Gangril days

Spring hopes

2012-01-17T12:58:00.012Z

Sunrise

Despite the hard frosts – minus 7 last night - there is a feeling that spring is just around the corner. The snowdrops and aconites have bloomed in the lea of the hawthorn hedge and two slender yellow crocus blooms have survived the “ Janwar’s cauld blast”

The morning walk for the newspapers is accomplished in near daylight – well, the return leg, at least. Yes, there is definitely a feeling that winter’s grip is slackening.

The local farmers are, thanks to the lack of snow, “weel forrit” with the work, the ploughed fields looking like acres of giant corduroy with their complement of foraging peewits, though, sadly, in nothing like the numbers remembered from childhood. The tups have been at the work as well, the red marks on the ewes’ rumps the evidence of their productivity.

The rights of way and the paths around the village have, at long last been cleared and way-marked. The spur seems to have been the walking festival scheduled for this summer. A visit from daughter and her lurcher meant a new companion on the walks after the departure of NCC, and the environs were duly inspected.

The nest boxes have been cleaned and repaired.

The birds at the feeders seem to be brightening up their plumage, the colours seeming more vibrant than the dowdy duds of winter…….. or am I just hoping.. Well, they do say …hope springs and all that.

Winter Solstice

2011-12-21T13:58:00.018Z

There is a series of footpaths and rights-of-way that makes a continuous walk from the ruins of our 14^th century priory, itself built on a previous pagan site, to a large conical knowe, (knoll, to the Anglophones amongst you) on the shore.

From the top, you get an uninterrupted view of the horizon facing due east. The perfect place to see the sun rise. The paths pass Bronze Age burial sites and odd, unexcavated mounds, as they follow the streams to the sea. The mound is probably glacial detritus but it does have a curiously regular shape. I fancy the walk is the remnant of an old processional way. What better day to follow it than today, the winter solstice, to witness the sun appear over the horizon on the shortest day.

Today is the true turn of the year, not the artificial constructs of Hogmanay and New Years day. Today the year begins anew.

Sunrise!

A disappointing end to the expedition, the rain and cloud made discerning the moment of sunrise almost impossible. The merest blanching of sky above the sea was all that was visible, a choice between two shades of grey - perhaps a comment from the old gods of Nature on our current state.

Nature has made its views on human endeavour even more explicit when the recent gales caused a wind turbine to become so out of control that it threatened the village and had to be cut free of its moorings. It now lies in its field like a broken toy that some giant child has thrown away in a tantrum.

Yet the Welsh poppy, unseasonably in bloom in the garden kept its head, so to speak, when all about the place were in danger of losing theirs to a runaway whirligig. Not a petal was lost. A moral in there somewhere, - maybe we should learn to bend with the elements instead of trying to bend them to our will.

The woodpecker is back at the peanuts in the bird feeder. It has been drumming away in the trees by the burn all summer but has risked returning to the garden for an easier food supply. Nature is quite good at taking advantage of us at times, usually causing pleasure rather than disruption.

....at least the days are getting longer......spring can't be far away!

Time and Place

2011-12-04T18:52:00.013Z

It’s some time since I wrote a blog. More time than I realised. Family, projects, day to day administration, they all take time. Funny thing, time, you seem to have lots of it but just when you’re distracted or look the other way, it slips away.

Time passes, sometimes it flies, sometimes it drags, it has even been said to stand still, but only in romantic fiction. Time heals, is money, can be against you or on your side and along with the tide, waits for no man. In photography, it lapses

For Einstein it was the fourth dimension.

St Augustine said of time, “If no-one asks me,I know but if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not”.

At CERN, it seems that, because some people think that neutrinos appear to travel faster than the speed of light, then, theoretically, time travel is possible. I don’t pretend to understand the physics and guess it’s only possible for subatomic particles not humans.

With time on my hands, and a sunny cold December day, I went off to see if any of our usual winter visitors had taken up local residence, it being that time of year. Two deep deans, inaccessible to sheep, provide a sheltered sanctuary for any arrivals. Full of hawthorn, hazel, blackthorn, whin and brambles they are as miniature remnants of the wildwood of millennia ago

The dean

As well as the usual suspects, fieldfares and redwings, there were a few white fronted geese gleaning in the stubble fields above the deans.

The streams, eventually merging before reaching the sea, have cut deep down, exposing the layers laid down over aeons of time. Down through the glacial deposits from the Ice Ages that make up the farmland of today, down through the Old Red Sandstone of the Devonian era, down to the harder Silurian greywracke laid down in the bed of ancient seas and the porphyric rocks pushed out as molten lava when ancient continents collidided.

Sandstone erosion

Stream bed, porphyric rock and greywracke

Four hundred million years in one walk

Anyone can travel in time if you have a mind to.

What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen

2011-01-10T14:45:00.012Z

Winter sunset

The hard frosts continue but, thankfully, the snows seem to be passing by our corner of the country.
The bird feeders are still well patronised by the usual suspects and a few itinerants.
The great spotted woodpecker has appeared on a few occasions, and a female blackcap has been feasting on the peanuts for a few days. The male of the species was seen last winter but not so far this year. (Blog 15/03/2010)
It is a reflection of the previously androcentric nature of society that the species is named after the male, the female having an equally obvious brown cap.

Blackcap-browncap

The cult sci-fi television series, “Red Dwarf”, had an episode when the hapless crew entered a parallel universe where the roles were reversed and they met their female equivalents, all with what we would regard as masculine habits and attitudes. Is there another universe with browncaps instead of blackcaps: brown flycatchers instead of pied flycatchers; browny-grey grouse instead of black; olive-brown finches instead of green.?

A snipe spent a day fossicking about under the hawthorn hedge where the ground remained unfrozen, probing the leaf litter with its beak. I presume it was a migrant resting after flying in over the coast. The next day it was gone.
NCC has had great fun on the frozen fields, flushing up coveys of resident partridge and a greater number of snipe than you would expect. They must be coming in over the North Sea. Her other sport is to chase the local roe deer who treat her fairly contemptuously, sprinting off to a safe distance then turning to view her with disdain.

NCC's quarry leaving her standing

They have been making their way down to the shoreline where they must browse amongst the kelp thrown up by the tides and, probably, finding shelter beneath the cliffs from the worst of the snowstorms.

Redshank on the kelp

The shelter of the shore

If the freeze lasts long enough, the Grand Match, the highlight of any curling season, might take place. It hasn’t been played since 1979 as seven inches of ice are needed to support the weight of up to two thousand curlers and their stones on a frozen loch.

It's an ill wind and all that.

Fingers crossed that some good comes of "Janwar's cauld blast"

Thundersnow

2010-11-30T17:30:00.005Z

The Approaching Storm

LotH thinks I’m slightly, or maybe more than slightly, daft. Going out at night in snowstorms being regarded as rather eccentric but being daft does lead me into odd situations.
I was out in the snow on one of my nocturnal rambles, checking on the foxes, owls and the other creatures that shy away in the day, when I witnessed an apparently rare phenomenon – Thundersnow.

Great flashes of lightning lit up the whole sky followed by rolls of very close sounding thunder. It was dramatic as the flashes reflecting off the fallen snow made the night vanish for a second.
Getting up to the top of the rise out of the village, I could see the source of the storm. Looking out to sea, the forks split the sky. The storm was obviously out over the water but close enough to the shore to provide a spectacular display. Then the snow came down again, icy and stinging on the face. Time to head home.

Checking up on the Net, it seems that this was most likely caused by the bitterly cold air coming in across the (relatively) warmer sea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundersnow

Are we in for a long winter?

A taste of Autumn

2010-10-21T11:08:00.015+01:00

Autumn woods

The wind is in the north. Skeins of geese are honking their way south. The scrogs are littering the woodland floor. The hedgerows are red with hips and haws. The local roe deer are changing their coats from the russet of summer to the hodden grey of winter. Autumn is surely here.
The wild flowers are long since seeded and gone. Now is the time for the fungi to suddenly come forth. Overnight, the woods are full of these colourful, slightly alien arrivals.

Fungi have always been a bit of a mystery. Mushrooms are great but we tend to be put off their cousins in the woods by lack of knowledge about what is good and what is not good to eat.
We did have parasol mushrooms growing under the hawthorn hedge one year and LotH has had adventures gathering field mushrooms on land occupied by a large bull but, by and large, we stick to the supermarket variety which are fairly bland to the taste.

O.K. to eat?

This week I discovered ceps, or thought that’s what they were, was almost certain that’s what they were, in a patch of mixed woodland.

Ceps, porcino, the penny bun boletus, Boletus edulis, known in Italy and France as the King of Mushrooms.

Penny bun cep

Picking the largest and taking it home to consult the books, I still had a scintilla of doubt but it seemed to be the same. We had dined with a farmer friend whose wife, superb cook that she is, had served us with wild mushroom soup while her husband had mischievously recounted the tale of a party in the Highlands who had all ended up on dialysis after mistaking one fungus for another. Needless to say, the soup was delicious

Home for the pot

LotH , fungophile that she is, was convinced my trophy was genuine, and bold enough to try some raw then proceed to sauté it in butter. It had, as the book said it would, the perfect mushroom flavour… and we are still here.

Cross my heart, it's true

2010-09-05T11:33:00.011+01:00

The weather being fine, LotH and I went off to have a look at a large but anomalous earthwork in the neighbouring county. Chesters is in East Lothian and, like so many similar places, it gets its name from castra - a camp- a reference to the large imposing fort like structure with its concentric walls to be found nearby.

The only odd aspect to the place is that as a defensive redoubt it woud have been useless as it is closely overlooked by a higher hill from where it would have been easy to lob missiles over the walls

Not very easily defended !

The explanation given on the information board is that it was built during the Romano-British period by the local tribe who were allies of the Romans and didn’t need it for defence so it was purely for prestige. This doesn’t sound right. If one was looking to build a site to show off wealth or social standing, it would still be built on the highest point.

Looking at the view across the flat fertile Lothian fields to the sea which is due east and where the sunrise would be very obvious with Berwick Law, that conical volcanic mount, acting as a marker, I wondered if it had been an older pagan religious site which had been taken over by the Otadini who were probably Christian in the Roman period.
Whatever the reason, it is an impressive monument.

The nearest village is Athelstaneford where, according to legend, a combined army of Picts and Scots of Alba defeated the Anglo-Saxons of Northumbria and secured the Lothians for the embryonic nation that was to become Scotland. Apparently Oengus, the Pictish king of Alba, had seen a symbol of the St Andrew’s cross in the sky and vowed that if he achieved victory he would adopt is his nation’s symbol.

A view across the battle site to Berwick Law

There is a heritage centre in a 16th century doocot behind the village church overlooking the battle field.
The doocot

Lo and behold, as we climbed to the top of Chesters, two vapour trails formed a X- shaped cross in the sky.

Perfect timing or what.

Young and old come forth to play, on a sunshine holiday

2010-09-01T16:38:00.002+01:00

I picked my first bramble of the year and the hedgerow goosegogs and wild rasps are well ripened. There is no doubt we are moving into the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”. Fortunately the “maturing sun” has also been in attendance so we took a day out to introduce the grandchildren to our own local version of the Galalpagos….the Farne Islands.

Castles had been the theme of the holiday with Alnwick Castle doubling as Hogwarts and Edinburgh with the one o'clock gun making everyone jump. The little castle on Holy Island was much more Enid Blyton ...A children's sized castle.

The morning was spent beach-combing and fossil hunting on Lindisfarne, then a boat out to the outer Farnes. The fossils looked like crinoids and belemnites and they were scattered all over the shingle and shoreline rocks

Fossils

The grandsons weren’t much interested in Saint Cuthbert or the ecclesiastical ruins except as a site for impromptu hide and seek. The trip on the boat was another matter, especially the fast outward journey with a massive bow wave and wash.
This late in the year, most of the puffins had left to resume their pelagic existence with only a few juveniles remaining and the terns had begun their marathon journey to winter, or summer, in the Antarctic. There were kittiwakes and shags aplenty and a large number of gannets displaying their diving skills.
For the boys the highlight had to be the grey seals, waiting for the breeding season to begin around about October and immensely curious regarding the boat, though they must be used to gawping tourists by now Seals

A flock of golden plover, more than a hundred strong flew in to land on one of the smaller islands, some were still wearing their striking summer plumage of black and white “waistcoat “ standing out from the gold back and wings but many had assumed their dowdier winter look.

The islands are the furthest fingers of the Great Whin Sill, the hard rock splits into columns like a miniature Giants Causeway, the cause of many a shipwreck, but we made it safely back to Seahouses. Ice-creams and doughnuts in the sun let us feel we could hang on to the summer holidays for just a little longer

Kittiwakes on columns

Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.!

The young ones

2010-08-09T16:20:00.011+01:00

The summer is passing before we’ve had time to grasp it. It’s like chasing a butterfly. It is moving faster than you think. The winter barley has been cut though the spring sowing is yet to ripen. Apparently the yields are very poor after the dry, cold start to the year It has meant that NCC has had a brief access to the stubble fields before they are ploughed, harrowed and seeded once more. She has had great fun flushing up families of partridge, the young ones now being quite capable of flying away from her clumsy blunderings into the headrigs
The haws are just starting to blush pink and the geans are hanging with cherries that no-one but me seems to pick. The butterflies are out in force.

Green veined white

The young buzzard has fledged and the adults seem to have moved on but the youngster …I’m sure it is the young one… has stayed close to the nest, plaintively pee-youing, presumably in the hope of a meal. It’s not just human offspring that are unsure of making their way in the world.

LotH was intrigued at the sight of a queen red-tailed bumble bee being fertilised by a drone just at the patio door. He will die and she will look for a nest site to hibernate until the spring.

She would have been less intrigued by the elephant hawk moth caterpillar that I found on some common willow herb. Three inches long with fearsome eye spots, he was the stuff of creepy crawly nightmares though his parents are really elegant.

Funny how the most unprepossessing of youngsters improve with age.

Elephant hawk moth caterpillar

My collection of attractive, minor cascades continues to grow with the addition of the Corbie Linn – literally, the waterfall of the crows - and crows there were, cawing away in the surrounding woods. The Corbie Linn
It was worth a stumble and nearly a headlong drop to get a picture. Luckily I escaped with a few scratches and slightly bent specs.
A timely reminder that my young days of agility are long past.

With a hey ho, the wind and the rain,the rain it raineth every day

2010-07-18T15:49:00.017+01:00

Swithin’s day, if thou dost rain,
For forty days it will remain
St Swithin’s day, if thou be fair,
For forty days ‘twill rain nae mair

St Swithin’s day has come and gone and, indeed, it did rain so are we due a long wet summer? The rain was certainly needed by the farmers but the prospect of more just as the harvest approaches cannot be anticipated with much delight. To be honest, the weather is never quite right for the agricultural community. What pleases the stockmen isn’t the best for the grain growers and what suits the tattie growers isn’t just perfect for the rest.

Ripening fields

Our annual pilgrimage to the Atlantic’s edge, the Isle of Lewis trip, featured wind and rain that, even by Hebridean standards, was dreadful. You don’t expect to need factor 30, but to be confined to quarters with paper backs and crosswords in July was a bit frustrating. The St Kilda trip was cancelled and even quick local forays resulted in soakings however we did manage a few jaunts so that LotH could recharge her Gaelic batteries.

On one trip to the west side of the island, we stopped at the Norse Mill in Shawbost, having driven past it scores of times before. A restoration of an old mill of the kind that was common throughout the islands right up into the 20th century with a horizontal water wheel rather than the more familiar vertical one. the design must date back to the Iron Age. A companion building housed a simple grain drying kiln heated by a peat fire so it would seem that the farmers had problems drying their crop right back to the days of old Saint Swithin himself. Of course, they didn’t have to meet the demands of the grain buyers on moisture content or pay for diesel but I bet they grumbled just as much.

Shawbost Norse Mill

Interior of mill

http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/lewis/norsemill/index.html

Heading home with a haul of famous Stornoway black puddings and duff (dumplings, to the uninitiated) we were lucky that the North Atlantic low had moved on taking its gales with it and allowing for a reasonable crossing of the Minch.

NCC was ecstatic to have her walks reinstated, throwing herself around and rolling over with joy. A couple of long walks seemed poor recompense for such a welcome and despite the prediction in the rhyme the rain has held off for the time being.
The wild flowers are, by and large, beginning to set seed though the almond scent of the meadowsweet is still a pleasant background to our tours of village.

The swallows seem fewer this year and I have not seen a swift at all. Only two last year and none this year. Sad. The scream of the devil birds round the houses was always part of village summers. I remember picking up a young swiftlet that had landed on the ground and couldn’t get airborne again with its long wings and short legs. Place it on top of a bay window for take off and off it went. What has happened to the swifts? Cousin in Florence tells me there are dozens there. Lack of nest sites as all the old buildings get tarted up?
Perhaps the planners could make it a condition of consent that nest sites are included. I doubt it.. If they don’t return, I’ll miss them because if ever a bird lived up to its name – blackbirds are black birds: ducks do duck: fly-catchers catch flies: wagtails do wag their tails and swifts are gloriously, wondrously swift.

As Ted Hughes says in his poem Swifts, about their return

They’ve made it again,
Which means the globe’s still working,

A more perceptive observation than old St Swithin’s rhyme ever was... and all the more ominous when no swifts are seen.

Grey, white and blue

2010-06-22T21:23:00.026+01:00

The Grey Mare's Tail

Eight months since I got my new hip, time for some field trials. With no unclimbed Munros near at hand, I settled for a Corbett (2500 to 3000 ft.). After last week’s foray up the Yarrow valley, it seemed natural to venture just a wee bit further over the watershed into Moffatdale to White Coomb. Roadside car parking, courtesy of the National Trust and a well maintained, if fairly steep, path up the side of the Grey Mare’s Tail waterfall was a easy start to the climb. Sun hat, sunscreen, plenty of fluids – gone are the days when you could happily drink from hill burns - a fleece, for despite the sunny day, the temperature at the top might be a lot less, and off I set.
Up the long “staircase” to the top of the falls then further up to Loch Skene sitting in its little valley below Lochcraighead . Itself no mean hill at over two thousand feet. – a so-called Donald after Donald’s lists of lowland hills of this height,- it lowered over the loch.
Halfway up, a hawk cried from a high crag but was too far off to identify, possibly a merlin. I had seen one in a neighbouring valley previously.

Lochcraighead looms over Loch Skene while a couple of feral goats pay me no attention

Lochcraighead proved a bit of a challenge on the old legs but once the summit was reached, the ridge out to White Coomb looked a nice stroll following the county boundary fence. Ah, the county boundary – a face saver, indeed, maybe even a life saver, in the days before GPS navigational aids. Lost in the mist – find the boundary fence and you knew where you were on the map. Follow it and you would get to somewhere else on the map without risk.

The boundary wall and fence !

White Coomb provided the greatest of views. To the east the Eildons and the Lammermuirs: to the north the Pentlands and the southern edge of the Grampians : west to the Manor hills : south to the Cheviots, then over to the Lowthers and, hanging in the haze, the Lakeland fells.

White Coomb from Loch Skene

Going up had been strenuous enough but, oh, coming down was hard on the old joints. Plenty of stops gave me time to admire the carpet of wild flowers. Yellow stars of tormentil, the deep blue of milkworts, the tufts of bog cotton, northern orchids, and masses of dwarf cornel. Apparently, its berries are an appetite stimulant which gives it its Gaelic name lus a chraois – plant of gluttony. I would have thought climbing two thousand feet would have been enough of a stimulant without any berries.

Dwarf cornel

Down at car-park level, there was time for an expedition up to Dobb’s Linn to look for fossils. The fossils are easily found amongst the oil shale rocks -Ordivician graptolites, like little doodles on the slatey shale.
Dobb's Linn
The most pleasing find was the linn itself, a delightful little three-stage fall, much prettier than its big blowsy hyped up neighbour down the road.
So the new pin stood up to a bit of off-roading. Well done, the orthopods !

The blue remembered hills ...............where I went but cannot come again

but now I can, thanks to the skill of the orthopaedic surgeons and the marvels of technology. I am very thankful.

Black magic and bread & butter pudding

2010-06-09T12:23:00.011+01:00

Monument to James Hogg near Tibbie Sheil's Inn

Reading James Hogg’s The Brownie of Bodsbeck with its setting in the Border valleys where Ettrick and Yarrow almost meet, we felt a trip to Tibbie Sheils Inn at the head of St Mary’s Loch and erstwhile convivial haunt of Hogg and Scott and the literarati of Edinburgh, was in order. By happy coincidence Tibbie Sheils turned up in the Times list of 50 Best Places to eat in Britain. It seemed like a good omen.
It also gave me a chance to go and look for the site of Binram’s Corse, corse being Old Scots for cross. It was common for the r to be transposed as in brunt for burnt or girse for grass.
According to tradition and to Hogg’s poem, Mess John, Binram was a priest at the nearby Kirk o’ the Forest who was so obsessed by “the bonnie lass o’ Craigieburn” that he raised the devil in order to bring her under his power and seduce her. He was shot and killed by Covenanters and his grave is still to be seen though the cross has long since gone.

After the success of my play with its hero, the grave-robbing Dr Laurie, a necromancer priest might just prove a source of further inspiration and there was the prospect of a pleasant meal in literary surroundings to boot.
Journeying up Yarrow is a trip into historical romance. _ the Dowie Dens of Yarrow. The characters appear from all sides Mungo Park the explorer of the Niger: Sir James Douglas, Bruce’s lieutenant, - the Black Douglas to the English, the Good Sir James to the Scots: Mary of Dryhope, the Flower of Yarrow: Hangingshaw, the home of the Outlaw Murray: Newark Tower, hunting seat of Scottish kings and setting for Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel: the Brakehope Burn, scene of the ballad The Douglas Tragedy with its tale of eloping lovers and pursuing brothers, duels and death.
What a river!
Tibbie’s proved as good as expected - simple food, excellently prepared, using local produce, a good Sunday roast beef and two veg. with a suitably comforting bread and butter pudding to follow, though LotH declined the latter.

After lunch, I wished I had taken the same firm stand as I puffed up the footpath looking for Binram’s grave.

Binram's Corse overlooking St Mary's loch and Bowerhope, once home to James Hogg

After my misadventures in the mist on Hart Fell (Blog 27/03/2007) when some rather dodgy compass work had resulted in my ending up in the wrong valley, the girls, fearing for my safety had bought me a GPS navigation aid, so it was easy-peasy finding the site using the RCAHMS co-ordinates..
A lonely spot made even more desolate by the mournful calls of the whaups, - curlews to English speakers. Binram's Corse, a lonely spot

Mission accomplished. Home to re-read Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Hogg’s great master work.

Ospreys and Eye-ops

2010-06-07T11:49:00.014+01:00

A trip up north to Carrbridge was just the way to take advantage of the recent sunny spell. A chance to watch the famous Boat of Garten ospreys and search for the elusive Scottish crossbill, our only truly indigenous bird. It’s a sair reflection on our delusions of Braveheart grandeur when we realise that our truly native species, found nowhere else, is not the majestic golden eagle but a dumpy wee finch with a beak like a pair of secateurs.

Male osprey leaving after bringing fish

The crossbills proved too elusive. It would seem the long harsh winter has diminished their numbers, but we did spot golden-eye on Loch Mallachie and Slavonian grebes on Loch Ruthven, six breeding pairs alongside red-throated divers and the dotterel on Cairngorm.

The Clootie Well

A trip to Cromarty in search of the dolphins ended up in Raigmore hospital. We had gone by way of the Clootie Well, an ancient site where people have left bits of clothing as part of an old belief that as the cloth decomposes the ailment from that part of the body will also go.
Two hours later, I was in the Eye department with a vitreous detachment and a retinal tear getting lasered. The influence of the Clootie Well is obviously not pro-active.

LotH has become an osprey fan and has been watching the hatching and the rearing of the three chicks via the web-cam.

http://www.rspb.org.uk/webcams/birdsofprey/lochgartenospreynest.asp

The last and smallest chick’s battles to get a share of the food are fascinating to watch. To raise three young is a huge achievement. but the pair did manage it last year and the male bird seems a great provider so here’s hoping for a similar success this time.

A trip to feed the Cairngorm reindeer was fun but an even easier way to watch wildlife is to go to Inshriach gardens and sit and eat cake while watching the squirrels. If only all nature was so accessible

!!!!

Close encounters for the third time

2010-05-04T00:58:00.017+01:00

UFO (Unidentified Floral Object)

Anyone who has been daft enough to persist with my ramblings over the past few years may recall the late, lamented VBA (Very Big Alsatian) and his encounter with the UFO (Unidentified Floral Object). For two summers the UFO appeared in The Dell, growing Triffid –like from the stony bed of the burn then, as suddenly as it appeared, it vanished.
Reference -Blog 06/05/2007
Yes, I know, who is going to remember that far back. O.K. It was a few years ago.
Today, while out poking about in a small wood downstream of The Dell ,where buzzards might be nesting and badgers have been busy, lo and behold, there was not one but two UFO’s and one of them looked as if it was beginning to flower. The long spike of a stamen was arising from a bract of leaves. They look like banana plants but even with global warming that would be really ridiculous. The mystery deepens. Obviously they are escapes but from where?

VBA and the original UFO May 2007

VBA liked to cool off in the burn and regarded the intruder with suspicion but NCC has no horticultural leanings and regards the wood only as a source of things furry or feathered to chase, if only for amusement

We shall monitor the Triffid’s development. I have sent a picture to a website that answers garden questions to see if it is terrestrial or if our wood is the secret landing site for alien plant life come to colonise Earth.

If they have come to stay here, they are as green as they are cabbage-looking, things being the way they are at present.

Do two swallows make a summer?

2010-04-25T16:52:00.010+01:00

Greater Celandine

Hurrah, Hurrah. The swallows are back. I saw my first two arrivals perched on the telephone wires yesterday, sighted on the same day as last year. How do they do it? Despite the volcanic ash and stiff northerly winds that have reduced us poor creatures to our natural status as humble ground dwellers, the swallows came swooping in, back from their winter sojourn bang on time. Wonderful creatures, they give me a lift every year, these spirits of the air.
Less pleasing is the pervasive, irresistible march of the celandine through the garden borders. The tiny bulbules are scattered at every attempt to eradicate it, spreading the pernicious weed even further.
Celandine derives from the Greek khelidon, a swallow, and it does bloom at the same time as their arrival but, each year, there seem to be fewer and fewer swallows and more and more celandine. Odd how some visitors are greeted with genuine delight and others with a moan of despair. The swallows don’t outstay their welcome and don’t take over the entire place like their starry, yellow namesakes. There is a lesson in there somewhere.

Invasive species aren’t all bad if they are in their proper place. Apparently, one can tell the age of a woodland by the extent of the spread of an Indicator Species such as Dog’s Mercury that increases its ground cover at a fixed rate. The same is true of Bluebells, Wood Anemone, Wood Sorrel and Ransomes.
Dog's Mercury, carpetting an ancient woodland floor

I will be checking out our local woods soon. Some of them must date back to the days when the monks of the Priory were granted rights to all the woods in the shire by William I , William the Lion. A fine of £10 (Scots) for anyone taking wood or wild animals or usurping the rights to warrens would have been an enormous deterrent when the average annual income was measured in shillings and pence.

Not much chance of anyone usurping the "rights of warren" these days, We seem to prefer battery chicken to free range coney. NCC has hurt her paw and is not for walks at present but as soon as she's better we can go and explore some of these ancient woods. She certainly shows a great deal of interest in rabbits.

Heights, hares and herons

2010-04-03T18:00:00.009+01:00

NCC on the road

The daffodils have survived the blast. The northerlies that brought winter back with sleet and rain left them battered but unbowed which is more than can be said for the Sky dish which tells us that “no signal is being received”. Hidden as it is up amongst the highest chimneys, it will need the vertigo-defying skills of our local T.V. man to repair it.
The first time it caused problems, the engineer from the parent company took one look, sucked his teeth and said that it was a job for the “exceptional heights” men. When they arrived, I was a bit disappointed to find they were a pair of cheery Glaswegians of quite average stature. Our local friendly T.V man takes it all in his stride although even he will have to wait until the wind drops a bit.

The latest stranger to the bird feeders has been a long tailed tit. I have seen them around the village before but not often and never in the garden. An extremely attractive bird in white,black and a hint of pink .

Long tailed tit

NCC has had her excursions curtailed by the appalling weather so, today, we made long circuit by way of some local conifer plantations and she set off madly in pursuit of a roe deer which was a dot on the horizon before she had got into full stride. BFC lived and died in the belief that he could catch deer and was equally as inept, trailing in their wake by half a mile.

My abiding interest in wildlife has caused me, on occasions, to be a less than attentive driver, my attention being caught by birds flying overhead or some thing glimpsed in a hedgerow. This has brought remonstrations from LotH as a passenger, often with what I would regard as an undue note of urgency in her tone. Last week, while driving down the A1, I saw a heron fly into a wood. Woods are not the normal habitat for herons so I returned, passenger-less, to have a nose around the spot. There it was, not more than thirty yards from the constant roar of the A1, a full blown heronry with at least half a dozen birds, though counting them in the canopy of the trees was difficult and played havoc with the old cervico- vertebral joints, they being much less flexible these days.

A pair of sentinel herons

Crossing the road during a lull in the stream of vehicles,. I came across a pair of brown hares, a jack and a jill, cementing their courtship in the next field, unconcerned about the traffic noise beyond the hedge.
We drive past in our mobile living rooms with the climate control and the C.D. player on, totally oblivious to the other world that goes on yards away: a world that regards us as, at best, an inconvenience, at worst, a threat. A world that we came from and were once part of but, with which we now have so little contact. What a pity when we are all urged to think about “the environment” that we spend so little time in this other world. Maybe if we did we would take better care of it all.

A New Chum

2010-03-15T09:44:00.008Z

There has been a blackcap feeding on the peanuts. The return of the migrants is always welcome. He is too much of a flibbertigibbet to get a decent shot of him, flitting from twig to twig doing his own impersonation of St Vitus.
I hope he stays as the northern nightingale is a boon to any summer evening in the garden but, as there is no sign of any females of the species, he will probably move on.

A new chum has enlivened recent outings. An ex-working collie belonging to a retired farm manager who has recently been in hospital, she has been a great addition to outings, pleased to get out for a long stretch of the legs and a good sniff around.
Like most working dogs she is totally intolerant of any of the pampered pooches she meets and shows an almost admirable willingness to fight with any of them regardless of size from Alsatians to Jack Russells, an attribute shared by the long lamented and dearly missed BFC ( Best Friend Collie). In his case, he only picked fights with other males, having other designs on the ladies. NCC (New Collie Chum) seems to adhere to a modern feminist ideal. When it comes to fights she is not gender specific. After the demise of VBA (Very Big Alsatian), I’ve missed having a dog on walks so this might be the start of a beautiful friendship as someone-in-a-movie once said. We shall see.
NCC

Wintry days

2010-02-21T11:36:00.012Z

The Beach

The influx of grandchildren usually means a trip to the beach no matter what the temperature so gloved, scarved and wellie-booted, we set off to dig and build and play giant steps against the on-rushing waves. Several brave souls in black neoprene were surfing on the incoming swell. Our beach is becoming popular with the boogie board crowd but California it is not, especially in February. Someone shouted “Dolphins, dolphins!” and there they were, two dorsal fins on black bodies breaking the surf.
They were not dolphins but harbour porpoises able to operate in the shallows only twenty yards or so offshore. Maybe they were curious as to the identity of the other group of aquatic mammals disporting themselves in the same waters. The surfers certainly looked like a fellow species.
Home with socks, wellies and children soaked from having lost the game to the waves, lunch was enlivened by the arrival of a large cock pheasant outside the patio doors. Christened Geoffrey by the children, he has taken up residence. The guns of the local shooting syndicate echo over the village but Geoffrey struts about the garden, like a WWI staff officer, well fed and safe, far from the action in a nice comfy billet.

Geoffrey

If Candlemas be clear and bright
Winter will take another flight

The second of February was a beautiful, sunny day and, true to the rhyme, winter is back with frost and snow. The cold weather does bring the birds to the feeders and the woodpecker has been back for the peanuts, though, unlike the finches, blackbirds and sparrows, he doesn’t hang about, more of a smash and grab raid. I did manage one decent picture though.

The snow has made spotting the local wild life a bit easier, like the four brown hares limbering up for the mating season with racing and chasing an in a nearby field. It is a bit early for the boxing matches to start in earnest. That will be next month.. Too big for the buzzard hunched on an ash tree to tackle, they don’t need to turn white like their mountain cousins but the little stoat in his full ermine fig that shot across my path, will be glad of the frosty whiteness otherwise he would have stood out like the man in a Bateman cartoon.
The countryside is stirring; the only dampener on the old joie de vivre was that, I noticed the beach hut is due a coat of paint. Oh well, everything has a price.

'Owling at the moon

2010-02-09T09:33:00.003Z

Two owls have been calling close to the village. Their hoo-oo-oo cries embodying their old Scots name – houlit.. There is something elemental in the sound of an owl. Like the pee-you of the buzzard or the flutey sound of the curlew, they evoke a wildness, a remoteness that the singing of a thrush never does. Birds of ill omen in most cultures but also of wisdom, owls have always held a special place in human myths. They occur over and over in literature from A. A. Milne to Thomas Gray, from Lear to Tennyson.

When icicles hang by the wall
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom brings logs into the hall
And milk comes frozen home in pail
When blood is nipped and ways be foul
Then nightly sings the staring owl
Tu-who
Tu -whit Tu-who – a merry note

(Love‘s Labours Lost)

Not Shakespeare’s most elegant lines perhaps, nor his usual accuracy as a naturalist.

Tu –wit Tu-who is the sound of two owls, a male and a female, calling to each other In my nocturnal ramblings, I hear two, presumably, male birds tu-whooing away like pantomime ghosts but no answering tu-wit. It looks like the females are not around or are not in the answering mood at present
I hope there is a change soon for the poor owl needs to hear a tu-wit to woo!
Sorry!

The North wind doth blow

2010-01-31T21:42:00.017Z

St Abbs Head from Earnsheugh

The snowdrops and aconites are out in the corners of the garden, the blackbirds are poking about under the hedges, inspecting twigs for length and strength, the collared doves are cosying up to each other and the jackdaws are checking every unused chimney pot for nest sites. If Spring has not yet sprung, she has started her run-up.
The Burns season of ritualistic haggis-bashing and tam-o’-shantering is drawing to its close when most of the populace will forget all about poems in eighteenth century Scots, indeed about poetry in general, until next year.

Burn’s night may be past but “Janwar’s cauld blast” that hanselled in his birth and his recent birthday, is still very much present as the raw, northerly winds keep threatening with little flurries, to bring back the snow.
The winds have whipped up the white horses on the sea and kept the sea birds in low profile though the garden birds have been present in large numbers due in no small part to LotH’s generous array of feeding stations. The RSPB garden bird count over one hour may have been artificially boosted by the seeds and fat-balls on offer.

The wind may have had an unexpected benefit. A local farmer, whose farm extends to the cliff edge, reported seeing a big buzzard-like bird with a wing span “as wide as a barn door”. He was sure it was a sea eagle, the erne or earn, as it used to be called. Several eagles have been released in Fife as part of ESSE, the East Scotland Sea Eagle Project, and the Fife coast is clearly visible from the cliff tops. With a tail wind from the north, one of the birds could easily make it to our shore.

http://www.rspb.org.uk/ourwork/conservation/projects/eastscotlandeagles/index.asp

It would be marvellous if they re-colonised this area. I say re-colonised as Muirhead’s Birds of Berwickshire, published in 1889 notes them as “being seen less frequently than before”. Since every account cited mentions where, when and by whom they were shot, it is little surprising that they became less frequently seen.. Our Victorian forefathers really have a lot to answer for!

Muirhead does say that there are several place-names associated with the sea eagles, Earns Rig, Earnscleugh and, for us, Earnsheugh, just along the cliff top from where the bird was seen.
How great would it be if the earns returned to Earnsheugh.

Earnsheugh above the cliffs

One day, we might even see the re-introduction of the “reid-nebbed craw”, the chough, once so common on the cliffs that local children kept them as pets.

A great place for choughs

Aye, as they say, it's an ill wind...and all that.

Curling at the edges

2010-01-16T11:14:00.017Z

Sweep Sweep!

So, the Grand Match didn’t happen. The once-in-a-lifetime event in the curler’s almanac, the alfresco bonspiel, the traditional North versus South contest on the Lake of Mentieth for hundreds of enthusiasts of the roaring game, never got off the ground or on to the ice, to be precise. By the time the RCCC had consulted with the various services and public bodies, got all the ducks lined up, the thaw had set in, the ice was unplayable and the ducks were back on the lake.

It has become extremely difficult to organise any event without running foul of some obstructive rule or regulation. Litigation has made the term “accident” redundant. Someone is always to blame or so we are reminded daily by television adverts. This is all the more ludicrous when quantum physics tells that the universe itself is based on probability not certainty. Chance is what keeps the whole business going. The universe, it seems, keeps all its options open all the time. Nothing is fixed until we look at it and it ceases to be fixed as soon as we stop looking. At the very building blocks of matter, you can never know for certain where anything is, only the probability.

The infinite number of possibilities provided convenient escape mechanisms for Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It all comes down to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. The more we know about one variable, the less we can know of the other. It is a fundamental law of the universe.

The Curling Club bonspiel did go ahead, thanks to the indefatigable efforts of George the blacksmith. Members were summoned, guests invited, sustenance arranged and rinks drawn, with the result of a splendid evening of sport and bonhomie.

Mind you, some of the curling did demonstrate the truth of The Principle of Uncertainty.
Simply put, the principle states that it is impossible to know both the position and the velocity of an object at the same time. Oh, how true of the curling stone. No wonder it is known as the roaring game, the noise made by the skips shouting their sweepers on and off - “Sweep sweep, harder harder, Leave it, Up Up , Oh no! Sweep sweep !” as they tried to judge the speed and the ultimate destination of a stone, would certainly justify the epithet and despite all the noise they were, mostly, no nearer solving the problem.

Perhaps the boys and girls at the Large Hadron Collider should take up curling. It certainly makes one philosophical about the fact that despite your best efforts, projected particles don't go where they should, unexpected results occur, disappointments are many and the next end is always going to be better.

Uncertainty rules!

S'now fun anymore

2010-01-07T21:03:00.011Z

The village

The snow plough has blocked us in having pushed enough of the white stuff up on to the sides of the road to barricade the entrance to the drive. Even the 4WD can’t get through it so it will be shovels out once it stops falling out of the sky. No point in starting it now while the flakes just keep coming down.

The garden is under a couple of feet and the birds couldn’t get at the feeders so a quick clearance job was needed for our daily diners to get to the seeds and peanuts.

Among the finches, tits, sparrows, dunnocks and robin, all squabbling and pecking furiously at the seeds, LotH spotted an oddity. A brambling had joined the chaffinches to grab some much needed sustenance. The poor deluded soul had flown over from northern Europe to escape the harsh weather and landed here in the worst winter for decades.
“The best laid schemes….etc”

Jackdaws have taken to coming to the fat ball feeder, clinging clumsily to the cage, wings flapping, as they peck at the suet. A yellowhammer, never one to voluntarily approach human habitation, has been warily inspecting the offerings. Times must be hard in the bird world

The geese have been flying up the coast in long straggly skeins, presumably looking for clearer feeding grounds.

Next day, two tracks were dug to get the Freelander out onto the road and a trip for essentials was possible. The main road from the village is “passable with care” mostly by 4WD’s but the other roads are only open courtesy of the local farmers coming in on their tractors to collect the “Scotsman” and leaving a couple of channels. Alright for pedestrians but too wide apart to be of much use to conventional vehicles.

Everyone seems cheery and the community spirit had come to the fore. The local shop has voluntarily rationed milk, a carer walked three miles to, and three miles back to visit her terminally ill patient, farmers have collected stranded workers with tractors, paths to coal bunkers have been dug for the elderly and cars given a helpful push on wheel-spinning slopes.
It’s all very picturesque and seasonal but it’s now getting to be a bit of a bore, like one of those snow scene ornaments that were popular years ago, after a couple of shakes, the novelty palled.
There is only so much winter wonderland one can take.

Blue moons and cold dips

2010-01-04T03:27:00.010Z

The year has reached its chilly end. Hogmanay gave us the rarity of a blue moon and it is even rarer still for it to fall on the last day of the year
There are usually twelve full moons in a year and each has its name from The Moon After Yule in January, to the Wolf Moon, Lenten Moon, and so on to the Harvest Moon, Hunter’s Moon and The Moon Before Yule. If the “extra” full moon at the end of the year was called the Moon after Yule which, strictly speaking, it is, it would knock all the other names out of place, so it has become the “blue” moon.
As we came scrunching back over the frozen snow after bringing in the New Year, the clouds parted obligingly for us to catch a brief glimpse of the silver disc and , yes, it did look to have a hint of blue about it. It won’t happen again until 2028, so that might have been our only chance. Who knows?

The first day of 2010 was the day for the annual dip in the North Sea. Starting as a dare about twenty odd years ago, the custom has continued and grown over time attracting new adherents, guests, and some of the offspring of the earliest participants carrying on in the family tradition. At least one of the pioneers was still braving the briny.

Being an original, I felt that I ought to still to be taking the plunge but had the excuse of convalescence to avoid the heart-stopping dive in to the sea.
Accompanied by a piper, and surrounded by well wishers and a few astonished visitors, the latest recruits, including two Frenchmen upholding the honour of la patrie, made that adrenalin-charged dash down the beach and into the waves..
It was heartening to see that sheer lunacy still prevails and our proud tradition of innate idiocy is being carried on by the next generation.

Who says that folk can’t make their own entertainment anymore?

keeping track of things

2009-12-21T16:40:00.001Z

The hard frost over the snow has let me wander off-piste so to speak, able to leave the straight and narrow and crunch my way over field and moor.

Up at the edge of the moor the sky was the colour that used to be associated with Mr Reckitt with wispy cirrus clouds but, on the northern horizon, there was a lowering bank of cumulus with snow in its folds.

I amused myself by trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to identify the animal and bird tracks in the snow. Some were easy, the lines of runes left by the local pheasantry, the neat prints of Mr Fox’s nocturnal searches and the dainty pockets in the snow of the roe deer.

Pheasant

It was obvious where deer had left one field and crossed the road into another, seeking shelter in the lea of a hedge, perhaps, so, fired with boy-scout enthusiasm, I followed on.

Feeling like a hunter I stalked my quarry although the illusion was somewhat dented when a fellow walker, spotting my camera said,
“There are some deer near the river. You might get some pictures”

I’m convinced I would have tracked them on my own!

With a bit of stealth, I did get within bow shot of one and felt that, if I were a Neolithic archer, I might have dined on venison even if I had had a bit of help on the way.

My unsuspecting prey

A better picture

Today is the winter solstice and my Neolithic antecedent would have been celebrating the sunrise. This is the true turning point of the year. Christmas, Hogmanay and all the other festivals are human constructs of religious, political or administrative origin. Gaia doesn’t know when they are but she does know when we have reached the nadir and things are looking up. The new year begins now.

Midwinter sunrise, December 21st 2009

Happy solstice!

Winter days

2009-12-15T11:32:00.002Z

The Trees

Now is the start of the halcyon days, the spell of mild weather around the winter solstice when the fabled halcyon would build its floating nest.
Freed from the embarrassment of sticks, I have begun to wander further afield though still on the beaten track. The flocks of fieldfares and redwings are back, stripping the haws off the hedgerows.
As I made my way along an avenue of old trees that once graced the approach to a mansion house now long gone, the low winter sun was bathing them with watery rays.
My eye was caught by a bobbing jerky movement around the bole of a venerable field maple. A great spotted woodpecker was busy investigating the cracks in the bark. I wondered if it was the one we photographed being fledged in the nearby wood last year.

Last year

As I watched it, I became aware of the amount of activity in the trees. Chaffinches and goldfinches even a bullfinch, were competing with coal tits and blue tits for what ever they could find in the crevices and between the scales of the bark. A wren was prospecting around the great roots.

Catching the rays

On another tree, I was lucky enough to spot a nuthatch, moving head downwards on the upper trunk. We are just at the northern boundary of their range, so is this the result of climate change?
The little group of two maples and a surviving elm were alive with birds and yet, when I returned after about half an hour, the sun had sunk behind the ridge and, although there was still plenty daylight, the trees were no longer illuminated by sunlight and were empty and silent.
Every creature craves the sun especially in the depths of winter and you can appreciate why our forefathers lit bonfires to celebrate, or to defy, the darkness of the shortest day.

I am beginning to see those seemingly OTT displays of illuminations festooning some of the nearby houses in a different light, if you’ll pardon the pun. The lights, the coloured, flickering ropes, the electric icicles, the santas, the reindeer, the Christmas trees, even, in one garden, Snow White and her vertically challenged chums are all burning up the kilowatts
My eco-spirit, instead of condemning them for an extravagant waste of resources, has been thinking, well, they are just the old bale-fires in a new guise. A shout against the tyranny of darkness and cold, they do seem to cheer up the passer-by.
After all, what is driving them is just the sunlight of millions of years ago bottled up in fossil fuels and we can allow ourselves just a wee drop especially when the daily ration is so curtailed.

Roll on the Yuletide, the 21st when, at last, the days will slowly start to lengthen again and we will all feel better.

Toad in a hole

2009-09-05T14:43:00.000+01:00

Toad has been missing from the garden for some time. Originally rescued from a dustbin where he had foolishly decided to hibernate, he was turned loose by the pond (or puddle, as the family referred scathingly to it) then he vanished under the radar or at least under the border plants. With the arrival of ambulant grandchildren, the pond was drained in the interests of safety and the frogs captured and re-homed in a neighbour’s bigger and very wildlife-friendly pond. Toad, however, escaped detection and it was assumed he had wandered off.
Now years later, he has turned up under an upturned plant pot, looking as handsome as ever.

We are wondering if his reappearance is connected with the fact that LotH has just taken possession of a new motor car. Poop Poop!!

It's all a bit of a myth.

2009-08-18T12:59:00.001+01:00

For the last week I have been watching the north-eastern skies for the Perseids meteor shower. Between periods of over-cast skies ( what else could I expect ?), the glow of a waning gibbous moon, and the light pollution of the village, I managed to spot a few shooting stars and wished on every one. Always the same wish for I am not greedy and, of course, you cannot ever tell your wish or it won’t come true.
The meteors originate around the constellation of Perseus, sitting in the heavens alongside his beloved Andromeda, with the head of Medusa, the Gorgon in his hand, the devil-star Algol, winking in the forehead. His perfidious in-laws Cassiopeia and Cepheus are there as well.
Perseus was probably some chieftain or warrior king in Bronze Age Greece. He was supposed to be the progenitor of the Mycenae who went on to dominate the eastern Mediterranean, fought the Trojan War, became the Greeks bearing gifts of whom we should beware, and who “burnt the topless towers of Ilium”.

At the weekend, I travelled up to Forteviot to see the excavations of the tomb of a Bronze Age warrior chief.
A stone lined cist set into an even older Neolithic henge that his people must have recognised as a sacred place. A “pillow” of quartz crystals pebbles and a birchbark coffin marked him as an important man. Even more so was presence of a bronze dagger with gold banding placed in the grave. His tomb was sealed with a four tonne capstone.

On the drive home, I reflected that we know all about Perseus, a man, probably contemporary with the occupant of the Perthshire tomb and probably of the same social standing, a warrior king, yet we know next to nothing about our local hero. Did his people see him in the sky after death? Was he the “Tabhaicht” in Fothair Tabhaicht or Forteviot?
There were later Pictish palaces on the site so it has always been associated with chiefs and kings.
A pity there was no Homer around to sing his praises.
We have to borrow our myths.

Westward Ho.

2009-07-19T14:30:00.000+01:00

We’ve been off travelling, overseas, to a land where temples to the sun and moon arise out of the landscape, where the natives speak an ancient tongue, where rare orchids are to be found and where there are tales of pygmy islands. A land of white sands and turquoise seas.

No, we’ve not been east of Zanzibar, more like west of Ullapool. A trip to the Outer Hebrides, to the Long Island, to Lewis to be precise, in order that LotH could recharge her Gaelic batteries and revisit youthful haunts and not-so-youthful relatives.
As the ferry approached Stornoway, we were welcomed by a pod of porpoises jumping ahead of the boat. A good omen and so it proved for the weather, so often a limiting factor on the Atlantic’s edge, stayed fair throughout our stay.
LotH enjoyed reliving her childhood all over the island, as well as doing all the tourist spots. The Callanish stones were, as usual, too crowded but we were able to soak in the atmosphere at Callanish II and III , the smaller circles in splendid solitude

Callanis II

A trip across the Bridge over the Atlantic took us to Bernera with its wild rugged scenery and spectacular beaches. The sea looked so inviting on a warm day; it was only the realisation that the waters were those of the North Atlantic and not the Caribbean that stopped us dipping a toe. LotH spied a golden eagle sitting on rock surveying us with imperious eye. And, yes, it was an eagle. We were in eagle country.

The bridge over the Atlantic

Neolithic sites, round every other corner, standing stone or chambered cairn or stone circle jostled for attention with Iron Age brochs, duns and crannogs and early Christian chapels and anchorite cells.

In between, there was time for a bit of orchid hunting. The Hebridean Spotted-orchid is native to the island but it proved elusive, hybridising as it does with other species. I think I found one but it was probably a hybrid with the Heath Spotted-orchid or with the Northern Marsh orchid which also abound on the moors and machair.

Northern Marsh, Heath - spotted, Hebridean ? Which orchid is which?

The Isle of Pygmies? Oh yes. Luchruban or Eilean na Luchrupain is a small outlier separated from the Butt of Lewis by a narrow channel and steep cliffs.

“On the sea coast about 1 mile WSW of the Butt of Lewis is a precipitous grass-covered rock, rising some 60 - 70ft above the sea, and isolated from the mainland by a deep cleft. It is known as Luchruban and has been identified with the 'Eilean na Luchrupain', or Isle of Pigmies or Little Men, recorded by Dean Munro in about 1549, and later writers. At the SE corner of the summit, which measures about 80ft - 70ft, is a building, built partly underground, which lies NE-SW and comprises an almost circular chamber about 10ft in diameter at the SW end, connected by a passage 9ft long and 2ft wide to a rectangular chamber 8ft long and 5 1/2ft wide. There is an entrance to the passage from the S, and opposite this on the other side there is a recess.” (RCAHMS
The building where the pygmies were thought to live is now regarded as yet another anchorite cell from the early Christian era like so many dotted around the island fringes, the Pabbays, Pappys, Pappas and Pabails of the western and northern isles.
Some thirty years ago, in younger fitter and, on reflection, foolhardier times, I climbed the cliffs to get on to the island. I have no idea how I managed it but I do recall a buttock tightening moment getting over the overhang on the way back.
A somewhat faded thirty year - old shot of the cell on Luchruban

Older and wiser counsel now prevailed and we viewed the island from the safety of Roinn a Roidh – the promontory of the bog myrtle (?). LotH announced that if she had known about it, I would never have made the first visit.
The weather continued to favour us but alas still neither sight nor sound of the elusive corn crake. BiL assured us that one had been calling just below the family croft and SiL had actually seen one crossing the road but, as usual, as soon as I arrive they take a vow of silence.
An expedition to find a chambered cairn on the moors aroused to proprietary instincts of a pair of Arctic skuas but at leas they weren’t as aggressive as their big cousins, the bonxies, whose ire I had aroused on previous field trips and who can really mean business when it comes to driving off intruders.

Tramping or in my case hirpling, across moors and machair made us appreciate the pleasures of the sauna and jacuzzi in our accommodation as well as the local restaurants and take-aways – Malay. Thai, Chinese, Indian, Italian and, of course, that most Scottish of cuisine, the chippie.
I wonder if there would be a market for a Hebridean restaurant serving Lewis lamb, Stornoway black pudding, tatties and salt herring, fresh mackerel, perhaps even guga in season. Guga? Oh that’s another story! Google it, if you you want to know more.
Sailing back across the Minch, expedition over and not a pith helmet or native bearer needed, it had turned out a fruitful trip in space and time.

Pushing the boat out

2009-07-14T11:22:00.000+01:00

Conditioned as we are to the to the sea haar and the easterly winds, when the sun shines it brings out the old joie de vivre, so, on a whim, LotH and I went off down to the harbour acting the tourists and took a trip in the latest addition to the local fleet – the Glass Bottomed Boat.
As the North Sea fish stocks diminish, the fishing community are turning, in some cases reluctantly but in others eagerly, to catching a new species - the visitor. It must be a lot easier life than fighting the elements and literally risking life and limb for uncertain returns. The trawlers, prawners, crab and lobster boats have been joined or sometimes replaced, by sub aqua dive boats, sea angling boats and, now, the Glass Bottomed Boat.
LotH and I boarded from the pontoon jetty with its gently slopping ramp. Another concession to the new market, you can’t expect land lubbers to climb down harbour ladders.

An easy life

The harbour seals are so spoiled they nosed expectantly round us as we chugged out to sea. Entrepreneurial local merchants or fish cadgers as they are called, have started selling fish to the visitors to feed the seals. A win-win-win situation. The fish sellers get rid of any unwanted fish, the tourists have a great time interacting with the wild life and the seals have a pleasant superannuated existence, eating and sleeping on the rocks.
There had been word of minkes moving up and down the coast, following the mackerel but neither they, nor the porpoises were to be seen but the trip was otherwise a great success.

Gannets soared up, folding their wings and diving like arrows, kittiwakes dipped into the water like children ducking for apples, and guillemots, swimming like penguins, shot under the boat, all in search of the sand eels which seem to be plentiful again. We even saw a solitary puffin. There are only about ten breeding pairs on the Head but even this is an improvement on previous years.

The shallow draft and the expertise of the local skipper who knew every rock of his native coast, let us get close into the breeding birds on the cliffs and outliers Shags, herring gulls, razorbills, fulmars, kittiwakes, all alight, take off, sleep and breed on the crowded ledges. The gannets have their own colony further up the coast on the Bass and other islands in the Forth.

High density accomodation

Despite the absence of the big sea mammals, a pleasant way to spend an afternoon. Seeing the land from the sea is a bit like coming into a town by train rather than car, you see familiar surroundings from a different angle. It made us feel even more like holiday makers so, after disembarking, a stroll to a harbour-side restaurant for lunch seemed obligatory.
We are so quick to dash off to foreign climes we sometimes ignore what is on the doorstep.
As Wallace and Gromit would say… “ a Grand Day Out”.

Puncturing my beliefs

2009-07-01T10:39:00.000+01:00

As soon as I straddled the usually reliable bicycle, I knew there was something amiss. The seat is never that comfortable but today it was positively attention grabbing. I had just read an article about excessive cycling as a threat to masculinity and this seemed the positive proof. A glance behind confirmed my suspicions. I had a puncture in the back tyre.
A quick whirl of the wheel revealed a tack in the tread. A curse on the local school and its poster campaign against dog fouling, Primary 3 & 4 thumbs are not up to pushing drawing pins into unyielding substrates and I had unwittingly fallen foul, if you will forgive the pun, of a stray drawing pin,
Mending a puncture is to have a Proustian moment, a remembrance of things past, like winding the clock or being able to do mental arithmetic. It took me back to school days when bicycles were just bikes not mountain bikes and had, if you were lucky, a Sturmey-Archer 3 speed gear.
It was with some trepidation, I approached the prospect of removing the rear wheel of a bike equipped with a fifteen speed derailleur “French “ gear with multiple cogs and shifts. I recalled the time when I broke the chain and, having managed to insert a new link, was faced with the prospect of re-aligning the chain and the gear wheels, especially when the aforesaid bicycle is turned upside down sitting on its seat and handlebars. A task that involved staring at the picture in the manual and then imagining it upside down and back to front.
Getting the tyre off was the first task. As far as I recalled, this used to involve a pal and two spoons filched from the kitchen drawer, the bent handles of which had to be explained afterwards to an irate parent of the female persuasion. There were no pals or spoons available so a couple of flat keys and a lot of cursing sufficed. Then the ritual of pumping up of the punctured tube, the immersion in a basin of water to find the tell-tale bubbles, the little yellow crayon to mark the hole, a sandpaper strip to roughen the surface, the rubber solution, peeling the backing of the patch, sticking it on and then, grating the French chalk over the patch to stop it adhering to the tyre, then the struggle to replace the tyre and the satisfying “plop” as it fits back onto the wheel.
There is something very satisfying about mending a puncture. In an age when cars are computerised mysteries and all electrical appliances are cheaper to bin than to repair, mending a puncture takes you back to youth, to “the blue remembered hills…. where I went and cannot come again” .
Once, in discussion about age, we concluded that once you were unable to do a cartwheel or climb a tree, you were old or, at least, no longer young. It is a couple of years since I, for a dare, performed a sort of cartwheel and as long since I climbed a tree but, yesterday, I mended a puncture.

Come wind, come weather

2009-06-22T20:51:00.000+01:00

The westerlies have returned.
The trade winds started to blow again last week, in mid June, and brought with them the torrential rain, our own mini-monsoon, that ruins so many sport events and outdoor gatherings planned with no thought of the weather cycle.
It happens with remarkable regularity, year in year out, but, cocooned as we are from the elements, we are hardly aware of it.
The buffeting winds and squally rain did not deter a group of archaeologists on a dig on one of the mounds that are scattered over the high moor above the village. The moor is where an outstretched limb of the Lammermuirs eventually descends to dip its toe in the North Sea at St Abbs and is as exposed a spot as one can find. Living there must be like living on the deck of a ship.
Folk did live there and still do.

The dig team assisted by "locals"

The dig was on a “settlement” that had just been de-scheduled from the list of ancient monuments probably to save the expense have to fence it off and it would appear to have been an exercise in checking to make absolutely certain there was nothing of significance on the site before leaving it to the depredations of the rabbits and the sheep.

Not much of interest, an external ditch, not really defensive, probably just to keep livestock out: a few spots where there was evidence of levelling out bumps in the bed-rock or of infilling depressions, to make a level floor; a water cistern cut into the rock. Not much, just folk making themselves a little more comfortable. An Iron Age farmhouse, probably occupied by people of the Brythonic tribe the Romans called the Votadini. A farmhouse then, just a hundred yards from the current farm house, a good place to live, high and dry above the marshy, wooded valley bottoms, a place with wonderful views of the coastline, a stream close at hand and the ability to exploit every resource from the fish in the sea to the game on the moor with the fertile ground to farm between the two, it would have been occupied for generations.

The modern farmhouse, on the right, is only a few yards away after 200o years

The only significant find was a huge post hole, one of four that would have supported the centre of the circular roof. It was extremely large and deep and the reason for all the effort to embed it so deeply in the bedrock floor was there for all to see or, rather, feel. It would have needed a firm setting to withstand the wind and keep the roof from blowing into the North Sea.

Those Iron Age people would have been only too aware of the return of the westerlies.

Bunker shots

2009-06-12T16:51:00.000+01:00

What with all the furore surrounding the D-Day commemoration reminding us how Tom Hanks won the war and a repeat showing of Churchill’s Secret Army on Channel 4, I thought I’d go and check out the secret wartime bunker hidden about a couple of miles outside the village. I heard about it from a pair of local worthies who stravage about the countryside even more than I do. They discovered it some years back dug out the entrance, got in and photographed the interior but kept it very quiet. I was given a rough idea where to look, so off I went.

The Main Entrance

Apparently in 1940 or so when a Nazi invasion was on the cards, a group of volunteers from the Home Guard were picked for training in sabotage, demolition, and survival. In the event of a German landing they were to leave their families, disappear and go underground, literally
Bunkers or “operational bases” were hidden in woods. I suppose, our village being close to the East Coast main line and the A1 with all it bridges, it would have been an obvious spot. Equipped with guns, explosives and supplies, these men would have formed the basis for a resistance movement ….or a suicide squad.
Needless to say they were never called upon and, in latter part of the war, were disbanded. Having been sworn to secrecy and signed the Official Secrets Act, they never divulged the details of the scheme and most of them, if not all, are long gone.
In these days of off- the-record briefings, smear campaigns, leaked documents, lost c.d.’s, and stolen lap-tops, their honest, loyal, honourable integrity seems touching.
They were told not to say anything so they didn’t
Would they have been so quick to volunteer if they had known what a collection of freeloaders, shysters and opportunists, now represent the democracy they were so keen to protect?

The Escape Hatch

The bunker is still intact, fifteen feet below ground, nearly seventy years after its construction from corrugated iron and brick. All there, entrance, escape hatch, blast wall, a tribute to the workmanship and quality of materials used even in wartime. How many of today’s housing estates will be standing above ground in seventy years?

The Interior (courtesy of the original finders)

Altogether, a fun day out. There is an Adopt- a-Monument scheme for preserving old buildings. I wonder if we could preserve it as a historic monument. We could alert the government to its survival. After all, they probably still own it. If not, someone could claim a second home allowance for it.. It is certainly an attractive spot and I’m sure there are those in the spotlight at the moment that might just welcome just such a tranquil hideaway.

The view from the bunker

Rhymer's Reel

2009-05-18T15:21:00.000+01:00

The Eildons

Fed up with the limitations imposed on my wanderings by a game leg and frustrated by erstwhile climbing companions gleefully reporting” there’s still snow on Ben Wyvis”, I decided to test myself on our own mini-mountains, the Eildon hills. The remains of an ancient volcano, Trimontium of the invading Romans, and oppidum of the native Selgovae, the Eildons stand out from the surrounding country and would, I thought, be a fair trial.

Melrose Abbey

Setting off from the site of the Eildon Tree where True Thomas the Rhymer met the Queen of Faerie, I trekked up North Eildon with much grunts and muttered expletives. It took a long time but it was worth it. On a clear day, such as it was, I could see as far as the moor above our village away on the coast and had a great view of Melrose Abbey where that other Border wizard, Michael Scott, lies buried.

Rhymer's Tower

Thomas the Rhymer was a real 13th century man. His keep still stands in Ercildoune (Earlston) and his name appears on documents of the time. He is credited with some of the earliest recorded Scots poetry. His poem-play, Sir Tristem ,was resurrected by Sir Walter Scott who also took the great landscape artist Turner to Rhymers Glen by the Huntley Burn. Turner’s watercolour of the glen is in the National Gallery.
Ralph Vaughan Williams was so intrigued by the tale that he started to compose an opera about Thomas. Sadly, it was never finished.

Thomas, apparently met the the queen of Elfland while resting under the Eildon tree, she took him away and he was not seen for either three or seven years depending on which version you read. He was given the gift of prophecy but cursed with only being able to speak the truth. An Orphean figure,his prophecies were widely consulted for hundreds of years down to at least the eighteenth century. Only being able to speak the truth might indeed be a curse but also quite a handy reputation to have once word got around that everything you said was gospel.

Our current politicians would give all their expenses for such an accolade. Many of them seem to have been “away with the fairies” when it came to filling in claim forms
Thomas probably worked as a spy, maybe even a double agent, in the days when borders were fluid and kings and families battled for overlordship as the Canmore dynasty came to an end. Quite handy then to disappear and claim to have been abducted by the fairy folk

In some versions, Thomas fell asleep by the Huntley Burn and woke to meet the fairy folk. The folk that go to sleep there nowadays awake to find bits of themselves missing. It is the site of our District General Hospital.

Midddle and West Eildon from North Eildon

After getting to the top of the North Eildon I could see the path up the next one but discretion being the better part and all that, I made my reluctant way back to the car., Still, a good day out and, on return, thank goodness for hot baths, ibuprofen and whisky.

Patriot Games

2009-05-07T10:41:00.000+01:00

The restoration of the thirteenth century Priory that dominates the centre of our village proceeds apace. A Cinderella amongst the great Border abbeys, it has been neglected for decades. Thanks to the efforts of local interest groups, support has been garnered from every conceivable source even including a visit from rock megastar, bassist, metal detector enthusiast and gentleman, Rolling Stone, Bill Wyman.

It all started after the local council started laying waste to the area with strimmers and chainsaws. My involvement came by chance as I rushed to protect three gean trees I had planted; one for each daughter in what was the wild area surrounding the ruins. That led to committees and meetings as I felt obliged, in my mind, to give useful advice or stick my nose in as others may have seen it.

The ruins are now being stabilised. The ancient grave slabs, including the enigmatic “Templar” crosses, are being professionally restored and interesting finds being unearthed. A wheel-head cross and an inscribed stone are probably from an even earlier establishment, closer in time to St Aebba herself. A Northumbrian princess, allegedly fleeing an arranged dynastic marriage, she was an Dark Age example of what is now called “girl power”. It is also a reminder how random are national boundaries.
This was once part of an Anglian, from whence “English”, kingdom. Aebba’s brother, Oswald, having already annexed Mercia, the area south to the Humber, marched north to the Forth and defeated the Scots. Aebba’s other brother, Oswui, consolidated the kingdom. Her nephew Ecgfrith laid siege as far north as Dunottar. Had it not been for the victory of the Picts at Nechtan’s Mere, Scotland and England might never have evolved into separate nations with arguably different characters. We might well have become part of the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria and be now worrying about Newcastle United’s imminent relegation from the Premier League. Way-ay, the lads
I tell myself this as part of an auto-conditioning process. In the event of Scotland not qualifying for the next World Cup, I will have to cheer on England, especially with four English grandchildren. I will have to shout encouragement to Rooney (sounds Irish): Rio Ferdinand (sounds Spanish enough to have sailed with the Armada): Gerrard (un morceau de sang normande, peut-etre ) and their Italian coach.
Nations are mere constructs and we should not get too hung up on them.
Mind you, if by the longest of shots, Scotland do qualify then I might sing a different song.
“ 0’ Flower of ….”

The waiting game

2009-04-27T11:16:00.000+01:00

I nearly waited too long for Godot. My cyber-alert system had been primed to let me know when Becket’s enigmatic piece was coming to Edinburgh but it had obviously decided that I was denying its existence by creating its memory and decided to be “of itself” and ignore my instructions. P erhaps it had been reading over my shoulder when I googled Becket.
Telephoning the theatre, I got what was, if not the last seat in the house, the next but one. I was seated in the top right hand corner of what is politely referred to as the Upper Circle but is generally known as “the gods”. I haven't sat so high up for years. It reminded me of school trips to pantomimes of yesteryear when gangs of nine and ten year olds were bussed up to Edinburgh for a Christmas treat and sat in jostling, unruly rows like so many pigeons on window sills, peering down from the giddy heights as Jimmy Logan or Stanley Baxter went through their routines.
Ah, the austerity of the fifties, when will we see the likes again? Gey soon, it would seem if the financial pundits are to be believed.
I hadn’t seen WFG for about thirty years and I had forgotten, or never realised, how funny it is. I suppose asides about prostatism, senior moments, incipient senility and daytime somnolence didn’t have the same relevance for me thirty years ago.
A superb production. McKellen, Stewart, Callow and Pickup were as good as all the revues said they were, The set, the lighting, even a very passable Merlot in the Upper Circle bar, all contributed to a tremendous experience. Yet after the buzz, the enjoyment of the theatrical experience, there was a bleakness that grabbed you unawares. We are all waiting for…for what ?

The swallows are back. I have seen my first of the year. 24th of April. Always the same, within 48 hours, every year! I have been waiting for them to arrive. We are always waiting for something but at least the swallows never disappoint.

Artful Dodging

2009-04-20T10:29:00.000+01:00

I took myself up to Edinburgh to see the “Turner in Italy” exhibition at what used to be the Royal Scottish Academy, now part of the "National Gallery Complex". Auld Reekie is really in a mess. In preparation for the new tram system, the streets have been dug up into a system of trenches to rival the Western Front. Peering down into them you could see exposed the network of pipes and cables and conduits that keep the city functioning – telephone, electricity, water, gas. It reminded me of times spent in the dissecting rooms tracing the paths of the brachial artery or the lateral cutaneous nerve of thigh on formalin-bronzed cadavers in what was, in my case, a rather vain attempt to commit the complexity of the human anatomy to memory.

But the Turners were worth all the crossing and re-crossing of streets and finding a way through the maze of health-and-safety mesh fencing ( hard hats must be worn).

The earlier pictures were great but the later ones of Venice, of the Santa Maria del Salute rising ghostly in the miasma off the canals, were astonishing.

A step round the back took me to the National Gallery proper to pay homage to Velazquez’ “An Old Woman Cooking Eggs” that has been away, starring in the BBC series "The Baroque", and is now back where it belongs. It also gave me a chance to feel the warm glow of ownership as I contemplated the acres of naked flesh that are the Titians, proudly purchased on our behalf, by the government of Scotland. They have spent money on less worthy causes.
All those dimply bums, love-handles and cellulite would certainly merit a stern lecture from the practice nurse on the perils of BMI’s over 25 and the danger to the skin of over-exposure to ultraviolet.
Waving my free pass, I clambered aboard the bus to trundle round the countryside back to the village, my I-pod suitably charged to while away the couple of hours it takes to reach the sticks.
Despite all the twinges and niggles and general falling apart, getting older can be quite enjoyable at times.

seven of one

2009-04-17T14:51:00.000+01:00

A sunny spring day and where better to be than The Greenyards for the Melrose Sevens or the Melrose Sports as the old men would call the tournament, harking back to when seven-a-side rugby was only part of the day’s events alongside kicking competitions, sprints and races. Now, this, the oldest sevens tournament in the world, the begetter of all others up to and including the Sevens World Cup, is great social event with fancy dress, Easter bonnets, a carnival atmosphere and literally, gallons of hospitality. It is still the Blue Riband event though, the one tournament every great player wants to win or at least play in. Waisale Serevi, probably the greatest exponent of the short game and playmaker of world champions Fiji was there for the swan song of his career and was reportedly happy just to have been involved despite his side being well beaten in the first round. My old home side suffered the same fate.
Sevens is a game for sheer blistering speed. There is no place to hide with only half the number of players on a full sized rugby pitch. Miss a tackle or throw a stray pass and like as not the other side are in under the posts. Seven and a half minutes doesn’t sound like much but it is a long time to keep running especially on a warm spring afternoon, then turn round and do it again and, if you win, you do it again and again, all afternoon. My only sevens medal came from a wet, dank afternoon on a muddy pitch in a junior tournament. The next week, on a sunny day and a dry pitch, my lack of pace was exposed, we went out in the first round and I was dropped.
I’ve always enjoyed sevens as a spectator sport having watched the great club sevens of the past when the perfect combination of backs and forwards were playing for one team at just the right time. Melrose themselves, Hawick, Kelso, Gala and the great visiting sides London Scottish, Loughborough the composite sides like the Barbarians, French Barbarians Irish Wolfhounds, Co-optomists and the overseas visitors, Randwick, Bay of Plenty, Stellenbosch, Narwaka have all had their day in the sun. Despite Melrose’s brave effort in getting to the final, I can’t see a Border side winning the sevens again such is the power, pace and pool of talent of teams like this year’s winners - University of Johannesburg.
A ten-a -side match between the finalists of the veteran’s tournament held the previous day took place between the semi-finals and the finals of the main event.
I felt the dead hand of Time on my shoulder when I heard the son of someone I was at school with described as a veteran!
Oh dear.

The Times they are a-changing

2009-04-17T14:45:00.000+01:00

The times have certainly changed.
AOL no longer supports blogs so I have had to pack up my hyphens, commas and ellipses and seek cyber-pastures new.
Post-traumatic avascular necrosis of the femoral head some thirty years after dislocation of the hip in an RTA has limited my walking range so no more big hills for me unless and until I get a nice shiny new one.
I am now confined to circuits round the village where the times are changing rapidly. I saw my first butterfly of the year, a peacock, sunning itself in the shelter a clump of aubretia that has sprouted and blossomed on the needs-a-bit-of-pointing-that-does garden wall. On the same day as I came across an ermine in full fig looking some what embarrassed to be still wearing last season’s colours.
The garden has been invaded by the golden yellow stars of celandine. A pernicious, if attractive, weed, it has proved impossible to eradicate. I console myself with the words of Old Jimmy Brown, a local market gardener who survived the Somme and lived to be ninety- umpty. Contemplating the encroaching invader with its tiny bulbules that scatter with every attempt to dig them out, he shrugged and remarked “It’s syn past”. In a week or two the fleshy leaves will wither away - until next year. It gets its name from the Greek for swallow though it will be long past before they arrive. That won’t be for a fortnight yet.
The swallows seem fewer in number every year and more so the swifts. Only two graced the skies above the village last year where dozens used to scream round the eaves when we first came here. The buzzards are on the increase and have been conducting their aerial courtship, diving and wheeling with outstretched talons. Their “pee-you” cries are so elemental they make the hairs on your neck prickle. I suppose the dawn take-away of last night’s road kill helps to sustain the rising population. It is certainly so of magpies, an uncommon bird here thirty years ago and now commonplace.
Nary a hedgehog is to be seen around the lanes and gardens where dozens snuffled in times past. BFC was adept at finding them and suffered for his inquisitiveness with prickles to his nose.
The times are not what they were.