I’m really getting into this blogging idea or, to be more truthful I am loving the way Wordpress can be tinkered with to produce something unique without having to use Dreamweaver or such like to set up a website. A couple of days doing said tinkering and I now have a new photoblog at www.photoblog.cankita.co.uk.
To start with I have put on a couple of dozen photographs of the West Coast of Scotland and The Outer Hebrides as that is an area I am particularly fond of. As the days (and years?) roll by I will add to these and also expand the selection to include all the other places I have photograped over the past five or so years. These are not just holiday snaps but photographs that I am proud of so it may well be worth a look. Above is a little taster of Eilean Donan Castle.
Although most of my work is landscape I do have a whole variety of subjects that I will work my way through in time so keep checking in!
One of the big problems I have is that I like neatness and order but at the same time I have wide ranging interests so I never know whether it is best to show photos with some sort of theme and move on once my stock of that subject has been uploaded or whether to just pick and choose according to fancy. I guess time will tell or maybe I might even get requests! Who knows?
I’d love to be able to add a photo a day to this new photoblog but I’m not that disciplined so I’ll upload as often as I can and try not to leave too long between. There’s a RSS feed on the bottom right side of the new blog for anyone who wants to follow the progress.
So yet another venture begins! Sometimes when writing a blog it’s difficult to find new things to say especially when one’s life is not greatly interesting at the time but with the photoblog I have five years of work to select from so I should always have something new to show.
Way back in 1976 I went for a nice bike ride with my then girlfriend starting at Wick going up to John O’Groats and then right along the North and West coasts of Scotland down to Glasgow (details of the trip can be found at www.bikeride.cankita.co.uk). Whilst cycling down the West Coast we would often glance over to the horizon in the west where some mysterious islands could be seen when the weather was fine. I knew they were The Outer Hebrides and I vowed one day that we would go there.
That ‘one day’ took almost thirty years to come about when, after many holidays in England, Scotland, Tenerife and Florida, I decided that the time had come to explore those mysterious islands. In April 2005 we hired a car, packed a couple of tents and Sandy, myself and our son, Sean, set off for a trip that would take us from the Butt of Lewis to Vatersay. After taking the ferry from Uig Bay to Tarbert we made our way to Stornoway and then on up to The Butt of Lewis where we camped for the first night. It’s a bit windy up there! We made our way down through Westside over to Uig and then down through Harris enjoying mostly good weather and then crossed to Berneray where we spent a great night beside the beach. The following day the storm came in and we saw nothing of North Uist and had to retreat to the Outdoor Centre at Lochmaddy where we had the place to ourselves for a couple of nights. We spent two days looking out of the window at the squalls across the nearby loch and ventured out only for food at the Lochmaddy Hotel - nearly losing the car door to the wind at one point! There was no way we could have camped.
After a couple of days the storm had lessened and we ventured onwards. We saw virtually nothing of North Uist and Benbecula but by the time we had reached South Uist the sun was shining again although the wind was still strong. We camped for a night near the beach at Howmore only to have the tent blow down in the middle of the night forcing us to retreat to the car for an uncomfortable night. On then down through South Uist and over to Barra and Vatersay in much better weather. We spent a couple of nights on a spit of land on Vatersay which overlooked Castlebay and watched the ferries and the Hebridean Princess come and go. On our final day we caught the ferry from Castlebay to Oban.
We had a couple of days that were truly awful, the tent had blown down and it was never easy to sleep with the wind constantly taering at the canvas but we had loved every single minute. What a superb place! We just had to come back.
It didn’t take long. Two months later, in June, Sandy and I hired a smaller car and booked a self-catering cottage in Cnip on Lewis - we had learned our lesson with the tent! Weatherwise it was a pretty poor week with every day bar one grey and drizzly and Mrs MacLennan, our host, would pop in each night and apologise for the weather. But we loved every single minute!
Back to the humdrum of every day life and Christmas 2005 came round. We did what we had done for the past ten years or so, had the family round and I cooked elaborate dinners for the whole ten days we were off. There was nothing wrong with it but something was stirring inside me. I realised that we might be doing the same thing for the rest of our lives. On New Years Day 2006 I suddenly made the decision that we would move to The Outer Hebrides. I told Sandy and she said ‘Great’. There was no need to talk any more about it but we had to plan it out. We still had a large mortgage on the house from having to re-mortgage about 10 years ago when the bank said ‘We want our money back’. There was no please about it, they would have taken the house in the blink of an eye. So we had to get the mortgage down as fast as we could as well as saving what we could to give us a start in our new life.We worked out that mid 2010 was the earliest we could make it and so the date was set. We would put the house on the market in early 2010, stick all the furniture on Ebay and then pack up our jobs at the end of July 2010. We would be in Lewis by my birthday on the 9th August.
From then on every day became simply a day to get done with and a day closer to our dream. We’ve had a few good times since 2006 but mostly every effort has been put towards reducing the mortgage and keeping the dream alive. The date is still firm although the current climate has made things much harder. Not only has the house gone down in value but Sandy works for Wedgwood (heard the news?) and interest rates mean that savings produce very little return. It’s going to be a lot tougher than we planned but whatever happens we will try our utmost to make the date and, whilst we will have far less money than we had hoped, we would rather be poor in the Outer Hebrides than well off where we are now.
So, you see, the counter is our lifeline, our spur to a better future. It’s now been 3 years and 13 days since we made the decision to move to The Hebrides and we hope to be there in 1 year 6 months and 23 days. Each day it seems like an eternity until it happens but when I look at the counter I can see that there is now much more behind us than there is to go.
When we were in (on?) Lewis in June 2005 we took a look at some of the houses that were for sale and one we particularly liked the look of was this one at Skigersta (typical Hebridean weather!).
It was on the market at the time for offers over £75,000 and sold four months later for £80,000. Now, a fraction over 3 years later, it’s back on the market at an astonishing ‘offers over £135,000′!
If we accept what’s being fed to us that house prices have dropped by 15% in the past year that means that the asking price of this particular house doubled in just two years. It’s not as though it was a wreck that has been done up because it was in ‘walk in’ condition when we saw it in 2005. That’s simply ridiculous and does nobody on Lewis any good except, maybe, the person who bought it. Even then, if they were local they will hardly benefit because they are going to have to pay a ridiculously inflated price for whatever they move into. On the other hand if it was bought by someone off-island as a speculative investment they have, indeed, made a healthy profit (assuming it sells). They probably don’t give a stuff about making it impossible for native islanders to buy a house of their own. It’s just money, money, money!
A few months earlier we were staying in a self-catering cottage in Cnip (actually one half of a house). The lady who owned it (who had lived there since she was married and whose husband’s family had farmed the croft since the 1850’s) was bemoaning the fact that another house in the township (of which there are only 15 houses) had recently been sold for £115,000, a sum that had most local people amazed and saddened. She felt (rightly) that such figures would drive away the youth of the area who could never afford a house at that price. In the event the sale fell through but the house was sold a few months later for £138,000! Within six weeks it had been given a lick of white paint and was put back on the market at £200,000. That’s disgraceful. I am sure that it must have been bought by an off-island speculator who knew nothing and cared nothing about the local people. Luckily it seems that it did not sell and whoever bought it still owns it. They were probably hanging on waiting for the next house price explosion. Serves them right! I hope they lose money.
In my opinion houses should be bought and sold for someone to live in, not as investments or money-grabbing opportunities. That’s part of the reason why so many folk are in dire straits now. I don’t feel at all sorry for those who have lost out in their attempts to make money but I do care about young people and locals who will now probably never be able to buy a house of their own.
If you want to check how the prices have risen in your area a good site for Scotland and the Islands is nethouseprices. You just need to enter a postcode and you will get (actual) local sales prices for the past couple of years.
One of the ways I liked to keep in touch with how things were in The Outer Hebrides was by reading various blogs from folks living there which were published on the BBC’s Island Blogging website. There were all sorts of blogs there and it was especially interesting to read about people who had done what we will be doing soon and moved up there to begin a new life. It has been interesting following people renovate old croft houses, build extensions and generally settle down in their new lives.
A few weeks ago the news came that the BBC were to shut down the site early in 2009 (is it just a coincidence that they will be shutting it down at about the same time they have to start paying Jonathon Ross again?) and I was hugely disappointed that a sort of lifeline to the Hebridean Dream would be lost. I started to put together plans to set up a WordPress Multi User blog with my exisiting webhost so that the site could carry on but someone beat me to it. So now there is a new Island Blogging site at www.island-blogging.co.uk. It’s still in its infancy and some of the setup is not what I would have done but we must all give it a chance to grow and hope that it becomes as slick and polished and interesting as I know it can be. Since I have no influence in the running of the site I am trying to help out by writing a ‘tutorial blog’ so that anyone who signs up can find out how to get the best from the site and add add extra interest to their blogging experience.
It should be fun watching the site grow and seeing what it might turn into. Who knows what direction it might take? One thing for sure is that Island Blogging is here to stay for if the new site doesn’t last (and I am sure it will) then I am happy to pick up the reigns. By then I will be a true Island Blogger myself!
No sea view but I guess we could cope
