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.
Plants of Skye, Raasay & The Small Isles
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A summary of plant recording in VC104 in the second half of 2019 is available here. Post-2000 records per tetrad look like this: Post-2000 records per tetrad The bright yellow squares have been visited and found to have no vascular plants (only bare rock above HWMS). The bright red squares have not...
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A woodlouse found on the recent SNG outing turns out to be Philoscia affinis, a cryptic species only recorded in the UK in 2017 but likely to have been here for many a year as an undiscovered native. For now, this is the most northerly record on the planet. Philoscia affinis Image N....
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I have just spotted that this was never posted at the end of May, so for the record….. One of the few remaining tetrads with no records ever was NG32H to the west of Eynort and south of Talisker Bay. On Tuesday Neil and I chose to walk in from Eynort and sorted that out with 136 records. We...
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Seven members of Skye Nature Group circumnavigated (well, nearly) Loch Eadar dà Bhaile, the loch between the townships of Balachuirn and Balameanach on Wednesday. This is a rich loch in which the vegetation is slowly covering the open water. We recorded 122 plants of which only Hypericum...
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My tour of Duckweed (Lemna) sites on Skye was successful in that I re-found the plants in nine out of ten places. However, none of them was convincingly Lemna gibba (Fat Duckweed) – see previous post. I am keeping specimens for molecular work as and when a DNA test becomes available. Skye...
Volunteer on Eigg
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2019 has flown by in a whirl of trees. From growing trees to harvesting trees, it all happened in 2019!! We had a really busy but very successful year in the tree nursery. After a stock take we have the very first 5,000 trees ready to be planted out in their final destination, its like the first...
Marc Calhoun
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I just saw the Call the Midwife episode that was filmed on Lewis. The scenes filmed at the Gearranan blackhouse village reminded me of one of the best short walk on Lewis, one that most tourists never make: the clifftop walk around the Aird Laimishader headland. I described the one-way...
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One of my favourite Hebridean islands is Scarp. I well remember several visits to Harris in the 1990s, standing at the slipway at Hushinish looking over to Scarp. I had no idea then how to get there, and neither did anyone I asked. Over a decade later, in the spring of 2004, I finally set foot on...
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Every winter I think back on an extraordinary day in 1998 when I climbed the snowy slopes of Heaval on the island of Barra. At an elevation of 900 feet, 350 feet below the summit, I came to the statue of Our Lady Star of the Sea.The name Star of the Sea comes from this prayer attributed to St...
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There is only one spot remaining on my 2020 cruise on Hjalmar Bjorge (for a female sharing a cabin). We plan to make a loop around the Western Isles, departing Oban April 25, returning May 4. Details can be found on the above 2020 Guided Cruise tab, and this Northern Lights page.Note...
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The Loganair flight out of Cork was late getting to Glasgow on September 24. So it was nearly 5pm by the time I drove out of the airport, crossed the Erskine Bridge, and then followed the A82 to Loch Lomond. Twenty minutes later I left the highway to take the Luss Bypass - a narrow stretch of the...
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Monday the 23rd of September dawned cloudy and dry - but it would turn out to get wet, very very wet. I'd decided to spend my last full day in Ireland visiting an island. But it would not be a deserted island like lonely Inishglora. It would be the busiest island in all of Ireland. Cork city...
wondering wanderers
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2019 was quite a year. We started it still on Rum with hopes to move on but no real idea quite where yet. We end the year very settled into our new lives with various work – self employed, employed and voluntary, new friends, new hobbies and interests and plenty to look forward to in 2020...
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Our first Christmas here in this house. It’s been a perfect Christmas house – lots of space, lovely high ceilings to accommodate a nice tall tree, lots of light so Ady has been able to have poinsettia, hyacinth and amaryllis bulbs all ready to flower for the big day. We have a stair...
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One of the most amazing things in our country is our health service. We have been incredibly fortunate – so far – to have needed to call on it fairly few times but both Davies and Scarlett were born with NHS midwives in attendance, Ady obviously had his emergency operation and both he...
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We began celebrating Solstice quite some few years ago and while on Rum it became a real turning point of the year when we lived so close to nature and were so dependent on natural daylight. Our days were so dictated to by what was happening outside be it weather or hours of day and night time, as...
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Scarlett is finally 17. I say finally not because she was desperate to reach that milestone birthday like I was when I was her age – it was my most longed for birthday because it heralded my provisional driving licence and start of my driving lessons, followed as swiftly as possible by my...
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I realised the other day I had been misrepresenting myself. When you move somewhere new, or start a new job, join a new club, meet a new social circle, or in the case of me do all of the above at once to a degree your slate is wiped clean. No one here really had much prior knowledge of me...
Treshnish Farm
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We were trying to remember when we bought the tractor. It was either in 1997 or 1999. Massey Ferguson stopped manufacturing the 135 in 1975 so it was at least more than 20 years old more by then.We had stayed the night before the sale at the Spital of Glenshee Hotel, where we had...
