Strathyre was blessed with fine weather over the recent holiday period, which pleased everyone, including the Easter Bunny. Feeling generous, he hid traditionally decorated boiled eggs around the site encouraging the kids to play the age-old game of ‘egg tapping’ before collecting their chocolate eggs.
We used the holiday period as an excuse to launch a chocolate treasure hunt, called the Chocuzzle. This can be played anytime during a guest’s stay and involves them collecting clues from around the site. They learn amazing facts and folklore linked to the local forest before solving the puzzle to win some chocolate – treasure hunting is hungry work!Our new group shelter is proving a huge success in our new Dusk Watch session ‘Bats, Owls and Spooky Tales’. This activity recently fell on the eve of May 1st, or the old Celtic fire festival of Beltane, which was very fitting as we toasted our marshmallows around the fire below a clear, starlit sky.
Traditionally, this was also the time for maypole dancing around the May tree, or hawthorn, which is particularly sacred to the faeries. Locally, the druids would have lit the Beltane fires on the top of the nearby Corbett, Ben Ledi, which translates from the Gaelic as ‘Hill of God’ or ‘Hill of the Shoulder’. Back then, the locals would extinguish their own fires in their homes then re-light them from the festival fire for good luck. 
During the festival, bannock (Scottish flatbread) would have been eaten as part of the feast, but someone would have received a piece with charcoal hidden in it. That person would then have had to leap over the fire three times as an appeasement to the gods and in the hope of a successful harvest for the year ahead. This is one part of tradition that we didn’t uphold! The swallows and house martins have started to arrive back from Africa, and are busy chasing insects and establishing their nests in the cabin eaves. There has been much folklore attached to the swallow over the years and it’s almost universally regarded as the herald of spring. In Scotland, it was thought lucky to spot the first swallow but only if you were sitting down! Both the Romans and Chinese believed that it was especially lucky to have swallows nesting on your house and unlucky if they flew away. In the north of England, they thought it unlucky to steal swallow’s eggs as the cows in the byre would then produce bloody milk.
It’s the Celtic tree month for Willow, believed to be equally powerful as a magic wand and as a natural pain killer (willow contains salicylic acid – an ingredient in aspirin). It’s believed that now is a good time to sit under a willow tree in order to gain intuition, creativity and a better understanding of our ‘watery’ emotions.
Lady’s Mantle has been bursting out amongst the cabins. It’s amazing to think these star-shaped leaves, which are so often trampled underfoot, were used for alchemy and collecting dew droplets in the morning, which would then be used as a refreshing face wash. In fact its Gaelic name translates as ‘dew cup’. It was also used in a traditional remedy for any cattle that had been shot by an arrow from malevolent elves!
