H&C

“August is one of the best times of year to be in the Scottish Highlands. The weather is normally fairly good, the evenings are still long, and the heather is in full bloom making the hills look almost fluorescent purple. It’s the time of year of Highland Games, and grouse shooting. It is also a time of year that we have lots of friends to stay who are either heading further north or on their way back south.

A Californian visitor

This year my sister, from California, has been staying with her family, as well as my mother, and a whole raft of friends, relations, and our children’s friends. The first guests arrived on the 4th August, and we have had a steady flow with our last guest due to leave on the 6th September. In that time, my wife tells me, we would have had over 40 people staying! For us, it is a great time of year and we love sharing it with friends and family. There are lots of things to do on the estate, including salmon and trout fishing, rabbit shooting, grouse shooting, walking, picnics, barbeques and most importantly for visitors relaxing without the mobile phone ringing! It is so quiet that everyone comments on how well they sleep, unless of course, I forget to shut the chickens up the night before. In that case, the cockerel has a habit of standing under the window crowing at 5.30am!

Tossing the caber

Our local Highland Games is hosted each year at Cortachy Castle, a large baronial pile owned for hundreds of years by the same family. It attracts people, mainly locals from all the Angus Glens, to its variety of fruit and vegetable and baking competitions, running races for all ages, dog show, and obligatory caber tossing competition. This year we had a number of young children staying, who decided they wanted to go into the dog show and proceeded to groom every dog in the house, no matter what shape or size, to enter into the show. My daughter Daisy, after entering three different classes eventually won first prize, as “The Dog the Judges Most Wanted to take Home”.

The grouse season begins

The other big event this time of year is the grouse shooting. It is not only a wonderful day out in the hills but a good source of income for the estate. I have had two let driven days so far, and on both we have managed to get 50 brace (i.e. 100 birds). In fact, grouse numbers all over Angus are good this year and it is lovely to see the moors so alive with the sound and sight of grouse coveys. These driven days are a big event to lay on with nine guns, 24 beaters, flankers and pickers up, plus others watching, etc. There can often be over 40 people up on the moor. We rely on our neighbouring estates to help us, just as we help them on their days. They often send over keepers to help the day, and with each estate having their own tweed, it is possible at a glance to see which estates are helping, even if you don’t recognise the keeper. This week we have got our first partridge day on Friday followed by a driven grouse day on Saturday so fingers crossed that the weather remains kind.”

“Despite the national weather forecasts telling everyone that it’s raining in Scotland, this part of Scotland is decidedly warm and sunny! In fact despite a few unsettled days, it is (so far!) the best summer I can remember in Scotland. We have spent much more time outside, and have had many more barbeques and picnics. Saying that, it’s not all good news, the lack of rain has meant the hydro scheme has been not producing much electricity, and trying to write this blog sitting outside in the glorious weather early this morning has proved difficult with all the midges biting! I’ve just moved back inside. Luckily we don’t get “midged” too badly compared with the West Coast of Scotland where people can be seen wearing midge nets covering their hands and faces all day! It can be like a beekeepers convention!

Refurbishments and lambs

Anyway the morning midges are a small price to pay for the privilege of living in such a glorious part of the world. It is thankfully a quiet time of year for us. The sheep are all up on the hill with their now well grown lambs and take very little looking after, most of the maintenance jobs have been done, and the shooting season has not yet begun so we have time to enjoy the good weather. We have completed the refurbishment of two out of the three cottages we were renovating and the third one should be complete in the next two weeks. These things always seem to take a lot longer than planned (and cost a lot more too) but the finished product is satisfying and we have let both completed properties without even advertising. The final cottage is, in my opinion, the nicest of the three so hopefully this will be easy to let too. We have started to catch some fish too. Last week we caught our first fish of the season with one salmon and two sea trout caught. It always takes a while for the fish to reach us so far up the river but now they have arrived and we should catch a few now until the end of the season. September and October are the best months for us normally. The holiday cottages are very busy too, with both cottages booked out permanently until about mid September.

A little cricket

I like to try and play a bit of cricket in the summer. Both my boys are very keen, and we have an annual Perthshire v Angus cricket match which takes place at a small cricket ground at Meigle on the Angus/Perth borders. It’s a lot of fun and not too serious, but each team obviously likes to win. I captain the Angus team and a friend captains the Perthshire team. The teams are made up of fathers and sons mainly with a minimum age of 13. The match has been going for three years and lots of friends and family turn up to have a picnic before the match. We tend to opt for a hybrid 30 overs match which is long enough to give a good game of cricket but short enough that the elderly and unfit amongst us don’t kill themselves! This year Angus managed to win, and having dropped a fairly easy catch I redeemed myself with two cover drives to the boundary to give us the winning runs. We are now 2-1 up, having won in 2008 and 2010.

A Dart to the pub

Cricket matches bring to mind English villages, and pubs, and vintage sports cars. We don’t sadly have English villages, but a pub down the road has been rejuvenated and is making a very good attempt at an English pub with gastro-food too. Last night, having finally got it back from being MOT’d, I took my 1961 Daimler SP250 (Dart), for a drive down to this local pub. That’s a two seater sports car btw! I got the whole way there and back with the roof down and in shirt sleeves. I really thought I was in the south of England! I’ve had the car since university days at Oxford, but sadly it seldom makes an appearance these days. Hopefully I will be able to use more of it this year, weather permitting.”

“Summer is well and truly with us now. It has been quite warm and very dry. We have hardly had any rain for about two months and the river and burns are as low as I can remember. And though the hydro scheme is not working I am not complaining about having a bit of proper summer weather for a change. The previous two summers have been terrible with lots of rain and cold weather. It was because of the poor summers that I eventually decided to buy a poly tunnel, and that is proving to be a really good decision despite the good weather. Ruth does my garden for me and has been in charge of the poly tunnel. She lives in the next door glen with her partner, who is a game keeper there. Anyway Ruth is, like me, from the south. Oxfordshire to be specific, and though we both love being in Scotland we do tend to commiserate over some things that are better in the south, for example the weather, and pubs. There are very few traditional type pubs in Scotland, the sort you would find in most villages in the south of England. She misses the quaintness, and I miss the good beer, and we both miss the good food! Ruth does a number of different jobs but one of them involves helping in my garden and she’s very good at it. She has got a ton of stuff coming up in the poly tunnel, and it is a joy on a warm summer evening to go into the poly tunnel and pick various different salad leaves to make a fresh salad. I particularly like rocket. In recent evenings, we like to think we are in the South of France by making a salad Nicoise for dinner to have with a cold glass of Provencal Rose. And that makes us realise how much we have missed the nice summer weather over the long winter. The hill is at last starting to green up, and the heather plants are again starting to colour up and grow, but the heather won’t bloom until late July at the earliest. In contrast the grouse have gone very quiet, looking after their young broods. This is the time of year that we keep our fingers crossed that we have a good breeding season, and no long periods of cold wet weather that can really effect the chick survival rates. We try to stay off the hill as much as possible to give all the nesting birds as much peace and quiet as possible. If we do go up, we never take the dogs, until after 15 July or so, at which time the chicks can all hopefully fly quite well. I have been up in the Land Rover with my binoculars to look for broods of grouse. It involves parking up at a vantage point and quietly observing the moor through the binoculars. I saw about 20 broods of grouse, which I was pleased with but with the heather being so tall I couldn’t count the exact number of chicks in each brood. I am cautiously optimistic that they have done okay this year.”

“It’s hot! I’ll say that again it’s actually HOT in our glen! Well 24 degrees Celsius and that’s hot for us, and still only May. I really hope that this bodes well for the rest of the summer. Unfortunately having good weather in the spring normally means a wet summer but this year I’m hopeful of better things, after the very long and cold winter we had. It is rare to be able to go on the hill with just a shirt on, because there is nearly always a cold breeze, but at the moment one could wear shorts up there! Lambing is now over, so we have lots of young lambs running around the fields with their mothers. It’s a lovely sight at a lovely time of year, with trees just coming into leaf and everything looking a very bright green. We are about to put all the sheep up onto the hill for the summer season. Over this period there is lots of grass on the hill, and that gives the low ground fields a rest before the autumn. The sheep, also have two benefits to the grouse, firstly they eat down the grass and other non heather plants which allows the heather to thrive, and secondly we treat them with a type of dip that kills ticks. So they act as a kind of “mop” to soak up the ticks (who latch on to the sheep as they pass, but die when they come into contact with the dip) that would other wise harm the grouse and other wildlife on the hill that we can’t treat. I am hearing cuckoos calling every day now. Sadly it seems to be a sound that is dying out in the British countryside but luckily we still have a fair number. The small birds seem to be thriving too, and I’m seeing lots of newly fledged song thrushes on the lawn. Though we have a huge range of birds on the place we don’t have any sparrows (house or tree), so I was delighted to see that one has turned up this year. The sound of sparrows chirping is one that reminds me of my childhood and English villages in summer. He was calling in vain for any other sparrows, but I only saw him, so I hope a mate for him turns up soon. Another iconic (sorry I hate that word but can’t think of an alternative!) sound is that of a curlew across a Scottish moor. It’s a beautiful and eerie sound, and this year we seem to have lots of curlews. I haven’t seen any curlew chicks yet but the lapwings have all had their chicks, and there are lots this year. They seem to be doing very well and that’s always a good sign for other bird life and of course the grouse! I have also just put up a poly tunnel. Having had a disaster with last year growing season because of the terrible summer, I decided to do something about it so we could grow vegetables most of the year. Ruth, who helps with my accounts, is also a keen gardener and she has volunteered to look after it. She has been busily working on it for the last week or two, and we now have a host of vegetables coming up. Living at this altitude (and this far north) we have a very short growing season so I am hoping the tunnel will help.”