We have lived at The Lint Mill since October 1st 2009. We have been learning to live sustainably, to learn from our land and to listen to the wisdom that sits in this place, our home, our landscape.
Lately, there have been some strange sounds around The Lint Mill, terrifying demonic screeching sounds like this! At the very least we thought it was one of our goat kids being attacked by a predator. The sounds weren’t confined to night-time, we heard them mostly at dusk and we couldn’t connect the sounds with an […]
It’s at this time of year that I start to wander round the cottage garden looking for signs of which border perennials have survived the winter. I dust off my shaky Latin and begin my little memory game of intoning the botanical plant names, ‘Lysimachia, Filipendula, Alchemilla Mollis, Aconitum, Cephalaria Gigantium, Digitalis’, and so on. Every […]
We keep three breeds of goat at The Lint Mill but only two of the breeds are milked to make our soap. The Bagots are a very rare breed that we keep to contribute to its survival. The prefix (family breeding name) for the goats we breed is Medwyn (after the river that boundaries our […]
I have become a bit of a soil geek and I have been doing a lot of watching grass grow! Do you know that in the places where the thatch is dense, the soil keeps its temperature and the grass continues to grow, even in our Scottish winter! But why is this interesting you might […]
If you have visited our website recently, the eagle eyed among you will have spotted a new item on our menu. Labelled ‘Learn‘, it’s a drop down menu that is designed to enable you to see at a glance all the opportunities we offer to enable you to come and learn something new in the […]
A snowy Lint Mill began 2022, as we published our first monthly newsletter. We hoped it would be a great way to share our lives at The Lint Mill with our followers more regularly. Each month The Lint Mill Newsletter contains the following enticing content: The most interesting news of the month (it’s often tricky […]
I wrote this entry just after the clocks had just gone back and we were well into the shortening days of autumn. It offers a useful context for the entries I am currently working on following my time at Racy Ghyll Farm. Late October 2021 The mood on the smallholding changes at this time of […]
Earlier this year we bought Herbert the Herdwick tup from our friends in Lockerbie who breed lovely Herdwick sheep. We planned for Herbert to be what is known as a ‘terminal sire’. In other words, his progeny would not be used for breeding themselves, so he represents the end of the breeding line. We wanted […]
Our Bagot keeping adventure is 3 years old today! On 18 August 2018 we went to the rare breed sale at Lanark. We were just going to ‘look’, to see what they had for sale and to meet other breeders and rare breed enthusiasts. We enjoyed looking round and chatting with people we tend only […]
This year has been dominated by Covid-19 for all of us. I’m fairly sure that I never imagined writing a blog in the middle of a global pandemic. Now, after months of uncertainty, it seems we are facing a winter of continued disquiet. One thing however, has felt certain for me; that it has never […]