THE HONEST BIT
5
MIN READ
What the midge actually wants
Six weeks a year, one insect decides how pleasant the evenings are. Understanding it helps more than complaining about it.
Fiona Ross
Estate manager
Culicoides impunctatus wants three things: still air, damp ground, and dusk. Remove any one of them and your evening is your own again.
Wind is the reliable one. Anything above about seven miles an hour and they are grounded, which is why the Eyrie almost never has them and why the terrace at the Long Lodge sometimes does.
Smoke works. The fire pit is laid daily for exactly this reason, and it is not a coincidence that it sits where it sits. Repellent works too, if you actually apply it before you need it rather than after.
June to August, and worst in the fortnight after rain. September onward, they are gone.
Read it, then come.
Six units on ninety acres of the same estate these were written on.