West Coast Islands Blogs
Blogs (web logs) provide an ideal opportunity to explore the traditions, culture and wildlife of Wild Lochaber. We have put together a collection of local blogs and provide the titles and text snippets to give a taste of each entry with direct links to the main blog entry on the host website. We hope you will find time to explore the full articles and further information on the host blog sites.
Please feel free to contact us if you have any suggestions for blogs you would like to see here.
Marc Calhoun
-
I am pleased to announce that the Islands Book Trust is now offering an Advance Order option for my new book - Thirty Years of Adventures in Search of the Past: The Outer Hebrides. Advance orders will be filled after the book launch in May.https://islandsbooktrust.org/products/thirty-years-of-...
-
The Islands Book Trust will be hosting two events for the launch my new book Thirty Years of Adventures in Search of the Past: The Outer Hebrides. The first will be at the Harris Hotel on May 14th (5 pm). The second event will be at the Uig Community Centre on May 21 (5:30 pm). Please stop by if...
-
Design work has been completed for my upcoming book Thirty Years of Adventures in Search of the Past: The Outer Hebrides. The book tells the stories of adventures on forty islands of the Outer Hebrides and includes over 150 colour photos. The Islands book Trust is aiming for publication in May, and...
-
This coming September I will have the privilege of guiding another cruise on Hjalmar Bjorge. Built in 1963, Hjalmar Bjørge served for thirty-three years as a rescue ship for the Norwegian fishing fleet. Seventy-five feet long, and twenty wide, this ninety-ton powerhouse, with her name proudly...
-
The route into the Arran hills started at Glenrosa Campsite. It was a deceptively easy start, the boot-beaten path gradually ascending along the winding Glenrosa Water. I’d visited Holy Island the day before, and was setting out to hike the Glen Rosa circuit, hoping to find a view of Holy Island...
Plants of Skye, Raasay & The Small Isles
-
Plant first – a few days ago I went for a short walk from home and spotted the diminutive fern Hymenophyllum wilsonii (Wilson’s Filmy-fern). This was new to my home tetrad (2 x 2 km square) and means that it is now recorded in 235 out of the 709 tetrads in VC104. Hymenophyllum...
-
The moth trap caught 12 moths of 7 species; nothing of great note though the Chestnut filled in a gap in my records having previously been seen in February and April. It appears to have had a run-in with one of the local avifauna. I also caught an ichneumonid, Ophion scutellaris, sometimes...
-
I disturbed a Common Plume (Emmelina monodactyla) in the garden yesterday. I have only had this twice before in the garden, both last year including one last March, but adults are known to occur in all months. Recent years have seen an increase in Calystegia sepium (Hedge Bindweed) in a shared...
-
I put the moth trap out last week, but the night was colder than forecast and I caught no moths. I shall have another go soon. In the garden there was a larva of Green-veined White butterfly in a cabbage we harvested and a pupa of the same species on the wall of the house. Green-veined White I...
-
That’s me, rather than the wildlife… On Sunday, Neil and I took advantage of a very low tide to revisit the spit on the east coast of Raasay. As well as a good variety of marine invertebrates, we found a new site for Zostera marina (Eelgrass). It is often easier to find wash-ups on...
-
A report on botanical activities in VC104 from July to December 2023 is available here. Sparganium natans at Loch Lonachan Photo: J Walmisley
Treshnish Farm
-
What I am noticing more and more is how right it is that we read the landscape through the eyes of the people who lived here before us. When I started the Fangan project, I was looking at it from my viewpoint today. But while they mean something to me - now - they represent something far...
-
Suddenly we are at the end of February. Ben More with a dusting of late February snow. The Lagganulva cows were on the move on Sunday. They like to lick the road salt (the road had just been gritted). It's not just the Herdwicks who get a bit of feeding in the mornings,...
-
Ensay. Across the Ensay burn from us. We rent the fields between the road and the Ensay Burn on a 364 day grazing agreement. This gives us the use of the beautiful fank there.
-
Chûn QuiotNewlynCarn EunyNear the Gurnard's Head pubPenzancePorthleven, after a stormFlushing Farmer's Market, on a Saturday morningNewlynSt Michael's MountSheds above Betsy's CoveCudden Point
-
Every morning. Rain or shine. The Herdwicks need their breakfast. They stand and wait for the sound of the quad bike at the gate.
-
The weather after New Year enabled me to get the drone in the air. Firstly over Calgary Beach, looking at the sands again and how they have shifted in the storms. Then over Haunn, the bird's eye view reaches to Calgary and over to Ardnamurchan.
-
This is a lovely walk just over the hill from Treshnish. Look for Dun Aisgain on the OS Map, near Burg.
-
The young stock over on the rented fields at Ensay have to come back to Treshnish for a few days at the end of the grazing agreement each year, so Farmer has to entice them up to the Ensay farm yard where he has erected a corral of flakes and gates to lead them in to, so he can load them into the...
wondering wanderers
-
AdyBad:* We have still not returned to Rum. This nags at me as there are things I would probably like to collect and I know things will be decaying and need to be dealt with. I can list the reasons why ; busyness, expense etc. but ultimately we just need to organise ourselves to do it.* The car....