Carianne MacDonald on giving up medical career for North Uist farm's Highland Cows

A full-time ‘stockwoman’, the 27-year-old has responsibility for some of the most valuable Highland cattle in the country: one particularly prized black Highland bull from the Ardbhan fold scooped a record £12,000 at one sale, others have been in demand from eager buyers across Europe.

While the photographs uploaded to her Ardbhan Highland Cattle social media pages gather ‘likes’ from global followers who can’t get enough of the island views, her pink-nosed, shaggy haired companions or her gentle and sometimes heart-tugging descriptions of crofting life.

It is, she says, her ideal job: “I’m living the dream,” she adds.

But, and perhaps in a message to this year’s school leavers considering their next steps, it could scarcely be any different to the career she seemed set to pursue – as a neuroscientist.

Carianne was 18 months into studying neuroscience at Aberdeen University and considering where her studies might take her when she decided to quit for what would become a life on the farm.

Carianne MacDonald

“I was one of those kid in school that did well in exams, I was fortunate – I put it down to having a photographic memory,” she explains. “And when you do well at school, it’s drummed into you that university is the way that you have to go.

“I had to make a decision about what to study. Everyone was telling me I had to go to university. I didn’t really want to be a brain surgeon, but I ended up doing neuroscience.”

Bubbling away in the background, however, was a deep bond with rural life ignited at her grandparents’ Gairloch croft where, as a little girl, she had helped nurse sick lambs back to health by warming them in the bottom oven of the Rayburn.

But, she adds: “It hadn’t crossed my mind that I could come back to farming once my grandparents retired.

“After a year and half at university, I knew I didn’t have the passion for it. There was no way I was going to stick it out.”

With a few months she had met her husband-to-be Fraser MacDonald, and joined his family at their Ardbhan croft on North Uist, helping to keep things ticking along as they focused on caring for his terminally ill sister, Ellie, while juggling the demands of farming.

Before long, she was looking after the 3,500-acre organic farm’s 300 head of cattle, including the 250 Ardbhan fold of pedigree Highland cattle, and a flock of around 300 blackface and Scotch mule sheep linked to her and husband’s croft.

The only full-time worker on the farm, her role is even more unusual because of its breath-taking location and unique method of moving the herd every November from North Uist to the island of Vallay.

There they spend winter and spring benefitting from the shelter of the sandy dunes, a derelict mansion house for refuge and abundant seaweed and machair grass to eat. The cows deliver their calves there before returning to North Uist in early summer to chew on hillside heather that leaves their shaggy coats gleaming.

One film of the two-mile journey, which showed the cows splashing through turquoise water surrounded by pristine white sands, went viral, earning the Ardbhan fold almost celebrity status.

The Ardbhan fold was established more than 40 years ago on North Uist by Ena MacDonald – Carianne’s husband’s grandmother - and began with a single Highland cow.

The fold developed further under Ena’s son, Angus and his wife Michelle, to include prize stock which have attracted buyers from across Europe.

One bull, three-year-old black Highland bull Muran Erchie of Ardbhan, made headlines when it fetched a record price for a black Highlander at the Highland Cattle Society’s Oban Show in 2019. Its selling price, £12,000 paid by a German farmer, was almost twice that of the next highest-priced bull.

According to Carianne, who posts almost daily updates and photographs of the fold and her crossbred Beef Shorthorn and Whitebred Shorthorn, most sales are now made via social media channels, often as a result of potential buyers seeing her Facebook posts.

“We have just sent 24 heifers to Romania, to someone who saw us on Facebook, and a few have gone to people in England,” she says. “Most of our sales are now private, and this last year have all been done online – and we’ve sold everything we wanted to sell.”

There are now only a handful of Highland calves waiting to be born on Vallay, offering a few final opportunities for a photoshoot before Carianne begins the task of moving the herd back to North Uist for the summer and autumn months.

This time there will be no greeting from Lord Mosscastle of Old Greenlaw, a majestic red-haired bull purchased as a two-year-old for just 600 Guineas after Carianne’s husband Angus outbid a butcher. He went on to sire over 600 calves in his lifetime.

He had been savouring a pleasant retirement roaming the heather moors and fertile North Uist machair when he was found, having died peacefully in the heather and looking towards the island of Vallay.

It is the downside of the job, she adds. “There have been a lot of tears.

“You can’t have it good all the time,” she adds. “But I do feel I’m living the dream.”