After many hours scraping I am tired, dirty and damp so I flop back into the car and set off home again. En route, as I cross the highest point of the Kintyre peninsula, a lady dressed in rough clothing steps out into the middle of the single track road, waving me to a halt, so I pull over and lower the window.
“Can you pull over here please for the Highlanders coming along the road”, she says.
My brain goes into overdrive as I imagine the approaching regiment in full dress uniform, bagpipes blasting out a marching tune and kilts swinging to and fro in time with each step.
Then I think how unlikely such a sight would be in this remote location and I peer ahead down the road to where a large brown animal is just coming into view, a huge pair of horns confronting me. Understanding dawns. These are the Highlanders. A herd of massive hairy ladies and one rather smaller but equally hairy calf come lumbering past us along the road, glancing warily at me as I take the picture. The ladies are all pregnant, I am told, due to give birth in May by which time there will hopefully be a little more warmth about. I bid them farewell and carry on homewards.
The procreation theme continues as in the damp area behind our house, just across the burn (Alt na Caillich or Stream of the Old Woman), there is evidence of an outburst of froggy promiscuity as the spawn bubbles up thickly forming small hillocks on the surface of a pool. Further away beside the forest track there are larger pools where frogspawn lies in dark masses and newts patrol the clear water around this like jackals weighing up their prey. There must be a balance here – the newts falling prey to something larger perhaps or maybe their bellies simply cannot accommodate all the tiny hatchlings before they grow large enough to defend themselves. Chaffinches are at it too, dividing their time now between our feeders and the task of collecting dried grass stems for their nests and sheep grazing beside the road leading down to Carradale bay appear more solid than usual, full to bursting with this year’s lambs.
Carradale point offers another spectacle to those who are prepared to risk injury clambering over the jumble of rocks out on the Point. Our feral goats are looking particularly stunning just now but to get a close look stealth is required as they are always alert to the slightest sound or movement. The landscape here offers plenty of opportunities for creeping up on them though – large tilted boulders to hide behind then peer over or else stay low and lift the camera up high enough to get a clear shot. Struggling around one obstacle I startle a heron standing up to its ankles in a shallow pool, waiting for his lunch to appear, no doubt. I am not sure who is more surprised, the bird or me, but it takes off away from me with much straining of its great muscles. Not having been this close to a heron before, less than 2 metres, I was struck by how little flesh there appears to be on the bird. The neck is stretched thinly out ahead as the bird strains for elevation and the body is no more than a swelling located some way further aft. The most spectacular feature is, of course, the wings that whistle downwards through the air on each stroke. When standing upright on the ground the eyes of an adult bird would be almost level with mine yet despite their size they build nests in the topmost tree branches, typically of conifers, from where their fledglings will sit and squawk monotonously all day long. I have always found the idea of our larger species of bird nesting in trees somewhat hard to comprehend. Years ago I was taken aback to discover that a peacock, a ground-loving bird ludicrously over-endowed with plumage, will roost in a tree at night. Which perhaps proves that gravity is not all it is cracked up to be.
By the time we came to retire from work we had decided, so we thought, that we would be content to travel about endlessly on our boat, settling only temporarily during the winter months to catch our breath and prepare for the next sailing season. And so it continued for the first few years, our lives orientated around sailing with escapes every so often to meet up with one or other of our widely scattered family. Then quite suddenly, twelve months ago, we woke up one day feeling unsettled by the fact that we did not have a permanent base on land to come back to…. and this is how we are now living in Carradale.
I can see it was a relatively dry Carradale we arrived at with enough warmth and sunshine to tempt us out exploring along the seashore before we had finished unpacking. Both of us can recall staring in awe and wonder at the scenery around us. With the anniversary of our arrival still a few weeks away the ground still needs to warm up and it is clear to see that it is holding far more moisture this year, moisture that as I write still drops out of the clouds just as it has done for many weeks. At this point we really cannot say whether this is the norm and last year the exception or whether the reverse is true. But neither do we really care because what the last year has taught us is to regard the weather in this place as neither good not bad, but always exciting. We take comfort from the fact that the house we have bought here has stood for many years and seen off so many gales in its past that it will continue to keep us safe too. It has a pleasant solid feel to it.
Clean air lets in more light, of course, so we can expect a better performance from our solar array than if we lived in a city. There are, so it seems, just too many variables for anyone to predict accurately how much benefit we will get once they are up and running. The best we can do is to measure what electricity we do get and smile smugly at our neighbours, most of whom will probably think we are slightly insane. One thing is certain, however. News of the installation will fly around this village like a wild rumour – news, good or bad, travels fast here – and it will be interesting to see what this leads to.
By any stretch of the imagination this is a miserable and thankless task as crouched between the hulls I work away with a scraper showering the ground with scrapings and filling the air with blue dust. I emerge after an hour or so stiff and sore, damp from lying on the ground and looking like an extra from a sci-fi movie. Using the tool two-handed I have to apply considerable pressure to cut my way through at least five or six layers of blue and several layers of black paint down to a white primer applied after the boat was epoxy treated many years ago. Trying to create a smooth surface whilst avoiding scratching the surface or cutting down too far, all the while kneeling or lying beneath the hull, is just about as physical a task as anyone would wish but this is the sort of punishment that all boat owners must endure for their hobby. Just part of the fun really!
We have been on another of our walks (it only takes a bit of sunshine to get us out), this one to a viewpoint just above the snowline from where the whole village spreads out like a map. It is very wet underfoot and the air is cold, but the view is well worth the effort of the climb. Before coming here we were told that snow rarely stays for long and that the climate is generally milder than its latitude justifies due to the influence of the Gulf Stream. 
From the mid point of our first winter it is difficult to judge the accuracy of this statement but a photo taken recently from the lane close to my mother’s house in East Sussex seems to indicate that there may be some truth there. The contrast between the two landscapes is striking.
We are delighted to learn that our friend Richard, who hails from our old sailing ground in Faversham, Kent, plans to bring his boat Endeavour to the Western Isles this year. What’s more, Richard’s son Tim, seen here playing music with dad in Endeavour’s cabin, now plans to bring his own boat (and music) to the Western Isles too. Is Scotland entirely ready for this influx of yachty Irish-Englishness or should we stand ready to repel them perhaps? No, their company will be most welcome and we look forward to sharing an anchorage with them some time soon.
Passing the village bakery at this time the nostrils are assaulted with one of the most enticing smells known to man, fresh bread straight from the oven, but I walked on by and turned up the lane to the golf course, immediately regretting not wearing wellington boots as rainwater squirted up from each step I took across the sodden grass. It was a fine morning but before I could get into a good position overlooking Kilbrannan Sound a dark cloud had raced overhead to spoil the sunrise. The photographic results were hardly worth the effort but in one of the shots I managed to capture Airds Castle, or what little remains of it, in the foreground. As I studied this from my viewpoint on the edge of the rain-drenched golf course I tried to imagine the role this place had played in this landscape. A river of ice had once scraped out the 100 metre deep chasm lying before me and as the glacier receded there would have been a terrific ice cliff here at which the waves nibbled away until eventually every drop had floated away. The sea level would then have been higher than today (there is a line of old cliffs all around the area as evidence of this) but over time this changed, the land itself rising higher to form a new shoreline. Then at some point humans began to settle here, one of whom spotted the craggy outcrop overlooking the water and saw it as a defensible position, from what, nobody knows. After the immensely powerful natural forces that had shaped everything around me, man’s impact here seems very small.
Back home again and the list of different creatures entering our back garden continues to rise. Two rabbits come through from the back now to nibble at some of the more succulent grasses, generally keeping pace with any winter growth, although it has to be said they they seem to prefer next door’s slightly longer herbage to our sodden greenery.
Then a pheasant dropped by and stood at the fence, gazing longingly at the longer grass next door but not quite being able to work out how to get there.
Most interesting is this specimen, strangely reminiscent of Kate, who stacked a trailer-load of wood into a neat pile next to our coal bunker. Memories came flooding back of our winter in the mountains of northern Italy two years ago when we survived on donations of olive wood for the fire and filled our glasses with wine in cartons from the local Lidl supermarket. The smell of the freshly split logs now invades us as we step outside but we must wait many months before we can reap the benefit of the heat energy stored here. Unlike the olive wood, these spruce logs are full of sap and need to dry out for many months before we can burn them.
My involvement in this has been to use Cirrus’ chartplotter to generate some latitude and longitude positions so that the required permissions can be obtained. In this photo, imagine a line of yachts just right of centre, quite close to the shore, lying between 55° 35.627’N, 5° 27.904’W and 55° 35.664’N, 5° 27.963’W and you get the picture. Having visitor moorings in place will put the village on a par with many other small communities in the Clyde and indeed all over the Western Isles. It is because there are so many places to stop that makes this area so attractive to sailors and word will soon get around that Carradale has moorings, sheltered from the westerly winds, close to the shore so that yachties can pop ashore for a drink or a meal. We can expect a steady stream of yellow-welly-clad visitors to Carradale this summer.