Fenced in at last

Major progress on the house with the last of the really major items now complete - the fence round the garden. This was put up by a gang of guys in just a few days - all done manually. They even rebuilt the fence round the vegetable patch and put a gate into it to save me climbing in each time - and moved it slightly to accommodate the polytunnel. We also now have a proper farm gate to hang the house name plate on. The first photo shows the sheep trying to figure out why they can no longer reach the house and the second is the gate with the newly reconstructed vegetable patch fence in the background.

With all the bills now in the total build cost is just over £200K which does not seem unreasonable to me for what we have ended up with. We have now prepared half of the patch which will be as close as we'll get to "lawn" and I hope to seed it whenever today's rain stops - yet again we've had a very dry spell, so the ground has been really hard. We can also start to plant hedging etc to make the place look a little less bare.

The past two week's have seen a gap in activities, before my golfing week and Bron's brother and sister arriving, so we've had a sort of internal holiday, doing things we've not yet got around to. First up was a trip to Jura with Pam, who was over for 10 days, partly with us and partly camping on Islay and Jura, and Roz, who came for a long weekend. The photo shows us all having lunch in the sunshine at the Jura hotel. Unfortunately the Jura House gardens were not friendly enough for dad's wheelchair, but we sat on the beach until the rain finally arrived.

Bronwen and I have done a couple of walks and a very long bike ride. One walk was along the Sound of Islay to a bothy (in photo) on a very hot but quite misty day. We could not find the return path "just behind the bothy" as the bracken was above head height. Bronwen was unlucky in that she seemed to pick up a couple of ticks - we are now expert at removing them, in fact the surgery sells a small kit for doing so. Finally a photo of Pam paddling in a frisky sea at Lossit Bay on the west coast of Islay - quite near where the experimental wave power generator is located - you may have seen if being officially connected to the grid on TV. You can see why they put it there!