Magpie

Strutting about the garden  in the rain with his swaggering gait, a bandit, a reiver, a robber.

Predator, egg thief, hunter of the weak and vulnerable, snapper up of any unconsidered trifle.

A magpie.

Bird of ill omen; bringer of bad luck; portent of doom; one for sorrow.

Yet, beautiful. Not gaudy but stylish. Classic black and white with that brilliant azure wing edging and the long elegant tail glossed with purple and green.

A deadly beauty like an F16 jet fighter or a chased steel rapier, a beauty that kills.

Unafraid, he strolled about the lawn with his cocky, jerky walk and searching eye while the sparrows scolded from the safety of the hawthorn hedge.

Finding nothing of note, he departed.

Jessie Lamont, the poet born in our village, was inspired by the bird.

Magpie

How I love you, magpie,

As you swiftly fly

From yew to willow tree!

On a stormy sea

Grey gulls may enthral,

But you are magical.

Bird, whom none befriends,

Bird, whose light transcends

Dark images of wrong,

To Beauty you belong!

I too, enjoyed my encounter but just to be safe, I tugged my forelock and asked after his family. No point in taking chances!

A Winter's Tale

Stormy sky

The polar vortex stopped spinning or split or slowed down or misbehaved in some way or another and released the “beast from the east” as the press have been calling it.  A freezing northeaster bringing blizzards and snow storms straight from the steppes of Siberia causing chaos and disruption to our shores.   In the garden, the hellebores had progressed from the Christmas rose to its Lenten equivalent and the snowdrops and aconites beneath the hedges were being followed by crocuses, yellow then white and purple, when all were buried under a white blanket drifting in the icy wind.

The community spirit of the village prevailed and the housebound and old got support.  One cheeky character actually stopped to offer me a lift as I made my way back from the local shops.

 “Got to make sure the elderly are okay,” he grinned through the rolled down car window.

Feeding the birds has been even more necessary than usual but the extra effort has had its own rewards.

The sight of four different members of the thrush family in the garden at the same time was a bonus.   Redwing, fieldfare, song thrush and blackbird all feeding on our offerings.

From the top - Fieldfare, Redwing and Song Thrush

 

The blackie, as usual, couldn’t curb his aggressive behaviour but even he settled down to let the rest join in along with the tits, sparrows and robins.

Typically aggressive blackbird

  Imagine flying all the way from Scandinavia to avoid the snow and landing in the worst weather of the winter. I happily raked the snow off the windfall apples still under the trees for them.

The long tailed tits have been back on the peanuts. They don’t seem to bother with the other food and always arrive mob-handed for few minutes of frantic feeding then vanish.  Do they have a round of peanut feeders to visit?

Long-tailed tits, two of the gang

 I even found a tiny goldcrest feeding among some of the aubretia that grows on many of the old walls, presumably searching for hibernating insects. I‘ve never seen one actually in the village before though they are in the surrounding woods.  Is it a good sign that they are coming closer in or is it just the stormy weather?  We shall see.

  Regarding tiny birds, the wrens have been flocking together and roosting in the cracks in the bark of the big gean tree though they don’t come to the feeders. Presumably they, like the goldcrest, find insects among the undergrowth and tree roots.  True troglodytes.

The old rhyme was right.

If Candlemas be clear and bright

Winter will have another bite

 Candlemas on February 2^nd, was indeed a great day and everyone was out walking and remarking how mild the weather had been. Little did we guess what Mother Nature had in store!

A field of battle

Coming north from a family party, we left the motorway and happened on a small village called Clifton.

A sign informed us it was the site of the last battle on English soil.

The retreating Jacobite army of Bonnie Prince Charlie was being pursued by the Hanoverian forces of the Duke of Cumberland and General Wade.

The house where the Duke of Cumberland is said to have stayed

A rear-guard action was fought by the Macdonells of Glengarry, the Clan Macpherson and the Stewarts of Appin, stopping the Government forces and allowing the main Jacobite host to escape.

This only delayed the inevitable as they were subsequently routed at Culloden in 1746 with the subsequent destruction of the Highland clan system in the aftermath.

Sir Walter Scott describes the battle in the novel Waverley when the eponymous hero, Edward Waverley, an Englishman, is involved in the Jacobite cause.

Waverley is pardoned for his part in the uprising but when Euan MacIvor the father of his love, the passionate Flora, is executed, she rejects Waverley. Edward later marries the sensible  Rose Bradwardine. 

Perhaps Scott was showing the  choice between the romance of the doomed Stuart cause and the stability of the Hanoverian regime.

In the novel, Scott draws upon the words of clan chief, Macpherson of Cluny in  his notes of the battle with its evocative description and the ring of the clan names and battle cries.

'The Stewarts and Macphersons marched forward at the word of command, as did the Macdonalds and MacDonnells on the right. The men on the on the right kept firing as they advanced but the Macphersons, who were on the left, soon came into contact with the English dragoons, and received the whole of their fire. Murray then drawing his sword, he cried out, "Claymore!", and, Cluny Macpherson doing the same, the Macphersons rushed down to the bottom ditch of the enclosure, and, clearing the hedges as they went, fell sword in hand upon the enemy, of whom a  number were killed at the lower ditch. The rest retreated across the moor, but received in their flight the fire of the MacDonnell of Glengarry regiment'.

Ten Government dragoons were killed and four of their officers wounded. One British dragoon is recorded as dying in Clifton several weeks later, presumably of wounds received in the battle. The dragoons killed in the battle are buried in St Cuthbert's churchyard. Near the churchyard gate is a stone commemorating the skirmish.

 Nearby is a tree said to be at the the site of the Jacobite graves.

The only prisoner taken on the occasion was a footman of the Duke of Cumberland. This man was later sent back to his master by Charles Edward Stuart.

Motorways are great for getting from one place to another but deny us these chances for an unplanned dip into the past.

The Battle of Clifton though it was little more than a skirmish, took place two hundred and seventy two years ago tomorrow, the 29th December by the Gregorian calendar. At the time of the battle the Julian calendar was still in use so the date was recorded as December 18th, eleven days earlier. 

There would still have been time to get home to Scotland for Hogmanay though with little reason to celebrate.

A journey in the wake of Patrick Brydone....and Ulysses

Patrick Brydone, the forgotten man of the Scottish Enlightenment, was born in 1741 in our village, a son of the manse. A soldier, a pioneer in the study of electricity and magnetism and a traveller, he wrote the first readable travel book - A Tour through Sicily and Malta : in a Series of Letters to William Beckford which ran to nine editions was immensely popular and is still easily accessible to this day.

We set sail from Southampton to cruise through the Mediterranean following, at least part of his route to Sicily and Mount Etna. 

 

Mount Etna

 

In his book he describes, amongst a fund of detailed observations, such titbits as the Italian love of ice-cream and the banditti who guarded him during his stay on the island :

Criminal as they are to society in general, yet to one another and to every person who puts himself under their protection, free from every imposition.

He climbed Mount Etna describing woods with great oaks and chestnut trees up to 204 feet in circumference. Here, he had discussion with a canon, Recupero, on the time taken for soil to accumulate from lava flows and that the calculations arising from this showed that Mt Etna had been erupting for at least 14000 years. This flew in the face of Bishop Ussher’s statement based on the Bible that the world began in 4004 B.C. 

Silvestri Crater

 

 

Etna's summit beckons

Brydone’s account of this was censured by Samuel Johnson and his biographer Boswell as being anti-mosiacal and he was advised to” pay more attention to the Bible.”.

David Hume, atheist, philosopher and giant of the Scottish Enlightenment praised Brydone for his geological expertise in letters to Wm Strahen

James Hutton of Siccar Point fame, the father of geology, published his Theory of the Earth in 1788. He would almost certainly have read Brydone’s Travels and would have been influenced by it.

While Mt Etna, Brydone noted that the Bishop of Catania received revenues for the sale of ice and snow to all of Sicily, Malta and part of Italy.

: “even the peasants regale themselves with ices during the summer heats […] and there is no entertainment given by the nobility of which these do not always make a principal part. When he visited the underground caves filled with ice he remarked that the peasants made the finest ice-houses: It was the peasants of Sicily who supplied ice to the confectioners, street sellers, and cafés of the island. 

 

At a later port of call, Venice, we had the finest ice cream I have ever tasted!

We sailed through the Straits of Messina in the footsteps or rather, the oar-sweeps of that other wanderer in the Mediterranean – Ulysses on his journey back to Ithaca.

Approaching the Straits of Messina

The twin dangers of Scylla and Charybdis guarding the straits meant little to the power of mighty diesel engines but the whirling eddies created by the meeting of the Tyrrhenian and Ionian seas in the narrow gap would indeed have seemed like the devouring monster Charybdis to the tiny galleys of the Achaeans. Circe's advice to Ulysses to "hug Scylla's rock" held true even today as we made our passage.

The swirling eddies of Charybdis

The Rock of Scylla

Ulysses had encountered Polyphemus the Cyclops on the island and escaped by cunning after blinding the giant by driving a blazing tree trunk into his one eye.

When anchored at Taormina, his men displeased the Sun god Apollo by killing the god's cattle for food. The god was so displeased that he threatened not to shine unless they were punished by the other Olympians. Only Ulyssses survived their vengeful shipwreck.

Taormina , with the bay where Ulysses men angered Apollo ?

Brydone recalled their fate when visiting the Craeco-Roman amphitheatre at Taormina. After more than two thousand years in is still in use as a concert venue.

Mount Etna seen from the amphitheatre

While Brydone sailed on to Malta in his journeys, we docked at Venice then crossed the Adriatic to Croatia.

We returned across Homer's "wine-dark sea", passing the "floating islands of Aeolus" the god of the winds, and so to the Pillars of Hercules at Gibraltar. 

The Aeolian Islands, home of the god of the winds

 

Gibraltar and one of the Pillars of Hercules

 

Sailing into the sunset

A journey in the wake of two adventurers three thousand years apart.

Equinox

Today is the autumnal equinox. The night and day are equal but because we have British Summer Time for another month, it seems to be getting dark earlier. Astronomically, it is the start of Autumn but to anyone with eyes to see, the season is half over. 

The brambles are past, the haws are red, the autumn crocuses are still blooming but not for long, the plum crop has been eaten or turned into jam and only the apples that are too high on the tree to be reached remain. They will have to wait until the equinoctial gales shake them loose.

Out of reach

The log store is stacked. The apples have been traded to the cider maker for a few bottles of last year's vintage. The jams and chutneys have been labelled and stored.

The bird feeders have been cleaned and disinfected for the winter seeds and nuts and one or two of the blue tits have been making an early inspection. The cotoneaster is laden with berries awaiting the waxwings. Will they appear this year?

The late burst of sunshine has brought out the butterflies to feed on the rotting windfalls but no wasps. Where have all the wasps gone? We have hardly seen one all summer.

Butterflies feed on the windfalls

The hedgehog has deserted the garden but he or she - it's difficult to tell with hedgehogs - is still around. I think its low profile is not due so much to imminent hibernation as to being picked up by an inquisitive collie. The hedgehog may have been a little bit miffed but there was no doubt from the yelps as to who came off worst from the encounter.

The year is on the turn and autumn, however you calculate it, is definitely here.

Macbeth Trail - Postscript

Lulach's stone, traditional site of his death near Mossat

Whether Lulach, Macbeth's stepson, fought at Lumphanan is unknown. What is known is that like the fictitious Fleance of Shakespeare's play, he escaped death at the time. Such was the prestige of Macbeth that, even after his demise, the House of Moray was powerful enough for the crown to pass to Lulach.

His is the first recorded coronation of a Scottish monarch, seated on the Stone of Destiny at Scone within a month of the defeat at Lumphanan.

In effect, Lulach was King only in the north, essentially in the old Pictish territories and of the far north and Northern Isles where there were family connections to ensure loyalty.

Lulach was nicknamed "Tairbeath", Lulach the Simple. Whether he was or not, he certainly wasn't of the same mould as his predecessor.

He was lured from the security of his home base, some say by a false promise of negotiation, to Mossat in Strathbogie on the ancient border of the lands of Moray.

Here, he was killed on the 17th March 1058 and consigned to history as a footnote. The traditional site is marked by an Iron Age standing stone of much greater antiquity so the exact circumstances of his death are unknown

Kildrummy Castle, seat of the Earls of Mar, still guards the approach to Moray

So died the last King of the House of Alpin, a dynasty which had started when Kenneth I,(Cináed mac Ailpín, Kenneth MacAlpin) became King of the Picts and Scots to form the beginnings of Alba in 843.

Lulach was also, arguably, the last King of Alba. Every monarch since Kenneth had in effect been the King of Scotland, but those up to King Aedh would have been referred to in their own time as Kings of the Picts and Scots; and those from Donald I onward as Kings of Alba. It was only with the replacement of the House of Moray (Macbeth) with the House of Dunkeld (Malcolm) that the occupant of the throne would be referred to by contemporary sources as the King of Scotland.

The line of Lulach continued, his son Máel Snechtai was Mormaer of Moray, while his daughter had a son, Óengus, who inherited the title of Mormaer of Moray and made an unsuccessful attempt to claim the throne in the reign of David I, which ended in his defeat and death in 1130.

After the defeat of Óengus, Moray was probably granted to William fitz Duncan and, after his death in 1147, it was to some extent colonized by King David's French, Flemish and English followers.

Returning from my journey on the trail of Macbeth, I crossed the Forth on the new bridge  - the Queensferry Crossing, named after Queen Margaret, wife of Malcolm Canmore, and Queen Gruoch's successor as consort to the king.  We live amidst our history.

The Queensferry bridge