Watch your step

Tash gets home tomorrow and Poppy caught the bus this morning so I thought I’d go fishing. Then I changed my mind. After a delightful week off work, with Poppy here, and with two friends coming for two or three days this coming week, I should crack on with the verge round the workshop as I need it on at least two sides to give me a datum for the levels, around and between the two buildings.

But I never even got the mattock from the shed and instead found myself gardening, digging out all the plants and their roots in and around where the verge is to go. The last thing I want to see next spring is hollyhocks, rosebay willow herb and autumn hawkbit powering up through the verge’s slate chippings – it’s meant to be a plant free no-man’s-land protecting the insulating foam foundation. To give our imminent flower beds a flying start I dug out and potted hollyhocks and foxgloves adding everything else to the bonfire pile.

One old pot, already loaded with hollyhocks, has been destroyed by the frost, adding to my repotting fun…

Perhaps tomorrow I’ll get out the mattock.

Poppy and I did nothing radically new but made the most of the rather indifferent weather. Our first attempt to drive to Skipness got no further than a back street garage in Tarbert – the front brake was sticking really badly. John said he couldn’t do anything that day, nor indeed the rest of the week. He wasn’t happy to be quite so busy. Bring it on Monday, he said, and rather than grind the car painfully eight miles home we left it on the waterfront and walked. Hitching was a possibility but we didn’t feel the need. It’s a pretty road and we were getting a good walk.

At home, on a stroll to the slipway, Poppy stopped me mid-stride on the track, pointing out what I was so close to stepping on; a diminutive twist of something the colour of autumnal bracken. I was expecting a slow-worm but it wasn’t. A young adder not six inches long, frozen, motionless, not even flicking its tongue, aware of our potential threat. In wellies we were safe, but could so easily have squished the snake before realising what we’d done. When we’d finished looking we stepped away quietly and it slid slowly away into the grass and heather. Wonderful!

The following day we took the electric car to Skipness where, in the absence of waterproof trousers (poor judgement), I was quickly soaked to the skin. We bought coffee in the tiny but well stocked shop then sat in their plastic dome to drink it and dry off while watching the sea and waiting for the driving rain to stop.

The tide was high and it took us a little while to work out why, in just one limited area, breaking waves were brown not white.

The peat-stained river was in spate, washing in to the bay. Still waiting for the weather to match the forecast we went for an early lunch in the the seafood cabin at the end of the road; the crab rolls were good and the rain stopped twenty five minutes after it was supposed to.

The previous weekend, after Tash had left and before Poppy arrived, I’d turned a cheap lightweight door into a work table for the green room, roomy enough for both of us to sit at together.

I shortened the door to the desired length for the room, re-using the thin piece of softwood (extracted from the piece I cut off) to close the end of the sandwich. Each leg is two pieces of larch, cut to a taper and glued. At each end I reinforced the door with a board onto which I fixed a solid block for each leg to attach to.

Poppy helped me manoeuvre the new table into the green room without bashing door frames on the way…

Our newly discovered ‘mushroom track’ was a good place to walk with Poppy, local, novel and rewarding. We picked hedgehog mushrooms nearby, found the expected chanterelles and then had a bonus with the season’s first winter chanterelles (AKA yellow legs).

They formed narrow swathes running diagonally up the hillside as though following an ancient root, seam of soil or… what?

We weather stayed damp, on and off, so we didn’t get round to burning the brambles and rushes I’d cleared but Rich said that when he’s around next week he’ll bring his chipper over and turn our felled willows into mulch.

Mystery item left at the road end.

Together we cleared the bank.

and my new tool started to prove its worth. A good old fashioned dung fork.

Anticipating rain we visited Kilmartin museum (great value as the receipt gives you unlimited return visits for a year), to be led gently backwards into the long history of the area, thousands of years of continuous but changing use. In the end it didn’t rain and we walked by the Crinan canal, looking out over the flat expanse of Moine Mhor (great moss/bog). The tide was high, the estuary brimming and the river Add backed up into its salt marshes.