The Cherry and the Sloe

**
About ane bank, quhair birdis on bewis
 Ten thusand tymis thair notis renewis
Ilke houre into the day: 
The Merle, & Maveis micht be sene,
The Progne, and the Phelomene,*
 Quhilk caussit me to stay:
 I lay and leynit me to ane bus,
To heir the birdis beir,

I saw  my first swallow of 2014 yesterday, skimming over the young barley like a miniature fighter plane.  A marvel of aerodynamics.   Exactly a year since the first sighting of 2013, they have returned.  How do they do it.?
Easter is for some people a time of miracles.  The  immaculate timing of the swallows is my Easter miracle.
The hedgerows are greening up, the gean trees are in blossom, and the spring flowers are blooming. Of course, we are at least two or more weeks behind the south of England where we have just spent a pleasant few days.  There, the bluebells are out in the woods and, at Leeds Castle, among the numbers of water fowl, I noticed the coots and mallards had fledglings.

Leeds Castle

Coots

Here, we are a bit slower in gearing up for summer - only one swallow so far.

The flouris fair wer flurischit,
As nature had them nurischit,
Baith delicate and deir:
And every blome on branche and bewch
So prettily wer spred,

The dean leading to the sea is a dense mass of white blackthorn and yellow whin blossom.  Celandine, named from the Greek for swallow, primrose, dog violet, cowslip, wood anemone and dogs mercury are all out on the braes above the shoreline.

The Dean

The blackthorn blossom undamaged by wind and rain holds out the promise of a good crop later in the year for the sloe gin makers but amount of blossom and subsequent fruiting doesn’t seem to have any rational relationship.  Some years there will be a large number of sloes on one bush and none on another.  One thicket will produce a crop for several seasons then suddenly become barren.  The gean or bird cherry has a fickleness all of its own.  One year the cherries will be as bitter as sloes then the next, tartly sweet.
 At the moment, the froth of blossom is a welcome sight.
The sloe and the gean are as unpredictable as most of life’s occurrences. 
The arrival of the swallows is reassuringly certain.



**  The Cherrie and the Slae  Alexander Montgomerie (circa 1545-1610)
 *  Merle - blackbird    Maveis- thrush
    Progne - swallow     Philomeme - nightingale

There are no nightingales anywhere in Scotland now despite global warming!

Underground, overground, wombling free!

A  week on the Fife coast, the “golden fringe on a beggars mantle”, was, despite the sunshine, spent underground for much of the time.
The  news on the telly proclaimed it was seventy  years since seventy six POW's escaped in a tunnel from Stalag Luft III and gave the Beeb an excuse to run “The Great Escape” for the umpteenth time so tunneling was very much the motif of the week.
 This was Fife after all, where the first coal mine under the sea was ingeniously constructed as long ago as 1575, in Culross.
 We also learned that nowhere in Fife, it seems, is pronounced as it is spelt.  Culross is apparently, “Cooross” and we stayed at Kilconquhar which is said like a sneeze - "Kinneuchar", not far from Anstruther or “Ainster"

St Fillan's cave

Pittenweem, the place of the cave, does seem to be phonetically sound, and there we made our first excursion into the bowels of the Earth to visit St Fillans cave, now consecrated as a church.

 
Fife abounds in saints - St Fillan, St Leonard, St Ternan, St Monan, St Rule and , of course, St Andrew.

St Rule's tower

Relics of the patron saint of Scotland were supposedly brought to Fife by St Rule (or Regulus) and the town grew up round the shrine with a castle, cathedral and university as befitted its status and, naturally made it a prime target in the religious strife that is so much part of Scottish history.

The ruins of the castle still stand and, by chance, have preserved one of the best examples of mediaeval siege warfare techniques - tunneling. The technical terms are mine and counter-mine.   Despite the current obsession with “ ‘elfin safety”,  you can still crawl beneath the tower of the castle were the attackers attempted to tunnel in and find the counter-mine made by the defenders who, guided only by the sound of the works and after several unsuccessful starts, broke into the tunnel and defeated them.   Apparently, it took a year to cut through the solid sandstone foundations.  Warfare was a slow business in the sixteenth century. Crouching under the low roof, it was hard to imagine a desperate struggle taking place in these cramped and dark conditions but it did.

The mine started below the tower on the right

The mine

Where mine and counter-mine meet

A plan of the tunnels can be found at 
http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/site/94410/details/st+andrews+castle+mine+and+countermine/

Warfare in the sixteenth century concerned small groups of armed men confronting each other whether in open field or holes in the ground.

Twentieth century wars were to have been fought and wrought by whole populations with few expected to survive.   Even the privileged few were likely to spend their last days or weeks trapped deep underground.

A visit to the nuclear-bomb-proof bunker - Scotland’s Secret Bunker- was especially interesting for us as such a bunker was built just next to our village.  Our bunker was never used.  Some say an underground spring flooded the lower levels and, certainly, when I made my one and only visit into its depths there was water beneath the concrete flagstones.   My visit was by torchlight.  The darkness was total, so dark you felt you could touch the blackness, and completely silent, no wind or rain, no bird song, no distant cars or noise of human activity, nothing penetrated the fifteen feet thick concrete walls. 
It was one of the most frightening places I have ever been in.
The bunker in Fife was fully operational up until the seventies and easily accessible, so it was with a degree of interest that I anticipated seeing what had been hidden from the pencil beam from my puny torch in our local version.
 No wonder I couldn’t see much by torchlight in the sealed-off version I visited . The bunkers are massive , the size of two football pitches, one on top of the other, one hundred feet underground.

The dummy house covering the entrance of standard MoD design

On arrival, I noted the dummy house that covers the entrance, is an exact copy of the one at our village.  Obviously the M.o.D. had only one design.

www.secretbunker.co.uk

Down fifty yards of sloping tunnel - everything was in imperial measure when this monster was built- was a whole world designed to withstand a nuclear blast and allow the protected few to govern the country afterwards.

An unidentified RAF operative manning the switchboard

A futile plan that thankfully was never put to the test.   A Cold War relic that is now a tourist attraction.
Back up in the sunlight, it was time to reflect but not too much, then off to Anstruther… sorry, Ainster, for  a visit to the famous fish and chip shop.