All good things must come to an end

Just a few photos today at the end of our wonderful week.  We had no fantastic sunsets this year – too much cloud most of the time, even on a good day,

 

but there were one or two evenings when breaks in the cloud allowed the sun though for a few moments, but sometimes silhouettes were just as striking.  This is Gripper with the nose of the headland, and Skye in the distance.

The smaller of the buoys is a marker for Jane’s lobster pots.  We often see her going out in the RIB to check them, and reset them after a catch.

We haven’t had lobster as such for a meal for a while, but this is what we generally look forward to on our last night – prawns!  Prawns gu leoir!  The Gaelic there led to the word Galore!  ‘S math sin! is another Gaelic expression we use in English, by the way.  It’s pronounced smashin  We just add a G to the end.  It means That’s good!  Anyway – prawns!  From head to tail they must be about 6 inches long!  We break off the heads, crack open the shells and extract the meat to eat with various delicious salad choices.  ‘S math sin!   It’s a messy meal but we do enjoy it!

 

Back to the boats and the weather!   This was Gripper out in the bay as usual one day, but Skye had disappeared in the mist!  

 

and here’s Andy in the RIB returning to the pier after mooring Mary Doune in the bay.

Meanwhile down at the pier, George and Ewan were fishing, and before long there was to be one proud young lad.

 

 

George had caught a wrasse!  Andy doesn’t reckon much to their flavour so after the obligatory photo, the wrasse was thrown back into the water to live another day!  I think it was a fine end for George’s holiday too!

At the wooden lodge the jigsaw that Janet, Norma and Sheila had been working on – but hadn’t managed to finish – was put away, bags were packed, and after breakfast on Saturday we walked with heavy hearts down to the pier to re-board Mary Doune for the journey back to Mallaig.  Martin, Jane and Liz were there to wave us off, and soon we were on our way.  Farewell, Doune, till next year.

We had wonderful cloudy views up Loch Nevis with the sun’s rays shining on Inverie , as we crossed to Mallaig…. 

 

 

…where the ferry for Armadale, on Skye, was in.  Maybe Janet would catch it and get home earlier than she anticipated. 

We moored at the foot of the steps at the old pier.  One last photo is of the old harbour  - no boats on the slipway today – before we disembarked.

Margaret and Lisbet were catching the train to Glasgow. Joan and Sheila were making for Inverness by car, while Norma and I were bound for Fort William, where Norma would carry on back home, and I would stop off at Janet’s mum’s house and then drive through the Great Glen to Inverness.  My travels were not over yet!

Talk again soon.

More photos from Doune

 

Some birds I do know at Doune were the great tit, left,  the song thrush, below with Mary Doune, and the chaffinch, a young female, left, with Gripper, as well as  other finches and siskins, all of which came to eat from the bird feeders outside the dining room.   There are other birds too that flit around by the shore.  I’m guessing there may be sandpipers and pippits among them.  They don’t stay still long enough to get a positive description of them, or they are too far away to see clearly.

The wildlife we none of us care for are the highland midges, particularly fierce tiny little biting beasties – only the female bites, they say, but who can tell which is which without a microscope!!   We all have our particular favourite midgie repellent, and this year I remembered to use one that really isn’t a midge repellent at all, but a skin softener!   So I can say that not only do I have soft skin now, but I escaped the midge bites that usually plague me with their itchiness and swelling.  However, there is one plant that is said to keep the midges away and that is bog myrtle, left.  A few crushed sprigs  tucked behind the ears or pinned to your clothes, works pretty well.  A friend was once talking of bog myrtle to someone, years ago now, when her little son piped up and asked,” Mummy, why is it called bog-mental?”  So as bog-mental it became known, not only in her family but among my friends too.  Well, mental or not, I reckon it works!  It seemed to in Skye at any rate.

When Friday came along, it was time to take stock.  Here’s my waterlily – a quarter done – sorry you can’t see the lace itself due to the forest of pins holding the threads in place.  I’ll see if I’ve made mistakes when the pins can come out!  Margaret had done a good deal more than me, but was planning to cut it off as she wasn’t happy with it.  I think she might tackle the hexagon pattern too eventually.

Janet worked quite a bit of her pattern but then she had already got started before she came over from her home just across the water, on Skye.

 

This was Sheila’s sample piece of a rather complicated Continental lace.

 

She had taken a drawing and designed her lace herself!  For what it’s worth I think the thread is too thick.  It needs to be more delicate, but isn’t the pattern beautiful? 

 

Norma had rattled on with the wedding garter and was nearly done. 

 

Joan’s was coming along well too…

…and Lisbet?    Well, she had a whole notebook of fabulous little sketches and paintings.  She should publish a book!

 

 

 

 

Talk again soon

Yet more from Doune

Pulled bracken beside the lodge and up on the hill path is turning a lovely russet brown.

 

 

Tubs have been planted out by the steps to the Stone Lodge verandah to make a beautiful splash of colour….

…and this is a tiny stonecrop, growing in the cracks of a stone.  It is such a pretty plant.

 

 

Here’s where the tubs of flowers sit outside the Stone Lodge, and below are the two Stone Lodges from the other end,

 

 

the left one being the dining room and kitchen, the right one being three beautiful ensuite bedrooms.  They were built in the foundations of part of a row of “cleared” cottages, using stone that had fallen into the ruins.  

We eat and work in the dining room, and sleep in the wooden lodge round the bay, left.

 

 

These were found in the ruins of the old houses too, a flat iron, a broken old cooking pot and some implement probably used in ploughing.  There were two of these, and several little glass bottles, etc.

 

 

If only they could talk….!

Doune has three boats, Mary Doune, Gripper II, and Eda Frandsen, Doune’s own “tall ship”.   Originally from Stavanger, Eda was rebuilt at Doune …twice – the second time after a devastating fire in the boat house a number of years ago.  She is normally chartered and away at sea when we are at Doune so this was a rare treat, seeing her in the bay.

 

 

 

The grey rocks and lighter, multicoloured stones on the shore deserve to be shown off.  The colours and patterns are very subtle but are quite beautiful seen close up or under water.

In this photo (enlarged) you can see plenty of colour… and also an LBJ (a little brown job) as an unidentified little brown bird is referred to.  He’s sitting on the yellow lichened rock.  I’m still not sure what it is! 

I love wandering down on the shore and pottering around the rock pools at low tide, where you can see tiny whelks and mussels, along with limpets and sea anemones.  

I took myself off on a walk over to Doune Head one afternoon after work was over for the day.  It had been raining, and was then only drizzling – Scotch mist – but the ground was quite wet and boggy, and the grasses heavy with raindrops.  The headland was the original prehistoric settlement here, and traces of the old vitrified fort or dun can be found if you know where to look.  In due course people built small stone houses further back and round the bay, draining and cultivating the land, eking out a meagre existence in the remote countryside till the middle of the 19th century when many landowners decided their tenants couldn’t bring them as good an income as sheep, so threw them out, destroyed their homes  and brought in flocks of sheep to graze the land.   There are plenty of traces of the ruined houses, rectangular foundations, one or two with walls a bit higher, or maybe just an area of green grass where houses would have stood.  For some reason the bracken doesn’t always grow where houses have been.  You can see the grass-covered ridges of old walls and also the overgrown “lazy-beds” that were the cultivated strips of land the old inhabitants worked hard on, growing crops to feed themselves with. 

In the shadow of a large rock fairly near the sea beyond the Dun is what was once a corn kiln, and now just a ring of stones full of bracken.  I used my walking pole to beat the bracken down, and could then see the large dish shape it had once been.  Underneath would have been where a fire was lit to heat the grain for whatever purpose it would have been used for – flour, some kind of beer, perhaps.  In this photo beyond the bay are the walls of an old sheep fank, or fold, built by the new shepherds brought in to tend the sheep.  The White House by the pier was also a new build after the Clearances.  It was likely built by Irishmen (the style of the fireplaces apparently gives an indication of the builders’ origins), for the factor or foreman, but even it fell into disrepair eventually and was rebuilt and extended by the Robinsons who about 25 years ago began the project that is now Doune-marine.  Click to see the website. There is so much more there than I can tell you about.

Talk again soon

More from Doune

We really enjoyed our week at Doune, working on our lace for the most part,  but when we felt the need of some fresh air, we just took ourselves off for a wander, or in some cases a good long walk.  Lisbet walked to Inverie and back one day – we reckon she did about 16 miles that day - but the others made it a one way affair, coming back with Liz in the van after she had had a trip to the village.  That day I stayed back at Doune trying to catch up on the  lacemaking time I had lost by a) arriving a day later and b)leaving necessary working information at home and having to prepare something completely different!   I had climbed the hill half way another day without too much difficulty but I didn’t take a lot of persuading to stay behind after it had rained hard during the night, turning the hill path into a bit of a mudslide! 

Generally I did go out at some time each day to look for photo opportunities I hadn’t already found over 14 years of visits!

 

  This time I tried to be a bit more “arty” so I can submit my pics to our Photographic Group  and I wasn’t unhappy with some of the results. 

 

 

 

 

 

Rocks, seashore, wild flowers, boats, etc make quite good subject matter!

 

 

 

 

This is a small clump of foxgloves growing by the front step of a long gone cottage, its last occupants having been evicted along with the rest of the settlement, in the late 1840s, by its ruthless  landowner, to make way for a more profitable income in the shape of sheep and deer.  There is something poignant in the flowers blooming here.

 

This is goosegrass, or as we know it “Sticky Willie” growing amongst the stones on the beach above the tide line.  As kids we’d have great fun with sticky willie , tying to stick it on our friends’ backs so that they were quite unaware of it!

Back to the rocks, and grasses growing with a tiny stonecrop plant. The boat in the water is  Gripper II, one of the Doune boats. 

 

I love the softness of this photo looking  across the Sound of Sleat to the long southern arm of the Isle of Skye.

So there we are for today.  I’ll have more pictures and stories from Doune next time too!!!

Talk again soon.