Fame! I wanna live forever...

I think we reached the pinnacle of our media careers this week.

Sheila and Tom Sheppard are a very interesting couple who settled in West Caledonia about 30 years ago. They have many strings to their respective bows, but both are involved in local journalism. Tom writes a column in The Advance, the local newspaper from Liverpool, and Sheila has a periodic spot on CBC radio about local affairs.

It turns out that the hill that our farm sits upon, was one one of the original 'seven settlers, seven hills' that was the start of Caledonia in 1817. The original settler of our land was a man named Alexander Spears and he hailed from Greenock, which as you may know, is only across the water from Arran, the Scottish island that I come from. Tom and Sheila wanted to talk to us about what brought to Caledonia and spotted the parallels between the old and the new settlers.

So, we featured in their respective journalistic output and I'm attaching Tom's article for your delectation! You can read the article here. It's a little bit big filesize-wise (for those of us on dial-up), my apologies.

There were two other outcomes from this episode...

The first concerns the aforementioned dial-up internet connection. As a postscript to Tom's article, Eastlink announced yesterday that they have won the contract to supply broadband service to our area, which means that the trial of high-speed wireless internet should soon become open to new subscribers - muted hurrah! One shouldn't count one's chickens...

The second was that it prompted us to ponder on a name for our farm. We're not sure how pretentious it is here to name your house/farm, but if we are going to market produce, we do need something with a little more ambience than our civic address. The original name was possibly 'Scotch House', though this is more likely to have been the original settlement in a different site. We like the ring of 'Settler Hill Farm', but given the geographical proximity of the two settlers' origins, we are thinking about calling it 'Kilbrannan Farm'. The Kilbrannan Sound separates Arran from Kintyre on the Scottish mainland, and strictly speaking the body of water between Arran and Greenock is the Firth of Clyde, but a small amount of poetic licence is perhaps allowable?

What do you think? Any votes?