February 2023

A legacy from Betty MacDonald (Betty Rhemore)

Back in December I said I would write about carbon sequestration, which I now regret, as so much has happened on the croft since then. We are also still getting our heads around the whole carbon caboodle. So, I’ll leave that for another day.

As I write, the croft is covered in snow for the second time this winter. The cows are attuned to any stirring from our house and march across the fields for their hay before we’re fully dressed.

They’ve lost weight since November, but are still in good shape, and we’re not yet through the hay we made this summer with a pair of scythes and a fish box. (A walk-behind tractor is definitely on the wish list!)  For purists, feeding the cows might not be seen as proper “rewilding”, but our aim isn’t to replicate the harshest aspects of nature and we’ve grown very attached to our cows.

We’ve managed to get a crofting grant for “no fence” collars, which arrived a couple of weeks ago and the cows are now wearing. The collars allow us to create ‘virtual fences’ using an app. The cows respond to a tone emitted by the collar that warns them of an invisible electric fence line and they turn back. They’re still in training, but they’re used to electric fencing and have learnt quickly, and the collars have meant we’ve already been able to move them to areas on the croft, difficult to fence that we couldn’t use before along the shore.

If everything works out, the plan is to take out the internal fencing and allow the cows to move more freely between woodland and pasture. This should help fuzz the edges between the two, encouraging regeneration and creating a more dynamic landscape. The collars also mean we can easily protect areas of woodland or newly planted trees when we need to.  

We’ve been working on a grazing plan, so the fields and woods get the benefit of the cows, and the cows get enough to eat without over-grazing i.e. more species competition in the meadows and seedlings growth in the churned earth the cows leave behind.

When we moved to the croft, we inherited Betty MacDonald’s cattle records from 1964 to 1997 and I like to think she’d be pleased to see cows back on Rhemore. It’s good to feel some sense of continuity. We never met Betty but have got to know her through her fastidious record keeping alongside what our neighbours have told us. 

Betty’s cows were a similar breed. Like us, she gave each one a name. She kept a record of the calves each year and sometimes the prices at sales (how different the economics are now!). She had some cows on her croft for over twenty years and we hope some of ours will be with us that long too. (I think Betty would have approved of our attachment to them.)

Who knows what Betty would have thought about the term “rewilding” (let alone carbon sequestration and nofence collars). I’m sure she would have laughed at how little we know generally. But from studying the croft we’re pretty sure it would have been much more diverse in Betty’s time – with different crops, fodder, and wilder patches and far fewer deer

coming down to the inbye every night. (The numbers now might well have shocked her). There would have been more types of plants producing different kinds of foods for different kinds of animals and birds at different times of the year.

Seeing these changes over a lifetime, Betty might well have recognised what we are in danger of losing, even here on Morvern, and appreciated that wilder patches, thicker woodlands and tussocky fields make it easier for all types of animals and birds to survive the winter snow.