Wild Lochaber Blogs
The latest bleats from the sheep on the street...
Blogs (web logs) and blogspots provide a unique insight into Highland life and nature in Lochaber and The West Highlands.
We have put together a collection of Lochaber blogs to highlight the traditions, culture and wildlife in the various regions, including the West Coast Islands.
We show entries from the last 100 days, organised by region, topic and blog. The titles and text snippets 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.
A Kilchoan Diary
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We have been on very intimate terms with some of the local insects. Having always assumed that ticks are only carried by animals such as deer and sheep, we discovered that birds must also carry them, which explained why we collected so many while picking raspberries in our vegetable patch.Ticks...
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Plocaig, Bourblaige & Camas Nan Geall, Ardnamurchan from FourK Media on Vimeo.Many thanks indeed to Ross Gilfillan for another super video.
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The following items are available, prices negotiable:Dehumidifier, hardly used - £30Office Chair, good quality, swivel - £25B&W Laser Printer - £5Magimix Food Processor - £10Silver & Bone Fish Knife & Fork Set, Vintage - £5RISK Board Game - £5Angle Grinder, small, little used, with...
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For the past twelve years we have lived in a house which faces southeast and which has a view which extends some twenty miles down the Sound of Mull. One of the joys of this view is that we have seen so many winter sunrises, this one from our bedroom window on a still February morning.In those...
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There's almost always a ship or a boat out in the Sound at any time of day or night, and we have spent hours over the years watching them from our house. The Lord of the Glens, a small cruise ship which is more at home in the Caledonian Canal and rarely ventures out beyond the protection of the...
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The summits of most of Western Ardnamurchan's hills offer magnificent panoramas, not least because the place is a peninsula so there are always combinations of land, sea and sky. This view is from the western slopes of Ben Hiant looking along the south coast towards Kilchoan. The hill in the...
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Mingary Castle had been abandoned for over 150 years when, in 2013, the Mingary Castle Preservation & Restoration Trust was set up to save the castle from imminent collapse and give it a modern purpose.It was my considerable privilege to be given open access to the castle throughout the three-...
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From Dale Meegan:The West Ardnamurchan Community Development Company and Community Council have received the final report following the Lottery funded community consultation which was held earlier this summer, and with it sixty recommendations. To view a copy of the report (2.4MB) click here, and/...
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Ardnamurchan's small and scattered population has meant that there are relatively few artificial lights at night. This gives it a night sky, when it's clear and the moon is new, which is genuinely dark. As a result, we've seen the moons of Jupiter and........spectacular meteorite showers - the one...
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Thank you for all the very generous comments and good wishes which have appeared on recent posts. I wish I had time to respond individually but our days are filled with the wearying task of packing up our possessions and making sure we leave the house in reasonable order.It has been a great...
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Watching the gannets sweep over the Sound of Mull and then suddenly tip their wings and plunge into the sea will be one of the memories of summer. At times we have seen as many as twenty manoeuvring in the air to attack a shoal of bait fish in the bay just below the house.The ringed plover will...
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It doesn't snow here much but, on the rare occasions on which we have enough for the snow to lie........the landscape is transformed.My impression is that it has snowed much less in recent winters. In the days when we had the shop, I can remember the community being cut off, the main problem being...
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I bought a digital camera in July 2006. For a long time pictures steadily accumulated in the photo library until there were getting on for 8,000, a number which I tried not to exceed, without success. I now have something like 12,000 pictures of Western Ardnamurchan, so the closing posts of the...
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Our house is sold and we expect to be moving on at the end of the month.After 21 years in Kilchoan, and now downsizing to a small flat, we have a huge amount to get rid of. Some we're selling - prices negotiable - like....APC Battery Back-Ups for power cuts and surges, two, bought August '16...
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We've been away for a very pleasant long weekend in Inverness where we were particularly impressed with the food in the two restaurants we patronised, but it was good to be welcomed as we returned along the road above Camas nan Geall by this magnificent sea eagle wheeling high above.We're always...
Dave MacLeod
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The first crux of Dun Briste E8 6c during the first ascent. Thanks to Cubby Images for these pics. Cubby, when are you doing your book?!! This summer I’ve tried to make up for last summer’s wet weather and broken legs and have picked up where I left off, trying to do some of the superb new...
Volunteer on Eigg
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As with this job you end up in parts of the woods you wouldn’t normally go, or just the fact we are out exploring different parts of the island all the time you come across some exciting and interesting things….. Rare Butterfly Orchids, stunning egg shell, munched hazel nuts, delicate...
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July has been a fine mixture of bridge making, path maintenance, stone work, helping some kids achieve their next steps within the Junior Award Scheme for Schools (JASS), Shorewatch training, initial site surveys for further peatland restoration project, training on tree seed collection, butterfly...
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Wow, can’t believe two months has gone by since the last update..sorry about that! Since the last update we have been very busy with preparations for the 20th Buyout Anniversary celebrations that included many days painting inside and out of our community hall, cleaning and grafting away on...
Lochaber Voice
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BEAR Scotland have notified councillors and local communities about planned daytime closures, over a two-week period, on the A828 between Ballachulish and Connel. It’s to undertake a variety of road improvements, including resurfacing along certain sections. Their rationale is that a...
