After a week of sanding and varnishing floorboards it has been brought to my attention that I have not been getting the puppies out enough. Their mode of communicating this has been fairly destructive. Trainers, wellies, hats and gloves have been chewed, footballs punctured and dog bedding ripped apart. They have rather helpfully thought to tear up the linoleum from the porch floor – I was about to do that anyway. 

Having admonished them for their acts of destruction, we head out for a walk. Because they are absolutely the best places to be (have I mentioned that before?) we make straight for a beach. Just to the east of the island’s central village is a vast expanse of tidal sand flanked by a massive dune system. At low tide one can walk straight across the sand flats for more than a mile. The limb of machair (herb rich coastal sandy grassland) and high dunes that delimits the flats to their east, gradually narrows until it is a mere fifty paces wide. On the eastern side of this limb is the most glorious beach imaginable, which must stretch for a good three miles, north to south.

Fulmar take off, stiff-winged, from their grass ledges and pilot down like bomber planes to check us out. They are claiming territories for their breeding season already. Swan, the older collie pup, chases one low flier at full pelt until she is stopped in her tracks by the shock of seawater up to her neck. The Fulmar lifts up and away with a cackle: a practical joke executed to perfection. 

The puppies run five miles for every one of mine. As we cross the dunes a Snipe lifts up from the ground and zigzags away from us. Red-breasted Merganser work the coastal waters in small groups. At the far end of the beach a rocky outcrop attracts a flock of Turnstone and I spot a few Purple Sandpiper among them. Dunlin squat on the sand in their pale grey winter plumage.

At the far end of the dunes, on a plug of rock, stands a big old house resplendent with archways, courtyards and a magnificent horse engine house – a round building with octagonal roof. The horse would have plodded round and round, turning a mechanism that drove a threshing machine. The property and the expanse of farmland and rocky coastline beyond it is only accessible by crossing the sand flats or following the narrow isthmus of the dunes. What a fabulous place to live, if a tad tricky for getting the kids to school of a morning perhaps.

By the end of our five-mile walk the puppies have slowed to my pace and flop beside me every time I pause to look at something. Good. I have tired them out for today at least. We pile into the Landrover and drive around the north end of the island to look for some of my favourite birds – Whooper Swans. There is nothing quite like the powerful swoosh of their wings when they fly. On the way home I spy several flocks of Greylag Geese feeding in the fields, a Hen Harrier quartering some marshland and a Merlin sitting on a fencepost. I’m glad that I have found my binoculars at last.