Barnacles for supper

We were still waiting for our better soil when, with frost imminent, our seventy five Rosa rugosa arrived. I heeled them in up on the vegetable plot. We made a couple more seaweed forays and prepared the first four tree pits by partly back-filling them with some of the soil we’d dug out, then adding a layer of seaweed. There were three nights of sharp frost and brilliant stars. As the greenhouse is due to arrive on 8 December (same day as the battery men come) I have also been digging a strip footing for it. My aim was to dig a trench a hundred and fifty millimetres deep and the same wide, but as I’m digging into compacted hardcore it’s a ragged affair and I’ve been making some shuttering, to tidy it up, limit the amount of concrete needed to fill it and to create a reasonably level base to attach it to.

On Wednesday Paul rolled down the drive in his monster pick-up but didn’t get out of the cab; the busy builder with several projects on the go. He opened the door and climbed down several minutes later, when he’d finished his phone call, and I showed him the beds we needed to fill. Three or four loads he reckoned and said I should go and talk to to the dumper driver on plot one who was expecting me.

When Paul left I walked down the track to where a big digger and dumper were scraping the construction area, creating a fresh hill on the edge of the field. I wasn’t wearing hi-vis, safety boots or a helmet and hung back until the dumper driver waved me over. We arranged that I’d return at one o’clock to show him the way to our plot.

Dumper driver Christian brought us four loads, tipping three on the bank and one up by the first tree pits. It’s fine, sticky, reddish brown soil. I was expecting it to be sandier but whatever, it looks good.

Our recent excavations show that in places there’s a lot of water close to the surface, such as in this bed (south of the house), so plants will have to be tolerant of, or happy in, damp ground. Here I think we’ll start with yellow flag iris, Siberian iris higher up, meadowsweet, purple loosestrife and bog myrtle…

The bare-rooted apples and gooseberries arrived, stapled into stout paper sacks and padded with straw smelling of hot summer. Each tree went in a pit, several barrowloads of new rich -ooking soil heaped in round it, then a thick layer of chipped willow and birch mulch on top. One gooseberry went in the drained pit and the other three halfway down the bank in a terraced bed I’d hastily constructed, using the biggest stones I could find (and move).

Unfortunately the big dumper was just too big to get where we needed the soil, and moving the new soil round to the other excavated beds is going to be a challenge. I think hiring a small dumper is the only sensible way to deal with it (short of hiring someone else to do it). Tash spent some time filling the bed by the workshop and even that was taxing.

My current indoor task is making a timber ladder to cross the deer fence into the wood, without having to use a neighbour’s gate. It’s an ‘A’ shape but, on account of the chosen location, one side is two feet shorter than the other. At the moment it’s all in pieces but I’ve morticed all the slots for the treads. I made a trip to Lochgilphead specifically to buy the timber as well as half a dozen more bags of ballast. I was pretty sure I’d find that I needed more than originally anticipated for the greenhouse base.

A sunny day tempted us to set work aside and head off. It was to be our first outing with the electric bikes on the back of the electric car, but the socket fitted to the car doesn’t match the plug on the bike rack; something else to deal with. We took the Berlingo, drove up past Lochgilphead, turned left at Cairnbaan beside the Crinan canal then down to Tayvallich (Taigh a’ Bhealaich). The small carpark was empty, the loos were open and the sun was shining. From there it’s only five or six miles, with lochs frequently visible on the left (fresh water then sea water), to Keils where, like the bony, vertical plated back of a stegosaurus, the land tapers into the Sound of Jura. We passed a plot we’d almost made a bid for (before Plot 5). Back then it was two small and ruinous cottages, now refurbished as chi-chi holiday lets. A shame as it could have been a stunning new build at a safer distance above the sea… there was a planning permission but no water supply and it was going to a sealed bid in forty eight hours.

Before the point the single track road cuts west, curling back on itself to pass a farm and then ending at a stone jetty. A jetty of striking geometry. Everything slopes and nothing is square, perhaps to suit all states of the tide and still make it practical to drive livestock onto a waiting boat. The stones are laid on edge and bound along the seaward edge by a rusty iron band. Across the water lies Jura.

We ate lunch on the jetty then, leaving our bikes by the road, walked towards the point, Rubha na Cille, through undulating tussocky terrain between tall flakes of rock. Without doubt the most impressive view of this rocky almost two dimensional spine is from a kayak out on the Sound of Jura where they stand on the skyline. This rocky point separates the Sound of Jura on the west from Loch na Cille on the east – the latter meaning loch of the chapel, and the chapel still stands, fifty feet above the road, in a burial ground enclosed within a crenelated stone wall. A simple rectangular building from the twelfth century, it contains a collection of nearly forty carved grave stones, gathered from the surrounding burial ground and mounted on its walls. Most are taller than a person and feature long swords or crosses and interlaced patterns. The oldest dates from the eight century.

We’d planned to cycle round the top of Loch na Cille to the island of Danna, which we did, but with insufficient time to visit the beach we’ve camped on when kayaking. We visited a seventeenth century house. Living quarters are on the first floor, via stone steps up the side. The ground floor seems to be a single, drive through space with double doors at each end – a barn or a store. A double lime kiln stands to one side.

Outside now the rain is lashing. It’s eleven at night. The power went for a couple of minutes but is back on. Somewhere there are two more apple trees, a plum, a damson and two more gooseberry bushes heading our way.

We have a lot of earth to shift…