Halcyon Days and Long Nights

Calm Seas

The weather has been settled for the last few days, the sea has been calm and the wind scarcely a breeze.

These are the halcyon days, the time of temperate climate around the winter solstice.

Fishing in the quiet dawn

Ovid in his Metamorphoses recorded the myth that Alcyone daughter of Aeolus, god of the winds, married to the mortal Cyex, king of Thessaly, upset Zeus and he caused a storm to drown her husband. Grief stricken, Alcyone, threw herself into the waves to join him. The gods, in compassion, changed them both into blue halcyon birds which flash over the waters. Now we commonly associate the story with the kingfisher, Alcedo atthis named after Alcyone.

But Zeus was not to be thwarted. He decreed that the birds should build their floating nests and lay their eggs in midwinter. Aeolus, master of the winds, ensured a period of gentle zephyrs at this time to help his daughter.

Thus, we have the halcyon days and, indeed it has been so for this week.

Sunrise at the Duddo Stones

The sky was overcast on the solstice day so the sunrise at 0836 hrs.was not spectacular but the setting at the Duddo stones made up for it.

Tonight, we have a full moon and the Ursid meteor shower from the region of Ursa Minor, the Little Bear. The sky is overcast so not much will be visible but the Moon appears between the clouds. We call it the Moon before Yule. The North American peoples call it the Moon of the Long Night, a much more evocative title.

The year is on the turn. The old year is gone. The tree of the month is the Yew. Green and resilient. 

The days will lengthen. Even the cold blast of January cannot stop the feeling that winter is past.

Woodland fungi

There it was. I was sure it wasn't there a day or two ago. An unseasonal warm spell and toadstools suddenly seem to appear at this time of year -

Overnight, very

Whitely, discreetly,

Very quietly

as Sylvia Plath described it with such economy of word.

This one was an ink cap, I think, though I wouldn't trust my judgement. An Ithinkcap maybe.

LotH and myself have consumed wild fungi in the past but only with some trepidation and after much book and internet searching. We have survived but it is a hazardous business. Penny Bun ceps found in a pine wood; parasol mushrooms from under a hedge; puffballs supplied by a farmer friend, sliced and dipped in egg like mushroomy french toast; we've enjoyed them all but always there was that doubt even with the obviously edible ones.  Make one mistake and it's curtains!

How did Man ever discover what was safe and indeed, good to eat and what was not? Are we indebted to long-forgotten Palaeolithic heroes who tried and tasted and survived... or didn't?

Perhaps there should be a statue to the unknown fungi eater who paved the way.

Thank goodness for greengrocers and mushroom farmers.

 Deadly fly agaric ...one to avoid!!

An enigma in stone

The Ettrick

Shopping trips to our capital city are a great excuse to spend some time at the National Museum.

While LotH reconnoitres George Street, I can slip away into the past.

In search of the Stone Age bow that inspired the Wildwood project (Blog 28/07/13), I came across this intriguing little carving.

The carved stone

 I just had to go and seek out its origins, a place called Over Kirkhope far up the valley of the  River Ettrick.

 It transpires it is a gravestone retrieved from its nineteenth century role as part of a drystane dyke! A local farmer had saved it when the site of an ancient burial ground was taken into agricultural use.

The Kirk Hope

 It was recorded that a line of trees was planted to mark the site of what had been a very early chapel probably from the era of the Celtic church, in the time of the Brythonic peoples before the Anglian invasion (Blog 07/09/18) 

There is evidence of village settlement in the same area and a raised bank or grassed-over wall defining the nearby burial ground.

The outline of the chapel

The bank or wall dividing off the burial ground

The figure is crudely carved and appears to be dancing but is in fact an Orans, the raised arms being in a position of supplication or prayer that was the norm before the adoption of the palms -together style of today.  It is the realisation in pecked stone outline of a saint albeit a long forgotten one

Over Kirkhope is a sheep farm in the sparsely populated upper reaches of the Ettrick valley.

The name is self explanatory... Kirk hope...the valley of the chapel.

Once part of the lands of Melrose Abbey, it was described as a "free forest". The valleys would have been thickly wooded, a segment of the Ettrick forest, itself a residue of the great Wood of Caledon of Arturian legend.

To such a place might have come a hermit, an anchorite seeking solitude in the wilderness. The village with its burial ground and chapel may have arisen later. The carved figure with the cross on its chest showing its beatification, was probably raised as memorial to their patron saint inviting his blessings.

The Kirkhope Burn joins the Ettrick

Now a lonely place, with a few sheep-grazed mounds to to show where people had once lived and died, strived to get a living from the land, to survive and to raise families, to be dispersed and forgotten and to leave the enigma of the stone carved figure.

The Spoot

October sky

 Last night, it rained then the rain turned to hail as the wind blew in from the North bringing the chill of the Arctic to the village. Too late to get the vulnerable plants into the greenhouse, the grapefruit and pomegranate plants grown for fun from pips, are unlikely to survive.

Rain is so much part of life in our climate that we forget what a precious occurrence it is for much of the world.  Recently, Cape Town had to introduce rationing of water as the reservoirs levels became lower and lower, much of Australia is in a state of near drought as is most of the Middle East.  The demand for water rises each year but there is too much in the wet areas causing flooding and not nearly enough in the dry areas causing drought.  Climate change is exacerbating the problem

Clean potable water is a boon. It always has been since Man started to spread out across the globe.  Maybe it was drought that drove us out of Africa.

Shellfish a-plenty in the rock pools

 On the hill coming up from our beach is a spring known locally as the Spoot.  It has never been known to dry up. In simpler times, folk would fill their kettles there to make tea in the little beach huts that line the shore. Now we have mains water and the Spoot has been demoted to washing sandy feet and watering thirsty dogs.

The Spoot

 Mesolithic sites, dating from some ten thousand years ago, have been discovered up and down the coast from here.  Those early hunters tended to keep to the coastline, the interior being dense wildwood or marsh.  Living at the beach made sense as there was a ready source of food. The  midden remains on these sites contain shellfish and hazel nuts as well as animal bones and I'm sure our beach was an ideal site.

Hazelnut filberts

There are still whelks, limpets and winkles a-plenty and hazel trees still grow in the deans ...and the Spoot still runs with clear sweet water just as it must have done all those millennia ago.

Climates have changed often since those times but the day the Spoot ceases to flow we will really be in trouble and it may be too late.