At Old Allangrange, on Scotland’s rural Black Isle peninsula, JayJay and David Gladwin aim to redress the balance between agriculture and nature by applying organic, wildlife-friendly principles to both its garden and farmland
WORDS CLARE FOGGETT PHOTOGRAPHS RAY COX
Historic aerial photographs of Old Allangrange show the 18th-century house marooned on a little postage stamp of greenery surrounded by vast swathes of brown farmland, every inch of it ploughed into uniform stripes. If it wasn’t for the colours and knowing that the house sits on the Black Isle peninsula, just north of Inverness, you might easily imagine it as an oasis in the centre of a barren desert.
Intensive farming that strips the countryside of hedgerows and habitats is a subject close to Old Allangrange’s owner JayJay Gladwin’s heart. She grew up on a Northumberland farm, where her father worked the land according to the prevailing thinking of the 1960s and ’70s. “He lived through the war as a child and all the consequences of it, including rationing in the 1950s, so he was absolutely convinced that what he ought to be doing was maximising production to feed the country,” JayJay says. “It was a model farm for hedges, but my father dug them up, which was exactly what everyone else was doing at the time. I went away to school and every time I came home, where I might previously have walked by a hedgerow with all sorts of birds flying in and out, there would just be whatever he was growing. It really, really bothered me,” she recalls. Clearly in tune with nature from an early age, her earliest memory, she says, is of causing annoyance by escorting a slug across the road.
So in 1995, when JayJay and her husband David moved to Old Allangrange, in its setting of monocultured sterile fields, they knew they wanted their garden to redress the balance. “Planting for wildlife was fundamental, as was using native species and single flowers for invertebrates,” she says. But first came work on the dilapidated house: “It wasn’t totally ruinous, but we made it so because we had to take its roof off, and some of the rooms needed electricity.”
As a setting for a home and garden, the sleepy Black Isle peninsula couldn’t be more bucolic. It juts out from the Scottish coastline, surrounded almost entirely by water, and when the couple moved to the area in the 1980s, the bridge carrying the A9 over the Moray Firth from Inverness had only just been built. Until then, JayJay says, the remote setting and
