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.

Talla to Gameshope

The way begins

Passing the Megget Stone (Blog 07/09/18) and descending the winding single track road to the Talla reservoir,  I came to the little bridge at Tallalinnfoot where, after a series of waterfalls or linns in Auld Scots, the Talla Water merges with the Gameshope Burn.

Sheep's bit Scabious

 Leaving the car, I set off up the track by the Burn. It is a most special place with strange rock formations and mounds or kames, left over from its glacial past.

Kame

The kames are hillocks composed of layers of sand and gravel laid down by glacial meltwater.  Is this how the glen got its name?  A "hope" is a valley so it might have been Kameshope at one time and changed over the years.

Following the burn up through the glen is almost mystical, so pleasing is the sound of the waterfalls and the sight of the boulders, the so-called erratics, scattered across the landscape where they were left by the ice as it retreated all those millennia ago.

The Borders Forest Trust has started to restore the original  woodland habitat that once preceded the sheep bitten uplands now so characteristic of the border hills. They've described it as the Children's Forest for it will be generations before it comes to fruition and fuses with  their first project, the Wildwood at Carrifran Gans to the south in a continuous swathe of  primal forest that has not been seen here  for thousands of years.  

Replanting has begun

While applauding the idea, I felt a little pang of regret that the bleak wildness of the place will eventually be softened and the vistas of stone and moor will be clad with trees. At least, I will still be able to enjoy it in my lifetime.

Field Mouse-ear growing with Foxglove

One of the massive stones is known as Peden's Pulpit after the famous Covenanter, Andrew Peden who is said to have preached there.

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  The Rev Andrew Peden had to leave his parish under the vicious suppression mounted by the restored Charles Stuart against his Presbyterian subjects., the Covenanters  A time known as "the killing times" and so vividly decribed by James Hogg in his novel The Brownie of Bodesbeck.(Blog18/03/14)

The story starts with the line

"It will be a bloody night in Gemsop ( Gameshope) this."

Conventicles were held in remote locations in the hills where the chance of discovery by the Royalist troops was lessened.
The Blanket Preaching at St Mary's Kirk in Yarrow  recalls these outdoor meetings when a blanket was held over the preacher's head to protect him from the elements. (Blog10/08/14)

 Peden supported the outlawed worshipers for ten years until he was caught, imprisoned and deported to the Americas. A sympathetic captain freed him en route to return to his preaching. His name is remembered across the lowlands of Scotland. There is a Peden's pulpit on Rubers Law (Blog 06/04/15) ), a Peden's Cove or Cave, a Peden's Tree, a Peden's church in Ayrshire.

 The track petered out after the Gameshope bothy, the site of the old sheep farm and I wasn't equipped for the higher ground so I had a slow wander back to the car just enjoying the atmosphere of this most exceptional of valleys.

The beach in October

Autumn has its benefits.

A time of reds, yellows and pinks colouring the butterflies, fungi, and berries... and skies that look as if they've come from a Turner painting.

The tourists have gone and we have our beach back to ourselves. The terns have left on their long migration southwards so we will miss their swooping flights over the bay with the sudden dip to take a fish as neatly as swallow taking an insect on the wing. They really deserve the name sea swallows.

There must be fish, probably mackerel, shoaling off shore. 

We have been visited by a pod of dolphins and the gannets are giving their usual display of high diving as they plummet down like daggers into the waves.

The refraction caused by the change from water to air must mean that the birds have to work out instantly where their target will be as they enter the sea rather than just where it appears to be when they spot it from above....and they do it over and over again.

There was an immature bird fishing among its elders. In its first summer, it hasn't achieved the wonderful white plumage of the adult birds.

I read somewhere that the white feathers of seabirds such as gannets and terns that dive for food is an advantage as it camouflages them against the sky and makes their approach difficult for fish to spot whereas birds that swim down to fish like shags, cormorants and guillemots don't need this and are dark.

It seems to make sense.

On that basis, the dark colouring of the young gannet would make life harder but as a result would make it even more important that it burnish its diving coordination skills which would last throughout its quite long life. Evolution is a subtle process.