Letters from Mull: May 2017

Cows in Killoran House Car Park

Opened for Guests

Well we got there in the end and opened for Guests on 5th May. We had been up here 4 weeks and we only just made it. There was such as lot to do in terms of the Guests’ Rooms and the Guests’ Lounge and the Restuarant and the Drinks and the Food and the in room service and the cleaning and ARRGGGH! We know how to work hard but goodness me. We only just made it.

We had some visitors too just prior to opening. Just wandered up the drive, hung for a day or so, ate everything in site, wondered who the wierdo was taking photos and then just up and left in the middle of the night, back to whence they came.

Killoran House Garden Seating 03

Warm and Dry

Mull certainly isn’t a place you come for a tan. It’s beauty comes at a price and that price is it’s geographical location and it’s weather. So just to utterly confuse us new Mullochs it was wall to wall blue sky and sunshine for most of May with a serious (see next bit) concern for the lack of water. It was glorious.

Plant pots were bone dry, everywhere was dusty, grass was turning brown, boggy ground had gone hard and we hardly used our Wellies. Super!

Water Shortage

Looking after and maintaining one’s own water supply can be tricky, especially when you have just moved from a place where water is of little or no relevance. If you are connected to the water mains in the UK today you are lucky to have one of the best qaulity and most secure water supplies in the world. Yet becuase of this it is often taken for granted.

Well not by me anymore.

Our water comes from a spring. It is taken from the spring and syphoned into a reservoir tank, and then as required to keep our header tank full, it is pumped into the header tank. This is then gravity fed into the house where it is filtered and steralised. The water is top notch.

The problem arises when, being new to the situation, ones does not equate the lack of rain fall with a drop in spring level which resulted at one point in us having only 1000 litres of water for 12 people. Just enough for 24 hours.

It turns out that if you have your own water supply, for which you are solely responsible, if it runs dry you are buggered. There is no help to be had. Believe my I tried.

Never the less I was able to re-instate the syphoning into the reservoir and all has been well (no punn intended!) since.

Lesson learned.

White Tailed Eagle

The White Tailed Eagles are the headline act for Mull’s Wildlife. They are the largest bird of prey in the UK, and they are nesting not far from us this year.

I am not a birder and know nothing about them, but I know when to get excited, and I know when on a beautiful day in May, and I am sitting out the front of my house pondering the meaning of life, and he (that’s what we’ve called it becuase we do not know – nice change from she) comes to soar around my house, and the front of my house, and give me the display of a lifetime, that I should not look a gift horse in the mouth so I took a few thousand photos. The best are below. I have zoomed in on two just so you can see how beautiful they are.

White Tailed Eagle at Killoran House May 2017 (01) White Tailed Eagle at Killoran House May 2017 (02) White Tailed Eagle at Killoran House May 2017 (03) - Zoomed White Tailed Eagle at Killoran House May 2017 (04) - Zoomed

I feel so lucky to have seen such a majestic site. It makes me ache with wonder at the beauty and mystery of nature.

‘Till next time.

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