Hello and welcome to our first post. We’d like to introduce ourselves with a brief description of our home and life style. It’s an extremely wet and rather cold September day, here in the Highlands of Scotland. In the last hour we’ve just been placed on a ‘Met Office Yellow Warning’ for rain.

As you’ll know from reading our story/bio we re-located to the Highlands in 2001 and have been here ever since. Our home was originally an ordinary bungalow with a very large roof area. We then converted the downstairs into a more open plan living area and extended up into the roof creating a wonderful first floor studio/living space with a rather large window looking out onto the Great Glen. With plenty of natural light and wonderful views this space instantly become a splendid environment for working and relaxing. 

Our garden is a natural haven (a nice way of saying neither of us is that keen on gardening) for lots of wildlife. We have many birds, in particular song thrushes, great tits, blue tits, robins, goldfinches, blackbirds, chaffinches, starlings, goldcrests, pheasants, grouse, hens and on the odd occasion a sparrow hawk has been known to pay us a visit. Souring overhead we see eagles, owls and just recently cormorants.  Two red squirrels also frequent our garden, along with a few pine martins, the odd fox, small deer, lots of rabbits and hares and even the local, feral cat occasionally has a wander about. Up here nobody has gates, so it’s easy for most animals to roam about freely.

Unfortunately we haven’t had a good summer,  this year. Too much rain and lots of wind. Large mushrooms/fungi started growing in our garden at the end of July and now we’ve got numerous varieties growing everywhere. The berries have already been on the trees for quite some time, supposedly this is a sign that a bad winter will follow, who knows, we’ll have to wait and see.