Around the estate on Thursday morning

Thursday morning

A rainy day at EPW

Wet April holiday

Cookies

Andrew had a lie in this morning so I made cookies.

Photos

Recipe

Lost men from the leccy board

We were roused from post-prandial drowse by someone coming down the track. A car! With a Land Rover lurking at the quarry. The chap who emerged from the car turned out to be a man from Scottish Hydro looking for the Forestry Commission road down to the bridge. I pointed them in the right direction ("It's the Tanglewood road") and off they went.

I thought they might be confused because of our "new" road (e.g. if someone told them it was the xth road past such-and-such, that might now be wrong), but it turns out that it was just their map that was rubbish.

The elves have been busy

Since Andrew & I were last here, the elves have been busy: they've fixed the water pump, they've painted the end wall, increased the number of working phone sockets, un-bent the gutter and lots of other things too I'm sure.

Another slate has come off the roof, though (South side, East end). And Pan has not brought leaves out on the trees yet, so it's still rather sere.

They trundled their little machine right out here

I have been meaning to put the Google Earth Street View link here for some time, just to record it. It was a lovely sunny day for their trip.

Here it is: LINK

If you can be bothered to do all the clicking, you can take a virtual trip to Kinlochhourn or to the shops in Fort Augustus.

Flowers and a tree

These are the daffodils that were fortunately disdained by the deer. They are much smaller than they seem in this picture, and the patch of them is rather larger than this shows.

Over the past week, we have been taking apart a fallen tree that offends our view to the south. It has been reduced to a large pile of fairly useless twiggy bits, a pile of useful logs (not yet short enough to get into the stove), a fairly massive trunk about four feet high, which is rotten and will therefore be fairly easy to manage, and some rather nice horizontal branches and smaller bits of trunk, which are nice to sit on.

Some colour in a sere landscape

We saw a pair of most exciting-looking birds when two friends came to lunch last week. We are pretty sure they were crossbills of one sort or another: rosy red all over flashing between the trees just outside the window and then going off down the slope.

There are lots of chaffinches and generally twittery things; and the woodpecker is hammering away in various places. I saw something that may have been a sort of warbler when I was cutting wood a couple of days ago; but I didn't have my monocular and merely have an impression of quite a lot of black and white in horizontal stripes on the head, blackish swept back wings, and a slightly rosy rear underbelly. It had an unusual rapid call, definitely not a chaffinch.

I really need a series of tutorials on bird recognition.

RIP Erythroniums

Bloody deer.

RIP erythroniums