The heart of Wales

I have just spent the last two weeks in the heart of Wales, near Llanidloes and to some extent it has repaired my heart, too. Dave pointed out to me, as I tried to have a conversation with him from the top of a windy hill (there was no mobile reception at the farm, nestled as it was below the hill), that I was literally in the middle of Wales, both North to South, and East to West. As I chatted to him, and then to Jeni I was aware of ravens, buzzards and red kites flying above and below me – just magical.

The hosts have been welcoming WWOOFers into their lives for the past twenty years and host about one hundred during the course of each year, so they have evolved a very effective way of organising the time so that everyone gets a little taste of everything. There were only three of us there when I arrived: Penelope, from Australia; Luigi, from Italy and me, as they had been let down by a few other people at the last minute – they normally have about six or seven WWOOFers at a time. Each WWOOFer is usually put in charge of a specific bit of garden (I had the polytunnel and courgette/pumpkin beds) and a group of animals, and they are responsible for checking these every day – the garden for vegetable readiness and caterpillar/slug attack, and the animals to make sure they are still standing.

After breakfast and before mid-morning tea break we would check our animals and inspect and weed our gardens, then we would have a cuppa and usually go off together to do some joint task until lunchtime. After lunch we would either continue with the morning job or switch to a different task, finishing at 4.00pm with a cup of tea and chat. Supper was at about 7.00pm and consisted almost entirely of home-produced goodness.

There were chickens and ducks, Jacob sheep and Jersey cows, two of whom were milked every morning and evening, by hand. Luigi, who said he was 61 but looked in his mid-seventies, loved milking so took over the job from our hostess for the duration of his stay. However, as the cows are not tethered during milking they have to be fed a constant trickle of pellets to stop them getting bored and wandering off, so it was a two-person job. Luigi was a very demanding man who had never married and very soon Penelope refused to have anything to do with him, so I was asked to assist him one evening and from then on I was his new best friend and he just assumed that I would trundle out to the barn every morning at 9.00 and every evening at 5.30 to feed Tess and Clara! We seemed to get on OK although his English was not good, but my patience was sorely tried when he decided that he must have a video of himself milking the cow. Well, Franco Zeffirelli couldn’t have made more of a production out of it: first of all I had to be shown how to press the button on his mobile phone to start recording, and then I had to be positioned at the correct angle and then await his instruction to start. All of this took quite a lot of time, and during all of that time the cow was steadily munching her way through the pellets I had flung in the feed trough, so the inevitable always happened – the cow finished the pellets, got restless, stepped backwards causing Luigi to stop milking and the video was useless, plus it was so dark in the barn that you couldn’t see any detail anyway. This craziness continued for several milkings and then he roped in the new WWOOFer, Victoria from Spain, to act as cameraperson. We both tried to explain about the dark problem so the next day he turned up with a torch! I was just beginning to feel slightly hysterical when our host turned up to feed the chickens and he got roped in to doing the video – I couldn’t look at him, I was laughing so much that I thought Luigi would notice, but he was too absorbed in admiring the video of himself!

The sheep needed quite a lot of handling while I was there as a few of them had a very nasty conjunctivitis-like eye infection and needed to have ointment put in their eyes and also, they needed to be put into groups to go out with the rams, or to go into retirement, or just to be put out on the hill pending their turn for the one-way trip to the abattoir. Also, at this time it’s a good idea to give all the sheep a pedicure to try and avert foot problems once they get heavily pregnant, so we all had a go at foot-trimming. Of course, I’ve done quite a lot of foot trimming over the years, so I ended up supervising Victoria, while my hostess showed Penelope what to do. Neither of them was happy or comfortable doing it so Fran and I ended up doing most of them ourselves, and then it was time for ear tagging, at which point Penelope went off to her garden muttering that she was a Buddhist and we were pushing her to the limit! I can’t understand why she decided to come and stay at a working farm that eats meat in the first place, if that is how she feels. There was a distinct cooling off in her attitude after that and she left two days earlier than she’d booked for.

On another day, when the weather was not good enough for outdoor work, I made a hard Cheddar-type cheese using about a gallon of milk – I’ve never done that before, well not on my own, anyway. It appeared to be a success but as it has to be matured for at least three months I won’t be around to try it, but I did make some Ricotta on another day and that is eaten very fresh. I flavoured it with garlic, chives and black pepper and it was very tasty.

Fran makes a lot of wine (she aims to make 100 gallons this year!) and all round the kitchen were demi-johns all gurgling away. Once the initial fast fermentation stops they are all moved to the ‘brewery’, a wondrous storeroom lined with shelves and stacked floor to ceiling with hundreds of demi-johns containing all manner of wines and also some mead. We were going to spend a day bottling wine but there were so many problems with animals and also the weather was too good to be inside that it never actually happened. I did spend some time labelling all the jars of jam that were on the table in the middle of the room and putting them away in a walk-in cupboard, and also turning the cheeses that were also stored there on planks suspended by wire from the ceiling. What a great place to while away a rainy day!

There was a huge amount of tomatoes in the polytunnel, ripening faster than we could eat them, so I emailed Jeni and begged her to send the Tomato Relish recipe by return, so that I could make some before I left. Victoria prepared all the tomatoes and onions one evening while I was cooking supper for everyone, and then we made the relish on the Friday. We were both leaving on the Saturday but were persuaded to stay for lunch so that we could try the relish. I protested that it should be left to mature for a bit before sampling, but they insisted and were delighted by the flavour, so I have left the recipe with Fran so that she can make some more with other WWOOFers. It’s strange to think that this recipe is now in Bolivia (Jeni gave it to her WWOOF host out there), and now it could be passed on to other international WWOOFers to take back to their countries.

I’ve had a brilliant two weeks and am seriously thinking of coming back next year to stay for longer – it’s the most ‘at home’ I’ve felt for a long time, offering me just the right balance of all the things I love to do, and the potential to do so much more with more time. I’m now in South Wales, near Cardigan but I’ll tell you all about that another time!

Back to Oswestry - again!

For about two and a half weeks from the middle of September I have been house-sitting for some previous WWOOF hosts near Oswestry in Shropshire, while they went over to Brittany to do some work on a tiny cottage they have there.

This place is one that I went to first in June 2010 and again with Jeni in April this year, and has three acres of gardens that they are gradually trying to reclaim. It is quite fascinating to see what they have achieved since I first visited. They don’t have very many WWOOFers per year, but they had a couple of New Zealanders this summer for just over two weeks, and with their help they have now built some more rustic steps (Jeni and I did some in April) and built on a raised decked area in front of the summer house, plus they continued cutting back and down some of the more overgrown areas.

Basically, the house sitting consisted of looking after the two cats and Jasper, the Miniature Schnauzer that arrived with them in April for two weeks and has never gone home to Dawn’s son in London! He was actually quite nice company as I was totally by myself in the middle of nowhere for two weeks, and it saved me having to talk to myself! As Jeni says, I’m very good at anthropomorphisising (spellcheck did not recognise this word so I don’t know whether it’s a real word or not!) so it wasn’t long before I thought I knew what he was thinking – I could become (am, already?) a very eccentric old woman.

Every day, when the weather was fine enough, the two of us would venture into the garden after breakfast and do some work, either in the vegetable patch or in the larger ‘pleasure’ garden. I was mainly weeding the veg beds and removing the finished peas and broad beans, and after two weeks I had cleared three of the raised beds and replanted another one with kale, and also sown some winter spinach. It was quite strange to remove the dead pea plants that Jeni and I had planted out in April and also to see how some of the later sowings had grown – the parsnips we sowed looked particularly impressive. When the weather was not so good I weeded the greenhouses and plaited the onions that were drying in the shed, so that they could be hung up over winter.

In the larger garden I tackled weeding paths and steps and also dug out some massive fern roots and ash saplings from the heather and conifer bed, and dug up a row of encroaching shrubs from along the driveway. I don’t know what they were – there is so much in this garden that I don’t recognise – but they spread by underground runners, so it won’t be long before they start to encroach again. I also weeded the ‘Jeni bed’ created by Jeni in April, and the ‘Jan bed’, on the opposite side of the steps, that I created back in 2010! I also started a ‘dead hedge’ on one boundary where sheep were getting in in the spring. A dead hedge is just a few stakes driven into the ground about three feet apart and then any small branches or woody stems from cutting back and pruning are woven in and out to form a strong barrier that should last for a few years and can be added to as and when more material becomes available.

I found the time that I was on my own quite trying at times, as I realised that, once I stop travelling, I will be living by myself all the time and I don’t relish that idea at all, so it made me rather sad and introspective. Luckily I had a couple of bracing chats with Jeni during that time and also with my Mum and that helped put things back into perspective a bit. I was still very glad when Dawn and Tony came home, and probably didn’t stop yakking for hours! I had hardly spoken to another human being for two weeks, apart from the checkout girl in Morrisons ‘Do you want help with your packing?’ – ‘No, It’s OK thanks’ and a rather strange chap who accosted me outside Oswestry post office on a Sunday morning to ask if I could direct him to Wilkinsons. As it was literally opposite where we were standing, I didn’t have too much difficulty! I then wondered, later on, whether that was some sort of chat up line that I’d failed to recognise!!

I am now embarked on a tour of Wales that should take me up to mid-December when I shall retreat to Mum’s for the Christmas festivities, before trying to think where to go in the New Year – I don’t somehow think it will be Scotland – perhaps I could go back to the South West and hope for a mild winter and lots of lovely log-burning stoves!

The fabric of life

I woke at 5.30 this morning with a blog, half-formed, trying to get out of my brain. I think that’s the trouble with taking time off from physical endeavour – I’m not too physically knackered to keep my brain comatose! I have had the last three weeks or so as a rather overdue break from WWOOFing – I had been on the go since April and, although you get time off during your stays, it is never quite as relaxing as being with family, and I was definitely struggling at my last placement in Scotland. I spent two weeks with my sister and family in Sheffield – a city that is far less grim and grey than I had previously thought: in fact it has the highest number of trees per head of population than any other city in Europe! (Who works out these statistics, I wonder, and do they physically go out and count all the trees? – see what I mean about my brain working overtime?) Its several years since I was last there and we had some lovely drives out into the Peak District, where the heather was at its purple best, and many leisurely chats over the kitchen table of a morning. We also went to the Shrewsbury Folk Festival where we camped for several nights at a time of year when camping in Britain is becoming a bit of a challenge – there were two nights where it was so cold that I slept virtually fully clothed and was still cold – but the festival was great fun and the company wonderful. For the last week or so I have been back at my Mum’s where I have been reunited with a much-improved Jeni and also my winter wardrobe – hurray on both counts!

Recently, I have heard with sadness of the passing of two people that I know. I was going to call them ‘friends’ but as they have not been an active part of my life for many years, I am not sure how they should be referred to. One was the husband of my first husband’s first wife (who is also the godmother of my daughter!) – now there’s a complex relationship for you, and I had not seen him since my children were small, and didn’t know him very well before that, but he seemed like a good and lovely person on the few times we did meet. The other was, again, someone I hadn’t seen much in the last forty years but he was part of the fabric of my childhood: his parents and mine were friends before I was born and we saw them quite frequently all through my childhood where I openly hero-worshipped Ian (and to a lesser extent, his brothers) as they rampaged through life, climbing trees, riding motorbikes and getting into all sorts of minor mischief. Then, as I went into my teenage years, gentle flirting with Ian at family gatherings became the order of the day and, at one point we went on an experimental date – I think we both wanted to test whether a childhood friendship could change into a romantic one but we both mutually agreed that it couldn’t and I went off to college and he went back to Uni and that was that. Except of course, it wasn’t, as my parents were still friends with his parents and down through the years I have been kept up-to-date with the family’s ‘doings’. It was all a bit of a blur, to be honest, who was married to who, which children they had and when, divorces and heartaches and all of life’s happenings lived second-hand through my Mum’s letters and phone calls. Ian’s father died of Motor Neurone Disease a few years ago and, when Ian and his mother attended my father’s funeral, it was obvious that things were not as they should be with Ian. Shortly after that he too was diagnosed with Motor Neurone and has been getting inexorably worse ever since – it is a cruel disease as the last muscle to ever be affected by the illness is the heart muscle. However, I don’t want to dwell on the negative aspects of all this because, while I was in Scotland, I stayed with his mother (unofficial WWOOFing, again) and was invited to go and visit Ian. I was extremely worried about this as I have always been frightened by physical and mental disability and didn’t know how I would react to someone at such an advanced stage of the disease – I did not want to cause upset or offence with an inappropriate response however understandable, but Mary talked me through how he would be and off we went. It all went really well, and although shaken(I nearly wrote ‘shocked’ there but realise that I wasn’t) by the extent of Ian’s incapacity I had a lovely time reliving old memories and also meeting, over the course of a few visits, a couple of his sons and their families. That particular thread of my life’s fabric has been finished now – not broken, but lovingly knotted and woven back into the material, and that got me thinking of fabrics and threads and weavings in relation to my life, and it’s amazing how threads rarely get completely broken. I know that reading this blog at the moment there could be two ex-boyfriends, one ex-husband (the other is not computer literate, so it’s unlikely that he’ll be reading it), one ex-step-daughter, a step-aunty, a couple of ex-WWOOF hosts and several friends who I hope are not ‘ex’! Perhaps I’m not typical – perhaps other people don’t collect complex relationships like I do, but everyone I’ve ever met has helped to shape me into who I’ve become – some more than others, and I am loathe to lose those threads because, if I did, I might unravel completely!

This has been a different sort of blog to usual, but I hope you haven’t felt it was too introspective or self-indulgent, because, to me, it felt like the right time to acknowledge all the people that read this blog and to let you know that you all form the threads that make up the warp and weft of my life. Thank you.

Last days in Scotland

I left the Aberdeen area at about 9.30am in cloudy, drizzly conditions but quite soon afterwards the sky brightened, the sun came out and it turned into a wonderful day. I’d decided not to go the most direct route across Scotland on the motorways and major A roads but to drive through the Cairngorms and the Trossachs. The route I actually took was Oldmeldrum, Inverurie, Kenmay, Torphins to Kincardine O’Neill and then through the Cairngorms via Braemar and Blairgowrie, Crieff and Crianlarich before heading down the length of Loch Lomond to Tarbet and finally Loch Fyne and Loch Eck towards Dunoon. It was beautiful and the roads weren’t too busy, so I could enjoy some of the views, but it took hours! I arrived at my destination at about 4pm only having stopped once for some lunch and once to buy petrol. I hadn’t realised that Scotland was so big.

However, the weather soon returned to ‘normal’ and by the next morning the rain was sheeting down. It rained so hard and so persistently that the river threatened to break its banks and we had to move the sheep to higher ground so that they would be safe. Leszek, a young Polish guy who arrived the day before me, was responsible for sheep feeding and checking and I was responsible for the two Highland cows and their calves from last year. Every day I had to coax them into the barn and then feed the calves in a separate area to their mothers so that they could be tethered and groomed in preparation for being sold at the Highland breed sales in Oban in October. Grooming them was a bit like grooming a hairy pony and I also had to try to tease out the knots and mats in their hair. Over the time that I was there they gradually got used to this routine and even seemed to quite enjoy being brushed, although they were never certain about having their fringe (dossan) combed and would pull back on their halters while I did it. On my last day there my host and I gave them their first bath. Again, it was very similar to the preparation we used to do on the ponies prior to a show or sale – wet animal all over with large sponge, apply shampoo and massage in well, rinse off with copious amounts of water, apply conditioner and comb through, rinse again, scrub hooves.

On my second full day there, Thea gave me my first tractor driving lesson and I spent about twenty minutes driving in forward and reverse gears up and down the yard at the farmyard at the end of the glen (where I couldn’t do much damage). The tractor was relatively modern in that it had a purpose-built cab, sprung seating, radio and good brakes! The only time I attempted to drive our old MF 165 it ran away with me and I couldn’t get the iffy brakes to work – not good when heading downhill, gathering momentum at an alarming rate heading for the stable block. Barry had to run alongside like a cowboy from the Wild West and jump onto the tractor and stamp hard on the brakes to avert disaster – I never got on the tractor again!

On my third full day there, Thea had a family crisis that necessitated her going away that evening so she spent the whole day sorting out jobs for Leszek and me and left us to it. This was on the Friday and she did not come back until the following Thursday lunchtime, so we pretty much held the fort for a week and reported to her by phone every lunchtime. Luckily nothing disastrous happened while she was away, although I thought she was very trusting to leave two strangers in charge of her farm!

On the Sunday of that week, Leszek and I were just clearing up after lunch when we heard someone come in the back door. I thought it was the lady from further up the glen who was going to leave her dog with us for a few days the following week, but when I turned round there were two strangers standing there. The lady had come to see if Thea was back as she knew that she’d had to go away for a few days. It turned out that she was the lady that Thea had told me about who sometimes walked up the glen to pick her fruit. I introduced myself and Leszek and asked who she was. ‘I’m Emma’, she said, ‘and this is Tindy’. Handshakes all round. ‘Can I leave a note for Thea?’ As I handed her pen and paper I was wondering where I could have met her before as her face looked quite familiar. I said ‘Your face looks familiar, somehow’. She said, ‘Yes, I’m an actor’. It was then that the penny dropped with an almost audible clang – I was chatting to Emma Thompson! She must have wondered what planet I’d dropped from when I asked who she was. My only excuse for failing to recognise her is that you don’t expect to bump into Emma Thompson on a farm 5 miles up a glen in Scotland. I actually managed to carry on a normal conversation with her and gave no hint that I’d finally recognised her, for which I am ridiculously proud.

By the time Thea returned we had accomplished most of the tasks that she had set us and she was really pleased – we’d found and fixed the leaks in the water pipes, dug holes for planting trees on a retaining bank, filled in a steep-sided and redundant sheep dipping tank with large rocks, pulled ragwort, dug up and transplanted some small saplings, cleared up the brash from her chain sawing jobs, weeded and mulched some young trees, rolled and packed the sheep fleeces and a myriad of other small jobs.

Finally, on my penultimate working day I got to drive the tractor with a topper behind and topped an 11-acre field. Topping is where a mower-like device is trailed behind the tractor and takes off the tops of the perennial weeds without mowing the grass. This has to be done periodically to stop weeds such as docks from seeding everywhere. On Thea’s ground it was to take out the soft rushes that abounded in the poorly drained pasture in the valley bottom. It was quite complicated as there were several areas of really boggy ground that I had to avoid and it took me the best part of 5 hours to complete. I think Thea was quite pleased with the speed at which I cut it and the fact that I made a reasonable job of it too, so now I really can say that I can drive a tractor – although I need to have a lot more practice before I’m fully competent.

I left Scotland on an overcast and drizzly Tuesday morning, heading for Sheffield and my sister’s house for some much needed R and R (and a trip to Shrewsbury Folk Festival) and as I crossed the border into England just south of Gretna Green the sun came out and shone all the way!

Whisky, whisky all around...............

At first glance (and, to be honest, second and third glance) my next placement was not one of my better choices! I arrived in pouring rain at the Walled Garden between Keith and Dufftown in Banffshire and was dismayed to find SIX other WWOOFers already there: there were two boys and a girl from Wales, who were staying in the cottage at the garden; a young couple from Massachusetts, US of A; and a young French guy from Bordeaux. They were all young students and they were all crowded into the living room of the cottage (known in Scotland as a ‘bothy’) drinking tea. They looked quite surprised when I introduced myself as the new WWOOFer but recovered enough to offer me a cuppa, too. When the rain eased off briefly I was taken on a tour of the garden. My hosts run a gardening business as well as trying to reclaim this semi-derelict walled garden and it is definitely a work-in-progress with shoulder high weeds in many beds, interspersed with vegetable plots and the odd herbaceous border. They also have a startling array of livestock: geese, ducks, turkeys, chickens, peafowl, rheas, rabbits, guinea pigs and two grossly overweight Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs.

I was staying at the house in Dufftown and for the first few days found it very difficult to adjust to my new surroundings. The house was quite large but there were nine adults living there, also two working cocker spaniels, a litter of five eight-week-old puppies and a very talkative African Grey parrot! The noise level was what got to me most and I would skulk off to my room at about 9.30 to read and wait until the house finally quietened down at about 11.30 before I could go to sleep.

We were ferried over to the garden in the mornings in the lorry and left there all day and then picked up again at about 5.30 (although sometimes it was quite a lot later, depending on their gardening jobs). We self-catered lunch from an interesting array of ingredients in the bothy – it was quite a squash when all seven WWOOFers were in there. The first day, I discovered blight in the potatoes and spent most of the day cutting the slimy haulms back to ground level in the hope that it hadn’t progressed to the tubers. Unfortunately, some of the tubers were affected too which meant that they couldn’t really sell them to customers, as they couldn’t guarantee that they were OK. This was a blow, as last year this was one of their major vegetable sales. Most of the work in the garden at this time of year is weeding, although we did get to pick red and white currants and also a few raspberries and strawberries, although the beds were pretty overgrown with weeds – they are going to make new strawberry beds for next season.

The weather for the most part was drizzle interspersed with rain – again I was very glad of my waterproofs! However, most of the others were really cheerful, so working in bad weather was not such an unpleasant experience and we had some good fun. On most days, the cocker spaniel puppies were at the garden in a pen, so that was always a good excuse for a break – the puppies needed to be checked (i.e. played with)! Unfortunately for us, all but one of the puppies went to their new owners in the first week that I was there, so puppy playtime was not quite so boisterous (although the house was a degree less chaotic).

Because there were so many WWOOFers to feed, my host used to go to the local shop just before closing time and buy up all the reduced items (she got Anchor butter for 5p for 250g one day), which led to an interesting mix of food in the fridge at any one time. They didn’t seem to reduce fruit and vegetables very often, and I began to wonder how quickly scurvy could set in! It is amazing how the body adapts to different diets though, and by the second week I hardly noticed the lack of greenery on my plate.

It was only after I’d been there a couple of days that it dawned on me that Dufftown is the whisky capital of the world (it actually says that on the town sign) and there was even a distillery opposite the house, so on my first day off I walked to the Glenfiddich Distillery and went on the free tour. It was very interesting and informative but, more importantly, I got to try three samples at the end – 12, 15 and 18 year old – you try saying ‘three, free samples’ after you’ve imbibed! I did toy with the idea of going back to do the tour again at some point, but never got round to it. Mind you, I didn’t really need to as my hosts were very generous with their whisky which was usually a 12-year old Balvenie, served like a glass of wine!

Set into one corner of the walled garden was a decking area complete with hot tub. The hot tub was heated by a woodburning boiler and this was fuelled by oak staves from old whisky barrels. I only know one person who has a hot tub (Hello, Mary!) and I thought she was a bit weird when she said how fantastic it was to relax in the hot tub, outside, in winter, but my hosts assured me that it was and that I should try it. They always had a hot tub evening when any of the WWOOFers was leaving, but the first time I declined as I felt very shy of getting into a hot tub with a bunch of young students, plus I had no idea what you wear in these situations. It turned out that most people wore shorts and T-shirts, so I would have had to borrow some shorts from someone anyway. However, as I sat on a picnic bench and the rest sat in the hot tub, I decided that it wasn’t really a spectator sport, so the next time that it happened, I borrowed a pair of shorts, donned as big and baggy a T-shirt as I could find and clambered in. It is actually very pleasant sitting up to your neck in warm water, drinking Port Dufftowns (a 50-50 mix of port and whisky, so-named by the American contingent!) and chatting convivially (and eventually, non-sensically!!) to people from different parts of the world. The worst bit, of course, is that moment when you have to get out, clothes dripping, and the cold wind blows your T-shirt against you before you can wrap a towel round you and head off to get dry and dressed in the bothy!

After a shaky start, when I wondered if I would stick the two weeks, I grew to really like my hosts and their challenging walled garden and have not ruled out the possibility of returning next year – as long as I get to stay in the bothy so that I can be quiet in the evenings!

I am currently doing an unofficial WWOOF for a family friend who lives near Aberdeen and then, on Tuesday, I head off westwards to Dunoon, a journey of at least 5 hours, to a smallholding 5 miles up a glen.

From stately home to statelier home!

I had been asked not to arrive at my next host’s until after 5.00pm as there would be no-one there to greet me so, to kill some time and to break up the four hour journey, I diverted to New Lanark on the way. New Lanark was a cotton mill and workers’ village set up in the early 19th Century by a forward-thinking mill owner. He provided the first crèche for workers’ children and schooling for all children up to the age of 10 and beyond with evening classes for those who worked in the mill after that age. He also formed the first co-operative store on which the whole co-operative system was modelled and was an all-round good guy who was, typically, disliked by his fellow mill owners for his philanthropic ideas. It was a very interesting two hours and I was glad I’d gone, but I didn’t have time to stop off at any other places (like the Falkirk Wheel) afterwards.

I was glad that I’d read the book about Kincardine that Maggie had lent me as it gave me an inkling of what I was going to, but the reality of turning in through the Lodge Gates, driving up the three-quarter mile driveway and then arriving outside the house, was still awe-inspiring! I found ‘The Laird’ in the Walled Garden mowing the grass and he quickly showed me to my room before returning to his mowing, because he needed to get it done before 6.00pm when he had a prospective wedding party turning up to view the place. Later on, Nicky returned from the funeral that she had had to attend, and we all had supper together. I knew I was going to enjoy this placement when we had globe artichokes and melted butter for starters followed by homemade chicken kiev! Two other WWOOFers were due to arrive later in the evening – Amanda and Owen from Canada. They had been here about three weeks before and then gone off to Skye and on to another host.

Our first job was weeding the rose beds in the Walled Garden, which is a wonderful space – it has a series of hornbeam hedges which screen off areas of the garden so that it is like a series of rooms, but it has a central fountain with gravel paths radiating from it. The water for the fountain comes from a spring up on the hill behind the house and although at no great pressure it is constant and crystal-clear. The beautiful herbaceous borders and the well-planted vegetable garden are all managed by Nicky, her sister, Verity, who works one day a week, and WWOOFers and it is amazing how well-tended it all looks. Andie has recently had to take on all the grass mowing on the estate as the elderly man who did this has become too ill to continue, so that is an extra burden on top of all his other work. The estate lands (all 3000 acres) are mainly leased to other farmers, but Andie and Nicky host quite a few corporate events, as well as weddings. In Scotland, it is the minister who is licensed to carry out weddings, not the venue, which means that you can choose to get married virtually anywhere.

The main reason that Nicky chose to have WWOOFers at this time was to help with the Deeside Suzuki Piano Festival which was being held at the castle for three days during the first weekend that we were there. Nicky is a Suzuki piano teacher and gives lessons in the music room at the castle. It is a very interesting method of learning a musical instrument as the child learns the sound of the piece before ever seeing the musical notation and the parents are heavily involved, too, in reinforcing the lessons at home with much praise and enthusiasm. This will be the seventh festival that she has hosted and it involves about 30 children and their parents who come to stay – not all of them stay in the castle, some just come for the day-time events. However, there were about 24 for breakfast each morning, more for lunch, and about the same for dinner. Our jobs were to be the behind-the-scenes help: making sure that the tea/coffee/squash station, outside by the marquee, was always topped up; laying up and clearing away the meals and generally helping to keep things rolling along like a well-oiled machine. It was great fun, but very humbling as some of these children were only about five, but played the piano really well.

Nicky gave us a quick guided tour of some of the rooms before people arrived: the Chinese Room contains a beautiful carved bed and there is only one other known version in the UK and that is in the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Queen’s Room – so called because when the Queen came to dine they thought that she might be going to stay the night, so hurriedly prepared this room for her! – contains a large four-poster bed that Andie made himself; and in the bathroom of one of the other rooms are some original William de Morgan tiles (he was a contemporary of William Morris of the Arts & Crafts movement). That is what I like about this house – although there are many precious and irreplaceable items, they are all still in daily use.

On Thursday we took delivery of a lorry load of provisions for the weekend but, unfortunately, they failed to deliver the chicken that we were supposed to be having on Friday evening, so Andie got out of the freezer the fifteen pound salmon that he had just put in there. It had been caught in the river and could not be put back, as they normally are, because it had swallowed the hook and would definitely have died. This fish was too large to fit into a normal fish kettle, so they pressed into service a turbot fish kettle which is rounder than a normal one, and the salmon sat in that curled round on itself and was poached gently across two burners on the gas stove. I contributed to the meal by making an enormous amount of mayonnaise. Twenty four people sat down to this meal and there was still enough salmon left over to make kedgeree later in the week and some lunchtime sandwiches.

There was a barbeque on the Saturday evening followed by an informal concert. The BBQ was in the marquee and just after the two oil drum BBQs were lit, the heavens opened and monsoon-like rain fell for about forty five minutes – I have never seen rain so heavy for such a prolonged period of time – every time we thought it couldn’t get any heavier – it did. I was very glad that traditionally BBQs are a man thing – Andie was outside, well partially under the cover of a gazebo, holding an umbrella over himself and the BBQ with one hand and cooking with the other. Amazingly, the meal for 50 people was a great success and we then all trouped indoors for the concert at which several children played piano and violin and Andie sang and Amanda performed a Highland Fling (she learned Scottish Dancing in Alberta!) whilst accompanied by Nicky’s and Andie’s son, Charlie, on the bagpipes.

After everyone had gone home on the Sunday, we all went in the estate Land Rover, to the River Feugh, a tributary of the Dee, to watch the salmon leaping. The river was in spate after all the rain we have had and was a dark brown peaty colour, and we watched for about half an hour as several salmon attempted, and failed, to scale the rocky barrier at this point on the river. Andie told me that they could and did wait until the river dropped to a more manageable level if they couldn’t get up it at the moment.

I have been made very welcome by this family and Andie is a great raconteur, but you know you are moving in elevated circles when, in one evening, Andie received a phone call from the Lord Chamberlain inviting him to some ‘do’ with Prince Charles (a fairly regular occurrence from what I can gather) and another phone call from a local landowner inviting him to come for a day of grouse shooting. We were also watching High Society on DVD the other evening when they dropped into the conversation that they had once met Grace Kelly, when she was Princess Grace of Monaco, at a party!

On our last Saturday here, we went to the Banchory Farmers’ Market with Nicky because, as well as all her other jobs, she runs Kincardine Castle Kitchen with another lady, producing homemade preserves and biscuits that are sold in local shops as well as at the market. The Shortbread Biscuits are amazing as is the rather interesting Champagne Rhubarb Chutney – not only made from the rhubarb variety called Champagne, but containing champagne, too! After the market finished, Amanda, Owen and I continued on to Aberdeen in my little car and went to see the final Harry Potter film in 3D – a fantastic film with lots of really good special effects.

I think my tour of Scottish stately homes is coming to an end now as tomorrow I head off to another Walled Garden but it is leased from the large estate, and I will be staying in much humbler surroundings.

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.