Wild Haggis

For any foreign readers out there, if you’ve ever wondered war a wild haggis really looks like, here you go.


We’d planned to pop over to Talmine to visit Alma and Chris today so we were up early and got some supplies in for the kids who were having a day of peace and quiet without us, then set off at lunchtime for a leisurely drive round to them.

We stopped on the way to eat our lunch and have a wander round Lotte Glob’s sculpture croft then headed on. We’d nipped into the shop at Tongue to pick up a paper and noticed fluid dripping from under the car. It turned out to be coolant so we nipped into the Ben Loyal hotel to have a cold drink wait for the car to cool down a bit. Once we had we topped up the coolant then headed to the local garage to pick up some more coolant and some rad weld.

Once we’d got that out the way we nipped up to Chris and Alma’s. We had a great couple of hours catching up and being fed with fantastic home baking, then headed off. We stopped at the Craggan in for some dinner then got back on the road. We’d only beed driving for ten minutes or so when the car started to seriously overheat. As we hadn’t put the rad weld stuff in yet we gave it a while for the radiator to cool down then stuck that in along with a bit more coolant and set off again. Once again the car started to overheat pretty quickly, so we had no choice but to phone Talmine for assistance. Chris drove out to meet us and followed us down to the local garage where fortunately the owner was in. He’s going to get a look at it first thing. Neither of us being mechanical types we had no idea how much coolant we could safely put in the radiator so hopefully it’s just that it’s nearly empty and the rad weld stuff we put in will seal it. That’s best case scenario.

Alma and Chris offered to put us up for the night which would have been great but as Maddy and Brodie were back in Durness and we hadn’t been able to get hold of them, they very kindly loaned us a car to get back. I’ve no idea what we would have done had we not got hold of them, so thank goodness we did.

After all that we got back to the cottage at about half past eleven. A pretty long day all in all. Fingers crossed it’s good news about the car.