Midwinter sunrise

The standing stones

The solstice  is just a  moment in time when the maximum height of the sun above the horizon is at its lowest point for the year.  Further north, above the Arctic Circle, it doesn’t rise above the horizon and the dawn doesn’t break.  The winter night is total.
The period of midwinter or Yule has now been subsumed into Christmas  but to the old peoples, it was  the turn of the year.   Although, because of the Earth’s tilt and its elliptical orbit, the days don’t actually get longer for some time after the solstice, it still represented the tipping point, the start of a new cycle.
In our electrically-lit, gas-warmed world it is difficult to imagine just how dark and cold the winter was four thousand years ago, especially how dark it was in the short days of midwinter.  Sunlight would have been precious, a gift to be enjoyed.
I got myself out to the standing stones to experience the sunrise of  midwinter.  The wind from the north seemed to come straight of the polar ice-cap. Walking out in the semi darkness of first light, the rays of the still hidden sun reflected on the  clouds along the horizon, in the bitterly cold wind, I wondered if people had come to the stones at this time thousands of years ago or were they erected for another purpose and I was merely being fanciful.

Sunrise

After waiting and freezing for what seemed like ages, I was rewarded with a spectacular sunrise and, turning round, with an equally evocative moon-set.

Moon-set

What ever the beliefs of the folk who put up the stones, I know that  the feeling of the sun on one’s face in the depth of winter is enough to lift the spirits and dispel the gloom.  The walk back was certainly brisker but the wind was behind me and breakfast beckoned.

.....And battles, long ago

The Cheviot still hides its head

 Still on the trail of the elusive Battle of Piperdean, I contacted the Department of Archaeology at Northumberland County Council  who were most helpful and referred me to the Transactions of The Berwickshire Naturalists, an esteemed body  known locally as “The Nats”.   It seems I was following old tracks for, in the accounts of 1910, there was a report asking the same question …

where was the battle of Piperdean?

Piperdean

The conclusion was that it was fought near Wark on the River Tweed, at a farm called Pressen where, indeed, there is a small valley, on the Pressen Burn, called Piperdean.  The farmer was well aware of the  supposed history of the site.

Piperdean looking east

Piperdean looking west

The explanation given in the Nats report is that Ridpath in his Border History in 1776 confused the battle with that of Chevy Chase, which, in turn, was often conflated and confused with the Battle of Otterburn.
 This is apparently the reason for Piperdean being described as “on the  River Breamish near the Cheviot” but this explanation falls down as Otterburn is nowhere near the Breamish either.

 It  seems there were just so many conflicts across the Debatable Lands as they were known, that folk had difficulty recalling who killed who and where and when.   The date of Piperdean is not even  accurately  known… sometimes 1435... sometimes 1436.
 The violence continued for nearly two more centuries and the farm of Pressen has a fortified bastle -house incorporated into the farm steading.

The crow-stepped gable of the bastle in the farm steading

Now a farm workshop, the massive masonry of the bastle is still  there

Built a hundred years after Piperdean, its massive walls still showed the need for the defence of people and livestock in those lawless days.



The search has been fun and has highlighted some hidden corners of our countryside and its colourful past.

Wikipedia has been corrected…again.

In search of dubious battle

The Cheviot is as hidden as the site of Pepperden

Just outside our village there is the site of a battle, or so it says in Wikipedia.   One of the many raids, skirmishes and sometimes large battles that constituted the Anglo-Scottish Wars between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.  The Battle of Piperdean …1436...was fought between the Scots and English or, to be more accurate between the Douglas and the Percy families.  The Scots won which was unusual.
The Battle of Piperdean… never heard of it… neither had I until I came across a reference to it whilst researching the Battle of Homildon Hill,  which I had heard of, which has a large marker stone near the site, and which the Scots lost.
The Battle of Piperdean.    A different tale.    No local knowledge, no marker, no reference on the RCAHMS website… not a trace… except on Wikipedia.

Piperdean, Auld Cambus

Within a few miles of us there is a field pictured on Wikipedia, with a burn running through it in a small gully that could just about  be called a dean and it is referred to as Piperdean on the O.S. map though, in past, the family who farmed the land called the field and the burn, Piper-ton.



George Ridpath’s Border History  of 1776 quotes the site where the Earl of Northumberland was surprised by the Scots as
“within his own territories at a place called Pepperden on Brammish not far from the mountains of Cheviot”

The Breamish  (Brammish) river is a tributary of the River Till which arises in the Cheviot range  well within the territories of the  Percy family but nowhere near our village.

Interestingly, the famous border ballads Chevy Chase and The Hunting of the Cheviot seem to share the confusion, having been thought to be about the Battle of Otterburn fought in 1388, nowhere near the Cheviot.

Daniel Defoe, journeying through Northumberland in the early 18th century was anxious to see where Chevy Chase was fought, the old ballad having featured in the Spectator in 1711.  He  records in his Tour through the whole Island of Great Britain that he was  shown  site on the side of a hill in the Cheviots where the conflict took place.    He was most likely shown the site of Homildon Hill where Percy and Douglas met in 1402.    The border hills were dotted with such scenes of slaughter for more than a hundred years.
It would seem that these old ballads, which probably conflate accounts of several encounters, contain at least some  details of Piperdean which appears more of a dispute about hunting rights, the continuation of a blood feud or  bloody minded provocation than anything political.


The Percy out of Northumberland
And a vow to God made he
That he would hunt the mountains
 of Cheviot within days three
In the magger* of doughty Douglas
And all ever with him be

* To spite or vex

Hector Boece or Boethius states “it is not known whether he (The Earl) had a commission to invade Scotland from the King of England or whether he undertook the enterprise himself.”
Whatever the reason for the fight, on this occasion, the Douglas won but the site of his victory seems to be lost.
Pepperden is no longer on the map but searching for it has brought me to some beautiful Northumbrian countryside and hidden jewels.





Old Bewick has a tiny Norman church built on what was probably  an Anglo-Saxon chapel.  It has been rebuilt many times, usually after destruction by marauding Scots, but still retains its essential Norman character.
An early 14th century effigy of a lady in the choir may be the wife of the man who first restored the church after the Scots invasions in the late 12th century.
Part of an Anglo-Saxon cross with a piscina is built into the porch and pieces of earlier carved stones incorporated into the restored walls.

14th century effigy

Saxon  carved stone in restored wall

.
It seems strange that a search for the site of conflict and killing, should lead one to such a peaceful spot.




 The Kirk Burn running alongside the church, for old ecclesiastical sites always had a source of water nearby for baptism, is crossed by a stone slab clapper bridge and the churchyard has some wonderful old gravestones and ancient yews.

Carved capitol with green man faces hinting at older religions

A succinct reminder

 The search for Piperdean will continue.

As I was walking...

A walk in the peace and tranquility of the Cheviots brings you upon a succession of hill forts dating back to the Bronze age and makes you realise that the status quo has not been the norm for most of the span of  the human occupation of these lands. Indeed they were, for centuries, the Debateable Lands and, before that, were fought over by Romans, Britons, Angles, Vikings who morphed into the kingdoms of  Bernicia then Northumbria then to Scots and English… always raiding and warring.
Long before that, the peoples of the Bronze and Iron Ages felt the need to defend themselves from incursions by their neighbours.
From the remains of the defensive structures on the tops of the hills, you can look down the valley of the  river Glen to the site of the Anglo-Saxon capital of Yeavering or Ad Gefrin as Bede called it.  Nothing remains to be seen of this royal residence destroyed in the wars between Mercians, Britons and Anglo-Saxons.

The valley of Glendale and the site of Ad-Gefrin

Yeavering Bell and the remains of a hill-fort

The landscape is dotted with churches built like forts, pele towers, bastle houses and markers to old battles and skirmishes.
The older parts of most of the village churches have massive thick walls to resist fire and assault; some have associated towers as refuges for the incumbents and the church plate.

Massive 15th C walls in a church

Pele tower  on a church

 Raiding and looting by the reivers from both sides of the disputed border must have made life a stressful business for the folk of the valley in the  fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

 The old saw was -
“If they come, they winna come
And if they dinna come, they’ll come hame” -
meaning if the Scots came reiving, the cattle out on the grazings wouldn’t be seen again but if they didn’t, the cattle would  come  safely home.

Bastle house ( steps and lower doors are later additions)

Full blown battles between Scots and English armies were frequent during the wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, culminating in the disaster for the Scottish side at Flodden, though even that defeat didn’t stop the Auld Enemies from continuing their aggression until the  Union of the Crowns in 1606.
One such battle, Homildon Hill, is marked by a Bronze age standing stone.  It was here that   Harry Hotspur of the Percy family captured Archibald 4th Earl of Douglas as recounted in Shakespeare’s  Henry IV part I

“..on Homeldon’s plains. Of prisoners Hotspur took,
Mordake the Earl of Fife and eldest son to beaten Douglas…”

Homildon stone

The fact that Hotspur refused to give up his prisoners to his king and, a year later, Douglas was allied with him in a rebellion against Henry shows how fluid loyalties were along the border to anyone other than family.

 The ordinary folk  just had to defend themselves as best they could in their fortified houses and pray in their churches as  the tides of war washed over them.    What are, today,  merely interesting aspects of rebuilt and reshaped buildings or piles of stones  were once the means of survival.
Tribal allegiances, power struggles, destruction and looting, rapine and havoc, we  see them still being played out on our T.V screens with the defenceless masses caught in the middle.   Strange to think it was once thus in these peaceful hills.

Even in 1940, defence was still needed. Pillbox at road junction

Fungi...the Bogeymen?

 Now is the time of the Fungi, the time for those otherworldly  beings to come…

“Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly…..

 …..We shall by morning
         inherit the earth             *           

         

The mycological world is an alien one, the stuff of legends and myths.  There is something disquieting, slightly disturbing, about fungi. Mushrooms especially the bland supermarket staples are fine but the others… even the ceps, the chanterelles, the meaty field mushrooms…they all carry that hint of danger.
What if they are not what they seem?

Horn of plenty

Then there are the tales of magic mushrooms, of “trips” and “highs”.. but which are the right ones and which are the traps for the unwary?  Masters of deception, many have their deadly doppelgangers.
Witches and shamans have long been associated with the fungi and their properties...and fairies, from a time when the wee folk weren’t the  pretty little bundles of joy of our modern children’s stories but vindictive sprites.  The penalties for stepping into a fairy ring could be severe.. early death or, at best, a life of “want and woe”.
They are neither plant nor animal but something quite different. Consumers of the dead, fragile yet resilient, pale yet vivid, they are part of that dark chthonic realm, the realm of the gothic and the macabre.

 Shaggy ink caps or Lawyers wigs

The woodlands that give shelter and sustenance to  huge numbers of fungi are threatened by their microscopic cousins.   Larch, chestnut and elm have all been attacked and now the  ubiquitous ash is their latest victim. The giant elms have all but gone from our hedgerows, forgotten, and, with them, the micro- environment they sustained.   Will those magnificent ash trees be next?  What will our countryside and, indeed, our towns, look like if we lose our ash trees.
Yggdrasil the world tree, the sacred tree that Odin hung on for “nine long nights” in Norse mythology was an ash tree.   Its wood is so good a fuel that our word for the remains of a fire share its name.  It is the last to come into leaf and the first to shed them.  Let us hope they survive.

Doomed?

*
Mushrooms   Sylvia Plath 

In the autumn of my days

The swallows have gone but the warm sunny days belie the presence of Autumn.  An Indian summer...why an Indian summer?    Apparently, it  came into use when the first colonists on North America noted these warm periods in autumn were essential to the native Americans for gathering their harvest and stores in preparation for their harsh winters.
 It is probably no longer politically correct to use the expression and we can't call the phenomenon a "Native or Pre-Columbian American Summer".  Perhaps we should go back to  St Martin's summer or St Luke's summer, so-called because of the feast days of these saints.   In some countries they call it an "old ladies" summer.
Whatever the name, it has been so enjoyable to get out and roam the countryside.  The grain harvest is past and the potatoes are being lifted. The days of the tattie howkers are long gone though a few still refer to the October school holiday as  " the tattie holidays", remembering a time when the back breaking toil of  picking up the crop by hand was a source of revenue for school-children. Now a machine does it all, its great curved tail depositing the earthy haul into the waiting trailer like a giant insect laying eggs.

The hedgerows are laden with fruit though how much will survive the slashing of the mechanised cutters is a concern for those of us interested in the survival of our bird life.
Why cut the hedges now?

A walk out to the Duddo stones raised the spirits. Set on an insignificant hillock, because of the surrounding topography, they command superb views of the surrounding country and distant hills.   They have stood for more than four thousand autumns, a tribute to the belief system that compelled the Neolithic farmers to erect them.  They give a perspective to our short lived concerns.

Duddo stone circle sometimes called the Singing Stones

The weathered face of the largest stone

A little further on the road was a small nature reserve.   A lowland moss formed at the end of the Ice Age, it had been the site of coal mining for three centuries.  Now Nature is reclaiming it.    The remains of the mine works look incongruous in the landscape and the workings themselves are all but gone.

The old mine workings on the Ford Moss

Nature seems to surmount all we can do to it … up until now, at least.
   
John Clare got it right.  Children plucked daisies long before the Duddo Stones were stood on end and children will probably pluck daisies thousands of years from now but the daisy will still be the same.   
“..A music that lives on and ever lives” *
Yet the landscape that the Neolithic farmers knew and  or that of John Clare, would have been vastly different from what we see today. For more than five thousand years we have been managing and shaping it.  Even the five Duddo Stones were once seven, two being removed to let the  plough come closer.
 Thousands of years of belief  exchanged for a few ears of grain. 
They are still  one of the most dramatic and impressive sites, especially on a beautiful, autumnal day with the blue shapes of the Cheviots, the Eildons and the edge of the Lammermuirs on the encircling horizon.

*  The Eternity of Nature    John Clare

Summer's lease has still to run

Autumn is officially here, the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness“.  Keats has got it right this year. The apple and  plum trees are hanging with fruit and the brambles, a taste of childhood, are fat and juicy.

The autumn crocuses and cyclamen are in flower under the cherry tree.
Yet, the swallows remain, flying their sorties over the stubble fields, rough shaven by the combines.   As long as they stay there is just a trace of summer to enjoy.  Suddenly they will be gone, one day swooping up to twitter in ranks on the telephone wires, the next, gone …every one…each obeying their own inner calendar yet leaving en masse and bringing the dark days of winter that bit closer.
Still the sun still shines and the winds, though northerly, are not too chill.

The pastures up on the moor are pink with sheep sorrel and the fungi are making their showy appearance in the woods. Winter is a long way off.

A bumble bee.. I think,a buff-tailed bumble bee …was hovering over a patch of grass and whins... then crawling about in the grass as if searching.   I wondered if it was a queen looking for a mouse hole or similar to make a nest for the winter.   It didn’t find any place that suited  it and flew off.  Even with  bumble bees, location, location, location… is everything.

The butterflies have been feasting on the rotting windfall apples...mostly peacocks which we seem to be seeing more and more often.   Presumably they too are stocking up on supplies before hibernation.   LotH bred a lot of Painted Lady butterflies in a lepidopterum, if that’s the word, last year and has been disappointed not to see any in the garden this year but I don’t think butterflies are like swallows or salmon… returning to their birthplace to breed.  They are a  truly beautiful excuse for not weeding.  Any remarks about the nettles in the borders are fended off with the retort that they are there for the butterflies!

 This handsome gentleman is still wearing his russet summer coat, though he seems haughtily suspicious of strangers

 "And stared at me. And so for some lasting seconds
I could think the deer were waiting for me
To remember the password and sign"       *

*Ted Hughes   The Roe Deer

Footsteps of Flodden revisited

  The exhibition on the life of Mary, Queen of Scots at the Scottish National Museum is superb.  The timelines of her convoluted personal and political life are easy to follow and  make it clear that so many of the problems that beset her reign were the unforeseen and, in some cases, unforeseeable, results of  her or someone else’s actions.

http://www.nms.ac.uk/our_museums/national_museum/upcoming_exhibitions/mary_queen_of_scots.aspx



Mary seems to have inherited her impetuosity from her grandfather, James IV, the  calamitous loser at the Battle of Flodden, an event that scarred Scotland for years.    Not so much from the slaughter of the nobility,  most of whom were only motivated by self interest and acquisition, but for the loss from the clerical and commercial classes. This set back for decades, the economic and intellectual life of the country, that had been flowering under the Renaissance ideals of James.
By the time Mary came to the Scots court,  it appeared unsophisticated  and dominated by the uncouth ruffians that passed for  the aristocracy, though the Reformation had brought the beginnings of  that far seeing experiment - a school in every parish- that was to lead to widespread literacy and, eventually, to the Scottish Enlightenment but what a struggle it was to get there.
 It is five hundred years since  James ‘s disastrous foray across the border to Flodden Field and, last weekend, a walk was arranged along  thirteen miles of the route taken from Edinburgh across the Lammermuirs to the mustering point at Ellemford on the Whitadder.  

http://www.lammermuirlife.co.uk/In-the-Footsteps-of-Flodden.cfm

 Play-lets and  encounters were set up to entertain the walkers and to give a voice to the “others”.. the camp followers, the commoners,  those pressed into service, those on the make…the ones that don’t appear in  the historic accounts.

In the Footsteps of Flodden - A knight and his servant have thoughts on their situation!

In the Footsteps of Flodden- a "penny-jo" accosts two young recruits on the march!

The day finished with “ Ghosts” a tribute to all the young men killed in battle since 1513,  in all the wars and campaigns. Men who were conscripted, duped or pressed into service of arms with no choice but to obey.   The finale was that ultimate in laments, The  Floor’s o’ the Forest, made all the more evocative by the soft summer rain that set in as the walk finished.



To paraphrase, or misquote, both Toynbee and Hubbard… history, like life, is just one damn thing after another.  In  most of Scottish history.. and probably the rest of humanity as well…it seems  to lurch from one calamity to the next with not much in the way of  reasoning or logic.  The religious or political philosophy that  there is a plan, divine or otherwise, behind it all, seems wide of the mark.    History like evolution , doesn’t seem to have any fixed aim or ending.  It just proceeds with sudden leaps or turns when a variation  of the norm occurs.
Even our planned walk had its twists, false starts and repeat performances but, by and large, it could be counted a success which is more than can be said for Mary Queen of Scots or James IV…their achievements were overshadowed by their mistakes.
 Poor old James, invaded another country, thought it would all be over in a few days, didn't have a real objective, didn't have an exit strategy,.......history doesn't always repeat itself but it does rhyme as somebody once said.  Somebody also said it is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.
 If only only we could learn from history but we never do so we seem doomed to repeat it ...and usually at the expense of young lives.

Requiem for a hedgehog

Usher Hall

August in Edinburgh means The Edinburgh International Festival.   There is also the Fringe where the old lady hoists her skirts and kicks her legs with the odd flash of garter but, for the Festival proper, she assumes her best going-out-to-the-theatre hat and makes her way to the douce sobriety of the Usher Hall.      So it was that a scruffy latecomer such as me, managed to squeeze himself into possibly the last available seat.

Perched in the vertiginous heights of the upper row of the upper circle, I exchanged pleasantries with my fellow alpinists.  We were a motley lot… American, Japanese…no doubt, there to hear their own Mitsuko Uchida’s expressive playing of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto… a city-suited gent, a collection of casually dressed tourists and formally dressed locals who had left it late to get tickets and had to settle for a seat in “the gods”.

Tchaikovsky’s Sixth is often described as a warhorse having been performed so many times in so many places but, no matter how often it played, it still has the power to speak to each person in the audience, an emotive appeal that’s individual to every listener.

Some of the audience were so carried away by the stirring march of the third movement that they burst into spontaneous applause…maybe they thought that nothing could follow it…but had to endure the anguish of the final movement and its conclusion of reflective, acceptance of the desolation of fate, of the end of a life

Getting back to the country, I stepped out into the garden to watch the beginning of the Perseid meteor showers.  It seemed appropriate given the theme from Tchaikovsky’s first movement was reworked into the pop song “The Story of a Starry Night”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUVBTP9JKXA

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipn1qBTN8MU

  Head back, staring up at Perseus, his love, Andromeda, and his perfidious in-laws, the W-shaped Cassiopeia and Q-shaped Cepheus, I didn’t notice the hedgehog snuffling over the lawn, nor him, me.    As soon as I moved, he shot off into the shrubs.

 We haven’t had hedgehogs around here for years so the encounter lifted my spirits and, for the next couple of nights, I left some meal worms out for my guest hoping to encourage him to stay in the safety of the garden.

A week later, my new chum was dead on the road, like so many of his kind.      His race have been around from long, long before Perseus killed Medusa to win Andromeda, his prickles making him invulnerable. Yet now, we seem determined to exterminate his kind and are succeeding.

There is a slow, resigned sadness in this.  It seems inevitable.   Maybe they deserve the Pathetique more than we do.

"Was there ever a master of motor cars as Toad of Toad Hall?"

Mr Toad made a rare appearance.   We don’t see him around the garden but every so often he turns up.  The last sighting was in 2009.  Then, we thought it was prompted by the arrival of a new motor car, toads being known to have a predilection for motor cars.  Poop,poop !

 No such novelties were at hand on this occasion so he was probably just enjoying the humid weather with it abundance of the sort of delicacies that toads like to eat.

Toad and his adventures with motor cars on the open road mirrored the experiences of early drivers and resulted in the creation of the RAC and the AA, organisations that existed to help stranded motorists.  I can remember the patrolmen on their motor-bikes saluting the cars that carried their badge.  It used to be believed that, if they didn’t salute, there was a speed trap ahead.

 After getting my first car, I duly obtained my badge and the key to the roadside boxes from whence help could be summoned.    Much to my later disappointment, I left my badge on my first car when I sold it and never liked the modern version but, strangely enough, I still have the key.

It was with delight that I came across one of the few remaining AA boxes at Cappercleuch near St Mary’s loch.    A reminder of pre- MOT motoring when cars, especially the kind I could afford, were completely unreliable, when fan-belts were regularly replaced by a nylon stocking, radiators boiled over and hoses perished.

I’m sure Mr Toad hankers after those days but not me, I like surround-sound, climate control, warning lights and beeps of every possible kind.  I’ve no wish to go back to standing in the rain trying to figure out why a pile of unresponsive metal won’t move.

Still, it was nice to see an AA box again.

An unexpected sight


Apparently ,out of eight hundred boxes, there are nineteen left and eight of them are Grade II listed buildings

A " listed" building


Mr Toad  would have approved of them.  He needed  all the help he could get on the road.