December 2024

It is hard to believe it’s only a year ago we took our first animals to the slaughter and I wrote about the pride and pleasure (as a former vegetarian) of producing good meat. So much has happened in our lives and on the croft since then.

The sheepskins we so carefully salted and trimmed over a year ago, are finally coming back to the croft from the tannery and we will be reunited with those animals once more and also have some fine sheep skins to sell. We’ve decided to concentrate on cattle since then, as they seem to suit us and the land better and rehomed our remaining sheep with our crofting neighbour Bibby. The Highlanders seem particularly well adapted and the herd now needs almost no treatment. We produced all our own hay last year, so the animals are fed entirely from the croft.  Our beef has proved as popular as the lamb, if not more so. We’ve partnered with the Whitehouse in Lochaline, so it is all sold and consumed locally (we are very much looking forward to eating their steak pies next week); and it’s still an enormous pleasure to put something on the table we know is good quality, from animals that have been loved, and have played such an important part in managing the land.

The polycrub has been amazing and extended our vegetable growing season and yield so that the croft now produces most of the vegetables we eat and a lot of the fruit including two delicious figs that miraculously decided to ripen last week.

These are small successes compared with the main goal for the croft, to regenerate the rainforest, which is much harder and is necessitating a shift in mindset that I am only just beginning to understand.  

For most of my life, I have found, if I put enough effort in, I have been able to achieve many of the things I wanted to. I have sprinted through life in bursts, focussing on milestones. At times, it has felt like a fight for survival, picking myself up, brushing myself down and ploughing on. But, it turns out this is not how you regenerate woodland.  You can make trees grow in a nursery and put energy into cultivating a garden, but natural regeneration means creating the right environment for nature to do its own thing and allowing lots of time. This involves a level of sustained commitment which, to work, must to be integrated into everyday life. It takes patience, routine, listening and observing, intuition, understanding, care; a different kind of energy than getting a film project off the ground. This feels more akin to being in a long term relationship and the work involved in loving another person over a sustained period of time; which is arguably much harder to achieve than conquering great milestones.

There is a fine balance between hope and despair in this work. Signs of woodland regrowth are difficult to perceive even on a yearly basis and it’s easy to get distracted by things that produce more immediate results; other people often cannot see the merit in what we are doing because it does not make profit, provide jobs, or produce much to sell; and ours is such a small patch of land compared to what is being lost around the world on a daily basis.

It’s taken a while to realise that the success of our croft depends on creating an environment where we also thrive and grow. Looking after each other and caring for the woods are inextricably linked, and often the task is holding out hope for each other.

I believe that caring for the environment cannot be separated from, and often begins with, caring for other people. The wonderful thing is that it is often a walk in the woods that restores our faith in the world.

Spotting new seedlings as the bracken dies back

Meals 100% from the croft

Our sheepskins in the tannery