No sooner had we waved goodbye to Brian amid some cold and windy weather than the next day ( Friday the 13th! ) the wind dropped to zero the sky cleared and the sun came out!

It was one of the most beautiful days I have known. Dave Major and Ben his son were working on the chimney and Anna and I thought it would be a great time to explore the ‘grounds’.

For those of you who don’t know, our land here is about an acre and is a long strip that borders a burn ( stream if you are south of Hadrian’s Wall ) and runs down to Stenness Loch ( no translation provided for that ! ). Beyond our back lawn is the grain store, an old derelict remainder of the old Mill which we have plans for, and beyond that the land drops a bit and goes down to the waterside.

Now we have never fully explored this part of the property, as when we were buying the place the vegetation was chest height. During the winter this has all died down but we had always considered it too soggy underfoot.

Even though we have had more than our fair share of rain recently we decided to give it a go and see how far we could get. Well, we manged to get right down to the waterside! True we disturbed several flocks of geese, oyster catchers, curlew and various gulls as none of them are used to humans being down that far. The ground although obviously boggy underneath, was dry to walk on because of all the layers of reeds that were lying on top. We walked slowly and picked our way and at the end we were treated to a magnificent view across a loch that was so calm it was like a mirror! ( See photos ) It was amazing and we both stood there in silence just admiring the view. At this point Anna had a little cry, she was so taken with the beauty of the day and the view. Me, I carried on with my manly investigations of the coastline of our land and found the floor of a small submerged boat that someone had previously used.

We strolled back our heads full of the things we will do with this part of the property, I then headed indoors to start to paint the new fireplace as Dave had assigned me this job to do over the weekend ready for installation of the burner next week.