Seeing as I had been hanging out with the Dirty Weekenders for two years but employment had kept me off every previous bothy I thought it time to pack in the job and have a good time instead. Plus it would be the last bothy John and Rosie were organising, so it was set to be a blast.
We drove out the luxurious accommodation of ‘Combruith’ a huge hostel in the nearby Comrie village, we had the run of the whole place to ourselves and quickly got into the taxing task of picking rooms, mainly based on which was named after your favourite woodland animal. John and Rosie made us some delicious linguini (far superior to it round cousin, spaghetti). Morna, on a search for anything sweet orchestrated the baking of a great apple crumble with backup from Lizzie.
We went to bed well filled ready for a big day of work. Breakfast was the biggest pan of porridge I have ever seen in my life, with toast for the fussy. We set off to visit Sam for our first day of work, prepared for the worst wrapped up in waterproofs.
Sam’s Croft is a huge, very steep field, which they are in the process of converting into a (hopefully) profitable business. The tasks of the day were path construction (mainly pushing barrows of hardcore), plant bed construction (pushing barrows of horse muck) or tree planting (pushing barrows of woodchip). But we conquered it in typical Dirties fashion with Maximum Effort. There was the fun of an engine powered tractor that a couple of us got to drive about (and maybe have the odd race in).
We needn’t have worried about the weather as it brightened up beautifully and we lazed about over lunch in the sunshine. After work some folks decided to walk home and took a stroll through the forest, where we found a lovely waterfall, of which some of us decided to climb up.
We came home to a delicious vegetable stew and the most epic game of sardines with 13 people in a cupboard or 14 jammed in a full storage room with the lights off. It quickly escalated into deception and subterfuge, with me, your poor narrator searching hopelessly on his own.
The second day of work was slower, mainly due to the weather, we still managed to get two rows of apple trees planted on the campsite nearby and another plant bed constructed through the rain, because We Are Heroes. Our hosts provided a delicious soup to bolster our sandwichy lunch but we soon had to get going (most of us had run out of energy) and we got back in the bus for a swift drive home.
Many thanks to John, Rosie and all those that helped out. It was a great weekend.
