A quick update on our Barn Swallow nestlings, as I’ve just been outside to check with the zoom lens. They certainly are growing fast and look much more alert! It’s now very clear that they have their eyes open and feathers are growing. And is that a tinge of russet colour? I can tell from…
I’m happy to report that the good fortune of our house is assured for the summer at least. This is due to the presence of a little swallow family nesting in the porch by our front door. We did try to explain to them that it wasn’t the quietest of locations, but neither parents nor…
Sunrise and sunset can be spectacularly beautiful on the island. I love to get up early and enjoy the pretty dawn colours, streaks of delicate yellows, pinks and oranges. I sometimes attempt to capture the subtle lighting with my camera, but there’s only a fleeting window of opportunity to do it in, before the sun…
It’s fun to take my sketchbook along on a walk instead of the camera, although it doesn’t half slow down progress! But what I lose in distance covered and numbers of images, I gain in terms of the quality of the scene imprinted on my memory. Places that I’ve sat and sketched are much more…
Since I wrote my article on Red roofs as part of the landscape last month, I’ve been looking with different eyes at buildings – and paintings of them. So many artists over the years have taken architecture as their subject, including red roofs (Camille Pissarro) and even blue roofs (Paul Gaugin). So let’s have a…
The word for a door in Croatian is vrata, which comes from the old Slavic word vorta. It’s always plural, in the same way that trousers or pants are in English. And vrata means both the opening, and the object we use to close it up. Now that may be a wooden door, glass door or wrought-iron gate, inside or outside, in the house or garden or field – vrata covers all types.
Where I grew up, in Edinburgh, only the older stone houses had working shutters, and those were on the inside of the windows to keep out the cold in winter. In much of southern Europe, houses are shuttered in the summer to keep out the heat. I also really enjoy the ability to close out the world when it gets cold, dark and wet in winter, especially when there’s a bura blowing! It’s all terribly convenient, and so much cheaper than extra heating or air conditioning.
Over the past few years, our house renovations have been concentrated on the building itself, first making it habitable, then improving our comfort – mainly on the inside! The outdoor area was left pretty much to itself, beyond clearing away all the debris which actually included a rusty old barbeque. What a difference! This year…
In Hvar’s Napoleon Fortress is a seismological station, part of a network covering the Adriatic coast from Rijeka in the north to Dubrovnik in the south. In fact they are all part of a larger international network that is responsible for monitoring earthquakes throughout the entire Mediterranean. Set up in 1973, the HVAR station contributes…
Our local housemartins are busy. You can see them swooping up under eaves and into small corners to build their nests. It’s just amazing how they can get a grip on what looks like a sheer wall to me! Here’s a time-lapse video of the birds coming in to select their sites. This house overlooking…
Go Hvar 
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