We had a fantastic day on Saturday at the Strathardle Gathering, that was the first time we'd been. Lots of sheep and cattle to look at, all very impressive! There were Highland Games on in the morning as well as the Highland Dancing competition. Our little friend Catriona was dancing, she won 6 medals, 3 firsts, 2 seconds and a third, as well as the overall cup winner for her group - well done Catriona!
Lots of money was spent trying to win a gold fish, both Catriona and I won one each! So far both are still alive although Catrionas has already jumped out of it's bowl once!!

The men spent most of the afternoon in the beer tent while us girls (myself, Christine, Suzie and Catriona) had fun taking part in the musical cars. You have to drive around the main ring and when the music stops the passenger has to run into the centre of the ring and grab a flag. Lots of cheating goes on, we didn't do too well as we got caught on the corner, we'll just have to do better next year!

After a few beers in the pub after the show, we managed to drag them men home to enjoy a great night up at our neighbours, John and
Christines farm. We all enjoyed a game of the
"cornflake box game"! You have to pick up the

cereal box with your teeth without your hands
touching the floor! Not the easiest, there were some very sore legs by the end of the game, as usual there was a reasonable amount of competitiveness between us all, determined to get that last slither off the floor! The remaining three were Catriona, Steve and myself, Catriona being the only one who actually managed to pick it up with her teeth, although I did manage to lick the floor! By 3am Gregg was asleep on the kitchen floor so we decided it was time to go home! All in all it was a fabulous day enjoyed by all!

Adventures in the country.........

We had a fun but windy time last weekend camping in Glen Clova with family and friends. On arrival we discovered that our campsite was half way up a hill to meet up with the others, so we carted all of our gear up the hill and decided on a spot to pitch the tent, when Chrissie the dog decided to do a big poo right in the middle of it!!! We also hadn't quite realised how big our tent was, but with the help of everyone we managed to get it pitched in the increasing wind! We had a super tea cooked on the open fire and BBQ, we even managed steam pudding with custard for pudding (thank you Claire)!!!! After a very competitive game of trivial pursuit in the Taj Mahal tent ( ours!!) we decided that at 2am we'd better all get off to bed. The wind had seriously picked up and as you can see from the photo above our tent had to be anchored down with stones!!!! By 6am one of our tent poles had snapped and the tent was more or less blowing away! Gregg decided to go out and try being a human tent peg but decided it wasn't really a job he fancied while I had another couple of hours zedz! Luckily the rain stayed off and we managed to get the tent down and all our gear back down the hill! We were back home and in bed by 9am!! The tent had seriously suffered though, by the time we took it down another pole has snapped and part of it had ripped!!! The joys of camping on a hillside in Scotland!! We did round the adventure off with a nice BBQ'd breakfast later on in the morning at our place when the rest of the troops had given in and packed up camp too!

Reekie Linn

We had our good friend Ivan up visiting for a couple of days this week, enjoying some peace and quite in the sticks away from the rat race of down south! I took him for a drive up through Glen Shee, absolutely gorgeous at this time of year. We stopped off in the Spittal hotel for some homemade soup and bread - scrumptious, I would highly recommend it! After spending Wednesday night consuming far too much cider and champagne we decided to blow the cobwebs away with a good walk along at Reekie Linn, the highest water fall in Scotland, it's only 5 minutes from our house. The water fall is amazing, even at this time of year when the rivers are really low, the falls are still huge. We were determined to get down to the base of the waterfall but couldn't find any safe paths so we'll need to pick our neighbours brains as there must be some way of getting down without having to abseil over the edge of the cliff side!!!

Pittenweem Arts Festival

On Saturday we went down to Pittenweem Arts Festival located in the East Neuk in Fife. Previously we've gone for the weekend but this year we only went for the day. It was an absolutely baking hot day, lovely for wandering around the village. Each of the artists exhibitions are in houses or gardens of the residents of the village, some of the artists being residents and others visiting artists. It's a lovely informal way of meeting the artists and a great way to have a nosy in the houses, some of which are absolutely amazing. There is a painting competition for amateurs on the Saturday morning, you can see from the photo, there are lots of artists dotted along the sea wall (photo from last year). We were a bit disappointed in the number of artists and venues this year, previously there have been over 100 but this year there were only 80 venues. It would also be nice to see some more textiles, ceramics and other 3D art. We were delighted to see a new exhibitor this year whose work included rope knots ranging from tiny little ones to huge ones - these would look superb dotted around the garden. I bought a rather cool rope knot pot with an alpine planted in it. Last year we made a weekend of it and stayed in the most wonderful B&B, Troustrie House in Crail, I would highly recommend it. http://www.troustrie.co.uk/

Happy hens

Our two new hens, the light sussex ladies seem to be settling in well, we let them all out of the run today to free roam around the garden. They found their way onto the well rotted manure heap at the side of the garden, they looked like they were having a great time! They've also continued to lay, very pale eggs compared to the dark brown eggs we get from the welsummers and marans. We have one welsummer in the "sin bin" to try and get her to stop being broody! And one of our little broody marans is sitting on a clutch of five eggs so fingers crossed around the 20th of August we should here the "cheap cheap" sound of little chicks!