TC: I guess most people, you know, in their early 30s, there’s so much hope and there’s so much optimism, and with that there’s this beautiful blend of naivety and, um, just thinking, “You know, wherever we go is gonna be okay.” The actual croft and the cottage and it had a barn and so much potential, you couldn’t have at that stage, you know, even have bought a tiny, tiny, uh, single bed studio for close to what we were putting down as our outlay, partly because it was in such poor condition, but, you know, it was 22 acres of just beautiful albeit unloved land, but there was so much potential there so really once we got to the island and found that place, you know, that decision was made pretty fast.
The first morning that we woke up there, we weren’t actually in the cottage because the cottage was still uninhabitable so, um, it was a different sort of peace waking up at first light in very early May, that beautiful early spring Hebridean gloaming light in the morning where the stars are still
out and you’ve got this lemon apricot sky and just a trace of the Milky Way passing over… beyond over the sea and all of the birds calling. And we’re lying in this very dilapidated, broken old caravan, um, which leaks so we’ve buckets there, you know, ready, ready for when the summer breaks, but fortunately the summer doesn’t break for two or three months. Um. LA: [laughs]
TC: And looking out of these, um, you know, steamed up windows, condensation, and just seeing the cottage there in this field and just thinking, “Wow. We’re here. This is, this is our life.”
LA: After the break, despite her lack of experience in farming Tamsin discovers she has a natural way with animals that’s crucial to her survival on the island. Clearly there was no coming back and it sounds just extraordinary, and you moved into something called a croft. I’m familiar with that word but I think for a lot of listeners that might seem totally foreign. What’s a croft?
TC: so a croft originally was a very small strip piece of grazing where when the islands were much more densely populated, it enabled families to have their own means of growing their own, um, food and also keeping very basic livestock, but at the… Right at the beginning, you know, never having kept livestock before, it was a prerequisite, um, mandatory to having a croft, and y- you don’t just take it. You have to actually apply for it and to be approved to take it by what was called the Crofting Commission, which is a very old, um, system that vets your application and sees if you are going to be stayers, what you’ve got to contribute and what you’ve got to offer, and why that particular piece of ground should go to you. So, um, we were, we were very fortunate. You know, we were, we were granted that permission, and so the first thing we had to do then was to go out to the local, um, auctions and markets and, um, we brought back cows, um, with calves at foot and, and having to learn how to handle those and, and, and what to do and so on. And then, and then, um, in, in one of the later sales,
