It's a no brainer

But we do have a Nissan Cabstar ! It's inaugural trip was picking up a tonne and a half of ashlar blocks from Dumfries. Every time you bring any vehicle over to Gigha that is over 5m in length you end up with high vehicle costs. A builder's merchant's wagon costs £190 return and a large van about £80. Our Cabstar is under 5m and costs the same as a car - £13.40 return. It carries just under 2 tonnes payload and has a flat bed big enough to carry full size sheets and 4.8m long sticks of timber propped over the cab. It's a no brainer for us as we have problems getting materials over to the plot given the appalling surface on the track. Taken slowly the Cabstar has high clearance and provided the track is not blocked by cows will take a full load very nicely. Problem is we got stuck turning round after offloading our first load as the rear wheel drive just slips when the truck is empty. However Micky rescued us and we got towed out by our Landrover.

wot no digger

In happier times in the summer the wee digger sat on the plot awaiting her tasks - however her services were required elsewhere and we just could not get even a few days work. Hiring off island is prohibitively expensive, especially if you are working part time and don't know which days you'll get on site and we waited for a mini digger from various sources... and waited.... and waited. Circumstances conspired to leave us diggerless so we just could not get on with the on site excavations and finishing the driveway.

As of winter 2009 the plot remained much the same as in summer 2009. Each stone in the pile of 250 tonnes of 75mm down crusher run remained unturned. So what could we do ? We could wait for a digger to become available on the island or we could buy our own, use it and sell it on. A 360° tracked excavator was great to drive but limited in what it could do. A series of technical problems with Lindsay's digger i.e. the one that was available on the island, meant we had to look elsewhere. A JCB on the other hand, despite being less use on wet ground and leaving a few ruts, had a back actor, a front bucket and could handle pallets - and as we have been loading our blocks etc., on to pallets this could be very useful. A JCB was more mobile than a tracked digger. It would also handle much bigger stones than a mini digger. As we have several stones of about two tonnes to drag and then raise into position for our revetment edge we tried Ian's old JCB. It lifted them fine but was sadly somewhat geriatric in abilities. An old lady maybe, but had the JCB equivalent of a zimmer frame in mobility - aka a dodgy torque convertor. However, the trial convinced us we should invest in a reasonably sound JCB and we watched Ebay auctions feverishly for several weeks, eventually finding one within budget and fully functional in Yorkshire.

Meanwhile, winter snows were everywhere but Gigha - though even in our wonderfully mild microclimate we had several days with smatterings of snow lying whilst the rest of Scotland had blizzards and people were stuck for weeks and couldn't get home. However, the ground got saturated and the far corner of the plot, where our big shed was going to be got saturated.