May sayings

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.*

No doubt about that as the gales buffet the fruit trees creating a snowstorm of apple blossom. Our hopes for a huge crop of apples to puree and freeze or trade with the cider maker for a share of last year's output is diminishing with every blast. The plums may have suffered the same fate though they were further advanced and the gean tree has shed a load of nascent bird cherries. 

 What will the blackies and fieldfares do come Autumn and what of the wood mouse who lives in the hedge and whose winter stores of cherry stones I find, each opened like a can of beans to get the kernels ?

May is a spectacularly variable month for weather, scorching sunshine then squalls of rain and wind to follow within a day. No sooner have we got the sun-lounger out than we are putting it away before it tumbles in the wind like a huge daddy-long-legs across the grass.

Ne'er cast a cloot 'til (the) may is oot. **

Last week with its scorching days, proved this a truism as the may blossom burst forth in frothy splendour with their their strange musky sweet scent heavy in the hot sun then, capricious as ever the wind blew in from the North and changed the adage to its commoner interpretation - ne'er cast a cloot 'til May is oot. 

The Merry month of May

The merriest month in all the year is the merry month of May***

A time for courting or "winching" as the Scots would have it, a time for the maypole with its significance, a time for May queens, a time when the may and May become fused into one great celebration of love and fertility.

Near us is the village of Polwarth, remembered in verse by Alan Ramsay in his Polwarth on the Green.

    At Polwart on the green

If you’ll meet me on the morn

Where lasses do conveen

To dance around the thorn

There was a tradition of newly-weds out walk around the hawthorn tree presumably a folk memory of an old fertility rite. Fortunately, the tree still survives and a descendant tree has been grown along side its ancient sire.

The Polwarth Thorn

Young love, fertility symbolism, the queens of the May, the green man, dancing round the may pole.

No wonder that May is the merriest month.

Here we come gathering nuts in May

Nuts in May

On a cold and frosty morning

Yes there are some cold and frosty mornings in May but nuts? There aren't ever nuts in May. It would seem it's really "knots" in May. Knots or bouquets of may flowers collected as part of a children's game pairing boys and girls, an echo of an older custom of choosing a spouse and so we come round again to May being the merriest of the months!

Knots of may

Fertility rites, Beltane (La Beulltain) fires, leaping over the flames, feasting with special bannocks and possets, washing your face in the dew......
...and now we make do with a bank holiday!

*     W.S.
**   Anon
*** Ballad

in not so splendid isolation

It's a surreal world we are living in. Social isolation, communication by internet, conversations across the width of a road. This pestilence has changed the way we live, possibly for ever.

We are lucky, living in a small village in the county.

We can walk for miles in our permitted exercise time without seeing a soul and yet the spring continues to burst out in the gardens and woods unaware of our human restrictions. Unthinking about our problems, the rest of the planet just gets on with what it has always done.

Violets bloom on a bank, a buzzard screams in the sky, the summer visitors arrive, the warblers and the swallows come back to their old haunts, the badgers seek new setts, oblivious of us.

"that breathes upon a bank of violets"

Viola odorata

Our ancient village has seen it all before

There is a plague stone near the edge of the village. Almost four hundred years ago, the inhabitants of Northfield, then a small hamlet, now a large farm, were struck by an outbreak of plague and quarantined. People didn't really understand the germ theory but they knew that contact spread the contagion so they filled the basin in the top of the stone with vinegar and the folk from Northfield would put their coins in the vinegar to buy food.

Today, the local butcher brought eggs, fresh vegetables and fruit to the doorstep and we left the money for him in an envelope. Plus ca change!

Yet people are risking their lives to minister to the sick, to care for the vulnerable, and to treat and save the seriously afflicted. We appreciate them now but will we continue to do so when the plague is defeated or will we go back to idolising vacuous "personalities", sports persons and commentators, game show hosts and all their associated trivia and lavishing vast sums upon them when their contribution is, as we have discovered, at best borderline and mostly unnecessary. 
 We shall see.

*Twelfth Night  W.S.

A turn off the road

Yester Kirk

Graveyards are always worth a visit when stravaiging about the countryside. The older ones attached to a kirk never fail to provide a story or two (Blog 2/7/2015).

On the way back from a necessary but fairly uninteresting visit to Edinburgh, I thought I deserved a turn on to the road less travelled and left the coast and the dual carriage-way for the Lammermuirs.  

Sign posts

Following some very specific sign-posts, I arrived in Gifford, perhaps the birth place of that noted misogynistic Calvanist, John Knox, a claim that is also made for the neighbouring Haddington. What that railer against the "monstrous regimen(t) of women" would have made of the current equality of the sexes in all walks of life and not just politics, would be interesting.

A gravestone to a former minister, James Witherspoon, mentions his son, John, who was the only clergyman to sign the American Declaration of Independence.

A look round the quiet kirk-yard showed the prominence of the Hay family, the Earls and Marquesses of Tweedale as well as other little historical insights. Two, dedicated to officers of that forerunner of the global economy, the East India Company, gave a reminder of Empire and the Raj.

Stones with the names of Gian Carlo Menotti and his wife, Malinda lie side by side. 

 They lived in Yester House, once the seat of the Earls of Tweeddale. Menotti composed several operas but his most well known must be Amal and the Night Vistors, a children's Christmas opera specifically conceived for television.

Yester House

It is surprising where a five minute stroll can take you on a turn off the road.

Gifford is also the site of the Goblin Ha'  at Yester Castle, giving its name to a local hotel.  Mentioned in Marmion by Walter Scott,  it is a fascinating place but too far off the track to explore today.  I'll have to come back again.

Hairst*

We approach the autumnal equinox. The full moon of September, the Harvest Moon, has just waned.  Before artificial lighting, its glow allowed farmers to take advantage of a dry spell and harvest their crop well into the night.

Driving home under its light, I came across a newly dead fox, no doubt hit by a car. It looked young, not much more than a cub with its soft red fur and black ears and socks. Part of the dispersal as the young foxes move out seeking territories and mates for themselves, this one hadn’t developed the skills needed to survive alongside humans. Few of the local community would mourn the death of a fox but it did make me feel sad.

The next day, I did have a chance to save a furry creature from the wheels of the cars when I found a black hairy caterpillar, a hairy oobit, crossing the road and ushered it into the verge. Hopefully it will grow up to be, I think, a leopard moth.

The fields have a roughly shaved look, and the last of the swallows have departed. Only last week, the tail-enders of this year’s brood were sweeping over the stubble like tiny jet fighters and then, in one day, they were gone on a journey already taken by their parents to a place they have never seen. How do they manage it?

As they move out, the long straggling skeins of geese come honking in from the north.

The hedgerows are flushed with haws and berries awaiting the return of those other visitors, the redwings and fieldfares and. hopefully, waxwings.

Haws, Hips and Scrogs

The warm sun still brings out the butterflies and dragonflies around the loch but after it sets the twilight has the cold touch of coming winter. Once more, the year is on the turn.

*Hairst,  the Scots for autumn is synonymous with harvest. Hairst-home is winter.

Cornflower blues

After the visitation of the Painted Ladies in August, ( Blog 31/07/19 ) other butterflies having been appearing in the garden. The recent burst of hot weather has helped to bring out more species fluttering around the fields and by-ways

Following a path by woodland, I tried to capture the latest batch with the phone camera but their compound eyes mean that they are off as soon as you approach, dancing enticingly from plant to plant never settling long enough to get the phone close to them. (Memo to self - bring the SLR the next time.)

Green veined white on thistle

Comma

They did lead me to a field of pasture being munched by a contented flock of ewes and there, along the field edge, growing among the sheep sorrel, were cornflowers.

Once, these "weeds of cultivation"were common in cereal crops as their names suggest, - cornflower, corn spurrey, corn marigold, corn cockle. Now, due to the use of agri-chemicals, most are rare but their seed can survive for a long time as witnessed by the proliferation of poppies along any roadside verge after digging by local councils or service providers.

Cornflowers, like poppies, grew in the churned up fields of the Western Front in WWI and were adopted by the French as their flower of remembrance – le bleuet de France

Now, they are seldom found in Britain except in gardens as part of a "wild flower" sowing or where environmentally friendly farmers have reintroduced them.

Wild flower meadow

My few were almost certainly survivors from an older time still managing to set seed despite the munching of the sheep.

Sheep sorrel

Sheep sorrel is a food plant for the small copper butterfly. I saw none that day but worth another look (with a better camera!).

Odd how the flowers of remembrance the field poppy and the cornflower are scarcely to be found in the countryside where they were once so much part of the landscape - a lost generation of blooms.

The bonnie, broukit bairn

On the 20th of August 1977, Voyager II was launched to be followed on the 5th September by its twin, Voyager I. The reversed sequence of launches was due to the different trajectories of the two craft as they set off for the outer reaches of our solar system to explore the gas and ice worlds of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, taking advantage of a once-in-175-years alignment of the planets The pictures they sent back were astounding.

I've just been watching again the Voyager programmes on the television and marvelling at the engineers' ability to guide a tiny probe with about as much computing power as a mobile phone, across billions of miles and decades of time and to receive back these spectacular images as well as all the scientific data.

The Voyagers have now gone beyond the heliosphere, beyond the influence of our sun and are travelling across the galaxy more than 20 billion miles away and will probably continue to do so even after our sun and its planets have ceased to exist.

In the years between then and now, we have had the Viking Landers on Mars, the red planet; the Mariner and Venera missions to Venus; Galileo and Cassini to Jupiter and Saturn again, all adding to our view of our solar system and its occupants.

Of all the images the most powerful, to my mind, is that of the "pale blue dot". As Voyager moved towards interstellar space, the cameras were turned round to look back over nearly 4 billion miles and there was this tiny speck.

This moved Carl Sagan to ask us "to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

The news is of micro-plastics in the snows of Antarctic, of animal, insect and plant species disappearing into extinction, and of global warming and the ecological and social problems that will bring.

The great Scots poet, Hugh Macdiarmid, showed remarkable prescience when in 1925 he wrote The Bonnie Broukit Bairn.

 Broukit, in Auld Scots, means neglected, begrimed. In 1925, it was dirty with soot from coal. MacDiarmid couldn't have imagined the levels of pollution we are now seeing.

Mars is braw in cramassy*,

Venus in a green silk goun

The auld mune shak's her gowden** feathers

Their starry talk's a wheen o' blethers,

Nane for thee a thochty sparin'

Earth thou bonnie broukit bairn

*crimson ** golden

Perhaps now we will spare a thochty for the pale blue dot.

Battle of Otterburn

It fell about the Lammas tide,

When the muir-men win their hay,

The doughty Earl of Douglas rode

Into England, to catch a prey.

 In 1388, England and France were locked in the struggle for dominance in the Hundred Years War. The Auld Alliance of Scotland with France gave the Scots a great excuse to raid the north of England and settle some old scores. The long standing enmity between the Douglases on the Scottish side and the Percy family of Northumberland never needed much to fan the flames of open conflict.

In August of that year James, the second Earl of Douglas led a raid as far south as Newcastle where he took a pennon as a trophy of his victory over Sir Henry "Hotspur" Percy, vowing to fly it from his castle at Dalkeith.

The Scots were retreating northwards and had camped for the night when Hotspur, still smarting at the loss of his standard, caught up with them and attacked.

The battle went the way of the Scots and Henry Percy and his brother Ralph were captured and later ransomed.

The site of  the battle

The bleak hillside is now grazed by sheep, the cries of the wounded and the clash of steel replaced by the happy sound of children playing  at the nearby primary school.

James Douglas was fatally wounded in the encounter and it was said that those closest to him hid his body under a bush so his army would not know of his death and wouldn't lose heart for the fight.

My wound is deep : I fain would sleep

Nae mair I'll fighting see,

Gae lay me in the braken bush

That grows on yonder lee.

The 1770 replacement Battle Stone

Sir Henry Percy came into combat with Hugh Montgomery, Douglas's nephew and, being wounded was given the chance to surrender. He refused, saying he would only surrender to the Earl of Douglas as befitted his rank. Montgomery indicated  where the dead body of the Scots leader lay and Percy yielded to the bush.

Thou shalt not yield to knave or loun

Nor shalt thou yield to me,

But yield thee to the braken bush

that grows upon yon lee

The deed was done at Otterburn

About the breaking of the day

Earl Douglas was buried at the braken bush

And the Percy led captive away

The original stone, the Battle Stone, that marked the site of Douglas's death is lost but base was incorporated into the replacement erected in 1777 when the turnpike road was made close by the spot.

A red flag as a warning of imminent firing on the range

The association with war is still attached to the area as it is now an Army firing range. What would Hotspur and Douglas have made of these weapons?

Otterburn Castle

  The castle was owned by Sir Robert de Umfraville, Lord of Redesdale whose younger brother, Thomas, led the English troops that flanked around the battle to try and capture the Scottish camp. The castle had been attacked on the morning on the 19 August 1388 as the Scottish forces traveled from Newcastle  towards the border but withstood the attempts made against it. Despite the Scots winning the battle, they quickly withdrew as English reinforcements arrived and therefore the castle was left intact.