Quince-cidence.

Scrog

The recreated medieval orchard planted in the grounds of our ruined 14^th century priory has started to mature. So far,the mulberry and  the medlar have remained barren but the geans and scrogs.. cherries and crab apples to anglophones...have born fruit...and so have the quinces.

Our word marmalade comes from the Portuguese marmelada, a quince jam.

Golden and aromatic, they were cultivated long before the apple.

It may be that references to apples in legends really apply to the quince... the apple in the garden of Eden, the apples in Solomon's Song of Songs, the Golden Apples of the Hesperides.

In Greek mythology, having been excluded by Zeus from a wedding, Eris, the goddess of discord, rolled such a golden apple among the guests. It was claimed by three of the guests, Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. Zeus asked the mortal Paris to decide who should have it. In the fateful Judgement of Paris, each goddess tried to bribe him and Aphrodite offered him the most beautiful woman in the world... Helen, wife of Menelaus, the Greek king.   Paris gave Aphrodite the golden apple and took Helen back to Troy. This provoked the Trojan War.

Only Heracles of the twelve labours and Perseus, slayer of Medusa, managed to get one of these prized fruit guarded, as they were, by nymphs and a dragon

 Perseus was helped by the nymphs of the Hesperides to kill the Gorgon. He saved Andromeda despite her mother Cassioipea's perfidy and can be seen in the Northern sky with his bride and her parents and the winged horse, Pegasus, that sprang from Medusa's severed neck. The red star, Algol still glares as the Gorgon's eye.

 I've just downloaded an app for my I-pod that shows the constellations overhead. A great boon to the star-gazer.

 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Perseus_%28constellation%29#mediaviewer/File:Perseus.gif

Having made a few jars of quince jelly, an ideal accompaniment to venison, I wondered if we had captured the myths. Certainly, the pan boiled over in the process, cascading boiling hot, sticky liquor everywhere.
 Was Medusa still spitting with fury? Was the rage of the Trojan's at being tricked erupting?

The jelly still came out clear and sweet. We must have defeated the ghosts.

See the conkering hero come

The balmy weather continues into October, all the more appreciated when we recall the snow storms of previous years. A local farmer ironically admitted that he was finding it difficult to find anything to complain about. Butterflies are still settling on the rotting windfalls and dragon flies still dart over the water of the little loch. The fields that have been cropped, ploughed, harrowed and re-sown are, with the warmth, are starting to show a shimmer of green.

Dragon fly  at the loch

….and it is conker time, though, as boys, we always called them  “cheggies”. 

 Their prickly outer husks must have evolved to allow them to bounce and roll away from the parent tree and so increase their chance of fulfilling their destiny and creating another chestnut tree …..until they fall prey to boys looking for conkers. Now they are probably safe to spread and grow. Do boys still play conkers? I doubt it.

In my distant youth...in history as my grand daughter put it....I recall hardening them with vinegar, drilling them with a nail and then fixing them on to a string to bash my specimen against another's and whichever survived the trial of durability was the winner and so graduated from a one-er to a two-er. The rules were that, if your opponent had a sixer and if you had, say, a fiver and you triumphed, you could add his score to yours and so have an elevener!

It is said horse chestnuts got their name from the horse shoe shaped scar left on the twig when the leaf falls. I think not. There are lots of species with the “horse” prefix – horse mussels, horse mackerel, horse radish, horse mushroom – and all are larger, coarser versions of their non-equine equivalents. The horse chestnut was perceived as a inedible, coarser version of the sweet chestnut.

 In fact, they are not related at all.

Another chestnut gets ready for a canter on the stubble field

The sheen on the brown nut emerging from the outer covering is a pleasing sight and one can see why brown horses came to be called chestnuts, the glossy horsehide mirroring the lustre of the conker.

Now, I collect cheggies not for playground battles but to grow in pots and, after a few seasons, plant out in hedge rows and field corners for another generation to enjoy. 

 Simple pleasures.

Planted some years ago

And summer's lease hath all to short a date

Summer is drawing to a close. The swallows are still here but the days are getting shorter and the winds have an autumnal feel. The fields have a shorn look as the combines gather the grain and the balers leave the giant rolls of straw to be picked up later on the prongs of a tractor. No chance of boys making forts out of these as we did with the man-handled bales of my childhood.

Yesterday, I had my first bramble from the hedgerow, a sure sign of autumn and the sloes are just taking on their bluish tinge. Next week it will be St Philbert's day when, traditionally, the young hazel nuts, the filberts, are edible though we are too far north. It will be a week or two yet before ours are ready.

I visited Pease Dean and Duns Castle reserves to try out a new app on the I-pod. It is a bird song identifier.You record the song and then ask for a match from the songs on the app. It works fairly well. It quickly and accurately identified the test subjects ...goldfinches, wrens, blackbirds etc but the thirty-second recording time means that you have to try over and over because, birds being birds, they will stop singing or calling just after you've pressed “record” and start again after the thirty seconds are up! It was less efficient with calls such as the buzzard circling over head. I suppose the wind noise distorted the recording. Still, a useful tool for the bird watcher.

Butterflies are everywhere. Their presence, just seeing them, seems to make life a bit more pleasant. They will be getting their eggs laid and it is a great excuse not to be too tidy a gardener. Nettles? ...Oh, I leave them for the butterflies. 

Red Admiral

Peacock butterfly

Unfortunately, the ride-on lawn mower has induced people to extend their mowing operations down the verges from their houses, farms and caravan sites for long distances, creating neat, barren strips of turf and further reducing the availability of weeds and seeds necessary for our wild life.

The insect world is getting its breeding done before the winter takes its toll. The bumble bee queens will be looking for a nest to overwinter with next year's generation in their abdomens while the rest, their jobs done,will die. 

A buff tailed bumble bee queen is impregnated

The forest shield bugs will lay their eggs in cracks in the bark of oak trees ready for next spring.

 Forest shield bugs mating

The blackbirds are fledging their second broods of the year.

Young hen blackie

.

  It is all hustle and bustle, the lazy days of summer exist only in song and time is passing.

The Blankit Preachin'

It fell about the Lammas tide,

When the muir-men win their hay

LotH and I attended the Blanket Preaching at the site of the old Kirk of St Mary of the Lowes –  by St Mary's Loch.

A reminder of the Covenanting days when the religious divide between the Presbyterian people and their king forced folk to worship in the hills to escape the soldiers of “Bluidy Clavers”, Sir John Graham of Claverhouse, latterly Viscount Dundee. ( Blog 18^th March)

 

A piper welcomes the worshippers to the old kirk

A blanket was held over the minister's head as a shield against the weather for he wouldn't be returning to a warm hearth afterwards.

The preacher needed no cover today

The present day service is a token nod to those violent times but also a celebration of a much a older rite.   

 Lammas, on August 1^st, is one of the Scottish quarter days – Candlemas, Whitsun, Lammas , Martinmas - correponding to the old Celtic festivals of Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasa, and Samhain.

Lammas signalled the first of the harvest being secured, a reason for rejoicing when supplies would be getting low.    On the quarter day, rents were due and may have been paid for in grain, farm servants were hired and terms and conditions for the forthcoming months agreed.

 

Rain clouds gather over St Mary's Loch

The setting above St Mary's Loch was perfect even down to the smirr of rain arriving at the end of the service to give a hint of how it might have been in more inclement times.

On the path back to the road, we gave a nod to Binram's grave, where one of the incumbents of the Kirk of St Mary of the Lowes, who was shot by the Covenanters is buried. He was accused of dabbling in the dark arts but may have been thought of as a spy for the king's forces.

A pleasant drive down the Yarrow valley with all its romance and tragedy, a meal at a local hotel, and the satisfaction of having supported an ancient custom

 A Harebell, the Scots blue-bell, on the path

Hay-ho

I drive past a sign sign saying “Well got hay for sale”. It has such quaint, bucolic charm that it invariably makes me smile.

Well got, the very sound of it speaks of hay meadows and sun and cider with Rosie. Another time. Well got hay is hay cut at its peak of growth and properly dried, the sort of hay that smells sweet and summery.

Hay-making, so dependent on the weather, seems to be in decline. Silage is easier and not so reliant on the vagaries of the British summer. This year has been different ... long sunny days and warm breezes.

The Dell

I wandered up through the Dell, one of my favourite places. A beech wood where pig-nuts grow. Probably planted a century ago with pigs in mind...pigs like beech-mast as well as pig-nuts... it is now the haunt of roe deer and buzzards. It leads on to a small hay meadow that the farmer cuts yearly but apart from that, because of its small acreage and the cost of fencing it for stock, it is usually left alone.

The hay meadow above the Dell

A hay meadow from the past, it is a refuge for wild flowers long since banished to the edges of farmland or worse, eliminated altogether. Orchids, thistles, vetches, corn-mint, self-heal and wound-wort all jostling for their place in the sun.

A meadow that may possibly be, when he gets round to it, well got, but is also well left, thanks to the farmer.

How spectacular even the common dock can be when left to it s own devices

A Marriage of Convenience

Lamberton Kirk

With the impending referendum on separation of Scotland and England coming closer by the day, I thought I should take a look at the place where the union of the previously sovereign states of the United Kingdom started.

 An insignificant ruin on the border, just a mile or so from the A1, stands Lamberton Kirk.

It was never of any importance, a part of the extensive holdings of the rich and influential Coldingham Priory , it was valued at a lowly 15 merks.
 It ceased to be used in the seventeenth century, yet it provided the backdrop to the what was to become the Union of the Crowns and eventually the Act of Union.

In 1503, Henry VII, that crafty Tudor monarch, attempted to do by marriage what generations of his Plantagenet predecessors had tried, unsuccessfully, to do by force – unite Scotland and England.

His daughter Margaret was sent north to become the wife of James IV. She was conveyed to the border and, as John Younge the Somerset herald, recorded in his journal of events -

apud ecclesiam vulgariter vocatam, Lamberton Kirk

- in the church commonly called Lamberton Kirk, she was married by proxy to James.

A great tournament was held with Scottish and English knights taking part and horse races were run on what was to be Scotland's earliest racecourse on Lamberton Moor. Of this, nothing remains but grazing for sheep.

A widowed Margaret returned to pray at Lamberton in 1517, going south after the disaster of Flodden and the death of her husband in battle but she had done her dynastic duty and produced a male heir and thus established her grandson's claim to the English throne when Elizabeth, the last of the Tudors died in 1603 and the two countries, though still separate, had one monarch, James VI of Scotland and I of England.

It would take another century of bloody civil war, religious strife, and national bankruptcy for James's dream of one nation to become reality. It did in 1707 and it all started with a thirteen year old princess coming to Lamberton Kirk in 1503.

There was marriage house at Lamberton. In it heyday, it was as famous as Gretna for runaway couples to get their troths plighted. It was demolished in the 1970's to make way for the new dual carriageway of the A1 as it roars across the border.

Legend had it that James IV had granted Lamberton Kirk the right to hold marriage ceremonies without the banns being called so, when the church was abandoned in the early 17^th century, the local toll house took on the role of marriage house.  It is recorded that a notice in the window said

“Ginger Beer sold here and marriages performed”.

Site of the Marriage House at Lamberton Toll

 The site of the house, once the source of romantic tales of elopement, is now lay-by much used by HGV's and home to a mobile snack bar - and, no, it doesn't sell ginger beer. 

 Come September will the marriage of Scotland and England still be intact?  Will the thistle and the rose still be growing side by side as they are at Lamberton today?

Big Ben

Seven years ago, I had to come off the hill while climbing the Five Sisters in Kintail.    My knee was so painful I was holding up the group.   As it transpired, that was to be my last Munro at the time. The cause of the pain became clear and a new hip was required. More pathology kept me from getting back to the big hills but I've always wanted to do one more before giving up completely.

What about the big one. Despite having done a good few Munros, I'd never climbed Ben Nevis.

It was a fine day, so I set off to do the straightforward, tourist approach up the pony track built in 1883 to service the long defunct weather station at the summit.

Imagine a seemingly endless stone staircase with every step a different size and shape and depth and sometimes more than one level on each step and you get some idea of the pony track. Proper walking is impossible.

 A succession of baby steps and giant steps and sideways shuffles are all that is possible and always upwards. 

The views as you get higher make it worthwhile. Looking down Glen Nevis to the Mamores with Stob Ban in the foreground, the landscape is dramatic. Equally scenic is the view back to Fort William and Loch Eil.

But the slog goes on up and up and up. Five and a half hours. Lochan Meall an t-Suidhe, is often called the Halfway lochan.. it isn't !!

Lochan Meall an t-Suidhe

After the rocky staircase there was a wide detour by the Lochan on easier going but then back to the path with boulders and scree intermixed. Crossing the lower end of a waterfall provide icy cool drinks and a few negative ions to boost the flagging spirit.

Zig-zagging up and up and up eventually the summit came into sight on the other side of a small snow-field.

This delighted a couple of boys from Brisbane who hadn't seen snow before. I was just delighted to see the summit.

Snowfield- summit obscured by mist

Small birds were flitting about in the scree and rocks - snow buntings, I'm sure. 

Unfortunately, a smirr of rain and mist came in just then to obscure the summit plateau but cleared quickly.

The descent began easily enough to begin with then became increasingly painful as each jolting downward step hit the old knees. That's the thing about hills they don't care how much you hurt there is no other way but to put one foot past the other and cover the ground, the hill doesn't get any smaller, the path doesn't get any shorter.

Ravens were circling overhead. They had obviously picked me out as a potential  carcase.

Starry Saxifrage, a true mountain plant

By the time I'd got to road level, my joints were telling me that it was indeed seven years since that last Munro and they and I were seven years older but not seven years wiser.

Five and a half hours up and four hours down, longer than expected, but it is done.

I am cured. I no longer have a hankering to do one more Munro. The knees have spoken.

Two enthusiasts planning to make a more rapid descent than I could manage!

I must add a special thanks to the Scottish - Canadian couple who generously drove the blogger back to his car when he came off the hill by the wrong path and ended up miles from where he had parked it... and gave him a can of Irn-bru.   My knees give thanks for that gesture!!