The ScottishLaird.com project was always going to evolve, building upon the basic idea and ensuring that year-on-year our offering develops such that all our Lairds and Ladies continue to enjoy our increasingly successful project. The next stage in the evolution is a new presentation pack folder. We’ve spent the last couple of months designing it and researching the copy, and we can now offer it to existing lairds and ladies.
We’ve just been working on some maps for another project, and found to our delight that Google have finally uploaded new sat images of Dunans. Looking at the image this must have been taken sometime in late summer 2005 – there’s half a hedge of Leylandii still to be felled. Anyway, more importantly, there’s the fantastic aerial shot of the ruin of the castle. You can clearly see the structure’s compartmentalisation. Fantastic. We’ll have to get the photos of around that time and create an annotated version.
May is the month in which all our best flowers put on their displays: the bluebells, azaleas, rhododendrons and some unusual narcissi. I though you’d like to get a flavour and whet your appetite:
This weekend we enjoyed higher numbers of visitors walking around the woodland garden than ever before. Partly this was due to our first weekend as one of Scotland’s Gardens Scheme gardens for which Sadie guided around thirty like-minded and thoroughly enthusiastic garden enthusiasts (!) around our 16 acres, and partly because we have now erected our front-of-house signage.
This image is hosted at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ghostschool/3445476246
I just had to share this image with you – which I am sure you will recognise as the classic view of Dunans Castle from the bridge. It captures the atmosphere of Dunans so well that it really made my day!
One of the projects I am constantly working on both strategically and as lead on the development team is forargyll.com, and recently the video news guys managed to travel out to Castle Duart to interview Sir Lachlan McLean. The resultant 8 minutes or so is a wonderful insight into the efforts of one of the great men of the West Coast to keep a wonderful building alive and lived in.Very inspirational for us here at Dunans.
We’re really pleased to say that we have just heard via ForArgyll.com and Dunans.org that the Douglas Fir which rises about the Laird’s plots in the Chaol Ghleann Ravine has just been confirmed as the tallest tree in the UK by a team of arborist’s from one of the UK’s foremost Arboreal centres, Sparsholt College in Hampshire.
We were privileged the week before last to be visited by Laird Brian McLean and his lovely wife, Lady Waltraud. They arrived on an overcast, dreich day, but the weather didn’t seem to dampen their spirits, keen as they were to inspect the McLean Family Seat and find an appropriate site for it.
This year the Scottish Laird project really took off at Christmas with interest in the project from all over the world and in unprecedented numbers. We have been enthused and delighted by the number of folk being given Laird- and Ladyships as presents. Not only that but Laird Anthony Daley made it over with his family and had an afternoon walking around our paths chatting both with myself, but my wife, Sadie. In fact they did great service helping walking our dogs!
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The Lairds' and Ladies' Contribution
