Friends are here for a long weekend and we discover a new walk just over the hill that takes us through a pine forest to reveal great views of the loch…
Category Archives: scotland
The last supper…(Nov 1)
Note to my vegetarian friends – you might not want to read this.
A week ago we went up to give ‘the pigs’ their final supper – the last of the fallen apples from the orchard. They never did make it down here as we couldn’t find the time to repair our fencing – but they’ve had a happy life up at the farm.
They came back from the butchers today as follows x 2. A box for Mr C and one for us:
6 x 500 g of mince
12 sausages
2 shanks
2 cheeks (including ears)
2 flat belly pork – 1 kilo each
1 loin – steak
1 loin – rolled joint
2 back legs – rolled for hams to cure
2 fore legs rolled
6 thick cut chops
4 trotters
It wasn’t the most pleasant job working out which bit was which (nothing was labelled) and involved a couple of calls to the butcher and a lot of blood. It certainly put us in touch with the reality of the situation – and a reality check seems in order if we’re going to carry on eating meat. At least this way nothing will be wasted.
After an hour’s work, it’s all in pristine bags and appropriately marked up in the chest freezer. It should last us a year. The first thing I’m planning is my own cured ham. The trotters seem like more of a challenge.
I have to admit that after today’s exercise I do feel a little queasy about eating it (it’s something to do with the butcher’s shop smell – reality check cont’d) but that may not last. Ed feels the same. Having said that, Mr C has 2 sheep set aside for the new year and next time Ed’s talking about doing the butchering himself….
Saving for a rainy day (Oct 27)
Oh dear. I got up in the middle of the night, towel in hand to catch a perennial drip from above our bedroom window and quickly discovered that ‘drip’ was an understatement. It was raining inside the house…
This is now an intermittent problem above 5 different windows, depending on which way the wind is blowing. It’s essentially down to the fact that a lot of the exterior walls need repointing. We’d hoped to get some of this work done during the summer (see The drip drip effect – Feb 16) but I’m afraid lack of funds put paid to that.
Ed and I joke that whenever a quote comes in for a big job on the house, we can safely predict the outcome – we can’t afford it! The cost of repointing just the east wall, including replacing a lintel, sadly didn’t prove us wrong. I guess it’s because everything here is on such a large scale.
We did make a happy discovery recently though; it turns out our roofer can do lime pointing and he also owns his own zip tower which he can get up and down in a day, and attend to anything urgent. This way we can keep the leaks at bay for a reasonable cost, until we can afford to do a more comprehensive job.
I think interior rain falls into the category of ‘urgent’ – so he’s coming tomorrow.
2 different windows…2 different views (Oct 7)
7pm this evening
Dreaming of a shower in the tower… (Sep 19)
After several weeks of plumbing work the hot water in the main wing is at last connected to the new biomass boiler. This has meant getting rid of 2 immersion heaters, re-routing some original pipework and putting in a load of new pipes that run from the boiler house up to a huge new tank in the roof space – and all the way back down again.
The house, as Ed puts it, is getting a bit ‘pipey’. We tried to find the route of least resistance and managed to avoid any of the grand rooms – but some of the corridors are suffering. It’s a perennial problem in old houses like this with lathe and plaster walls and lots of plaster mouldings.
This is the worst bit in part of our downstairs, back corridor…
The black pipes are the hot water pipes covered in insulation. The copper pipes were added a year ago to extend the heating and the white pipes were already here. It would be good to hide them all at some point – we’re not quite sure how yet. Another problem for another day.
The up-side is that we now have really hot water whenever we want it and it’s cheaper to heat. The pressure is better too as it’s running directly off the mains. It’s also another step forward in our master plan for this side of the house: we’ve got 3 small bathrooms to renovate and one of the large bedroom’s on the top floor is earmarked to become a fourth. It took a bit of time to persuade Ed of this plan but if you can’t have a huge bathroom in a house like this then when can you?
One of the lovely features of this room is the inside of the small round tower in the corner. At the moment it’s a semi-circular cupboard but I’m hoping to transform it into a walk-in shower.
Turning this vision into a reality is a long way off but ever since we bought the house I’ve been dreaming of relaxing in the bath in the middle of this room – a glass of something in my hand, a real fire burning in the hearth, taking in the view of the mountains in the distance as snow falls gently on the lawn. When that day comes my work here will be done.
Harvesting honey (Aug 18)
The end of the summer means the end of the honey flow. So last week we took the first honeycomb from the hives. When I say ‘we’ I do mean we, as this time I borrowed Ed’s spare bee-suit jacket and hat. Intrigue took over. I was charged with stacking the frames which meant I could keep some distance but in the event I felt quite protected. I did suffer a psychosomatic attack of itchiness though – just enough to keep me on red alert…
We removed all the honeycomb from the stacks at the top – 10 frames in all – and reduced down the size of each hive. Only a third of the cells on our frames are ‘capped’ or sealed over with bees wax. Each capped cell it’s own miniature, hexagonal pot of perfect honey with it’s own lid. Ed’s a bit disappointed about the capped to non-capped ratio – and as our ‘bee-catcher’ sadly didn’t attract another swarm (see our First Hive – May 11) this is all our honey for this year.
To get the honey out the caps are sliced off and the comb goes into a spinning machine. At this time of year Neil the bee-man has a honey extractor in his (apparently very sticky) kitchen. Today is extraction day – and Ed’s returned with a bucketful of honey that we’ve just transferred into small jars…
There are 33 jars in all which is much more than we expected so we’re delighted. It has a very delicate, floral flavour which could be partly lime flowers, as the huge lime trees on our drive were buzzing this summer…
The bees will now hunker down for the winter and the colony will become much smaller. They stop doing all the normal bee-type things so they live longer and the queen stops laying eggs. We’ve left enough honey inside the hive to feed them through till spring.
Ed thinks that we should be able to produce around three times as much honey next year, as the bees have now made all the honeycomb. God knows what we’ll do with it all? He’s already talking about farmer’s markets but I think we’ve got quite enough on our hands for now…
This year’s veg; successes and failures… (Aug 16)
After last year’s club root disaster (see Club foot! Aug 24, 2013 ) Ed bought resistant strains and this year brilliantly all the brassicas have come through.
The onions were kept in pots too long before they were planted out so ours didn’t do well at all. Luckily we are sharing everything and Mr C planted his out at the right time…
We’ve had a glut of courgettes (we have 3 kinds) and tomatoes – they just keep on coming. So I’ve been making batches of soup to freeze and tried my hand at ketchup as it uses up nearly a kilo of tomatoes per bottle (it turned out a bit runny for ketchup – I blame the sieve – so I’m calling it relish).
We’ve discovered that runner beans and peas need to be picked at just the right time – otherwise the beans are stringy and the peas go powdery.
We have curly kale and cavalo nero – the curly kale tastes a bit earthy but the cavalo nero is delicious.
We also have house stores. We pulled up all the beetroot which are now buried in a bucket of sand – and all the carrots which are now buried in a box of compost. All the potatoes – we have 2 kinds – are sorted and in sacks for the winter.
We have more lettuces and parsley than we know what to do with. The spinach is now coming through, as are the leeks – and the parsnips will be next. It’s been a bumper year and now we know what grows really well the next skill to master is ‘succession’ – so we have year-round veg.
Call the engineer! (Aug 15)
There’s a crack in the lintel of the fireplace in the old kitchen. If you stand back far enough there’s also a slight bow.
It’s been like this for years but since we took the bricks out I’m a bit concerned it might be getting worse. As we had a builder round today to look at some pointing on the east wall we got him to take a look. He took unnervingly swift action (see below, you can see the crack above the left brick column) and suggested calling an engineer, which I did!
Whether the wall needs supporting or not the stone lintel still needs replacing, so excavation of the fire place is now on hold. Next job is to find a stonemason who can source the right piece of stone for us and get it in – and until this is done the rest of the work is going to have to wait. One step forward…
Make-over heaven (Aug 12)
You’ve gotta love a mood board – and at last I’m starting. One of the previous owners of the house was an architect and he rather fortunately ringed the the walls of the huge main office with large foam pin boards. Given that we have 28 rooms, 8 different halls and several walk-in cupboards – all of which need a make-over, these boards are going to prove very useful. The house actually has 29 rooms but I’m not counting the wine cellar as Ed did this last year (see The most important room in the house Dec 10, 2013)
I have of course become an avid user of pinterest so for a closer look at our plans go to…
A Castle in the Sky 