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The Firewood Festival
The Firewood festival deserves a little explaining.
The Insider proper and its line up starts on Friday but we are sharing some of the infrastructure with the National Park to organise a Festival of Firewood, woodworking and renewable energy. Its a free public day with talks, demonstrations, some yurts, good food and a few tunes. We will have schools in until 3 doing mask making, storytelling and friction firelighting so unless you are 12 or part of our crew we ask that you don’t arrive until 4, after which those activities will continue but you can try your hand at pole lathing, woodworking and splitting and we will have some serious and some irreverent solutions to heating with wood, plus Ord Ban will be cooking on wood, Henry from the Woodland Orchestra will be conjuring up some rhythms and Bruce Luckhurst (who makes amazing stoves) is doing a fireshow. Its a good cause. And perhaps the electric car will offset my belching Land Rover a little.
If you hold an Insider ticket you are welcome to camp Thursday night but we are required to close the bar at 10pm in accordance with our license. You can stay up late on Friday.
Pretty in tents.
Last week was a rollercoaster for the yurt and a learning experience for myself. We had about 5 minutes of deceptively decent weather during which Helen Abraham got some lovely photos and they went into this article in the Guardian. It was a bit of a hurried mocking up for the photos and despite looking lovely the yurt was by no means finished, no door latches, not even put up very straight, and despite a late night (maybe Thursday) of bashing in fence posts and roping down the crown, it was not very cleverly pinned down.
Throughout the second and third day the snow came. By day four it was drifting 2 feet deep in the gateways and up the back of the yurt. Friday and Saturday the weather gave us a vital break (see below) but on Sunday the wind came whipping along the valley, squeezing the yurt out of shape and knocking off a door. Yesterday the wind picked up some more and when I went last night the whole structure had slipped its moorings and jumped back on its platform, scattering crockery and Victoriana and leaving me battling in the wind and encroaching darkness to dismantle the whole thing.
There was no damage to anything but its dignity but by the time it actually opens I’m going to tie it down using every single eyelet, stake and fencepost I can find…
While this was going on we also had a party on. Against the odds we put up a 60 foot marquee and on Saturday night it was fully lit and dressed and catered and floored and staged and contained 120 people (of which more later).
Despite the storms we not only got the yurt in the papers (good PR, even if this honest little write up probably negates some of that) but cleared enough snow to get the marquee up and despite one more major casualty (our catering tent ended up getting mangled) I think we got away with it.
I apologise for the pun but I know some people who will appreciate it.
The Yurt.
Very exciting news from the front, the yurt is complete and has taken up residence in the woods. It is a tardis of a thing, being very tall and shaped like a Christmas cake it looks small from the outside but once inside it is spacious and domed and airy. We scratched together a Victorian double bed, a wood burning stove, a little mahogany table and all the other furniture so that Helen Abraham could take some photos for a possible press scoop next weekend. I just need to cut a hole for the chimney, put some slats in the bed and caulk the gaps between the boards and it will be a cosy woodland getaway (outdoorsy couples preferred) or alternatively I can move the contents for more managerial encounters.
You can see photos from conception to completion on the the Inshriach Flickr page. Many thanks to Paul from Red Kite Yurts for running the courses last year and for being such a good sport. Most of his yurts, including a spectacular 36 footer (this is a fraction under 16) will be along for the Insider, of which more later, and we intend to run some more yurt building courses this year so if you are interested get in touch.
Once we get this finished, other than a few bookings I already have through the house or for the festival, it will be in the capable hands of Alastair Sawdays new operation, Canopys and Stars, who will handle our publicity and bookings.
Tom’s Stag.
We wouldnt normally take stag parties at Inshriach but this weekend was for our good friend Tom and we were assured that we would have 17, ahem, impeccably behaved gents coming to stay. Bar a generous measure of Balvenie and a fridge full of food we didn’t over plan, on Friday walking the 4 hours from Inshriach to Aviemore via the Inshriach Bothy, Loch an Eilean, tea, cakes and gin at Ord Ban and onto dinner at the Old Bridge.
Saturday we were picked up by John from Full on Adventure and taken white water rafting on the Findhorn which was high and hairy and swollen with meltwater. Then in the evening Allan from One Pot Borrowed once again excelled himself by coming round and cooking our bedraggled and slightly whisky tarnished party another exceptional meal in the house.
All in lovely weekend and a privilege to have hosted it, congratulations Tommy, see you at the wedding.
Centurion.
This time last year I was working on Neil Marshall’s Roman epic ‘Centurion’ which was being filmed all over the Spey Valley, Rothiemurchus, Glen Feshie and up to the Falls at Foyers. This trailer has just been released which makes holidaying in these parts in February a very tempting prospect.
Hopefully they will show this in the newly reopened and very smart Spey Valley Cinema in Aviemore.
Yurty Old Man.
Going on 6 months from the first Red Kite Yurts course at Inshriach the yurt is finally covered. It has a Victorian bed in it (just in need of restoring), from which you can see the stars through the crown. It has a wood burner made from old gas bottles, a door from old floorboards and a floor from old scaffold planks still to be polished up. The olive walls and the bothy furniture give it a real campaign feel. Within the month it will be in the woods and ready to rent out.
Thank you very much to everyone involved, especially Paul, Lucy and Nitsen for knowing what they were doing and Ian and Laura for coming all this way to get it moving. An honourable mention has to go to Dan for securing me a new web address;
www.yurtyoldman.com.
Fire by friction.
Malcolm Handoll from 5 senses in Orkney came down last weekend and ran a one day course on making fire by friction, a method used since the stone age. We had a forage in the woods for birch bark and bracken, made some bows and nests of (pretty damp) grass and dry thistle and then sawed away until we had made a tiny ember to then coax into flames. It was a simple yet strangely satisfying day and with luck the workshops at Inshriach will be pressed into service for this and other bushcrafty activities through 2010.
ICA award for the Insider.
The Insider, the music festival we run at Inshriach, has been nominated in the best live music event category at the ICA awards. If we win we promise to drink lots of champagne and make a very silly acceptance speech (hopefully it is that kind of party) so please vote for us here.
To whet your appetite here is the facebook page for Insider 2010 – a full website is in the pipeline.
The other Thing.
Petal (the mean looking grey Landrover which is our closest approximation to an estate vehicle) has not featured in these pages for some time, her summer of filming and adventure curtailed by steadily deteriorating health. Eventually it was the gearbox that let go, a crunch, a grind and a bang during a futile attempt to tow out a snowbound neighbour left Petal stranded in a ditch, apparently for the winter. Despite it being well into the minuses last week and Mr Light snr being on holiday he insisted on donning the overalls and getting stuck straight into an engine swap. Now I have just details to sort out before Petal rides again. Mr Light I salute you.
The Thing.
THE [NEAR] THING from danlight on Vimeo.
The Inshriach House / Light family Swede is showing the signs of becoming a fine tradition, having now happened twice (see last years Lord of the Rings). This year the Sound of Music was ruled out because of a heavy dump of snow so John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ got the treatment even though it will be 10 years before any of the cast are old enough to know what was going on.
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