The English half-term holidays brought some wee people to Riskinhope Farm. While closing a window one evening I saw two little girls in wellingtons, white cotton night dresses and cardigans walking with their mother along the hummocky banks of the burn.
The lambs and ewes fled in different directions. So I brought Redhorn, our last pet lamb, over to them.
At the weekend they came through the small gate at the side of our cottage thinking that they were back at the house. They ate pancakes and jam
, boiled eggs, drank apple juice and chattered to themselves, blissfully proud of their small adventure.
They looked through a box of bangles as I changed the sheets on the bed.
Then in the sun and the breeze we hung out washing which billowed about our hair. As I tidied the house, Mia and Sasha sat in their 'boat' between the towels and sheets, on carpet ends and a circular mat for the steering wheel.
A few days later I was standing at the washing line in the sun and the wind with my nieces and my sister.
We walked the dogs down to the loch which made Jessie slightly apprehensive, but Rosie told the lady at Robert Smails Print Works that she had been out 'training' the dogs.
My sister and I exchanged a smile. That evening after a roast chicken dinner we walked up to the 'secret wood'. I had promised the girls that we would go there in the dark to look for fairies. I lost count of how many fairy doors we found around the bases of these old trees.
The next morning none of the three sleepy heads wanted to walk the dogs first thing. Jessie had fallen asleep listening to fairy stories which she had asked me, with droopy eyelids, to make up for her.
Today was a perfect day for visiting the 'willow wood'. At the edge of the wood a mallard duck with a hoard of ducklings took flight from her shelter in the reeds, we watched them swim across the fine ripples of the loch framed by the silhouettes of birch and willow.
Light flickered on and off as we made our way through the naturally-spaced shrubs and trees; eventually iris, meadow sweet and sedges were brushing past our legs as we walked through the open marsh towards the burn. We took our picnic to the loch side, while we ate a goosander waited in the silent heat as her brood was surfing back and forth on the shallow water that was moving over the fluvial fan where the Little Yarrow flows into Loch o' the Lowes.
Oyster catchers congregated on the fluvial fan at the end of Riskinhope Burn. I could see in my sister's eyes, as she turned her face to their call, a memory of childhood on the Isle of Arran – long summer days on the hills, canoeing in the bay, reading on the warm sands at Duke's Beach.
A few weeks later I walked along the loch to look at the butterwort and marsh valerian. However, I noted a few places where there were the remnants of a kill, small spray of fine brown and white feathers with faeces in the middle. I imagine that possibly some of the ducklings that we had seen playing in the sun were taken by otter or mink.
