TALES FROM THE FAR NORTH: GETTING READY FOR WINTER IN THE HIGHLANDS

Welcome to my fourth Tales from The Far North.

It’s been very busy since my last column back in September about my life as a fencing contractor and crofter here in a slightly colder but nonetheless stunning and picturesque Sutherland in the far north of Scotland.

As the nights draw in and the mornings are darker, it’s a case of adding the head torches into the daily essentials along with the piece bag, coffee flask and truck keys. It really is a time of year where I have to get used to driving to and from work in the dark, a tall order on our single-track roads!

In order to make the most of the shorter days I have been getting to the yard in the dark and loading the truck and trailer depending on what’s needed for what job etc and then using the early daylight for a quick but thorough check of the sheep and ponies before heading to the fence line.

In terms of working locations I have been all over with jobs in Lairg, Tain (home of the famous Glenmorangie distillery) and Rogart as well as a few site visits in Caithness on the far northwest coast) and I’ve been as far west as Kylesku, home of the iconic and remote, sweeping Kylesku bridge (used in many car adverts). Those site visits represent jobs for next year’s diary with the order books basically filled up until August 2025 at the time of writing. That’s not a bad place to be!

The recent jobs in the areas mentioned include a good spec stock fence with creo timber and Tornado wire and one was just shy of 340m.

Then it was onto 140m of post and rail and 80m of stock fencing for the same client before moving onto a 610m deer fence with a split net spec and finished with rabbit netting pinned with 4mm mild steel wire to keep the rabbits at bay until the grass grows where it will naturally hold the netting down.

This was a good fence to build and with the materials carted in using my small Kubota tracked dumper. The build itself was done by hand, making me glad I had a tracked chapper (even if it was sitting at home in the yard due to the ground conditions and fancy lawn that ran adjacent with the fence line).

On the crofting side it is fairly quiet at the moment. We have started feeding some of the sheep and teaching the young stock to eat the pellets for when the weather turns and the ground is covered with snow. They need to keep their strength up.

I’m hearing mixed reports of how bad a winter is predicted but we will take it one day at a time and see what the outcome is.

On another rather serious farming-related topic I was shocked by the recent Budget announcement. The weather, it seems, will be the least of the worries for a lot of farming families out there.

These will be tough and uncertain times for sure and it’s more important, now more than ever, that we look out for one another and have each other’s backs going forward.

Have a great Christmas and New Year regardless and I look forward to updating you all in February!

Best wishes,
Mark
M Fence Scotland

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