Woodworking courses.

There's another woodland oddity coming together at Inshriach. Woodentom is building a cruck framed workshop to move the carving and green woodworking courses out of the farmyard and into our oak woods, its going to be a beautiful secluded little spot. With any luck it will be finished in time for a suitably ungrand open day next weekend.

Here are some provisional dates for 2012 but Tom can arrange courses pretty much on demand if there is enough of a group interested. Contact him for prices and availability, woodentom1@gmail.com.

31st March - Open day.
12th May - Stool Making.
15th - 16th June - Insider Festival.
28th - 29th June - Shave horse making.
5th August - Fun day.
23rd - 24th - Rustic furniture.
13th October - Spoon carving.
27th October - Bowl Carving.
8th / 9th November - Rustic furniture.

There is also the coracle making course on the 25th - 27th May, you can read more about this here.

More rubbish sheds.

Another part of our plan to keep Inshriach sustainable involves taking as much of our firewood as we can from the estate. Last year we reckon around 15 tons was fed into the house and perhaps half of it we chopped and split ourselves. Storage is the problem, laying down the wood in suitable conditions to season properly. With the yurt, the beermoth, the house and two bothies all anticipating pretty strong levels of occupation it was time to get recycling.

The top shed was easy. 5 offcuts of wriggly tin from the tip, 5 pieces of wood, some screws and three half pallets. The bottom one was the result of a pile of used 4 inch posts and 6 more sheets of salvaged tin sitting dangerously close to each other and getting in the way for a few months. I'm not quite sure what to clad it with but something will no doubt appear.

Now we need to go out and chop some logs.

Coracle Building at Inshriach

With the help of coracle master builder Peter Faulkner, basket maker Edmund Howan and Henry Fosbrooke we are running a 3 day Spey coracle building course at Inshriach between Thursday 25th May and Sunday 27th May.

All the willow for the basket work, a pre cured hide for a cover, softwood to make the seat and blanks to make paddles are provided. You will need to find your own accommodation and food but camping can be made available at Inshriach and we can chip together for communal meals if we like.

The cost per coracle is £450 including all the materials (one would expect to pay at least £500 to buy a ready made coracle) and we reckon on making 6 coracles over the weekend so if you can find someone to share the work (and the coracle) the cost would be £225 per person. Once they are finished we can take to the spey to see if anyone can stay upright.

Please email walter@inshriachhouse.com or call 01540651341 for more details.

Good press and great photos.

There has been a run of press interest in Inshriach recently.

There are articles in the pipeline for both Easyjet Magazine and The Scotsman about Inshriach as a whole and The Guardian are here to review the Bothy Project as I speak. The Scotsman sent John Paul Photography along to bring their article to life and being a total gent he went some way beyond his remit of 8 photos, he ended up taking pictures of the whole place and letting us use them. You can see the full set on our flickr page but it means that for the first time I have a decent picture of the newly decorated big drawing room and can give you a teaser of the outside of the bothy...