45

Catherine and I are invited to lunch at Tim's. There's home-made pizza and salad served at a table by the open glass doors – Tim, Catherine and I and Tim's wife Alice. The sun's shining and a bee from Tim's apiary is buzzing at an orchid which prompts Tim to remark on the orchid's marvellous efficiency as a receptor of pollination. This leads to a discussion between him and Catherine on moths (her special interest) and then, by a tangent, to the mention of Sir John Lister-Kaye whose home and field centre at Aigas is just along the road to Beauly. He's an excellent naturalist and a great enthusiast, says Tim – we should see him in the field with his clients or students or whatever you call them, where ‘he makes a drama of everything’.

Down below us in the field, we see Tim's five brown heifers. He says they often come up to the house and peer through the kitchen window. He talks to them all the time and they follow him. Alice, who lectures in Inverness, says she'd like to have a couple of black cattle of her own when she retires – I think she fantasises about leading them in the cattle ring at the Black Isle showground.

Tim says he and Alice still can't believe their luck in finding this spot for a home. They kept trying to buy old cottages, of which there are plenty in Strathglass in various stages of decay, but no one would sell. Mostly people wanted to keep them in the family. Then they saw ground advertised here at Mauld. When Tim enquired, he was told schedules had already been sent to 300 applicants and one was coming over from South Africa to see the ground, so it looked hopeless. For one thing, they'd no house to sell, having lived until then in tied accommodation. But Tim drafted three short paragraphs describing his background and his plans for the future and it must have struck a chord with the seller – Iain Thomson, a former soldier, shepherd, cattle farmer, now turned author – for his offer was accepted. There was joy when the letter was opened and maybe disbelief. Can this be true?

Tim says four offers higher than his were received so something in those three short paragraphs must have taken Thomson's fancy. They scraped funds together and took a mortgage and here they are. Tim says his early background was not dissimilar to Iain's, which may have helped. He was a stalker in youth and he worked for his father in forestry, besides which he's a great outdoors man, a climber, and he keeps fit. Every year, he does the Highland Cross, the coast-to-coast race between Kintail and Beauly through Glen Affric, running and cycling over the passes.

This time I see his precious old Porsche unwrapped – a dazzling yellow, with an official badge fixed in front of the bonnet that says ‘Le Mans Vintage Tour’. He and Alice will drive to France for a vintage Porsche rally later in the year – not to race but to bask in the atmosphere, the sunshine ‘and enjoy the food and wine’.