The promise of sloes

The dew as diamondis did hing

Upon the tender twistis, and ying

Ouir-twinkling all the treis

And ay quair flowris flourischit faire

Thair suddainly I saw repaire

In swarmes, the sounding beis

Sum sweitly hes the hony socht *

The equinox has come and gone with the expected gales amounting to no more than a stiff breeze.

All the wind managed was to blow over the recycling bin and scatter its contents.  Could chase the empty plastic bottle down the street ever become the latest fitness fad ?

The weather, since day and night synchronised and we officially entered Spring, has been mild enough to tempt out the solitary bees and the hibernating butterflies; peacocks, red admirals and tortoiseshells have all been dancing in the sunlight.

 Chaffinch on Blackthorn

 The garden birds are in full song and the spring flowers are bursting forth.

Too much too soon?

Wood anemone and Butter-bur

The blackthorn bushes look like snow drifts with the white blossoms on the bare branches. A ready source of nectar for the hungry bees and the promise of a heavy crop of sloes for the gin infusers later in the year.

Red -tailed bee on Blackthorn

Beware!

The "blackthorn winter" can quickly follow when March must repay the "borrowed days" and rain, sleet and even snow can blight the blossoms and freeze the precocious, presumptive  flowering.

Maybe that's why sloes are such an erratic crop. Some years the bushes are laden, the next they have only the occasional berry.

Let's hope this year is one of plenty.

*The Cherrie and the Slae

Alexander Montgomery (c1545 - c1610)

If you're in a hole keep digging

Present day Priory and medieval ruins

The results are back. Our dig in the Glebe field on the seaward side of the Priory unearthed a huge number of animal bones: cows, deer, sheep, pigs, even chickens. (Blog 26/06/18)  Now we have the C14 dating outcome and there is no doubt we were digging a site from the 7th to 9th centuries, the time of the Anglo-Saxons and St Aebba.

https://digventures.com/coldingham-priory/timeline/diary/the-radiocarbon-dates-are-in/

Local tradition has it that her monastery was on the top of the Kirk Hill, part of the massive St Abbs Head though digs there have never unearthed any archaeological evidence.   There was an Iron Age fort there, probably the seat of the local chief possibly Colud or one of his line.

 As I said at the meeting prior to the dig, if you want to convert people to new religion, you don't ask them to walk four miles then climb a steep hill!

Kirk Hill - no place for a monastery

Aebba may well have been received at the Kirk Hill fort on her arrival as would be befitting for a Northumbrian princess and sister of the most powerful king in the area but when it came to establishing her monastery it would have been between the streams that run down the two sides of the village and at the ancient pagan holy site framed by them.

The story that she was seeking sanctuary and avoiding a forced marriage is not likely to have much substance either. If she were escaping from the Northumbrian court, she would have had to have settled a lot further away from the border than she did.  There must have been some conflation with a period in her early life when she did indeed have to flee to Dal Riada in the north-west during the dynastic struggles that resulted in the creation of Northumbria from the previous smaller kingdoms.

She was a strong woman, the sister of two kings and would have acted as an ambassador rather than a refugee.

Aebba's foundation was almost certainly overlaid by the subsequent 12th and, later 14th century buildings.

We were  digging in the area beside the encompassing vallum, the perimeter dyke or ditch that separated the sacred from the profane, the religious from the lay communities.

After geophysics scanning, four trenches were chosen by popular vote and we seem to have been lucky.

Trench Plan

 From the masses of bones in one trench, we seem to have hit the monastery abattoir and thus obtained good carbon dating material.

Hopefully funds can be found for other digs on the unexplored parts of the site.

We now have a vindication that our village is indeed the Urbs Coludi of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum - The Ecclesiastical History of the English People.

Coludsbyrig. Colud's burgh or town hence Coldingham in the Anglo-Saxon tongue.