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

Where the bee sucks

Bloomsday, the sixteenth of June passed with little celebration this year in our house. In the past we have gone to Dublin follow Leopold Bloom and Simon Daedalus as they make their way through the streets and places in the novel, to mimic Bloom and feed the seagulls and enjoy the celebration of James Joyce's works, in particular, his masterpiece, Ulysses. The action of this, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth or any other century, takes place over the course of one day - 16th June 1904.  This was Joyce's recognition of his partner and muse, Nora Barnacle, for it was the day they first went out together.

Finns Hotel where Nora worked as a chambermaid

So, no trip to Dublin, no visit to Davy Byrne's pub, no Martello tower, just a viewing of John Huston's film of Joyce’s short story from Dubliners, "The Dead" and a dip into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

The weather has improved and sitting, reading, in the garden, I became increasingly aware of the hum of bees. The warm weather has brought them all out to feast on the cotoneaster flowers, the foxgloves and the Iceland poppies. Watching them and trying to identify the different bees, I was delighted to see the bumble bees disappearing up the trumpets of the foxgloves like cars entering a garage.  The honey bees seemed to spend most of their time on the tiny flowers of the cotoneaster.

A bee-keeping friend explained that they have shorter tongues so prefer open or small flowers while the white- or red-tailed bumble bees are better adapted for the bell shaped blooms.

Bees on Thyme

I found a black bee among the flowers. Apparently, the native black honey bee was thought to be heading for extinction but is now making a comeback.  Hurray

In Joyce's unfinished, autobiographical first novel, Stephen Hero that provided the basis for Portrait, Stephen (Joyce) discusses with his friend, Cranley, how, in order to devote himself to writing, the best way to live with the minimum of labour.

 Cranley suggests keeping bees.

Stephen quotes Shelley.* Cranley scoffs at him.

In December 1903, Joyce offered to translate Maeterlinck’s study La Vie Des Abeille (The Life of the Bee) for the Irish Bee-Keeper, and the journal is mentioned again on a book-cart in Ulysses.  Joyce obviously had an interest in bees which is hardly surprising as he was the great explorer of communication, verbal and otherwise and bees are the great communicators.

The hum of the bees on a warm summer day, bees on the blooms on Bloomsday. Perfect.

*
The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy bloom