Rooks and castles, Knights and kings.

At last, a warm day and a chance to do a bit of aimless stravaiging about  the countryside to see what turns up.   A toss of a coin to decide north or south, a quick scan of the local map and a short car journey through the back roads of East Lothian had me at Crowhill above the Thornton nature reserve, a steep ravine of very ancient woodland.

 Apparently, there are indicator species that give some idea of the age of a wood, as they spread at a fairly steady rate year on year.  Two are ransomes or wild garlic and dog’s mercury.   They flourish in abundance in Thornton Dean so the woods must be very old.

Dog's mercury

Ransomes

The crows still dominate the skies around Crowhill, nothing changes for them.  The rooks cawed with proprietoral indignation as I followed the path up the glen beneath their nests

 Two castles once stood on either side of the ravine. Innerwick, a Stewart and later, Hamilton, stronghold and Thornton occupied by who else in this part of the world but the Homes.    It must have been like a scene out of a Grimm fairy tale or Gulliver’s Travels, two castles, within shouting distance of each other, separated by a deep gully and a burn

Both were attacked by Harry “Hotspur” Percy and his erstwhile prisoner and subsequent confederate, Archibald, Earl of Douglas in a scenario straight out of Shakespeare’s Henry IV as they tried to lure the king’s forces north while they slipped south to ally themselves with the Welsh forces of Owen Glendower.  All came to naught at the battle of Shrewsbury.

A hundred and forty odd years later, the redoubts were attacked again in  “the Rough Wooing” of  Henry VII and Thornton was completely razed.  There is now not a trace to be seen.  Some of the stones may have been used to repair Innerwick, though it never achieved any significance again.  The rest probably went to build dykes and cottages.

Standing on a rocky crag, there is still an air of romance around the ruins of the castle with vaulted chambers,  tunnel -like entrance passages with little guard rooms off.,the remains of a tower that has a few of the spiral steps remaining...

It is a pity it has been allowed to deteriorate so far and no effort made to restrict the dense ivy threatening to envelope the whole edifice.

Just as I was leaving, I notice a fragment of oyster shell.  Part of a medieval banquet?   Possibly it came from the shells burnt to produce lime for mortar or, more likely, it had been used as packing in a line of masonry in the same way that a modern kitchen fitter will use a sliver of wood to get the units aligned..

A castle well worth a visit.

 I will never be able to hear Henry IV compare the bold Henry Hotspur favourably to his own son, the wastrel prince Henry, pal of Falstaff., yet, in the same speech, wonder why Hotspur hasn’t given up his Scots prisoner to his king, without thinking of the ruse the pair had tried at Innerwick.

“ ..In envy that my Lord Northumberland

should be the father to so blest a son….

….Then I would have his Harry and he mine

… What think you, coz

Of this young Percy’s pride?    The prisoners

 To his own use he keeps; and sends me word

 I shall have none…..”

Hotspur was busy hatching rebellion and the feint attack on Innerwick castle was to be his first move

The prodigal Prince Hal made his father proud by defeating the rebels and killing Hotspur but the wily Douglas managed live to fight another day

.

“Go to the Douglas and deliver him

 up to his pleasure ransomeless and free”

  Ever the canny Scot. 

April is the cruellest month

It’s been a slow, slow spring. The cold east wind and the snow have proved a death knell to many lambs, disheartening for the local farmers and stretching their resourcefulness to the limit. The cold weather may be responsible for the dead puffins and guillemots coming ashore.  Maybe the sand eels are not there for feeding.  It bodes ill for the breeding season.

The wind has swung round an airt to the south and temperatures have risen but only with the loss of the drying effect of the wind as more rain comes in from the Atlantic.

Species are resilient however and the primroses and coltsfoot – what is the plural?  coltsfeet? -  are blooming on the sea braes and even a brave cowslip was testing the force of the blast.     

Scurvy grass is out.    Full of vitamin C it is, as its name suggests, a good anti-scorbutic and was used well into the nineteenth century until the availability of citrus fruits made it redundant.

It has a peppery taste more powerful than the rest of its crucifer cousins and would make a piquant addition to a salad but, despite W.S.’s  submission that names don’t matter and roses smell just as sweet etc., a menu with  “ garnished with scurvy grass” doesn’t have quite the same ring as with “rocket and watercress”. 

 Scurvy grass’s time in the limelight is past, replaced by a fizzy tablet

The celandine is in flower. Named after the swallow with whose arrival it is supposed to coincide; it is always earlier than those delightful harbingers of summer.  None are here yet but within a week they will come swooping in, helped by the southerly winds.   It is indeed an ill wind that blows no good.

While the swallows haven’t arrived yet, the goldeneye should be left for the north.  A pair on a local river must think it’s still winter.  An easy mistake to make.   Some do breed in Scotland, but in the Highlands, not here….or perhaps they are going to start.   Why fly off to Russia when you can enjoy the same weather here

Dublin

A trip to Dublin is always a treat for a Joycean.  Best is 16^th June but any time will do.

Just to wander in the footsteps of Bloom and Dedalus is distraction enough while LotH is off to Grafton and Henry Streets to try and rescue the Irish economy single-handedly.

We stayed at Dalkey with superb views over Sandycove and Dublin Bay, at the top of the hill where Joyce taught at Clifton School. 

 Dublin Bay with the Martello tower in foreground

To climb the narrow winding stair of the Martello tower is to hear Buck Mulligan’s voice from the gun emplacement.

“Come up Kinch. You fearful Jesuit”

 A quick trip on the DART train took us to the heart of Dublin and shoe leather did the rest.

 

To visit Sweney’s chemist shop and buy  lemon scented soap, pause at the National Library before taking coffee at Bewley’s on Grafton Street just by Thornton’s where Blazes Boylan bought peaches and pears for Molly…..Grand stuff.

A diversion to St Stephen’s cathedral allowed me to pay homage to Jonathon Swift whose jaundiced view of humanity belied his deeply held beliefs and quiet charity.

Returning home and reading Milo O’Shea’s obituary in The Times brought another Joycean trip but this time down the years.

In 1968, we boarded a bus to the next city to see a film banned by the local council.

“Ulysses” had suffered more cuts than a Chinese torture victim and continuity, always a difficulty with Joyce, was almost lost but, to this day, Leopold Bloom has Milo O’Shea’s face and I could never see T.P.Mckenna on television, usually playing a doctor, without hearing him intoning

“Introibus ad altare Dei”

over his shaving bowl on the parapet of the Martello tower above the “snot-green sea”.

 

 LotH is keen for a return trip.  There must be at least one shop left unpatronised, so, hopefully, it will be June16th, 2014….but it will still be Milo O’Shea having a glass of Burgundy and gorgonzola in Davy Byrne’s pub and picking over the book stalls at Merchants Arch.

The ineluctable modality of the memory!!

  Merchants Arch








Night-town but never as J.J. knew it!

Gilmerton Cove

 Gilmerton is a small village south of Edinburgh.  Once a mining area, it is now a suburb of Scotland's capital.
 Drum Street is a busy thoroughfare with take-aways and hairdressers, mums with buggies and folk buying filled rolls and a newspaper from the shop on the corner for their lunch break.

A simple door in an unassuming cottage attached to a bookies didn’t seem worthy of a second glance.  The door was locked and  the only information was a poster in the blank window with a phone number for the “ Gilmerton Cove".    A quick call on the mobile and a cheery voice said,

 “ I’ll just be a minute, we’re just coming up from the underground “

A minute later a smiling young woman appeared and welcomed us in.  The entrance room was small and hung with information panels  about the Cove.

Despite the fanciful interpretations and puns on covens and covenanters, it would seem that “cove” is just and old Scots word for cave.

A cave indeed as we discovered when, hard-hatted for health and safety reasons, we were led down in the depths below the pavement level.

 The Tunnels are low!

  The hard hats proved that, for once, health’n’safety rulings can be useful as the tunnels are quite low and the sandstone though soft and easily worked, is not so soft as allow head butting with impunity.

 Used by a local blacksmith, George Paterson as a store, home and illegal drinking bothy in the eighteenth century,  the Cove has been connected fancifully with Freemasonry ( there are a couple of Masonic symbols carved as graffiti), Covenanters,  witches, Robert the Bruce, he of the cave and the spider, and, of course, the Knights Templar.

The blacksmith claimed he had hewn the multi-chambered construction himself in five years which was manifestly nonsense. He may have rediscovered it and even worked some of the sandstone into which it has been cut but this is not the work of a single eighteenth century blacksmith.

 Archaeological opinion is that it is much older, the pock marked walls of the tunnels being evidence of older tools than iron chisels.

  The marks of simple tools on the walls

 Some of the features have attracted simplified explanations and names to fit with the preconceived and probably erroneous notions of the functions of the"cove". 

 The misnamed “forge” and “well” are not what they seem at first sight.  The “punchbowl” is obviously not that either.   Why bother to carve a bowl into solid stone when it is an easily portable piece of table ware and what use is a forge in a chamber with no chimney?

 The table room wth carved "punchbowl"

Despite all the romantic stories and tales of tunnels extending for miles to Craigmillar Castle and Roslin Chapel, I got the distinct impression that whatever use it had been put in the recent past, this place was much, much older.
It must have taken a great deal of social organisation and possibly coercion to dig out all this solid sandstone and to fashion  the features within the chambers.   Only  a group with a powerful grip on a community could command such obedience and effort, especially in times when providing the day to day neccessities of life was hard enough.   In return for all this effort what did the people get?  Solace, the allaying of fears, comfort in bereavement, the promise of good harvests, predictions and prophesies - all the trappings of  a religion of some kind. 

The Hypogeum in Malta is over 4000 years old dating from the time when the Chalcolithic, the copper age, was at its height and fertility  rites and Earth Mother religion seemed to have predominated among the early agriculturalist peoples.

 An oracle window?

 Though much more sophisticated and complex than Gilmerton Cove, there are many striking similarities.  Niches for cult objects, windows cut in to chambers that may have been where oracles were consulted, altars, votive pits -  all have echoes at Gilmerton. 

The mis-named forge, possibly place for a cult object

Both at the Hypogeum and at the associated megalithic temples at Tarxien,  “fat lady” statues and votive offerings  suggestive of  mother goddess have been found.  Where better to worship such a goddess then in the body of the goddess herself , under the ground.

A model of the fat lady statue from the megalithic site im Malta

 The Hypogeum is a World Heritage Site and, while Gilmerton Cove isn’t in that league, it deserves a visit, a fascinating place that hopefully will be preserved, explored and subjected to academic scrutiny in the years to come. 

http://www.gilmertoncove.org.uk

http://www.heritagemalta.org/hypogeum.html

Island in the sun

The Clisham without boots

A trip to the Western Isles gave LotH a chance to recharge her Gaelic batteries and me a chance to climb the Clisham, the largest peak in the long island acting as a barrier between the moors of Lewis and the hills of Harris.  At 2,621 feet, it is a wee bit short of Munro status but still a good climb.

The impertinent calls of the cuckoos and the wheet of their erstwhile foster parents, the meadow pipits, echoed up Glen Scaradale as I parked the car near the start of the old post track now designated the North Harris Walkway.  It was then I discovered that I’d left my boots back at base. Oh, the trials of age and memory!

  From Gormul Maraig

Nothing for it, having come this far, I set off up the track in a pair of slip-on driving shoes…well, the track looked fairly dry…well, sort of.

The Clisham

Skirting the wettest bits, I made my way up the old path to a stony outcrop, Gormul Maraig, and climbed up over this to the shoulder of Tomnabhal where the Clisham came into view, then came a long slog up the boulder-strewn slopes to the break in the rocky summit ridge.

 The summit approach 

 The views were great down to Harris and up to Lewis but the feet were beginning to feel the strain and there was still the descent to come.  The trek was livened up by sights of greenshanks, the sudden burst from heathery hiding places of red grouse and the wary stares of red deer. 

 View to Harris

 Glacier grooved

As I scrambled back over the large boulders with their glacier grooved surfaces, I pondered on what a pensioner with hypertension and a tin hip was doing stravaging about alone on a mountain.   At that point, a bird flew over and, clear and concise, came the call “coo-coo, coo-coo”.  All the way from Africa to voice an opinion and maybe not far wrong either.  
 It took a day or two for the muscles to recover, the shoes never will. 

 Boating for Eagles

The trip to the Flannans was off, so I settled for a trip round Loch Roag in a RIB, hoping to catch sight of a sea-eagle, it being a bit too early for basking sharks to be seen.

Approaching a sea cave

 Spectacular interiors

Exploring the natural lagoons of Pabaigh Mor and Bhacasaigh with their turquoise waters and white sands was pleasant enough and the arches Pabaigh Beag and the sea caves of Fuaighh Mor were spectacular but no sign of the erne, even as we passed below Creag- na- Iolaire – the crag of the eagle - on Fuaigh Mor.  Not a glimpse.

Venturing out into darker water was a bit stimulating, the bouncy RIB and the spray making it a bit of fun and shaking up the old bones.  The island of Fuaigh Beag is now considered as the source of the uprights for the famed Callanish stones.  Apparently at a very low tide, workings were discovered where the stones may have been cut.  It would only have been a short trip for the slabs through by Bernera where the “bridge over the Atlantic” spans the narrow strait, to their destination at Callanais.

The Bridge over the Atlantic

As we made our way back to our starting point, I glanced up into the cloudless sky and there was a circling dot.   Could it be a sea eagle?   I swept up the binoculars and found that the dot didn’t get any bigger. 
 A floater in the vitreous humour… another penalty of age.

Home, to relax and watch the wonderful sunsets.  We had been hoping to see the fabled “green flash”. Apparently, this occurs just as the sun sets below the horizon – a momentary green flash in the sky. 

 Needless to say, no green flash was seen.

So, no sea eagle, no green flash but a great day out and a wonderful end with a sunset like a Rothko painting.

Birdsong

 The rigs run down to the cliff edge

Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending was recently voted the most popular piece of classical music in the country.    It was chosen as one of the pieces played at the commemoration of the 9/11 tragedy so its appeal extends far beyond our shores.

Vaughan Williams himself did not, apparently, regard it as one of his greatest works.

Its popularity maybe partly due to the image of this tiny bird rising into the blue, wings beating frantically while it pours out its song.  The human equivalent might be to sprint a hundred metres in ten seconds while singing “Che gelida manina" at full register.

The skylarks were in good voice as I skirted the long rigs that run down to the tops of the cliffs along our local coastline but they were in competition with another songster perched inconspicuously atop a stunted hawthorn.   A song that gives rise to that old Scots expression of joy – “singing like lintie” – it was a linnet.  Once so numerous, that our Victorian forefathers, perpetrators of so much wildlife crime, kept them as cage-birds, they are now on the “Red” list of endangered breeds.

 Coastline walk

Birdsong has and probably will always be an inspiration for composers.  The cuckoo features famously in Beethoven, Britten, Mahler and Mozart. The nightingale makes several appearances and there have been parts for robins, wagtails and even siskins.  Vivaldi had his “Goldfinch ” concerto but I can’t find a reference to the linnet.  There must be one somewhere.

Probably the most famous bird in music is the little bird, Peter’s friend in Peter and the Wolf  though I don’t think Prokofiev said what sort of bird it was.  I think it sounds like a wren but I am definitely no musician.

A  recent trip to the Hebrides was enlivened by the daily calling of the gowk whose name, to Anglophones, embodies its call…the cuckoo, and by that sound, now so rare on the mainland, that of the corn crake.

The corn crake’s onomatopoeic Latin name, crex crex, like a thumbnail running down a comb, exactly describes the call that seems to come from about six different birds or from six different locations in the reeds.  No wonder it has a reputation as a ventriloquist.

Watching people going about, walking, jogging, cycling, even waiting at bus stops, with their ears plugged into their i-pods, I fear that a generation will never know the song of a blackbird or the “wise thrush; he sings each song twice over” let alone the linnet or the skylark.

Trees

A visit to Perthshire to the big hills and big trees made a pleasant break from the sodden byways of the Scottish Borders.

The Falls

The Birks

The Birks of Aberfeldy, immortalised in verse by Burns, provided a pleasant evening stroll.  The air was charged with negative ions from the cascading Falls of Moness, its purity vouched for by the lichens clinging to every ancient tree.   Wood anemones and red squirrels added to the enjoyment.

Being among such splendid trees, there had to be a visit to the Fortingall yew, reputed to be up to five thousand years old.   For years it suffered depredation by souvenir hunters and local children and is now protected in a walled enclosure.  There is a local legend that Pontius Pilate was born here as the offspring of a Roman ambassador and a Pictish woman but it seems a highly unlikely tale.

The Yew

 If its age is a great as recorded, the yew has stood from a time before the Neolithic settlers raised the stone circles that still abound in the surrounding fields.  It was once circled by wolf and bear.  Wild boar would have rooted about in its shade.

It’s a thought.   A living organism that goes on and on, regardless of human existence, oblivious to us except when we come and cut chunks from it or set fire to it as has happened to the yew.   Five thousand years,  hmmm!

I have this little yew in a pot.  I found it growing under one of the apple trees.  It was probably seeded by a thrush having dined on the berries of a mature specimen that grows by the nearby burn.  Thrushes seem to be only birds that eat yew berries - and laburnum seeds - without any harm coming to them.  

  Now, if I can just grow it up a bit, then find a safe spot to plant it out …….and in  7012…..will there be any one here to see it?

On the subject of trees, I’ve been keeping an eye on the oak and the ash coming into leaf.

Oak before the ash, in for a splash

Ash before the oak, in for a soak

At the moment they seem to be neck and neck but I have a feeling the ash is going to draw away in the leafy stakes and we are in for a wet summer.    Experts say it is temperature that controls the sequence with cooler weather favouring the ash and doesn’t predict rainfall.  I hope they are right