It’s gotta be a first

Considering how nice the day was I did not actually start any serious work until well after lunch, much of which can be attributed to a wee silver car that should by now be in Inverness. I really should have just dismantled wifey’s ex pride and joy long ago and posted it’s various parts far and wide across the land via ebay and the royal mail 🙂 I’m sure I read about the pharaohs of ancient Egypt doing this sort of thing with the various body parts of their enemies though I don’t suppose they sold the bits or used royal mail. The plan for the day was to fence a bit of the croft off that is treacherous,  especially  in winter due to the deep drainage ditches that run through it, pigs and drainage ditches don’t mix as they are constantly pushing sods into them with that plough of a snout they have and if they inadvertently end up in one they are not very nimble, so can be tricky to remove ( I speak from experience ). Before that however I had to take my boy to school in the Land Rover  as the Astra I bought as a temporary steed for the swineherd is now uninsured as we transfered the insurance back onto the Daihatsu yesterday in anticipation of it’s return to Raasay under it’s own steam. Still at least I could do some guerrilla quarrying on the way back 🙂 With that done and the contents of the trailer spread over the road in front of the house I phoned the secret Daihatsu dealer in Inverness I say secret because when I looked on the Daihatsu website a couple of weeks ago for Scottish dealers it said the nearest one was in Peterhead! However I’m assured that Kens garage in Inverness are dealers and I phoned them last week just to check, sure enough they are, in fact not only are they Daihatsu dealers but so are Dicksons!!!!! However when I phoned them on my return from the school they told me that as it was probably an immobilizer fault and they’d need all 3 keys. Of course this being Raasay the post office is 10 miles away and closes at 12:00, the mail has already gone  tomorrow is Saturday, so if I want to gaurantee delivery to Inverness for Monday I must drive back down the south end right away before it closes! Still at least I could do some guerrilla quarrying on the way back 🙂

A squadron of Heinkels and one Meschersmit

With all the excitement of the last few days I’d quite forgotten that http://www.scottishmicrocarclub.co.uk/index.asp were coming to Raasay today and after first visiting Raasay primary school were then going to take a trip down ‘Calum’s road’. On the way back down to the village to post the keys I phoned the Loch Striven to see if they’d arrived.

Heinkel's away

Not only had they arrived but Angus Maclean the skipper had taken some pictures and said I could use them on here, cheers mate! As it was now 11:45 and the swarm of wee cars had arrived an hour previously I figured they’d be well on their way to Arnish by now so we headed north in hot pursuit. Hot referring to the temperature of the engine of my 23 year old Land Rover towing a trailer load of rock up 1 in 4 hills rather than any reference to speed. Just after the half way mark we spotted a stray but he was heading the wrong way!

Wolf in sheeps clothing

This one however is not all it seems, for lurking underneath at the rear is a Kawasaki 650cc motorcycle engine and gearbox, problem is motorbikes don’t have a reverse gear, still it’s easy enough to push! Fortunately we managed to reach ‘The end of the road’ before the rest of the squadron departed

Meschersmit

Heinkel

Trojan

NSU on the left and a Trojan on the right, I think the Trojan is just a re badged Heinkel ( probably someone at Heinkel realised that they weren’t selling very well only 15 years after the blitz so re named them )

50 years and still going strong

This beauty a 1959 NSU was the oldest and I Think it had travelled the furthest, possibly from Brighton but certainly from the midlands and I’m really sorry if I’ve got any of the info wrong chaps but I’ve a memory like a hen!

The ‘stuck pig’

By the time we’d finished admiring the hardware and had lunch the sun was well past the yard arm and I set about my fence which due to the heat went surprisingly well. Firstly all the pigs were, initially at least just to busy sun bathing to hassle me

Tammy's & Spotties

You should not really mix pigs of different ages and sizes but we’ve found (as you can see) that if they have plenty of room to roam about they get on fine. We kept these two groups apart fore a couple of weeks but they’re so much happier as a gang! The Tamworths probably do get a little more feed than the spotties but pretty soon they’ll be off to http://www.lochalshbutchers.com/ soon so the wee ones will soon catch up. The Tammy’s and Spotties were the other side of the fence

Dinner time

so even when they did finally awake they could not hassel me

Never use a bucket

Jamie Lee and Bramble however were in the same field and I’d made the fatal mistake of using a bucket to carry my tools in so once the pigs had finished sun bathing they started looking for dinner.

Stuck pig!

I took said bucket and deposited it over the fence out of harms way and went back to stretching my top wire. A curious noise caught my attention and when I looked around, to my horror the heavily pregnant Bramble was stuck in the ditch I was fencing off!

Bramble in a ditch 17/04/09

Using a heavy plank of wood with a mop bucket underneath I made a ramp for her to walk up but she was having none of it. I tried pushing but that was like pushing a grunting brick wall then I went for some feed and sure enough she was out like a shot. One thing about pigs, they do love their grub!