We were looking for eggs on the corner in Backies the other day and there weren't any, but a young man came out from the house and apologised. It's his parents who own the house where the egg cupboard is but he has the croft from which the eggs come. It's one we've noticed before....
....a little further along the road, with the chickens. He inherited the croft from his grandfather and has obviously put a lot of time and money into it, though, like many crofters, he also has a job, in his case servicing tractors anywhere between Thurso and Perth.
The croft is an amalgamation of three of the original clearance crofts - which gives one an idea of how tiny they were - so in Backies today there are now only six crofts, of which two are worked.
It's fairly obvious which is the other worked croft, but it's sad to hear that the other four are neglected. The two active crofters now have all the 'soumings' - that is, the shares - in the common grazings, so they have access to plenty of land, though the common grazing are moorland.
The young man we talked to is running sheep and was thinking of trying a few cattle. He did have pigs, buying them as weaners, but he didn't seem too interested in becoming a pig farmer.
Little wonder then that so much of the land in Backies looks like this, so there are four crofts needing someone to love them. When I suggested that young people, like him, might be keen to take them on, particularly if they could work or run a business on line, he agreed but said there was a problem: his internet download speed is 1Mb/s: I have upward of 40.
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