You may well look away in shame...

...the dung heap is not the most appropriate place to go ratting, Flossie!

The Weaning Blues

Where's ma mumma gone? (do dum do dum do dum)

I'll holler all night long (do dum do dum do dum)

I'm keepin you awake (do dum do dum do dum)

For ma mumma you did take (do dum do dum do dum)

[Repeat, ad nauseam, all bloody night, taking it in turns - first the calves, then Brian's lambs across the valley, now ours]

On goes the roof

More updates from Blacktail Lodge...

The roof is now boarded in, and Mark the Builder is battening ready for slates:

The front porch ended up being far far bigger than we imagined:

Ian and Sonny in the living room/kitchen (I think Ian is standing in the sink):

Looking back across the living room to the front door, a bedroom, and the storage hatch in the roof:

The view from the living room windows (hopefully someone will move that van):

And for Auntie Ann, Ruth's rose is thriving after it's transplant from the cottages:

The difference a few days make...

What is it about my absence that galvanises activity?  I go to Cambridge on a Sunday, and come home to an almost completed house on the Friday...

While Ian and Farmer Rob make silage and hay, suspiciously eyeing the gathering clouds, builders descend upon our building site and up she goes.

Start with foundations and some scaffolding...

...add a crane...

...a load of panels and a couple of men...

...and several more men and panels...

...and more...

...voilà!  Now all we need is a roof...watch this space, coming on Monday.

Góðan dag frá Íslandi!

Shearing over, and a pause for breath - so a perfect time to take a week out and travel to Iceland.  While here is not the place to wax lyrical about how wonderful the scenery was, how awesome the glaciers and volcanic geology, and...ooop, just did...this is a farm blog.

The Icelandic sheep were ubiquitous - small and hardy, seemingly as happy to be grazing beside a road as on a cliff face or the volcanic beaches.  Lambing was well over, and each mum had two rapidly growing charges.

While there were cattle, mostly dairy as far as we could tell, another staple of the Icelandic diet (look away now if you are squeamish) is horse (along with various other things foreign to our palate, such as whale and reindeer).  I can categorically state that we most probably did not eat horse burger (and I am most definitely lying - when in Rome...).

We were probably the only two tourists who stopped to watch haymaking (coming soon back at home) and looked longingly at the über-cool combined baling and wrapping rig that the local bóndi (that's yer real Icelandic for farmer, that is) was using to store away his winter feed.

However, some of the tractors were a bit small.

The official line is that we did not flirt with other sheepdogs (please, please don't tell Sonny!)

The bird life was amazing, and each field had territories of redshank, whimbrel, snipe, plover, godwit, redwing - the dawn chorus was the space-invader sound that snipe wings make as they fly about, with a background of wader calls and skylark singing.  I say dawn chorus - given it was light all night, a 5-6am peak in activity was probaby just habit.

Black-tailed godwit, long-tailed duck, red-necked phalarope, Slavonian grebe, whimbrel, black guillemot

An eider mother and her chicks

Mutch Ado about Shearing

Shearing has been and gone, and was exhausting as usual.  This year we were surprised to have Gavin Mutch come along with our regular Gavin to shear the sheep - nice to know a World Champion is on hand when you need to work your way through 365 ewes, ewe lambs and rams before mid-afternoon.  And the pun belongs to Sue O'Dowd who wrote the article - don't blame me!

On the build front, we now have electric, a damp-proof course, and a concrete pad - ready for the build on the 4th of July.

In the evening, it's nice to sit with a beer as the sun goes down...but always under the watchful eyes from the other side of the garden fence...