Grey, white and blue

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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