The week after Jeni left was a sad and pretty unproductive one. I spent nearly all of Sunday and the greater part of Monday in bed feeling very sorry for myself as I snivelled and coughed and used up most of my supply of tissues. It is very embarrassing to be ill in someone’s house when you are there to work for your keep! Luckily, Mary and Terry were lovely people and very understanding (Mary felt guilty for giving me the cold in the first place). Once I was up and about again Terry went down with mysterious stomach pains and had to retire to bed for several days so I was pretty much left to my own devices. I planted some more seeds and repotted the cucumbers before weeding the flower beds and planting out some tobacco plant seedlings, which promptly nearly all succumbed to the pounding rain and the onslaught of slugs! I also did some interior painting of a window frame and door on the days when it was too persistently wet to even venture outside – the weather has been atrocious for all but two days of my stay. When Terry was feeling better and the weather was a bit drier, we spent a day with the digger and some large straps moving huge rocks from a pile to put along the side of the stream which only flows intermittently in wet spells. It took all day to manoeuvre these stones into place and backfill behind them and we thought we’d done a pretty good job – until the rain came back. It rained torrentially for twenty four hours and when I went outside on my last morning it was a scene of utter devastation – the burn had moved two of the biggest stones into the stream bed, it had then overflowed its banks and filled the still-to-be-finished pond, and had completely destroyed the area we were about to turn into a little waterfall. I couldn’t believe how a tiny trickle had suddenly become big enough to do all that damage, but we had had an awful lot of rain.

On one of my last evenings there, a group of friends turned up with wine and instruments and we had an impromptu concert in the kitchen – there was one guy on guitar, one girl on fiddle and another guy played piano accordion. His name was Pete and he is using one of the barns at the house to store his old showman’s wagon while he does it up as he’s lived in it for fifteen years but it now leaks like a sieve and needs a new roof. He’s a professional musician and plays in a band called Moyshe’s Bagel who are performing at this year’s Priddy Folk Festival, if any of you are thinking of going. It was a great evening but I left them to it at about 11.30 and went off to bed – apparently they continued playing until about 2.00am!

I left Tynron on 23rd June and drove for literally five minutes down the road to my next WWOOF host – no need to factor in the usual twenty-minute-getting-lost margin that I usually include! I turned in by the Lodge and drove over the balustrade bridge over the river and up the half mile driveway, finally arriving at the gravel sweep in front of a huge pink sandstone stately home! Maggie’s email had merely described it as a large Victorian house and garden and that she required help with hedge-trimming and topiary. Maggie met me at the front door and decided to take me for a stroll around the gardens first to calm the dogs down: two black (thank Heavens!) Labradors and a young black cocker spaniel puppy. Later she showed me to my room which is on the third floor. It is really pretty with high ceilings, plaster cornice, yellow striped wallpaper and a Victorian half-tester bed (basically it has a wooden canopy that extends over half the bed and side curtains). I’ve never stayed in a stately home before! There are stuffed birds in display cases all the way up one staircase and stuffed and mounted deer heads on nearly every wall, plus lots of family portraits. The magnificent wooden staircase that ascends to my room is at least 10’ wide and the family kitchen could easily house my entire cottage floor plan.

Once I’d brought my bags inside and carried them up the fifty stairs to my room, we went outside via the impressive Orangery to start work on the box hedges in the Italian Garden. Between us we managed to trim all of the box hedges, using an incredible electric hedgetrimmer/hoover device, in two days as opposed to the two weeks that it normally takes Maggie – she was very impressed and I scored numerous Brownie points.
At the weekend, Robert wanted me to help him with some jobs so I agreed to have a day off on Tuesday, so on Saturday we went off to clear bracken. This involved walking for what seemed miles through the forest plantations to where some new oak trees had been planted and then cutting down the bracken within a metre of each tree with a hand sickle. The day was very hot and humid and I worked in a cloud of constantly buzzing flies and was soon extremely damp – from drizzle and sweat! Between us we managed to clear the bracken from around 300 young trees in an afternoon, and then we had to walk back again. They own 2000 acres of land; some farmland but most is down to woodland and I felt like I’d walked through all of it!

On Sunday I was coerced into attending a religious service in a marquee to celebrate the start of the annual Gala Week in the village. Maggie was playing piano and her daughter was playing the cello, so I felt I should go along and support them in their endeavours. After lunch, Catie and I were persuaded by her Granny to go and ride her ponies – it was sort of assumed that I could ride. I did try to explain that I hadn’t ridden anything for years and I had never been a competent or confident rider but these excuses were just ignored and I soon found myself mounted on Nutty, an Exmoor pony. It was only as I nervously set off down the road that Granny pointed out that she was not insured for me to ride her pony and, more importantly, it was not unusual for Nutty to buck unexpectedly and then take off at a canter! Before I could dismount I found myself in a field of just-cut silage and luckily, Nutty was far more interested in grabbing huge mouthfuls of lush green grass than with tanking off with me aboard. Phew! That was a narrow escape – I had visions of trying to drive my car or carry on wwoofing with a broken arm or leg.

On my day off I went to Wanlockhead which is the highest village in Scotland at 1,531 feet above sea level, and home to a Leadmining Museum. Part of the experience was donning a hard hat and being guided into an old drift mine to see how the miners had worked and then touring some old cottages that were furnished in the periods of 1750, 1850 and 1900. It was all very interesting and the guide was excellent. I had lunch there and then drove to Drumlanrig Castle, home of the Dukes of Buccleugh. It actually felt a bit silly going round a stately home, albeit on a bigger scale, when I was already staying in one, but it passed the time.

Quite a lot of the rest of my time at Capenoch was spent in the walled garden, part of which is rented by a lady who lives in the old gardener’s cottage and runs a plant nursery business, but part is used by the family to grow vegetables. The main job was to try and cut back and weed the box hedges that surround these beds and this took a couple of days of back-breaking work and then I completely rearranged and rebuilt their compost bins, thereby creating Jan’s Compost Corner!

I was Maggie’s first official WWOOFer as she only signed up this year and I told her I’d set the Gold Standard for other WWOOFers to aspire to. She has two French students coming at the end of July and I shall be quite intrigued to find out how they got on.

Yesterday I drove over two hundred miles North East to a village about half-an-hour from Aberdeen, but I’ll tell you about that another time. I really missed my little navigator on the journey but she is still recuperating at my Mum’s. The doctor has diagnosed Costochondritis which is damage to the cartilages connecting the ribs to the sternum (probably caused by the over-enthusiastic mucking out of the goat stable in Cumbria). It can be excruciatingly painful and the only treatment is painkillers and rest, and it can take a few months to sort out completely, so I shall be without her for the foreseeable future. Thank you to everyone who got in touch by email after my last blog – it was much appreciated.