Since returning from the Galloway Hills, it has been a busy week of roe and rain, but it’s worth quickly mentioning that I’ll be at the CLA game fair tomorrow (Friday), and it would be good to meet any readers of this blog as I work my way through a shopping list which includes a… Continue reading

In very brief, it is certainly worth mentioning a stunning fishing trip deep into the wild terrain of the Galloway/Ayrshire border over the weekend. It would take several blog articles to adequately capture the full delight of three days on the water amongst shoals of brown trout, tumbling eagles and the eerie lowing of black throated divers, but… Continue reading

It has been interesting to read through the feedback from my recent post about windfarms and forestry, particularly since it has raised some interesting new ideas about the imbalance between forestry and renewable development. From a landowner’s perspective, the various voices from within the renewables world have spent the past ten years dangling enormous sums… Continue reading

Couldn’t resist quickly posting this picture of a wheatear chick found on the road this afternoon. He must have stepped out of the nest a matter of hours before I saw him, and his wings were taking some getting used to. They flopped around beside him, and he moved around in a fumbling, foolish series… Continue reading

Windfarms have become the new Galloway buzzword. Nowhere else in Scotland has attracted such a huge amount of attention from the wind developers, and over the past ten years on the Chayne, over a dozen different companies have expressed their interest in one capacity or another. The various development reps have not exactly covered themselves in… Continue reading

It has been an odd year for drying peat. The May wind was thorough and chased away the water, but since then the damp and the rain have soaked in to parts where the skin had not formed, and many of the most promising peats are now as crisp as biscuits on top while soggy and soluble below. I… Continue reading

It’s fascinating to see how birds and wildlife respond to a bad summer. Driving out of Dumfries yesterday, I passed a female lapwing with a brood of two day-old chicks at heel, wandering carefully through a recently mown silage field. Nearby, a flock of twenty full-grown lapwings looked on; one of the hotchpotch gangs of immature birds and… Continue reading

Always keen to help with the work of the Galloway Fisheries Trust, I was excited to take part in an “Anglers’ Riverfly Monitoring Initiative” workshop yesterday in Gatehouse of Fleet. After an introduction to the concept of river fly monitoring (and a comprehensive health and safety brief), we headed up the Fleet to take some samples and… Continue reading

My wife has gone to visit her parents in Cornwall, and as much as I mourn her absence, I do enjoy some time on my own. I like the freedom to mooch around and do precisely as I please, and I have been looking forward to a day or two of total, teenage independence. However, this… Continue reading

Amidst swarms of swallows and ragged robin, the Chayne is coasting through summer. I headed up to turn the peats and clear a fallen tree this afternoon, and the hill was literally reeking with the tang of bedstraw. Flights of linnets and goldfinches prowled around the thistles, and snipe chipped with a sing-song cheeriness over the… Continue reading