A turn off the road

Yester Kirk

Graveyards are always worth a visit when stravaiging about the countryside. The older ones attached to a kirk never fail to provide a story or two (Blog 2/7/2015).

On the way back from a necessary but fairly uninteresting visit to Edinburgh, I thought I deserved a turn on to the road less travelled and left the coast and the dual carriage-way for the Lammermuirs.  

Sign posts

Following some very specific sign-posts, I arrived in Gifford, perhaps the birth place of that noted misogynistic Calvanist, John Knox, a claim that is also made for the neighbouring Haddington. What that railer against the "monstrous regimen(t) of women" would have made of the current equality of the sexes in all walks of life and not just politics, would be interesting.

A gravestone to a former minister, James Witherspoon, mentions his son, John, who was the only clergyman to sign the American Declaration of Independence.

A look round the quiet kirk-yard showed the prominence of the Hay family, the Earls and Marquesses of Tweedale as well as other little historical insights. Two, dedicated to officers of that forerunner of the global economy, the East India Company, gave a reminder of Empire and the Raj.

Stones with the names of Gian Carlo Menotti and his wife, Malinda lie side by side. 

 They lived in Yester House, once the seat of the Earls of Tweeddale. Menotti composed several operas but his most well known must be Amal and the Night Vistors, a children's Christmas opera specifically conceived for television.

Yester House

It is surprising where a five minute stroll can take you on a turn off the road.

Gifford is also the site of the Goblin Ha'  at Yester Castle, giving its name to a local hotel.  Mentioned in Marmion by Walter Scott,  it is a fascinating place but too far off the track to explore today.  I'll have to come back again.

Hairst*

We approach the autumnal equinox. The full moon of September, the Harvest Moon, has just waned.  Before artificial lighting, its glow allowed farmers to take advantage of a dry spell and harvest their crop well into the night.

Driving home under its light, I came across a newly dead fox, no doubt hit by a car. It looked young, not much more than a cub with its soft red fur and black ears and socks. Part of the dispersal as the young foxes move out seeking territories and mates for themselves, this one hadn’t developed the skills needed to survive alongside humans. Few of the local community would mourn the death of a fox but it did make me feel sad.

The next day, I did have a chance to save a furry creature from the wheels of the cars when I found a black hairy caterpillar, a hairy oobit, crossing the road and ushered it into the verge. Hopefully it will grow up to be, I think, a leopard moth.

The fields have a roughly shaved look, and the last of the swallows have departed. Only last week, the tail-enders of this year’s brood were sweeping over the stubble like tiny jet fighters and then, in one day, they were gone on a journey already taken by their parents to a place they have never seen. How do they manage it?

As they move out, the long straggling skeins of geese come honking in from the north.

The hedgerows are flushed with haws and berries awaiting the return of those other visitors, the redwings and fieldfares and. hopefully, waxwings.

Haws, Hips and Scrogs

The warm sun still brings out the butterflies and dragonflies around the loch but after it sets the twilight has the cold touch of coming winter. Once more, the year is on the turn.

*Hairst,  the Scots for autumn is synonymous with harvest. Hairst-home is winter.

Cornflower blues

After the visitation of the Painted Ladies in August, ( Blog 31/07/19 ) other butterflies having been appearing in the garden. The recent burst of hot weather has helped to bring out more species fluttering around the fields and by-ways

Following a path by woodland, I tried to capture the latest batch with the phone camera but their compound eyes mean that they are off as soon as you approach, dancing enticingly from plant to plant never settling long enough to get the phone close to them. (Memo to self - bring the SLR the next time.)

Green veined white on thistle

Comma

They did lead me to a field of pasture being munched by a contented flock of ewes and there, along the field edge, growing among the sheep sorrel, were cornflowers.

Once, these "weeds of cultivation"were common in cereal crops as their names suggest, - cornflower, corn spurrey, corn marigold, corn cockle. Now, due to the use of agri-chemicals, most are rare but their seed can survive for a long time as witnessed by the proliferation of poppies along any roadside verge after digging by local councils or service providers.

Cornflowers, like poppies, grew in the churned up fields of the Western Front in WWI and were adopted by the French as their flower of remembrance – le bleuet de France

Now, they are seldom found in Britain except in gardens as part of a "wild flower" sowing or where environmentally friendly farmers have reintroduced them.

Wild flower meadow

My few were almost certainly survivors from an older time still managing to set seed despite the munching of the sheep.

Sheep sorrel

Sheep sorrel is a food plant for the small copper butterfly. I saw none that day but worth another look (with a better camera!).

Odd how the flowers of remembrance the field poppy and the cornflower are scarcely to be found in the countryside where they were once so much part of the landscape - a lost generation of blooms.

The bonnie, broukit bairn

On the 20th of August 1977, Voyager II was launched to be followed on the 5th September by its twin, Voyager I. The reversed sequence of launches was due to the different trajectories of the two craft as they set off for the outer reaches of our solar system to explore the gas and ice worlds of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, taking advantage of a once-in-175-years alignment of the planets The pictures they sent back were astounding.

I've just been watching again the Voyager programmes on the television and marvelling at the engineers' ability to guide a tiny probe with about as much computing power as a mobile phone, across billions of miles and decades of time and to receive back these spectacular images as well as all the scientific data.

The Voyagers have now gone beyond the heliosphere, beyond the influence of our sun and are travelling across the galaxy more than 20 billion miles away and will probably continue to do so even after our sun and its planets have ceased to exist.

In the years between then and now, we have had the Viking Landers on Mars, the red planet; the Mariner and Venera missions to Venus; Galileo and Cassini to Jupiter and Saturn again, all adding to our view of our solar system and its occupants.

Of all the images the most powerful, to my mind, is that of the "pale blue dot". As Voyager moved towards interstellar space, the cameras were turned round to look back over nearly 4 billion miles and there was this tiny speck.

This moved Carl Sagan to ask us "to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

The news is of micro-plastics in the snows of Antarctic, of animal, insect and plant species disappearing into extinction, and of global warming and the ecological and social problems that will bring.

The great Scots poet, Hugh Macdiarmid, showed remarkable prescience when in 1925 he wrote The Bonnie Broukit Bairn.

 Broukit, in Auld Scots, means neglected, begrimed. In 1925, it was dirty with soot from coal. MacDiarmid couldn't have imagined the levels of pollution we are now seeing.

Mars is braw in cramassy*,

Venus in a green silk goun

The auld mune shak's her gowden** feathers

Their starry talk's a wheen o' blethers,

Nane for thee a thochty sparin'

Earth thou bonnie broukit bairn

*crimson ** golden

Perhaps now we will spare a thochty for the pale blue dot.

Battle of Otterburn

It fell about the Lammas tide,

When the muir-men win their hay,

The doughty Earl of Douglas rode

Into England, to catch a prey.

 In 1388, England and France were locked in the struggle for dominance in the Hundred Years War. The Auld Alliance of Scotland with France gave the Scots a great excuse to raid the north of England and settle some old scores. The long standing enmity between the Douglases on the Scottish side and the Percy family of Northumberland never needed much to fan the flames of open conflict.

In August of that year James, the second Earl of Douglas led a raid as far south as Newcastle where he took a pennon as a trophy of his victory over Sir Henry "Hotspur" Percy, vowing to fly it from his castle at Dalkeith.

The Scots were retreating northwards and had camped for the night when Hotspur, still smarting at the loss of his standard, caught up with them and attacked.

The battle went the way of the Scots and Henry Percy and his brother Ralph were captured and later ransomed.

The site of  the battle

The bleak hillside is now grazed by sheep, the cries of the wounded and the clash of steel replaced by the happy sound of children playing  at the nearby primary school.

James Douglas was fatally wounded in the encounter and it was said that those closest to him hid his body under a bush so his army would not know of his death and wouldn't lose heart for the fight.

My wound is deep : I fain would sleep

Nae mair I'll fighting see,

Gae lay me in the braken bush

That grows on yonder lee.

The 1770 replacement Battle Stone

Sir Henry Percy came into combat with Hugh Montgomery, Douglas's nephew and, being wounded was given the chance to surrender. He refused, saying he would only surrender to the Earl of Douglas as befitted his rank. Montgomery indicated  where the dead body of the Scots leader lay and Percy yielded to the bush.

Thou shalt not yield to knave or loun

Nor shalt thou yield to me,

But yield thee to the braken bush

that grows upon yon lee

The deed was done at Otterburn

About the breaking of the day

Earl Douglas was buried at the braken bush

And the Percy led captive away

The original stone, the Battle Stone, that marked the site of Douglas's death is lost but base was incorporated into the replacement erected in 1777 when the turnpike road was made close by the spot.

A red flag as a warning of imminent firing on the range

The association with war is still attached to the area as it is now an Army firing range. What would Hotspur and Douglas have made of these weapons?

Otterburn Castle

  The castle was owned by Sir Robert de Umfraville, Lord of Redesdale whose younger brother, Thomas, led the English troops that flanked around the battle to try and capture the Scottish camp. The castle had been attacked on the morning on the 19 August 1388 as the Scottish forces traveled from Newcastle  towards the border but withstood the attempts made against it. Despite the Scots winning the battle, they quickly withdrew as English reinforcements arrived and therefore the castle was left intact.

Ladies Choice

All the way from Africa, an invasion of Painted Ladies; all the way to our garden. Dozens, nay scores, of orange beauties dancing and fluttering on the buddleia flowers. 

This year has seen millions of them arriving from Europe though they start their journey in Africa to where they will migrate back in the Autumn after reaching as or north as Iceland and even out to St Kilda. Each butterfly's entire life-cycle is about a month so it takes several generations to make each journey, mating and breeding on the move.

How does this tiny creature manage such a feat? With no opportunity to follow its now deceased parents, how does each succeeding generation know where to go and when to turn back? Hard-wired into a brain the size of a pin-head, what are the stimuli that control the mass movement?

We take their beauty so lightly, these marvels of migration arriving in our gardens looking for nettles and thistles for their caterpillars.

Perfect food for Painted Lady caterpillars

A solitary Red Admiral among the Ladies

The future through a stone

On our way south after the trip to the Outer Hebrides, we stopped at Brahan - Brathainn in Gaelic, the ancient seat of the Seaforths, the chiefs of the great Mackenzie clan and erstwhile home at the beginning of the seventeenth century, of Coinneach Odhar," Brown Kenneth" otherwise known as the Brahan Seer.

Brahan today

The stable block and clock tower at Brahan

There is little left of Brahan, the house long demolished but the legend of the Seer lives on.

Coinneach was credited with forseeing the Highland Clearances - the crow of a cock will not be heard north of Drumochter, people would flee from their country before an army of sheep to islands as yet unknown; the Caledonian Canal - Ships in full sail shall pass by Tomnahurich; the coming of the railway or motor car- long strings of carriages without horse or bridle; the Battle of Culloden-Drumossie, thy bleak moor will be stained with the best blood of the Highlands and even the discovery of oil - black rains; as well as many many more.

It is his prediction of the fall of the clan Mackenzie with all the detail of the characteristics of the neighbouring lairds alive at the time which allowed for the incumbent to know when his fate would come, that has captured people's imagination since then.

The Countess of Seaforth had summoned Coinneach and asked him of news of her husband, the third Earl, who was in Paris as an ambassador for King Charles II. Coinneach applied his divination stone, a pebble with a hole through it, to his eye and replied that the Earl was well and happy. The countess plagued him with further questions until the Seer, perhaps feeling aggrieved that his strange abilities were being trivialised, admitted that he saw the the Earl in the company of a young woman enjoying all the delights of Paris. The countess' fury at her husband's behaviour was inflamed further in that it had been made known in front of retainers and servants. In a rage, she condemned Coinneach to a cruel death at Chanonry Point, to be burnt to death in a tar barrel.

 Before of his execution he predicted the death of the last Earl of Seaforth, predeceased by all his four sons and the downfall of the House of Mackenzie with such accuracy that the last Earl would be in no doubt that his line was coming to an end.

In 1815, the last lord Seaforth died in the circumstances predicted by Coinneach Odhar.

Did these giant oaks at Brahan witness the end of the Seaforths?

The Seer made his predictions after peering through a natural hole in a stone. Such "holey " stones are sometimes called hag stones, Odin's stones, or in Scotland, adder-stanes and there is a long-held belief that they enable the viewer to catch a glimpse of other worlds or, like the Seer, the future. They were also worn or hung from doors and boat prows as charms. Some are made by boring molluscs called piddocks, others by the action of sea currents on the stones, swirling one upon another.

Holey Stones

On the point of his execution, after making his famous prediction foretelling the end of the Seaforths, all the more powerful for its being made before an assembled company and in such dramatic and violent circumstances, Coinneach Odhar threw his stone into a loch. It was lost forever.

Dungeness

Flowers in the shingle

A year or two ago, I found such a stone on Dungeness beach or, as is the belief, it found me.

It lies on my desk today.

I have often held it to my eye but no glimpses of the future or of Faerie has it offered me. I live in hope.

A word of warning. Attempts to make such a stone by artificial means are said to bring bad luck on the perpetrator.

Summer solstice

Solstice sunrise

The summer solstice and, for once, a sunny day. Having seen solstice sunrises when the sky, sea and shore looked like paint shop shade card - light grey, dark grey and brown - it was great to have a mid-summer day that lived up to its name.

In recognition of the day, I headed off to the Lammermuirs to seek out the stone circles that still dot the grouse moors. These enigmatic stones must have witnessed thousands of solstices and possibly been part of their celebration.

The Whitadder Water

A tramp up from the Whitadder took me towards Nine Stanes rig passing a circle of stones between two tumuli. The moors are defaced by the march of pylons across the landscape and the new invaders, the wind farms.

Stone circle and tumuli

Despite their presence, the bird life thrives, at least until someone with a gun comes and blows them out the sky or some gamekeeper decides that some others might pose a threat to those that are going to be blown out of the sky so they have to be eliminated first... and we think we live in a civilised society.

Today was different. The grouse were telling me to "go-back, go-back" and luring me away from their chicks with the broken wing trick. The oystercatchers were piping their shrill deterrence and the curlew were adding their eerie whoops. There were golden plover, lapwing, snipe, sky larks, pipits.... and me.

The Nine Stanes

I found the nine stones, now recumbent having been disturbed in the past by digging for non-existent treasure and wondered about the folk who erected them and the other circles on the rig, Why nine stones? There are a number of nine stone circles...and twelve stone ones. Were the numbers significant?

We will never know the reason for the stones. They probably had a calendrical and astronomical purpose so the solstice may well have featured n their use. Today, it did.

The stone circle  and tumuli from Nine Stanes rig