It has been a great week at Croick, blessed with a nice run of late season weather which have involved the most extraordinarily colourful sunrises. Almost every morning has brought colours which if painted would be dismissed as fancifully over-wrought. But all the pictures here are shown just as they came out of the camera, usually between 7.00 and 7.30 in the morning. It’s not hard to get up and get out when it looks like that outside.

We also had the excitement of a great display of the Northern Lights in the middle of the week. We were the happy beneficiaries of an evening power cut, otherwise we might not have realised that there was a great early evening light show going on outside.

This has also been the week when we took this year’s calves to auction. It is inevitably a rather tense day, and not just because there is quite a lot of money involved. The first task of the day is corralling all the cows, separating off the calves and then loading the calves onto transport for the trip to the auction. It is one of those occasion when the mothering instinct can take hold amongst the cows and they can become awkward. Fortunately on this occasion it all went reasonably smoothly and the cows limited themselves to circling the pen where the calves were held and voicing noisy displeasure. The calves were reluctant to load but the handling equipment we now have makes that less of an issue than it was, and one of the calves did inflict some damage when they were being unloaded. Oh, and a couple of the cows decided to pursue the vehicle transporting their calves down the strath for a while! Anyway the loading passed safely and the prices were good at the mart, so it was a satisfactory day.

And, of course, the rut is in full swing with the strath echoing to stags roaring. I’m not sure we have ever heard such a noise as we did on a couple of days last week. The wind has been unhelpful on occasion but with nice weather most days it has been a great week to be out on the hill.