New website and blog.

With the new Inshriach House website getting up and running over this weekend we have a new format for blog posts so all future installments will appear directly onto the website rather than going up here. We havent gone away, we are just moving to a more modern platform. See you there. www.inshriachhouse.com

More news from the bar.

Last Friday George Clarke's team phoned to say they were in Scotland and they wanted to film the various bits and bobs we have going on at Inshriach. That was just the kick in the proverbial a**e that we needed. On Friday there was nothing in the bar apart from a half hearted attempt at the bar itself, there was also nothing but tools in what subsequently became the piano bar, and not a stick of stock in the shop. And half the windows were out and there were no lights.

In went the piano, some corner cupboards from the barn, a pair of spectacular and slightly soggy green gold velour armchairs, loads of stuff from the tip, blackboards, a dressers worth of dubious booze and some pub lights. Money changed hands but only to the tune of the £40 it took to have the last 3 signs made up and for the bottle of wine it took to hang them at 1 in the morning.

So this is how it looks now. Next stage is to build a new hen house and evict the chickens because at some point in the next fortnight some lovely copper stills are arriving the distillery can be commissioned.

Getting on with the shop / distillery / bar etc.

We are finally making moves to sort out the farm shop and get our planning permission for the station and the barn conversion into a usable form. The latest hurdle came Hannahs hard drive with all the drawings and 5 years worth of pre planning decided to give up the ghost so everything now has to be arduously transcribed back from the printed copies.

In order to submit the application (once the transcribing is done) we also had to conduct a bat survey. It turns out that we have a little roost of pipistrelles in the roof of the barn but nothing that is going to get in the way of phase one, a pair of new bathrooms to serve the off grid holiday business. We also have enormous roosts in two of the cottages so we would like to thank the bats for their convenient choice of residence.

To celebrate this non-wildlife event we busted out the stihl saw and the chainsaw and started cutting holes in the chicken sheds. This building will end up containing the stills for Crossbill, a small and very curious residents bar and a shop with unusual whittled gifts, tweed hats, storm kettles and other essential items for life on the range.

Lloyd Kahn - Tiny Homes on the Move, feat. the Beermoth.

A lovely book has just appeared through the post, this time from the author of the exceptional 'Shelter' and 'Homework". Tiny Homes on the Move features all sorts of amazing tales of 21st Century nomads and their creations, from trucks to school buses, boats to gypsy caravans. And it has a great big spread on the Beermoth, which is a real honour and we are mighty chuffed.

Photo Location work at Inshriach.

Last week we had a crew staying here and shooting the Autumn / Winter catalogue for Plumo. We did the catering, took them round, showed them all the best weather faded walls, crumbling textures, photogenic outbuildings and riverside vistas and then they got on with it.

Our new website will have a section dedicated to location work as it becomes an increasingly important and entertaining strand of the business here. Regular holiday rentals will only ever get to see a little fraction of what goes on here and we are going to have a scale of location fees depending on how much access and which buildings are required. You can get a good idea of what Inshriach has to offer by looking at our flickr page.

I will have some proper pictures from the shoot to post in a few weeks time but in the meantime here is a terrible one of them shooting outside the bothy.

The vegetable gardens get moving.

I have been trying to get a team photo with everyone who now lives at Inshriach and even on this, the ceremonial first potato planting, we are still short of Brook and Jake. 2014 will be the first year we have had enough interested folk here to really make the most of the Edwardian kitchen gardens and at this rate we will all be eating like kings in a month or two. We will also have loads of good produce to put into the farm shop (when we finish building it).

Axe throwing at Inshriach.

At Inshriach House we have never really done activities. Between Woodentom and the new crew here all that is about to change. If your idea of a good weekend is some oddball combination of axe throwing, elaborate treasure hunts, a wood fired riverside spa, tasty food and somewhere really unusual to stay then you have probably come to the right place.

The Inshriach House Spa.

The farmyard has been a scene of hectic activity these last few weeks. For the last Insider Festival we built a wood fired hot tub on an arrows military trailer and a wood fired sauna in a very decrepit horsebox but we never had the chance to finish them properly. With the holiday season starting and our fancy camping business going from strength to strength we set ourselves a very short deadline to make them nice. Jon Panniers is our resident guitar maker and all round expert wood worker, just the man to apply strips of reclaimed oak around the tub and a final layer of the bright red gel coat. I set to putting a new window and another reclaimed parquet floor in the sauna and Sam (Jon's girlfriend) set about the first shed / compost loo transformation by combining a cheap shed with a reclaimed roof and window and its own solar lighting. We had a deadline of Friday afternoon for a guinea pig hen party and on Friday morning our motley convoy finally rolled out of the farmyard towards the march pool. Then we hit ebay for a petrol powered pump to fill it with water, added a tipi as a changing room, put fairy lights in the trees, inset solar lights into the sauna floor and hauled in an ancient land rover to use as the log shed.

On the first firing the hot tub took a day and a half to heat up. Saturdays party turned into Sundays hot tub. The second weekend we had the technique down a bit better and we were in business in a mere 12 hours. By the third weekend a brand new and enormous stainless steel burner had arrived from Germany so now our firing time from not hot at all to sometimes way too hot to use is now down to around 4 hours

The Inshriach Spa will be available from 1st April. If you are staying in the house or one of the Canopy and stars places the sauna is £5 and you can use it whenever we haven't got an exclusive booking and aren't fixing it. If you are staying here and want the hot tub and sauna we can fire them all up for you and look after them for the day for £150. We can also take bookings from people not staying at Inshriach to use it for the afternoon, that will start from £250 but we can add bell tents, massage, food and all sorts, you can even arrive by boat if you want. All of those are a lot cheaper than just hiring a small hot tub for the weekend.

These pictures do no justice to how beautiful the setting is. You can see a gallery of the whole operation over on the Inshriach House Facebook page

Avie-more the Movie.

Thanks to Ollie who stayed here last week for this fine piece of film making.

Avie-more from Ollie Gallant on Vimeo.

Late availability for May - 25% off.

The last 2 weeks we have available on Inshriach House before the peak Summer season kicks in are the weeks starting Monday 5th May and Monday 12th May. We are offering 25% off either full week or weekend bookings on those dates which brings them in at £2100 for a full week or £1575 for a weekend. Email hello@inshriachhouse.com for details.

Jon Panniers - bespoke guitars and joinery.

Jon Panniers has been the main man on the Insider build team for the last 5 years and it took me all that to persuade him to move to Inshriach on a permanent basis. Jon is a trained luthier and builder of custom acoustic guitars and can repair and set up stringed instruments. Until we get that business established he is also happy to turn his hand to a kitchen, some shutters, set building or general high quality joinery.

We have turned over the squash court to become his workshop and are busy wiring it up, fitting the extraction system and installing some mighty tools and he can build pretty much anything in house for very reasonable rates.

If you want a quote for something, however unusual or elaborate, or if you have sat on your guitar, drop him an email to jmpanniers@yahoo.co.uk.

Badger in a hole.

The badgers used to turn up in the farmyard most days at dusk, intent on wreaking merry destructive havoc amongst the chickens. That was until we trained the chickens to put themselves to bed through a high level hatch. Now the bins and compost and any food we choose to leave out are a more achievable target. This fella must have been snooping around the yard and had fallen into the inspection pit in the workshop. He sat tight and unnoticed in a corner for the time it took to me remove an exhaust and I only spotted him when I dropped a spanner and shone my torch at him. This is not the usual fighty flighty attitude I have encountered from cornered badgers in the past so presuming he may have been down there some time I took down some chicken soup and water and some dog food and then made him a ramp and by the morning both the food and the badger were gone.

The Inshriach Shepherds Hut - part II.

This is the shepherds hut out in position. I have been staying in it the last few nights and it is a delicious little nest. Our friend Lucy donated a little Alles stove that does a fine job of roasting the occupants and on which you can cook very small meals. Marcus the smithy folded up some steel to support the steps, Lizzie made the curtains and turned the bed into a ball-pool of cushions, we made some little shelves for pots and pans and once the skirting is painted and the last details are taken care of it will be available to rent through canopy and stars alongside the yurt, the beermoth and the bothy project.

Dune film.

Here is a little film I just came across that was made while shooting this seasons Dune catalogue back in May. Recognise any of it?

Introducing - The Blunder Bus.

The day after the shepherds hut made its perilous journey from the farmyard down toward the March pool (it is now tucked away in the juniper down towards the bothy project - not far short of the new sauna), another project arrived to take its place. Almost immediately christened the blunder bus, this is a 1951 Bedford K type which once upon a time was used to ferry pilots around an airfield. It then spent some time as a school bus and now is pretty much in kit form after languishing partly restored for a decade or so. Apparently it is one of only two left in the country.

As an accompaniment to the Beermoth in the Canopy and Stars stable of oddball rentals the current thinking is that it is going to need some buttoned leather, perhaps a chesterfield style fold out bed, a gramophone, a drinks cabinet and the right lighting. It also needs the body removed from the chassis just to get into the workshop. And it needs a whole heap of metalwork.

What this means is - if plans go according to plan - that in the spring the full Inshriach public transport restoration department will come into operation. At one end of the farmyard the Railway station will be coming together and at the other end we will be restoring a vintage bus. To me, this is a very exciting prospect. Thankfully we have 5 more new and amazing people living around the farm now, all skilled and willing and up for getting involved. When we are back to full strength after Christmas I will introduce them.

Watch this space.

Availability for 2014 and tripadvisor.

The earlier months of next year are booking up fast on the main house, you can have a look at our availability calendar through 2014 over on our Holiday Lettings / Trip Advisor page and if you have stayed here feel free to add to the (so far) extremely positive feedback.

The shepherds hut.

Huge thanks to Tim Westman, who in close collaboration with his daughter Lizzy, has built this tremendous Swedish inspired shepherds hut which made the journey from South Wales to Inshriach a few weeks ago. We are busy fitting it out down in the farmyard and next year it will be available to rent via Canopy and Stars as the fourth installment in the yurt, beermoth, bothy project saga.

You can see more as it develops over on the Inshriach House facebook page.

The solar wood shed.

In order to make way for the Railway station a double garage in the farmyard is going to have to come down. That in itself is no great problem except that it carries 10 not very well orientated solar panels and I don't want to put them back onto the station once it is up. The woodshed that services the yurt and beermoth is also in the station's path so on nice days we have been building something that will perform both functions, and get maximum solar gain both for the panels and for seasoning the wood in the shed. We started with a lot of digging and a concrete pad which cost only £1 more than we got for a trailer full of scrap metal, and the rest is pine logs we felled round the estate pegged together with chunky oak dowels.

If anyone is getting rid of some reasonably straight corrugated iron we can get it finished under our budget (of nothing).

Dune and Bertie photoshoots.

Back in May we had another shoot at Inshriach, the fruits of which are now creeping into shops and magazines and spreading across the net. The current catalogues for Dune and Bertie, as well as in store and film campaigns are all Inshriach based. They were shot by Esther Hasse, organised by the agent Terrie Tanaka and produced by Location Scotland and I will post more of the pictures and films as they appear.

The eagle eyed amongst you will spot locations in the house, by the loch and down by the march pool in the Dune campaign with the Bertie shoot focusing its efforts at the yurt. To top it all Monty has a new career and a couple of the more unusual vehicles from the Inshriach stable had an outing.

Homes from Homes.

And in a week of full blown press and publication, Vinny Lee's new book Homes from Home 'Inventive Small spaces from chic shacks to cabins and caravans' has just come out featuring the Beermoth. Its a beautifully researched book and full of ideas if you are planning on going down the route of building something small and unusual.