. We like siskins because they're such a tiny bird yet very unafraid, allowing one to walk up to within a few feet before flying off. The other species that hasn't been much in evidence this year is the coal tit.

Despite their fallen numbers, these birds have cost us an arm and a leg in food, but it's well worth it just for the sheer pleasure of sitting by the window on a winter's day and watching them go about their tiny business.

The Runrig System

A powdering of snow like we had in mid-February is perfect for emphasising the ridges and furrows which cover so much of the lower land around here. These 'lazy beds' are evidence of the old 'runrig' system of agriculture which pre-dates crofting.

From Iron Age times until the years that followed the battle of Culloden in 1746, most people in highland Scotland lived in small, communally-run villages called clachans. The houses were surrounded by the best land, the inbye, which was organised in the runrig system, in which intensively-farmed plots were worked in the strips seen here, the crops being grown on the ridges while the furrows drained the land.

The clan land was held communally under the clan chief. He divided the land between tacksmen, often in reward for military service, each of whom allocated a tack to a clachan community in return for rent in the form of produce, labour or money. Decisions within the settlement were taken communally. It was a very equitable society: in some clachans, a system of drawing lots every three years or so was used to decide which family received which plot.

The old Highland system was destroyed in the 'improvements' of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when the clan lands became commercialised to take sheep, many being sold off as estates to incomers. The better land became sheep runs; the populations of the clachans were moved to poorer land and reorganised into crofting townships or encouraged to leave - for the south or abroad.

The upper photograph looks across what is now the common grazing land of Ormsaigmore crofting township. Scattered across the inbye fields of today's township are the remains of the stone houses of the old clachan. The second picture shows the slopes below Beinn na h-Urchrach. This was the land belonging to Skinid clachan, also a ruin, now part of Ardnamurchan Estate.

Cobbles - 4

Many of the cobbles along the shore come from very ancient rocks to the east of Kilchoan, They may originally have been sedimentary rocks such as sandstones, muds and clays but, during an intense mountain-building event, were deeply buried, cooked, and subjected to huge pressures. They didn't quite melt, but their minerals were completely changed.

The one above may have been a slightly muddy sandstone but it's now a gneiss; and gneisses are about as cooked as these metamorphic rocks get before they melt and produce magma which later cools to form igneous rocks such as granite.

The prettiest metamorphic rocks are the schists, which haven't been cooked quite as much as the gneisses and, because they have more clay minerals in their orginal rocks, contain a lot of mica. The mica is flaky and shiny. This particular one has developed another characteristic metamorphic mineral - garnet.

The garnets, which are red, are clearly seen in this close-up. It's probably almandine garnet. the most common variety.

The nearest metamorphic rocks to Kilchoan are to the east, just the other side of Loch Mudle. They are called the Moine Schists, the word moine being Gaelic for peat or moor. There's a good, freshly exposed outcrop of these garnet-mica schists in the road cutting at Salen, on the opposite side to the Salen Hotel.

Take-off

A tagged sea eagle takes off from the shore below the Ormsaigbeg road....

...and flies off westwards along the coast.

A few steps further along the road, a buzzard takes off from a tree....

....and flies off in the same direction as the eagle.

Winter always seems the best time of year to see the raptors, and this winter, for all its perverse weather, has been no different. In the last few weeks we've seen sea and golden eagles, buzzards, kestrels and sparrow hawks.

Beinn an Leathaid - 2

Had we taken the direct route from the south up the backbone of this mountain we might have found the climb easier, but we strayed along the eastern flank, in part because of the fine views down into the valley below, and we soon found ourselves with a steep climb to make it to the summit. Having started in bright sunshine, the sky had now clouded over, but the increasingly strong east wind helped to push us up the incline.

There's a large cairn at the top of Beinn an Leathaid, which was just as well as it offered us some shelter from the wind. With the sun gone, the views away to the north - to the isles of Rhum and Eigg - had become mistier.

Occasional flashes of sunlight lit the slopes of the mountain to the east, Meall na Con, the hill of the dogs. At 437m it sightly tops Beinn an Leathaid's 401m.

To the north the ridge runs on to form Cathair Mhic Dhiarmaid, MacDiarmid's Seat. A small, un-named lochan nestles close to that summit

We set off back along the western slope of the hill, which made for more pleasant walking as it was sheltered from what was, by now, a brisk wind. This steep sided valley separates Beinn an Leathaid from Meall nan Con. We had expected to find deer sheltering in it but it was strangely deserted. This stream runs away to the north to reach the sea at Fascadale.

A map of the area is here.

Inside the Beehive

These two 'industrial units' were built at the same time as the Community Centre. For most of their earlier life they had little use - the rent was rumoured to be too high to encourage pudding entrepreneurs. The best thing that ever happened to them was when the right-hand unit was taken over by Lochaber College.

Some months ago the other one was taken by what is now West Highland College, which is part of the University of the Highlands & Islands. It has been completely refurbished, equipped with a large number of computers and other learning aids, and is now a lecture/meeting room with space for twenty-five people.

It has a microwave and a constant source of hot water for drinks. It's clean, bright, warm and friendly.

The older room, which houses a large number of computers, has a booth in which distance learning, by video conference, can take place. The Diary is now following a module of a UHI Archaeology course, and attends for a weekly lecture which is transmitted from Orkney.

The reason for a tiny academic institution's sudden and explosive expansion in such a remote community is the dynamism of the Centre Manager, Pat Glenday. The courses offered are very well supported simply because she has the ability to listen to the community and respond to its needs. For more information, contact Pat on pat.glenday@whc.uhi.ac.uk or check out West Ardnamurchan News.

Never was a building more appropriately name an 'industrial unit'. This is the industry of bees. We are extremely lucky.

A Lonely Cottage

To the north of Sanna a ridge runs east-west, its highest point, Dun Ban, the pale fort, being a much visited spot for those who enjoy rambling in the hills and taking in the views across the Minches to Eigg, Muck and Skye. In the picture, the ridge can be seen beyond the houses of the township.

Tucked close against its southern face against the weather is a line of stone buildings. Trees grow around and within them, bracken chokes their rooms, brambles wind their canes across the paths that passed their doors.

The largest is a substantial building with thick walls and the characteristic rounded corners of local croft houses, and a window at the front beside the door - all evidence that it was, at some time, inhabited, the other buildings being byres.

One wonders who lived in this cottage, someone who didn't want to be part of the villages of Sanna or Plocaig, which is only a few hundred metres away; someone who enjoyed their own company; someone who may once have used an enamel teapot.

Beinn an Leathaid - 1

Beinn an Leathaid, the broad hill, is the feature that dominates the view from the cairn, at the point where the Kilmory and Fascadale road leaves the main B8007 Kilchoan-Salen road. We set off to climb it on a fine morning, our only companions on the lower slopes being a few blackface sheep and small groups of red deer hinds.

The initial approach, up the spine of the hill, is straightforward enough....

....though it's a steady and unrelenting slog. We stopped on the 250m contour to look southwestwards, across the open valley of Allt Choire Mhuillinn, the stream of the mill in the hollow, to the Sound and Mull.

As we climbed, so more of the view to the east became visible. This looks across the stream that leaves Loch Mudle and runs north. In its first section it's called Allt an Doire Dharaich, the burn of the oak grove, but later it becomes the Achateny Water. Nestling alone in this beautiful valley, which is filled with red deer throughout the year, is one of Ardnamurchan Estate's letting houses, the Braehouse, details here.

We worked our way along the eastern flank of Beinn an Leathaid, which became steeper and steeper. This picture looks down on the Achateny water, with the village of Branault in the centre, and Kilmory, on the north coast of Ardnamurchan, away to the left.

Branault is a compact little village, but it has only one remaining working farm. It used to support a number of small crofts but these have gone, the broken walls of their houses being just visible in the bottom left of the photo.

Kilmory is a more dispersed village, its land still worked as crofts. It's heartening to see a new house which has just been built, to centre left of the picture, which will be occupied all the year round by one of our posties.

A map of the area is here.

Many thanks to Moira Fisher for help with the Gaelic translation.

House Sparrows

For some years we've been very worried about the decline in house sparrow numbers in Ormsaigbeg. Our concern was shared - the RSPB website here suggests there has been a steady fall in numbers over a long period, with a 71% drop between the years 1977 and 2008, to the extent that they are now red-listed as a species of high conservation concern.

Red listed! Sparrows used to be as common as the dust they bathed in. One could hardly imagine a world without them. The idea that this noisy, quarrelsome, gregarious and cheeky little bird might disappear was too horrific to contemplate. Research was being done to discover the causes before there was a catastrophe.

Well, we're pleased to report that, whatever the trends elsewhere, our sparrows showed a sudden, amazing resurgence during the summer. It was getting to the point where they were becoming a nuisance again, and we'd have been quite pleased if the researchers had come and helped themselves to a few to take away for research purposes and to reintroduce them in places where they were needed.

During the breeding season, mothers and fathers were bringing their young along to our feeders and explaining how to out-compete the chaffinches which had, until then, been our main customers.

With the onset of winter things began to change again. The sparrows didn't disappear, but their numbers started to fall. Part of the trouble seemed to be that they were being buried under chaffinches.

Chaffinches are simply better at doing everything. They're supposed to be ground-feeding birds - the finches that turned over the chaff for seed that had been left after harvest - but now they're almost as good as the tits at hanging off windswept peanut feeders. For all their valiant efforts, the sparrows are simply being out-competed for food.

As the winter draws to an end, we only have a few sparrows coming in for food, but the important thing is that they have survived. Here's hoping that they have a good nesting season and become a nuisance once again.

Cobbles - 3

The wealth of material in amongst all these cobbles scattered along the Ormsaigbeg shoreline is quite amazing - easily enough to fill a university geology lab with specimens.

This one is a basalt lava probably dating from some 60 million years ago, the period of eruption when Ardnamurchan was a volcano. You would find similar specimens on the slopes of places like Hawaii, produced when red-hot rivers of lava cool. Its dark colour, and the spots of rust, show that it's rich in iron though, to pick it up, it very light in weight since it's full of bubbles created by escaping gasses.

In this specimen, the escaping gases formed bubbles which later filled with a white mineral precipitated from ground waters moving through the rock. These bubbles are called amygdales.

Some of the amygdales are quite large - the barnacle gives a sense of scale - and have been filled with crystals. There are crystals of two minerals here. Even larger amygdales are called geodes, and sometimes contain prettily coloured minerals such as amethyst and agate. They're often seen in curio shops and, we've been told, do occur around Kilchoan - but we haven't found any yet.