The view outside Beth Rose’s window is a picture perfect Highland view; there are rolling heather-clad mountains, passing deer and the occasional swooping sea eagle.

The blue painted vintage Fordson Dexta tractor is parked in the yard.

The weed choked land that it couldn’t reach has been adequately churned thanks to Wilma, Julia and Marcia, a trio of happy pigs who, before heading off to be turned into sausages and bacon, have turned up a fine collection of stones to be picked from the mud.

Beth, who is six months pregnant, plans to lift them one by one into a wheelbarrow, which she will shove over uneven ground to the nearby orchard and tip the contents into the ground to back fill a drain pipe.

It’s back breaking work. But as Beth points out, she lifted the cow’s ring feeder when she was five months pregnant last time around, and trying to stop the lawn mower roaring off and disappearing into a ditch turned out to be far more strenuous.

A former theatre nurse who as a child battled and beat a brain tumour, there’s not much that fazes Beth, one of a new breed of Highland crofter who has shunned the thought of an ordinary day job to get dirt under her nails and quite often the blood and guts of her small collection of animals on her hands.

“My son William was three months old when I did the lambing,” she recalls. “I’d be up feeding him, then I’d pull out a lamb, go back to bed for a little while, then get up again to feed him, and check the lambs. I was shattered.

“During calving season and when I was still working at Raigmore Hospital, I’d get up at 5am and deal with the cows before going to work.

“You can be knee deep, elbow deep in who knows what," she adds. "Out in horizontal rain, trying to put down a calf with a vet.

“But my attitude is ‘I’ve had a brain tumour, I can do this’.”

Birchwood Croft sits against a backdrop of the Monadhliath Mountains to the west of Aviemore. In mid-September, as the sun sets and casts a warm glow over the hay bales and fruit-laden orchard, it is almost possible to forget the harsh winter to come.

“It will be interesting with the baby due in winter,” reflects Beth, 36. “We’re one and a half miles up dirt track from the road, I was snowed in last year and had to shovel a path to get the buggy through. My arms will kill me if I have to shovel a path for a double buggy.”

With husband Tim, 38, working offshore, it often falls to Beth to keep on top of the croft they’ve owned since 2011.

Her nursing skills have been handy for skinning deer, tube feeding a sick calf and being able to emotionally detach herself from Fergus and Fingal, the Shetland cattle who also enjoyed croft life before being turned into steak, roasts and a range of other cuts.

The work of a new generation of crofters like Beth, 36, will be celebrated in a few weeks time, when the Scottish Crofting Federation reveals the winners of its Young Crofter and Best Newcomer Crofter awards.

For Donald MacSween, who is shortlisted with Beth for the Young Crofter title, crofting was already in his blood when he was gifted a croft on family land at Ness, Isle of Lewis. An unusual 21st birthday present, he has spent the past 13 years getting the croft into working order.

“I plodded for a bit then decided to take it seriously,” he says. “I have 600 hens now and I’m one of the largest egg producers in the Western Isles.”

A full-time crofter, he also keeps pigs, 150 ewes and a few Highland cows. The eggs pay the bills, while his meat boxes are delivered to customers all over Scotland. “People want to know where their meat comes from and that the animals have been cared for,” he says.

Like Beth, he wakes every day to breath-taking scenery. “I have a golden beach at one end and rambling moorland at the other of the croft.

“It’s great in summer when the sun shines and it’s dry. But in winter when it doesn’t get light until 10am, it’s pouring with rain, freezing cold and you’re pulling a dead lamb out of a bog, it’s not so nice.

“It’s not all cute lambs and cuddly animals. There’s blood and guts.

“A lot of people have a romantic notion of what crofting is, but we are in danger of Brexit, it could kill crofting and kill rural communities.”

Crofters like Donald, 34, fear the impact of Australian and New Zealand lambs flooding the market, while the loss of EU subsidies is expected to hit pockets hard.

“But I like not having to work 9 to 5, I am my own boss and I love lambing,” he adds. “That’s my favourite time, seeing new life arrive and the world waking up. “

Across the Minch and 125 miles east, mum of two Lucy Williams pops her nine months old baby, Ottilie, into a sling and gets to work on the 1500 tea plants at her five-acre croft in Bonar Bridge, Sutherland. Her other daughter, Eyra, who’s four, helps out. “She calls herself ‘the tea doctor’, and checks the crop for aphids or weeds,” says Lucy.

Tea may seem an odd crop for a Highland croft but Lucy, 35 and husband Chris, 36, who works for the Forestry Commission, figured that with little land for livestock, tea was the best high value crop they could plant.

As well as traditional black tea plants - Camellia sinensis – she is growing peppermint, chamomile and lavender for herbal teas, using goats’ milk to make soap and grinds green tea to make Matcha tea to use in hand creams and lip salve.

“When I was 40 weeks pregnant, I was out putting fleece on the tea plants to protect them. Before that I was planting tea plants with a baby on my back,” she says.

“We could put up polytunnels but it’s about the authenticity of the plants being exposed to the elements. You have to be prepared to make sacrifices.”

Lucy, who is competing in the ‘Best Newcomer Crofter 2018’ category against Sandra Baer and Lynn Cassells, who run Lynbreck Croft in the heart of the Cairngorms, sells her Tulloch Tea online and expects to build her crop to 3000 plants over the next few years.

“The croft is gorgeous,” she says. “There are incredible views; we look over the Kyle of Sutherland, west is Ullapool, Dornoch is to the south, Loch Migdale is just east.

“We are planting hedgerow plants to protect the tea from the west winds – winter is wild,” she adds.

“But they should survive for up to 80 years - they’ll outlast us all.”

The awards will be made at a Celebrating the Spirit of Crofting event on October 5, at Rothes, Moray.

Crofter Beth, who swapped the cut and thrust of the operating theatre for the wheel of her vintage tractor, sums up crofting life: “I enjoy being outside, I don’t have to sit in an office, the cows don’t chat back.

“I look across fields and am dead chuffed because I can see the lines where I’ve mowed it.

“Even if I’m just picking up stones, I feel I’ve achieved something.”