I don’t think I put enough thought into planting up the new wood. I took six ten foot silver birches from a friend and planted them on the higher, drier ground. Four of them promptly died. I then put six five foot larches on the lower ground where standing water gushes through the soil. They Continue reading

I am starting to get bored of planting. It’s a good thing that the season for it is almost over and there are thousands of other things to do instead. The Chayne suffers from the fact that it only has one tiny wood, so scattering single trees and stands of a few dozen across the Continue reading

The cows are coming. Each summer, two lorry loads of cows come up from the tenant’s other farm in the lowlands and spend the summer behaving boisterously and making themselves unpopular. The shepherd is dreading their arrival, but this is the way things have been since time immemorial and nothing short of a major volcanic Continue reading

Although I hadn’t meant it to, this blog has become overwhelmed with posts about black grouse. I am utterly in love with the birds, and seeing them properly for the first time this spring has skyrocketed them up my list of favourite British birds. Finding them on the farm was a tremendous boost, and I Continue reading

Larch trees are something of a new discovery for me. Before I began this project, all trees were dull, shapeless and ambiguously leafy. I could tell the difference between oak and horse chestnut, and I was only dimly aware of the existence of a handful of other species. Coming to manage the Chayne and realising Continue reading

Over the last few days, the Chayne has stepped boldly into spring. Before now, I observed the arrival of the first cuckoo and the first swallow as signs of a coming change in the seasons, but with the arrival of the first lambs, there can no longer be any doubt. Spring is formally here. All Continue reading

The long woodcock strip now lies in three sections. Part has been opened up with a long ride and a series of clearings, part has been brashed to a height of six feet and the remaining two acres have not been touched by a chainsaw. The ride and the series of clearings were designed to Continue reading

Country people are renowned for driving enormous cars. It is the definitive statement of rural intent to own a mud spattered 4×4 and fill it with dogs, sticks and sloe gin. Aside from a small urban minority who insist on taking range rovers through the city centre of London, country cars are constantly forced into Continue reading

A previous post mentioned puritan martyrs, hounded across the Galloway countryside in the last years of the seventeenth century. While it doesn’t have much to do with grouse, the weather has been so wild recently that I haven’t been able to get up to the farm for the last two days, and it occurred to Continue reading