New Neighbour Nightmare

Yesterday's low cloud, mist and drizzle made for a dreary day here in Ormsaigbeg, lightened when a suspiciously cheerful Hughie arrived to deliver coal.  "Met your new neighbours yet?" he says.  "No."  "Not noticed, then?" he grins.  "No. What?"

Usually it's nice having new neighbours, particularly in this part of the world where humans aren't particularly thick on the ground.  But what we saw when we finally discovered them appalled us.  Pigs! New pigs, big pigs, female pigs (though the Diary has been known to be wrong in this identification on previous occasions), three big female pigs capable of producing thirty or more baby pigs at a sitting two or three times a year for decades.

We hadn't spotted them because whoever they belong to had been careful to hide the pigs' mobile home behind a convenient rowan tree so we couldn't see it.  We have a suspicion of who their owner is - Hughie hotly denies they're his.  We'll find out soon enough.

Once a grinning Hughie had left we went down to meet them.  Two are saddlebacks like Betsy, but we're really not sure what breed the ginger pig is.

The British Pig Association's website, here, hasn't got anything that's remotely like her, so we assume she's a rare Highland breed that's been living on Ardnamurchan for generations but no-one's noticed.  Whatever she is, she didn't take to kindly to our disturbing her, so we were quite pleased there was an electric fence between us.

Their run's very neatly set up, the electric fence has three strands rather than Hughie's two, and the pigs have a big patch of bracken to deal with, but....  More pigs?  What is Ormsaigbeg coming to?  At this rate, instead of becoming a nice housing estate, it'll be overrun with porkers and no-one will want to live here, so it'll become another abandoned village to add to those we've already got lying around the place.