Pig on the Loose

We had just enjoyed another fiery sunrise this morning, with the prospect of a sunny day to come, when everything was spoilt....

....by a resurgence of pig problems.  Just as Ormsaigbeg residents were beginning to get used to the idea that pigs stayed in their electrified pens and that it's sheep, at this time of year, which wander all over the croft lands and threaten our vegetable gardens, this sow came waltzing down the road, having paid a rather unwelcome visit to the croft on the other side of us, which also has pigs.

In the low light of late afternoon on a drive out of the village towards Caim, we saw a large herd of as many as fifty red deer grazing near the road.  The pleasure of this peaceful country scene was rather spoiled by the thought that, one day, if deer numbers exploded as fast as local pig populations, we might find a similar sized herd enjoying our vegetable garden.

News of Tim Steele

Many people, both local residents and visitors, will know Tim Steele, who has had his base in Kilchoan for nearly twenty years.  After being deeply involved in the completion and opening of our Community Centre, he began his travels, so we've not seen so much of him except for when, during breaks back in this country, he volunteered in the Centre.

Before the tsunami disaster in Sri Lanka, he worked with VSO in setting up community-based organisations there, using his experience from setting up the Community Centre as well as from his earlier private sector commercial career.

Post-disaster relief work in Sri Lanka included raising nearly $500,000 from UDAid to reconstruct villages, houses, clinic and schools, empowering local people to do the work.

In Bangladesh he has helped set up a pharmaceutical company, has set up a Prince of Wales Youth Business International programme, a Bangladesh Youth Enterprise Advice and Helpcentre, and supported the development of an inbound tourism facility that involved the building of an eighteen-berth luxury river cruiser.

Most recently, he has concept developed, and overseen the design, engineering and construction of a luxury resort Surfing Club, the Cox’s Bazar Surf Club, and opened it to provide facilities for both resident expatriates and inbound tourists, on what is believed to be one of the world’s longest sea beaches....

....the 120km beach that reaches from Cox’s Bazar - named in 1799 for Scots-born Captain Hiram Cox - to the Myanmar border on the Naf river.

The Club was officially opened in June by the British High Commissioner, HE Robert W Gibson CMG. Tim now expects to be seen more often back in Kilchoan.

It's always good to carry news of the links this small Scottish community has to many unusual places across the world.  If you have a story, please contact the Diary

On a Clear Morning....

At this time of year, on a clear morning, dawn seems to go on forever.  The first light was in the sky long before seven, when we surfaced, and by a quarter to nine the sun had still not shown his face - a ferry and two jet planes had made much earlier starts on their day's journeys.

Ten minutes later one could tell where the sun was going to appear, though....

 ....five minutes later he was still playing with an increasingly cold photographer, finally....

....breaking the horizon at seven minutes past nine.

We had planned to drive east along the peninsula for a walk in the foothills of Ben Hiant, but one look at the road, white with a night's frost and covered in sheets of black ice from surface water flowing across it from blocked drains, changed our minds so, instead....

....we walked up the back of the house, then headed west into the vast spaces which are the Ormsaigbeg township's common grazings.  By this time the first clouds were drifting across the sky on a light northerly wind, gradually....

 ....obscuring the sun.

The frost made for some treacherous walking, made worse by the days of rain and hail we've had, which have left the earth cold and saturated.

The vegetation in the hills looks dead, brown and burnt by the cold, hardly a blade of green and not a flower in a place where, just a couple of months ago, wildflowers grew in profusion and we enjoyed one of the best shows of heather in years.  Only in places....

....is there a splash of brilliant colour.  Please, how does moss manage what all the other plants can't?

As we walked higher, so the encroaching cloud darkened the landscape until the scene lay spread below us in shades of monochrome.

As always, we had some sort of objective, and this was the first place we wanted to revisit.  Dubh Chreag, at top left, means the black crag, though there's nothing darker about it than any of the other peaks around it.  One could speculate over how it got its name: there are signs of old agricultural workings in the glen running up this side of it and, if one looks hard enough, of a small stone structure, perhaps a dwelling; so perhaps the man who lived here was called Dubh, as someone who lives alone in such a bleak wilderness might be, and this little summit was named for him.

Once across the saddle between the hills we could see north to the white peaks of Rum.  In front of it is the much smaller island of Muck, and the bay on the coast is Sanna.  We also saw that the cloud might clear.

Looking east, with the sun just reappearing, this is one of the twin lochans which nestle in the wide glen between the ridge behind our house, Druim na Gearr Leacainn, and the heights of Beinn na Seilg.

From the summit of Dubh Creag we looked northwest towards Ardnamurchan Point lighthouse and the Minches.  The twin lochans are called Lochain Dubh, the black lochans, and the larger loch beyond is Loch Caorach, the sheep's loch.

This was our final objective, Lochan na Cloich, the stoney lochan, perched in a cut in the hills.  A thin skin of ice covered the lochan's surface, which was....

....broken by the heads of some coarse grass and a scattering of rocky islands after which, perhaps, the lochan was named.

A Busy Ben Hiant

Ben Hiant looked beautiful in the early afternoon sunshine, tranquil, magnificent, peaceful, but....

....it must have been a busy place earlier, with someone paragliding off its summit while three companions watched from just below the trig point, and....

....Kilchoan Early Bird with his group reaching the summit across some fairly treacherous-looking rocks, before....

.....exploring a new route down.

Many thanks to the Raptor for the photo of the paraglider,

and to Kilchoan Early Bird for the third & fourth pictures.

Hail

An exceptionally heavy hail shower woke us around half past three this morning.  The land was still white with it when we first got up but by midday most had melted away, except on the higher tops.  We walked down to the bay below the house to enjoy some of the sunshine, with not a breath of breeze to disturb the surface of the sea.

Looking up to the back of the beach, the hills where we walked on Christmas Day were dusted with what looked like icing sugar.  Huge amounts of kelp and other seaweeds cover the beach from recent storms, offering rich pickings to some of the croft sheep and to....

....a number of small birds, including pipits, dunnocks and this lonely grey wagtail.

Clouds and low mist have come and gone all day.  When the wind finally woke it set itself in the north and the temperature, which had struggled to 6C at midday, began to fall.  We're hoping the clouds will clear later as there were aurora events last night.