Red River Croft
Red River Croft is our home. It is an agricultural smallholding of 11 acres that sits on the western coast of Ross-shire in the North West Highlands of Scotland. After more than forty years of visits to the area, to climb in the hills and holiday with our family, Rob and I gave up our full-time jobs to move here and to take on a croft.
Crofts are small parcels of land, their boundaries determined by estate owners during and following the Clearances – the forced evictions of tenant farmers by the landowners which took place from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. They can be found across the Highlands and Islands and form one of the most iconic of landscape types, that of fields of grasses and wildflowers. Often populated by a rare diversity of wildlife, they lie surrounded by the more familiar Highland scenery of rugged coasts and beaches, lochs and rivers, peat bogs and moorlands, and Scotland’s greatest mountain ranges.
Red River Croft is managed for conservation purposes, to protect the land for its wildlife and natural habitats. Unlike most crofts in the area, Red River Croft hosts a complex collection of different habitat types; from wildflower and grass meadows, to peat bog and scrub. As we learned about our new home, our croft-work has evolved to manage about five acres for traditional hay, with the remainder given over to wet meadow, peat bog, riparian habitats, and our new area of native trees.
Over the decade we've been here, we've seen salmon and corncrake return, otters make their home, and the rare creamy-white lesser butterfly orchid spread so widely that its scent, like sweet vanilla essence, now drifts across the croft in early summer. The pasture lies largely ungrazed and each year provides hay for the livestock of neighbouring crofts. This helps to continue a tradition that has barely changed since settlers first made this place their home centuries ago.
As a physical geographer, I studied coastal landscapes, peat bogs and mountains. With a young family of four, I had spent many hours as a storyteller, a craft passed down to me by my own story-weaving mother. When we began our crofting life, our children grown and living across the world, I began to keep a written and photographic diary to record what we saw, learned and came to love in this place; sharing our new life with them and our grandchildren. But these notes and photographs soon became an online blog, which in time developed into an archive of story about place, change and nature.
Over a decade, the Red River Croft blog became the beating heart of my writing life and the inspiration for words and images, drawings, and photographs. It is where the threads of my life finally met: place and landscape, environment and time, all bound tightly together by family. As I grew to love the croft as well as the wider, wilder landscapes of coast and mountain, I began to write essays for publication, and gradually these notes, paragraphs and essays became my book, Windswept.
