PEAT thieves have stolen a grand-mother's precious supply of the fuel from her remote cottage on Skye.
Cheryl Farnaby, 67, was heartbroken after what she said was a breach of trust in the relatively crime-free area.
She had spent a day carrying out the arduous job of cutting peats before laying the 10 bags down in a neat bank at the side of a lonely road in Uiginish, near the village of Dunvegan.
They were intended to be dried out in time to heat her former croft cottage in the winter.
Mrs Farnaby said: "It's not so much losing the monetary value of the 10 bags, about £80, but the thought someone would stoop so low as steal a pensioner's winter fuel supply. It is heartbreaking."
The mother-of-two moved with her late husband, Stanton, to Skye from Yorkshire 20 years ago. She took up the back-breaking job of digging peats after his death. She added: "You can imagine my shock, hurt and disappointment to go to my peat bank the other day and discover someone had stolen my peats. I am sure the culprit is nobody local for I am a familiar figure digging my peats."
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