Winter Solstice

There is a series of footpaths and rights-of-way that makes a continuous walk from the ruins of our 14^th century priory, itself built on a previous pagan site, to a large conical knowe, (knoll, to the Anglophones amongst you) on the shore.

From the top, you get an uninterrupted view of the horizon facing due east. The perfect place to see the sun rise. The paths pass Bronze Age burial sites and odd, unexcavated mounds, as they follow the streams to the sea. The mound is probably glacial detritus but it does have a curiously regular shape. I fancy the walk is the remnant of an old processional way. What better day to follow it than today, the winter solstice, to witness the sun appear over the horizon on the shortest day.

Today is the true turn of the year, not the artificial constructs of Hogmanay and New Years day. Today the year begins anew.

Sunrise!

A disappointing end to the expedition, the rain and cloud made discerning the moment of sunrise almost impossible. The merest blanching of sky above the sea was all that was visible, a choice between two shades of grey - perhaps a comment from the old gods of Nature on our current state.

Nature has made its views on human endeavour even more explicit when the recent gales caused a wind turbine to become so out of control that it threatened the village and had to be cut free of its moorings. It now lies in its field like a broken toy that some giant child has thrown away in a tantrum.

Yet the Welsh poppy, unseasonably in bloom in the garden kept its head, so to speak, when all about the place were in danger of losing theirs to a runaway whirligig. Not a petal was lost. A moral in there somewhere, - maybe we should learn to bend with the elements instead of trying to bend them to our will.

The woodpecker is back at the peanuts in the bird feeder. It has been drumming away in the trees by the burn all summer but has risked returning to the garden for an easier food supply. Nature is quite good at taking advantage of us at times, usually causing pleasure rather than disruption.

....at least the days are getting longer......spring can't be far away!

Time and Place

It’s some time since I wrote a blog. More time than I realised. Family, projects, day to day administration, they all take time. Funny thing, time, you seem to have lots of it but just when you’re distracted or look the other way, it slips away.

Time passes, sometimes it flies, sometimes it drags, it has even been said to stand still, but only in romantic fiction. Time heals, is money, can be against you or on your side and along with the tide, waits for no man. In photography, it lapses

For Einstein it was the fourth dimension.

St Augustine said of time, “If no-one asks me,I know but if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not”.

At CERN, it seems that, because some people think that neutrinos appear to travel faster than the speed of light, then, theoretically, time travel is possible. I don’t pretend to understand the physics and guess it’s only possible for subatomic particles not humans.

With time on my hands, and a sunny cold December day, I went off to see if any of our usual winter visitors had taken up local residence, it being that time of year. Two deep deans, inaccessible to sheep, provide a sheltered sanctuary for any arrivals. Full of hawthorn, hazel, blackthorn, whin and brambles they are as miniature remnants of the wildwood of millennia ago

The dean

As well as the usual suspects, fieldfares and redwings, there were a few white fronted geese gleaning in the stubble fields above the deans.

The streams, eventually merging before reaching the sea, have cut deep down, exposing the layers laid down over aeons of time. Down through the glacial deposits from the Ice Ages that make up the farmland of today, down through the Old Red Sandstone of the Devonian era, down to the harder Silurian greywracke laid down in the bed of ancient seas and the porphyric rocks pushed out as molten lava when ancient continents collidided.

Sandstone erosion

Stream bed, porphyric rock and greywracke

Four hundred million years in one walk

Anyone can travel in time if you have a mind to.

What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen

Winter sunset

The hard frosts continue but, thankfully, the snows seem to be passing by our corner of the country.
The bird feeders are still well patronised by the usual suspects and a few itinerants.
The great spotted woodpecker has appeared on a few occasions, and a female blackcap has been feasting on the peanuts for a few days. The male of the species was seen last winter but not so far this year. (Blog 15/03/2010)
It is a reflection of the previously androcentric nature of society that the species is named after the male, the female having an equally obvious brown cap.

Blackcap-browncap

The cult sci-fi television series, “Red Dwarf”, had an episode when the hapless crew entered a parallel universe where the roles were reversed and they met their female equivalents, all with what we would regard as masculine habits and attitudes. Is there another universe with browncaps instead of blackcaps: brown flycatchers instead of pied flycatchers; browny-grey grouse instead of black; olive-brown finches instead of green.?

A snipe spent a day fossicking about under the hawthorn hedge where the ground remained unfrozen, probing the leaf litter with its beak. I presume it was a migrant resting after flying in over the coast. The next day it was gone.
NCC has had great fun on the frozen fields, flushing up coveys of resident partridge and a greater number of snipe than you would expect. They must be coming in over the North Sea. Her other sport is to chase the local roe deer who treat her fairly contemptuously, sprinting off to a safe distance then turning to view her with disdain.




NCC's quarry leaving her standing


They have been making their way down to the shoreline where they must browse amongst the kelp thrown up by the tides and, probably, finding shelter beneath the cliffs from the worst of the snowstorms.


Redshank on the kelp

The shelter of the shore

If the freeze lasts long enough, the Grand Match, the highlight of any curling season, might take place. It hasn’t been played since 1979 as seven inches of ice are needed to support the weight of up to two thousand curlers and their stones on a frozen loch.

It's an ill wind and all that.

Fingers crossed that some good comes of "Janwar's cauld blast"