Wednesday 18 January 2012

The Journey to Holy Island...

After my job in Inverness had finished, I returned to Hemel to look for winter work as I was unable to find any in Scotland. However, I was unable to find anything in Hemel, and mostly spent my time volunteering for my local conservation group and visiting Jason in Norfolk, thinking that I’d be unemployed all winter. So imagine my surprise when Jason and I received an email from our boss from the Farne Islands asking if we would be interested in living and working on Lindisfarne over the winter! The National Trust owns Lindisfarne castle and some of the surrounding land, and keep the castle open during the winter, and they needed someone to live on the island and take the emergency phone in the evenings after the staff had left, and make sure that the castle doesn’t burn down! It’s a pretty simple job, with free accommodation, and with few prospects of a job elsewhere, me and Jason agreed to do it! A month or so later and all was sorted, we were moving up to Lindisfarne on the 8th January to live in the National Trust’s holiday cottage and look after the castle in the evenings until 25th March! All went well with the move up here, although it was a very long drive from home (thankfully, Jason has a car. It would have been even worse on the train)!

This is now our second week of living up here and the job is going very well so far! It really is simple. We get all day off to do whatever we want, which mostly involves exploring the island and looking for birds, and when the staff at the castle go home for the day we take the emergency phone. If it rings, we answer it and go up to the castle to see what’s wrong. We check the fire alarms, make sure there isn’t a fire, reset the alarms, lock up and go home again. Obviously, if there is a fire we call emergency services etc., but we have been reassured that there will almost certainly be no problem with the alarm system, and hopefully no fires, so it’s really just a precautionary measure, and we get our weekends off! As it’s only part-time, the pay isn’t brilliant, but as we get a rent-and-bill-free cottage to live in, so all we really have to buy is food, so the pay is not an issue really! And the cottage is really nice! It’s fairly old, so the floors are uneven in places and the doorframes are a bit short so Jason has to watch his head sometimes, but I like it, it’s quirky! And it's furnished nicely, with a little wood-burning fire so it’s really cosy! No broadband here, so we’re using a dongle which doesn’t get a lot of signal, and not a lot of mobile phone signal either, but it hasn’t been too much of an issue so far!

Lindisfarne, or Holy Island as it’s also known (due to the monks that lived here many hundreds of years ago), is a small island off the north Northumberland coast, very close to the Scottish border and the Farne Islands, which we can see from here on a clear day. Access to the island is via a tidal causeway, which means it is readily accessible by car 12 hours a day, but cut off from the mainland for the other 12. This means that we do have to be quite careful and check the safe crossing times before we try to cross the causeway; get it wrong and your car gets drowned in salt water, and you have to await rescue by the coastguard!! Apparently it does happen a few times each year, just look at these news stories, so we need to watch out for that! Also, we have to make sure that we’re back on the island in good time, or we could be stuck on the mainland all night! The causeway also means that our working hours change each day. None of the castle staff live on the island, so they come on to the island in the morning, work all day at the castle, and then leave before the causeway closes. As soon as they leave our job begins, so depending on the tides we may have to have the phone from 2pm onwards or from 8pm onwards. While we have the phone we can’t leave the island, as we need to be nearby if something does go wrong.

It really is a very nice island with areas of saltmarsh, sand dunes, ponds and fields, with the small village on the south-east side of the island, closest to the causeway and the mainland. Only about 150 people live here, with a small shop, post-office and a couple of pubs on the island, which remain closed most of the time during the winter, except for half-term week when they should be open for business. It’s pretty quiet here, but it gives us time to explore the island and look for interesting birds! A few days ago, Jason spotted a Green-winged Teal (a type of duck) on one of the ponds, which is a North American version of the Eurasian Teal that we get in the UK, as well as seeing some nice geese and a couple of Mute Swans with coloured rings on their legs (for identifying them). We have a couple of bird feeders up in our little garden, which have mostly been attracting House Sparrows, Blackbirds and Starlings, but just today we had a lovely little Tree Sparrow, which aren’t seen here too often, and several Greenfinches, which are really pretty! We are keeping our eyes open for more interesting birds, and will keep you posted on what we see, and our adventures whilst we're here! I am also applying for summer jobs while I’m up here, and will keep you updated on my progress, hopefully I’ll get something good again this year – wish me luck and watch out for my next post, which should include some photos!