The Island Stars Again - Landward Visits.

The island looking sun baked and scorched.

Filming the seabirds.



Filming the arrival of Dougie.



Dougie attacks the old boardwalk.

Results of cleaning the beach at Pilgrims Haven.

Righting Evelyn's purple shed and tying it down....again.

More work on replacing the boardwalk.

The start of the season has been a bit mad to say the least and I am afraid that the blog has lapsed a bit but I am know catching up with myself and will do a couple of posts to get up to date.
I was very lucky to have glorious weather for my moving out to the island. The first couple of days were a blur of sorting 2 boat loads of gear, supplies and laundry and gradually getting the island ready for the visitor season. I received reinforcements last Friday when 8 volunteers from BTCV came over for a long working weekend. With them came also a BBC film crew from Landward, Colin the cameraman, Laura the producer and Dougie Vipond the presenter.  They want to film the volunteers carrying out vdifferent tasks and find out why we wanted visitors to come to the island. The island looked fantastic in brilliant sunshine so as soon as the volunteers arrive we set them to work in front of the cameras. With Dougie's vigorous help they pulled up the old boardwalk on Holymans road and started the painting of the Mousehouse visitor centre. It has to be said that the film crew were great (not always the case), they were interested in the island and what we were trying to achieve and didn't intrude too much. The programme will go out on 20 April on BBC Scotland if you are interested, it should be available on iPlayer after that.
But the volunteers weren't just playing up for the cameras. once the crew had gone they kept at it and over the 4 days painted the whole visitor centre inside and out, toilets included, rebuilt the boardwalk, built and installed 5 tern nesting platforms, cleared all the rubbish off Pilgrims Haven and even half dug the veg garden. You could ask anymore. And they say that the sun shines on the righteous, well someone in that group had been good.. The shame was that they took the good weather with them as the day they left the weather started going down hill but they had left a fine legacy of a smart island.