Author Archive
Huts all round.
Last weekend saw another bothy building delegation descend on Inshriach, now the wall cladding is on, the side windows are in, complete with beautiful oak sills and sides, and most of the insulation and lining has gone in. The architectural detail that has gone into the design is starting to tell in the overall proportions, the views through the building, the floor to eaves windows, the custom made, diminutive and beautiful (if probably not very practical) folded gutters and the silvery cladding. It is a traditional bothy with a modernist twist. We are two weeks off the next build party when we hope to have it clad, windowed and watertight. There is a much more extensive blog and photo gallery of the build here on the bothy project website.
Meanwhile, just along the valley at the Lazy Duck in Nethy Bridge, David and Valerie have just finished their fabulous Woodmans hut, living proof that there is more than one way to skin a cat. Their hut is situated on the old woodmans trail that runs through their forest and is mostly built with timber thinned from its immediate surroundings. The hut has great views of the Cairngorms and a veranda out front perfectly suited to Appalacian relaxation. Inside it has a box bed, a stove, oak flooring and a great little kitchen, outside there’s a bush shower, compost loo and fridge (ie a stream). Its very cute and I highly advise getting in to stay there before they realise what a bargain it is or it gets famous and is booked out all the time. 
Simon and Lucy’s wedding.
Our second last wedding of the year took place a few weeks back so my congratulations go out to Lucy and Simon. We do seem to be picking up the alternative end of the Aviemore wedding market, each one this year (7 to date) has had its own distinctive style due to the personalities and choices of those involved, this one was pretty frantic for the last 48 hours but worked out to be a lot of fun. This was the first time Bygone drives have been brought in for the wedding cars, the first time we have used this particular marquee and lighting company and the first time we have gone for a photo booth in the tipi. 
Ord Ban played again, they are proving hard to top for the music, Taste of Moray were super professional helping get the house sorted while everyone was at church and then doing fine things with the food and Helen Abraham once again took amazing photos (these rubbish ones are my own work). You can read Helen’s take on the wedding and have a look at a few rather better photos here on her website.
Without turning this into a sales pitch (we dont really do sales pitches) if you want a wedding at Inshriach we charge a facility fee of £1200 on top of the full weekly rental. We don’t charge corkage or put a commission on anything, we can introduce you to all the best people for lights, tent, staging, music, food and everything else you need and we are pretty laid back about people camping if they want to (there will usually be a small per head charge for that). And that’s that.
Spoon Carving course.
On the 8th October we are running our first spoon carving course with Wooden Tom. Its going to cover the basics of using the axe, knife and crook knife. You can see the full details and how to book here on Tom’s website. This one is already fully booked but let me or Tom know if you fancy coming on a course and we can organise another.
The other bothy project.
The building we have always known as the bothy used to be the laundry for the big house. By the 1970s it had became a summer house and workshops and gradually, as materials became available, we have been improving it. We put back a laundry that now covers the yurt and beermoth, insulated, refloored and plastered parts of it, put in a stove, a boiler and some heating. Then we came to the tediously repetitive bit, the outside, and this is my chance to say thank you to Harry. He and Sophie have been at Inshriach since last May. They thoroughly ingrained themselves into life round here, were a source of great entertainment and Harry has taken some properly thankless tasks and made them his own. He got an offer he couldn’t refuse from the White Cube Gallery in Hoxton and left this morning (say hello if you see him, you will recognise him from the mask and plus fours).
I dont know how many weeks it has taken for him to wire brush all the paint off the old cast gutters, rustproof, prime, undercoat and topcoat them but its been ages and they look amazing. Big tubs of traditional limewash arrived a week ago and I’m now battling to remove all the modern white paint from the whole building to put on an original Edwardian finish.
I’m not massively looking forward to going solo on the game larder, the generator shed, the dairy, the dogshed, the squash court, the garages, the workshops…
Harry – if it doesn’t work out in Shoreditch there’s always a grinder here with your name on it.
Getting out there.
I have three sets of thank yous for last week. The first is to our cousin Philip (second from left) and his 11 year old Patrick (right) for coming to stay for the first time in 30 years and giving me an excuse to down tools, pick up the phone and go out to try some of the activities available locally.
First up was G2s new zip park over on Alvie. Since they put in the brilliant zip line at the Insider I have been itching to give this a shot. They have installed 7 zip lines of increasing height, length and speed slicing to and fro over a river gorge up in the forest. You get the confidence up on the first few so by the last ones, which are seriously impressive, you can glide through the view and take it all in. It’s 25 quid for a session, suitable for all ages and I will put some pictures up when I get some so you get a better idea.
Round 2 was river tubing with Full On Adventure. I have been white water rafting with Full On John but this is a relatively new one. Its rafting for one, seated in a rubber ring, suited, booted, helmeted up and pointed off down the river. The Feshie was on the powerful side for an all ages group so we took to the Druie instead. Being in a ring you can navigate relatively shallow water, bounce yourself off the rocks (especially if you dont weigh much) and go down narrow rapids and flues. It’s obviously a lot colder and wetter and marginally riskier than the zip lines, its £39 for a session amounting to an hour and a half or so on the water and again, comes highly recommended.
The Bothy Project.
It is not every day that someone offers you a bothy, pre fab, insulated, small enough to be a temporary structure, large enough to stay in. A month ago that’s exactly what happened and so, hot on the heels of the Beermoth comes The Bothy Project. This is how the project describes itself.
‘A cross-disciplinary art project that aims to develop a network of
small-scale art residency spaces in distinct and diverse locations
around Scotland.
A platform for artists to journey and explore the peculiarities of Scotland’s history, mythology, ecology, landscape and people.
An opportunity to inhabit existing buildings and create purpose built structures’.
So last week the bothy moved from its temporary home at Edinburgh Sculpture workshops and arrived here on a truck on Saturday. Today is day 3 of the build, there is a troupe of willing bothy builders now cooking breakfast at the Beermoth and by close of play today the walls will be up, by the end of the week the building will be finished and between artist residencies it will be available to rent.
The Beer Moth has landed.
After 6 months of not hurrying the job it finally took a man called Kevin to get the Beer Moth up and running.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with it the Beer Moth is a 1956 Commer Q4, 4 ton 4×4, ex auxiliary fire service hose carrying truck. I bought it in Kent back in February with the intention of adding it to the stable of oddball holiday options put out through Canopy and Stars. I penned a few words then about our slow and woefully fuel consumptive journey home. By the Insider it had gained a taller hood frame, a back wall and a staircase, all recycled, a parquet floor which has travelled with me in rubble sacks for years, a snooker table slate for a hearth (which we put in the wrong place on our first attempt) and the major expense, a beautiful custom canvas by Classic Covers. At the same time, with lots of handy folks, the farmyard gained a Rayburn no 1, the very first model of Rayburn, current when the truck was built, about half a ton and in this case, wanting to be totally rebuilt.
Kevin had seen the yurt online and insisted on staying in the Beermoth even if it was unfinished, effectively throwing down the gauntlet with about a week to spare.
The bed (a brassy Victorian 4′ double) got new slats and a mattress, I took apart the bits of the Rayburn that would come apart, Marcus MacBean fabricated a new flue box for it and trundled his forklift down to lift it in, a new flue arrived, solar lighting went in, an enamel 50s sink, little drawers for the cutlery, a hamper, enamelled plates, enamelled jugs and enamelled mugs. By the time Kevin got here it needed a doorhandle, a coffee maker, a tin opener that opened tins and it needed towing into the field by a terrified Sophie in our hopelessly inadequate tractor (a mystery electrical fault rendering it not working).
At the same time the water main to the farm packed up so to thank Kevin for galvanising us all into action we invited him to spend the first day of his holiday digging an enormous trench across the farmyard in the rain – that’s him in blue, as seen through a very soggy phone.
Stuart and Rachel.
Big congratulations to Stuart and Rachel who had their wedding reception here last weekend, a lovely home made affair with heavy bunting, lots of hand made direction signs and they pretty much self catered it (with the help of their friends at the Mountain Cafe). They chose the traditional 30×50 marquee from Grants tent hire we used for last years Insider.
Then it was a mad rush to finish the Beer Moth for its first rental…
The racing / composting sedan chair.
With the Beer Moth slowly closing in and the extra pressure that will put on the bathroom, the time had come to equip the yurt with a compost loo. Next years Insider includes a historical Olympiad so a multi purpose heraldic racing composting long drop sedan chair made perfect sense…
It is going to get curtains front and sides but the yurt is isolated enough that you can leave them open if you fancy a poo with a view.
That is my 200th Inshriach House blog entry.
Unexpected weekends part II.
The Hebridean Celtic Music festival in Stornoway was always in the back of my mind as one to hit but the means to do so didn’t reveal themselves until it was almost too late.
Aidan O’Rourke was performing with Kan among the Saturday night headliners and he threw an invitation and a place to stay in my direction, all that remained was how to get there.
I asked Isobel of Bygone Drives if I could borrow her Morris Minor but instead she offered a Mazda MX5. It’s a 2004 plate Euphonic, meaning a 1.6 engine but with bigger wheels, leather, heated seats, a decent stereo and a few choice extras. I thought that heading to Ullapool on Friday night would keep my options open. I would pop to the Ceilidh place, catch a tune or two then find somewhere sensible to stay before the morning ferry. I hadn’t factored in the Tall Ships. Ullapool was mobbed and soaked and there was not a room in town so it was either back to Inverness or North into the unknown. It turned out God’s own country starts a few miles North of Ullapool. The hills come at you in layers and as the rain eased I peeled off along an extraordinary single track road following signs for Achiltibuie.
It’s been a while since I had a proper drive in an MX5, I have a Mk1, I cant justify running it but cant bear to part with it. This one is quieter, a bit heavier and more civilised so it feels slow at first but then you find a good road and hang onto the revs and the steering gets into its dance, it’s really poised and well damped with so little inertia you can balance its movements in all directions and don’t need to do 100 to feel like it’s flying. You can also have the roof down in a flash between downpours.
In the pub that evening the locals spoke of the road to Lochinver as being a wild one and I figured that at a push I might just do it and make the ferry. It bucks and weaves across moorland one minute, past lakes, peaks and through woods, rattling between dry stone walls and cliffs, the road all the time barely wider than the car and with odd cambers, changing surfaces, blind crests and invisible tightening bends. The MX5 is such a wriggly responsive little cart of a car it might have been made for here. I got back to Ullapool feeling like my blood had been carbonated, and missed the ferry.
That meant an unexpectedly pleasurable afternoon back at the Tall Ships. The coastguard put on a display, I explored a Danish square rigger and a couple of pubs and 500 folk gathered along Shore street for a Strip the Willow.
Then it was time for Heb Celt. Arriving in Stornoway at 9pm on the last night is hardly fully committed but I slid in, caught Kan folking up a storm, dropped in for a few minutes of KT Tunstall then headed across to the Arts Centre for Saltfishforty with Anna and Mairead, a dash more Kan, caught up with loads of friendly faces from the Insider and went on to a late (all) nighter in the Royal Hotel.
We took the 2.30 ferry back to Ullapool on Sunday afternoon (full of even more lovely people), I picked up the car and was back at Inshriach in time for tea. Next year I’m planning on taking the car over, staying for the whole festival before camping my way down through Lewis, Harrisa and Uist, probably catching the ferry back to Skye and perhaps getting home in time for tea on Thursday. I’m taking the MX5 if someone doesn’t get there first.
This rather lovely little video by Tom Pickles, appropriately and coincidentally set to music by Lau (Aidens’s other band – see all the Insider festival chat if you don’t know them) shows the Lochinver to Ullapool bit.
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