Issue Eight · Page 66Spring and Summer 2024 · page 66This Farming Life.
Rewilding Scotland's wilderness has been at the top of the agenda for years. On a farm above Loch Ness, a family is doing something quieter and just as radical.
WordsLucy Gillmore
A cursory sideways glance as you wind through the hills north of Loch Ness, and South Clunes Farm appears to be a traditional Highland homestead, a handsome stone farmhouse surrounded by sheep- along with cattle-grazed paddock and pasture. The 400-acre hill farm is home to the Swifts – and a thousand Suffolk and Texel-cross ewes, 65 Luing cows and a handful of shaggy Highlanders. However, the row of young fenced-off fruit trees and beehives on a nearby slope hint at changes in the air. There’s the obligatory off-grid shepherd’s hut perched at the top of a field, but what’s not visible as you slalom along the single track-lane, dodging kamikaze guinea fowl, are the beavers.
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Meet Anna: A Focus on Guardswell Farm.
On the Carse of Gowrie, where the Sidlaw hills succumb to the lowlands, sits a farm that can see for miles – to Auchterhouse and Dundee, to North Fife, and on clear days, St Andrews. The air is crisp, laden with seasonal scents – fresh cut hay, sweet haylage, woodsmoke – and the meadows are a sea of different vetches, plantain, yarrow, sheep’s sorrel, knapweed, mouse-ear and galium. This is Guardswell, the small mixed working farm headed by Anna Lamotte and her family, encompassing accommodation and workshops, events and weddings. “Guardswell loves to open her gates to anyone who needs to step back from a life that is too busy, too full on, too fast,” says Anna. She describes it as a place to retreat when you need to take stock and rest, to explore on foot or immerse yourself in nature in any number of bucolic spots – “the Big Wood when the bluebells are out and the ferns unfurling. The boat on the hill, when the wind picks up and you need a little refuge. The veg field when the rhubarb is enormous and the beds are overflowing. The glasshouse on an early summer’s morning with a cup of tea”. Here, she shares the Guardswell story.
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