In the Far East (of Fife)

Sometimes it’s good to change your mind. Guardbridge lurks interestingly at the head of the tidal section of the River Eden. There are sweeps of marsh and mudflat. Having an affinity with mudflats and salt creeks since my youth in Essex, I wanted to walk along this estuary to St. Andrews. But the coast path apparently hugged the main road tediously all the way, so I drove into St. Andrews instead, spent a happy hour in the Botanic Gardens and another meeting up and drinking tea with a fellow blogger (https://threewheelsonmywaggon.com/), talking gardens and travellers’ tales. Then I set off on another section of coast path, starting well south of the town and uninfected by tedious miles of golf course.

I’m so glad I changed course!

Stepping out from the village of Boarhills towards the sea and the cool onshore breezes felt like entering a far and distant land, echoes of the west country of England in the sunken lanes and low-slung cottages, bat-squeak reminders of the Low Countries, and little bits of many parts of Scotland, all rolled up together.

I reached a river, gurgling in a deep valley, heard long before it was seen. Into a wood, the scent of bluebells, another kind of river, blue and shimmering, lithe ferns stretching curled fingers to the far away sky. A riot of vegetation, clambering around rocks and slabs: the relics of buildings, maybe a mill, maybe haunted, reeking of untold stories and secrets. Here and there, dark openings that could have been windows, or tunnels, or perhaps caves in the cliff-like rocks. As I walked and clambered, it became hard to distinguish in the imagination what was human masonry and what was the masonry of geology. Huge tree trunks erupted alike from broken walls and natural crevices.

On and on, the path tagging the rattle and song of the river as it twisted and turned, trees closing overhead, veiling the bright sky with their shimmering new leaves. I began to wonder if this river led, not to the sea, but curiously inland, if perhaps it was one of the anomalies of Fife (there are a number!). Then, it hushed, grew calm, and through a gap in the woods was the open sea. Suddenly I was reminded again of a south Cornwall estuary.

The river subsided into a quiet bay, and the path began to follow the rocky coast; great sandstone pavements hugging small beaches, the excitement of salt and seaweed in the air. Jed, my collie raced off at every little beach, I stretched my steps to embrace the fabulous wind and sky and sea, arms wide, feeling as if I were meeting once more a great and long lost friend. I sang. Luckily, I was alone, bar the dog, who refrained from comment.

This was the far east of Fife, nothing, bar sea on my left. Cowslips, thrift, ribwort plantain, campion, dandelion – all rampaging like banners and bunting along the path. The heron, ever my companion, in a bay, black-backed gulls skulking on the sand, and skylarks over the barley fields to my right.

Along a bay which began with the curious black of an exposed coal layer and ended near Cambo, I joined Jed in the water and gave my feet a treat. The walk back to Boarhills in the evening sunshine combined new familiarity with repeated exhilaration. This is a fabulous and unique part of the Fife Coast,. I could have walked on and on, but for the appetite all that salt air had given me……

In Search of….anything but asparagus….

*What I aspire to! Grown by J. Neill & Sons*

In Catalonia, we stalked shifty looking men in the woods, all clearly trying to avoid being followed, saw them emerging later from the scrub carrying scrawny, dangling wisps of green. The Wild Asparagus. Allegedly, the acme of a forager’s progress. And no-one was about to help us find it.

So, grow your own, I decide. The very first raised bed with which I replaced nursery benches as I journeyed towards retirement three years ago, I planted up with two-year old purple asparagus crowns. They said, you need to be patient to grow asparagus, but it will be worth waiting for. I have waited. I have ladled seaweed, imported from Fife and Angus beaches, over the bed twice a year. I have weeded more meticulously than is my habit, because the asparagus gurus say asparagus cannot tolerate weeds. I have fed the largely invisible plants. Now, it is May again, and still there’s nothing much to see here.

But there are alternatives. In spring the emerging spears of Solomon’s Seal, an enthusiastic wild member of the same family – Liliaceae – provide a luscious alternative; slightly more bitter but I’d argue all the better for that. No chewy tough bases to the spears, either. Their season is but a fortnight, and does not satisfy.

And REAL asparagus, they tell me, is better…. I do not believe them.

I WILL have shoots and spears in spring. I go to the clearing in the hazel copse, where annually the willow herb heaves itself through soil and its own winter debris, in the form of thickish shoots and red-brown, furled leaves. I pick the fattest and youngest and steam them, then sizzle in butter, Now these ARE bitter….and some are like toothpicks. I eat a plateful anyway.

Back to the garden, where five out of the original twelve asparagus crowns are showing single, unenthusiastic, skinny purple spears. I think, how many new potatoes could I be getting out of that bed? How much chard or broccoli or succulent fennel? A friend donates some asparagus seed, originally collected in Italy but bred in Perthshire over twenty years, to our seed library and puts pictures on Facebook of fists-full of fat, early spears in April. I sow the seed, to back up my shy and retiring crowns, who are now five years old. I discover that my friend’s grows itself, without fuss, in a polytunnel. So shall mine do.

Hop shoots call to me. Vigorous, ornamental, golden hops and the fatter, darker, beery ones, seething with alcoholic promise. All are edible and they taste great. They’re in the nettle family, and, like nettles, the more you pick the shoots, the more shoots come. I find that hops and nettles combined appeases me greatly.

*Hop shoots – Golden, Challenger & Fuggles, all good*

Then up come the hostas. Fleshy, delicious, plumper than any asparagus but shorter too. I cut them before the leaves unfurl, but it’s not crucial: the leaves of this delectable Japanese vegetable are also very tasty and should never be consigned to a flower border. Although the flowers, when they come, are bonnie to look at as well. I remember that hostas are also in the lily family. They aren’t asparagus, but they’re close; and they’re easy to grow, reliable and pretty too.

After a moment’s thought, I cut two of the pathetic asparagus spears and add them to a dish of hosta. We get one spear each, but plenty of hosta shoots.

(Today I found someone is growing asparagus locally, commercially. It’s abundant, large and not too expensive. I’ve decided, if this year doesn’t reward my patience, that bed is going to be hostas next summer. And maybe the new seedlings in the polytunnel will one day give me payback!)

The Long Way Round to Taymount Wood

We met up at the Taymount Wood car park, Linda and I, put on our boots and turned away, not into the gate. This was to be the long road to the woods, a circular walk via the disused railway line which once ran as a ponderous branch from Stanley across the River Tay to Coupar Angus. The embankment is reached from the Taymount Mains farm track, and you then head towards Kinclaven and Ballathie, across open country, under disused bridges and past a little railwaymen’s shed made of sleepers with a brick chimney still in place. Although today’s challenge for us was to find and walk the narrow path through the northern finger of the wood, the line itself offered a few challenges – a chilly wind and stretches of water where the rains of March hadn’t percolated the poorly-drained soil.

You turn north-west away from the line before you get to the grounds of Ballathie Hotel, crossing the road and continuing north up a rough track beside the Old Smiddy. The track goes past several houses and in the past, we’d stuck to it, until it vanishes at a farmhouse. Then we’d scrambled witlessly through fields and fences and bits of scrub till we arrived, somehow, on a track in Taymount Wood. This time, we were determined to find the “proper” path. So, we left the comfy track when it turned the bend and continued up to the edge of the wood. People had been this way, but not many, and it wasn’t clear how far in we should go before we turned left. Google satellite was remarkably unhelpful.

Dogs have many uses. Everyone thinks of companionship, protection and exercise machine, but an intelligent dog is a wonder at Finding the Path. While we stood wondering and wafting around, Jed set off into the unruly herbage with a look of collie dog purpose, nose to the ground. Sure enough, when we followed, there were the vestiges of a footpath. It doesn’t take many human footprints – and barely one canine print – to inform Jed this is The Way to Go. We continued, scrambling after him, and he didn’t lead us into any blind alleys. At times, we were on the point of losing faith, but then the path would reappear, on the other side of a boggy stretch or a tangle of bramble and brushwood.

Wind-throw had put up many of the barriers that challenged us. I discovered I’m at an age where I’m a bit stiff for limbo-dancing under fallen trees, and my sense of balance (never my strong point) for climbing over them was precarious to say the least. There were points when we even doubted the dog, but then to our great surprise we encountered someone going the other way – an ecologist doing a survey of small mammals for West Stormont Woodland Group no less – who assured us that a. we were on the path and b. it was passable, if a tad wet in places. Well, we certainly found the wet places and finally stumbled out onto the hard forestry track that would eventually take us through the main wood and back to the car park. The challenge wasn’t quite over – several metres of scratchy, mean-minded gorse had colonised the track to meet in the middle, and we suffered quite a few scratches and tears before we were through it – noting jealously how impervious the coat of a collie dog is just about anything.

Common Chiffchaff (photo Bishnu Sarangi, Pixabay)

And the gift from today’s walk? There were lots – newly unfurling larch leaves, frogspawn in a drowning bit of track, skeletons of last year’s ferns, the beautiful vertical grandeur of the trees that hadn’t blown down, some chestnut brown bracket fungi left from the autumn. But as soon as we entered the wood on our optimistically rediscovered path, we heard the chiff-chaff call nearby. The earliest of our summer warblers to arrive, this is a small brown job of a bird, indistinguishable from willow and wood warblers unless it keeps still and stays a metre away from you. This one didn’t – they never do – but the call, exactly like the bird’s name, sets it apart. We never saw our little warbler, but the mocking “chiff-chaff-chiff-chiff-chaff” was never far away. It was, I am sure, laughing its little head off, but we chose to find it encouraging. When we found ourselves safely “out of the woods” and into the wood, it went off to scoff at something else. It made us appreciate all over again the wide range of habitats the woods provide for many bird species, residents and summer or winter visitors. I look forward to more birdsong in Taymount Woods this spring.

Find out more about WSWG and out hopes for community ownership of the woods at weststormontwoodlandgroup.scot

The Undefeated Willow

Willows are the most curious trees. For a start, there are well over 300 species worldwide, with eyebrow-raising common names such as Eared, Goat, Cricket Bat and Crack, or casually colour-hinting names (black, white, grey, violet, red and purple). The colours usually refer to the young stems, and that’s why willows have long been valued everywhere to make beautiful baskets, hurdles and sculpture – along with their wonderful flexibility which makes them capable of being woven without snapping. A well-made willow basket is strong and lasts a lifetime.

Those hundreds of species readily hybridise promiscuously, making identification a chore, to say the least – even in Britain where only nineteen species are considered native. I think it’s unlikely humans really know just how many species and hybrids there are. Willow – or sallow, or osier (even the names are slippery) just won’t be pinned down.

Willow won’t be kept down either, even when it falls. Put a bunch of willow stems in the rain-butt to soak for basketry, and the next thing you know, they’ve all grown roots. They grow quickly, ferociously fast. Two metres a year is not uncommon for new growth. Coppice them, and they’re back up the next year. Their Lazarus impersonations are all the more improbable given the mind-boggling number of diseases the genus is prone to – black canker, blight, powdery mildew, scab, watermark disease, root rot, heart rot and willow anthracnose, to name but a few. They are pioneer trees, kicking off the cycle of colonisation in open ground that is damp or downright boggy, and no one fairly expects them to last for centuries.

By what remains of the old Back Mill millpond in Bankfoot, there are some death-defying willows. I don’t know the species. One monster of a tree, often pollarded in the past, still stands erect – outrageously enormous, ancient, decrepit. As the millpond has steadily drained of its water and silted up, the roots of these massive willows have been exposed. A flood of heavy rain then washes away the soil, until eventually the whole tree comes crashing down.

End of story? No way. In falling, the wood, being watery willow, ripped asunder, cracking and splitting in a hundred fibrous places. Some trunks, now horizontal, appear shredded and mashed. Branches poke up out of the devastation akimbo, some dry and decayed, some clinging to life.

Make no mistake, these willows fell a long time ago, Birds have nested in the crevices where they toppled onto each other. Mosses, algae, lichens, ferns have been succeeded in places by other woody plants, growing out of, and contributing to, the accumulation of soil and organic matter. The trees are alive, but they are a substrate for life also.

From the felled boles and wrecked structures, arrow-straight, insolent shoots clamber skywards. They are making new trunks from the old,even where the original tree has scarcely more than a twisted root in soil or water. A veritable willow plantation arises from the un-dead.

Circular Walk, Spring Morning

A night of light snow, followed by clear-sky freezing has left
The ground hard and white.
Rapidly the sun, heroic, overcoming all, climbing high,
Melts snow to iridescence at every margin, every edge.

On a single hill, snow is held in thrall. Like a crumpled Mount Fuji, but
No blossom, no art,
The hill holds its ghost-clothes, despite the sun’s triumphal progress.
Magisterial old beeches sun themselves among old walls and
Moss-covered stones, dripping, wet, full of temptation.

Birds call, fluting, piping, chameleon-coloured, slipping away like lizards.

I’ve never understood the detritus of forestry. The wind cuts and dives
In and out of the shambles of stumps and trenches, where startled pines left behind
Look half-naked and vulnerable, hesitantly beginning to stretch arms to the sky,
To each other, united in the icy wind.

I follow the wind. I leave the wreckage, the small shelter
Of self-seeded spruce erupting from glossy gorse and broom. Ahead
A vast and dreary vista of huge, brown and empty fields,
Unpunctuated by tree or hedge-bank, meticulously ploughed and harrowed.
The dust rises, faintly reeking still of the abattoir, that small, derisory recompense
For decades of soil inevitably lost and life precluded.

Back by road, the first wood anemones
In the deep and shady gulf where children once played canyons,
And a rising stir of sound comes up from behind. Suddenly
A thousand geese are shifting and snaking in the blue, blue sky,
Withering the last frost with their joy.

Bankfoot Church is Falling Down

In February 2004, workmen were burning rubbish on a demolition site. It was a day of gusty winds, when safety procedures should have never allowed a bonfire to be considered. At some point, sparks whirled viciously into a neighbouring building, caught hold, and within minutes a blaze ensued that could not be extinguished before the building was lost.

The building was Auchtergaven & Moneydie Parish Church, sited on almost the highest point in the Perthshire village of Bankfoot. It had stood, glowering over the village, for 207 years, its timbers dry, warm and perfect for burning. Not a regular churchgoer, I’d nontheless been there a few times in the seven years I’d lived in Bankfoot, panting my way up the steep path to the entrance, and I’d enjoyed the simple, uncluttered warmth of the wood-lined interior and the sincerity of the congregation. It was a bonnie church, and a landmark for miles around. That day, horrified drivers on the nearby A9 slowed to a crawl, as flames shot to the sky.

In the aftermath, the old church was not “burnt to the ground” – but it was certainly gutted. From a distance, there were many years when at first glance, you’d never know it was a ruin. The tower still stood, majestic – maybe more so than before – defiant, presiding over a landscape of haphazard hamlets congealed into one village, farmland, people and beasts. After considerable deliberation and assessment of the building’s condition and fitness for purpose, the Church of Scotland, advised by the will of the congregation, opted to build a new church on flat land it owned in the centre of Bankfoot, complete with community facilities and a low carbon footprint. It was a brave and right decision, I think, which offered accessibility and possibilities the old church never could. The original bell, cracked by fire to tonelessness, was rescued and installed as the new font.

But it left little in the coffers to do anything with the remaining structure. Disputes and debates went to and fro for years, between the culprit building firm, insurers, the Kirk, local residents, fundraisers, historians and those with an interest in the surrounding graveyard. Meanwhile, safety fencing went up around the site, the grass grew, and saplings appeared in the smoke-blackened walls. Stone crumbled unnoticed. Blocks occasionally fell; still the tower stood, indomitable. Saplings grew into trees; buddleia, that great exploiter of devastation and demolition, proliferated in the nave and drew in butterflies. Wild flowers and ferns took hold of crevices in outer and inner walls, solitary bees visited and maybe nested in crumbling mortar. Jackdaws and pigeons were regular inhabitants in spring. A garden began to grow in the sanctuary. Who knows what wild creatures found refuge among the piles of fallen rubble? No-one could get in to disturb or identify them.

I know many people found it heart-wrenchingly sad. For me, with an ambivalent attitude to organised religion at best, it was more a change in emphasis. I felt the human-centred heart of the building died with the fall of the final clock-face, never to chime again and remind us of the days and hours. One day, out walking in early spring 2020, I noticed that the tower looked a bit odd. I went closer to see if I was imagining things, and discovered that although the front facade still held fairly intact, most of the sides of the tower had fallen in. What was left looked more precarious than ever, but it hadn’t stopped the jackdaws from building warring nests on each remaining pinnacle, or the collared doves gossiping lovingly in hollowed alcoves. Chaffinches and sparrows bustled about purposefully, hopping between the seed heads, roosting on bits of masonry.

I wondered what God – by any name or none – would make of it all. Inevitably St. Francis came to mind, who would surely be quite at ease to see wildlife frequenting a religious building. I thought of the early saints who taught that Celtic version of Christianity which reveres all life, not just the human kind. Jesus himself (despite an unfortunate show of spite to a certain fig tree) counselled his followers on the great value of seeds and sparrows, and the lilies of the field.

Well, I’m no theologian. Who knows? But now the rest of the tower has finally gone, with a crash in the night that woke up the residents of Cairneyhill. The skyline will never be quite the same. I hope the jackdaws and all the other members of Auchtergaven’s wild congregation hadn’t started to build their nests.

Gimme Shelter!

This post was written for West Stormont Woodland Group as part of the Gift and a Challenge series. To find out more about WSWG, go to weststormontwoodlandgroup.scot

To begin with the challenge – it’s March. The month that can’t decide whether to ally itself with winter or summer, blows literally hot and cold – but blows anyway, more often than not. This March, temperatures have veered spectacularly – almost hot at times when the sun is fully out, only to evoke shivers and a sullen quest for shelter when the sun goes behind the never-far-away bank of clouds.

The track in Five Mile Wood is set high around the hill; the clearance of the windthrown central forest has left only bare, angular, dead or dying thin trees, leafless and affording no windbreak. The wind skitters over the gorse; the tall grasses and herbage of summer still skulk in the earth. Between the grey and ghastly yellow of dead wood, last year’s vegetation lies smashed and parched, husky and brittle, desiccated by months of ice, snow and frost.

There is nowhere to hide. Nothing to distract, punctuate or alleviate the March winds and the wreckage of a long winter.

And so to the potential gift from the woods – one that might, with time, give some respite from the challenge of March. We have few native evergreen trees; apart from the magnificent Scots Pine (which can be poor shelter when most of its branches are way above our heads), there are only holly, box and yew. Holly is an important food source for many birds, especially the blackbird family and the robin from the Christmas card, and into any suitable habitat those birds will pass the seeds from all the berries they devour. Thus, holly will start to appear in snatches of clearing or under bigger trees, the seedlings going unnoticed until the taproots are impossible to get out. It was a relief to see, on the margins of the cleared gap in Five Mile Wood, a couple of well-established young holly bushes. They may have grown from seed from a mature tree decked with twining stems of honeysuckle, that grows beside the track, on the edge of the wood.

Hollies are dioecious. You get male trees and female trees, and only the females have berries. In March, there are just a few berries left, lurking behind the armoured leaves, while a thrush skulks in the greenery, hunting them out. He is just beginning to try out his repetitious mating call. Aside from shelter from March winds and berries for birds, holly is one of the most valuable wildlife plants and a real gift to have in a wood. Wood mice and other small mammals also feed on the berries, and deer enjoy a prickly snack of holly shoots. The holly by the track is already playing host to the Holly Leaf Miner – an invertebrate recognised by the squiggly patterns of its tunnels, between the upper and lower surfaces of the leaf. They have co-existed with the holly tree for a very long time, and do little real harm to the tree, although the texts of horticultural imperialists will make them sound like the devil incarnate and command the use of an army of chemicals to destroy them.

There is a very beautiful butterfly, the Holly Blue, whose caterpillars in spring feed almost entirely on shoots of holly, and later broods move onto ivy. It’s not common in Scotland, although it has been seen dotted around. The looper caterpillars of the holly tortrix moth, as well as many other insect larvae, seek refuge in this prickly tree too.

And like all evergreens, it provides impenetrable debris for hibernating hedgehogs and is a formidable cosy shelter tree for roosting or nesting birds. Not to mention windblown humans in March.

Diamonds and Opals and Precious Sparkly Things

When I was at primary school, the all-consuming craze among the girls was collecting beads. Everyone had a collection, and everyone brought their bead stash to school for swapping and gloating over in the playground. Beads were sometimes acquired from the broken necklaces of aunts, older sisters’ discarded best dresses (sequins were in vogue), theft from mothers and through swapping. Crystals and glass beads were everyone’s favourite, which we called diamonds (or rubies, emeralds or amber, depending on the colour of the glass). I had (oh my god, I still have) a “diamond” dropped by the Queen. Well, I found it in the Mall, when my sister Barbara took me to see Buckingham Palace. She assured me the queen must have dropped it from her coach when waving from an open window. To avoid being hustled for it by the Bead Bullies, I left it at home on schooldays. Most usually, beads were collected by going round the streets and playgrounds picking up those dropped by others. There seemed to be no shortage, but some girls made certain of it. My best friend Pamela (who had a nasty, vicious streak) would run about, “accidentally” barging into gaggles of girls peering into their open bags or boxes of beads. She’d even help to pick them up – but pocketed the choicest, and there were always plenty no-one spotted rolling away. Keep your eyes to the ground long enough, you’d soon build a collection.

I don’t know at what point I decided to look up at the stars rather than down at my feet, but when I did, I realised the most precious jewels were the intangible ones that faded or shape-shifted before your eyes. Recent falls of snow, melting, re-freezing and glittering in cold, rare sunlight have reminded me of the times as a child when I ran across dew-covered lawns, chasing the rainbows in the water drops. If I stopped running, and swayed gently from side to side, the colours of these so-precious gems changed. But if I touched them or moved toward them, they vanished. Then there were the frosty mornings when my mother got me up early to go round the garden with her, finding exquisite frost patterns on leaf and glass and stone, shimmering in the early sun. Or the first foggy morning of autumn, when every spider’s web was be-jewelled and bewildering in its complexity and simplicity.

Diamonds are famously said to be “forever”. What a nonsense. They’re fairly nice to look at, and they collect rainbows in the same way glass or water does, but I wouldn’t pay money for them.

Collecting snowflakes and making mental snapshots of them before they melted. The fractal patterns of ice creeping over a cold surface. The world viewed through a dripping icicle. The vanishing, slippery uncertainty of the Merrie Dancers, green and rose, across northern skies. Sun on a breaking wave. These precious sparkly things, along with the now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t twinkling of stars as they emerge at dusk or retreat into cloud, these are the jewels of value, the real pearls-beyond price. Ephemeral, transient, temporary. I can’t buy them, own them, hoard them, swap them or sell them, and I never want to try.

I still have most of my schoolgirl hoard! I am sure one day I’ll find a use for them. I’ve strung some onto the Christmas tree or hung them round the garden before now, and forgotten about them. Maybe they’ll be archaeology for someone, some day. Me, I’ll stick to rainbows in the dew. If you see me swaying about in a meadow on a spring morning, you’ll know what I’m doing!

“Diamond” cast my way by QE1 (of Scotland) aka QE2 (of England etc), circa 1964

Whose Woods are These? I think I know….*

(This is the first in a new series of posts for West Stormont Woodland Group. From fear or repeating myself, I thought I’d write about the fact that each month, the woods have a Gift for us. And every month, there is at least one challenge that faces us – whether physical, philosophical or organisational – in contemplation of owning woodland as a community.)

Of course, there are gorse bushes in flower in February in Five Mile Wood. There are gorse bushes in flower in the woods every month of the year, providing pollen and nectar for insects out too early or too late in the season. Some ancient lecher noticed this and spawned the saying “When gorse is not in flower, then kissing’s out of season.”

Gorse in flower in a cold and clenching winter such as this of 2021 is a real gift. It’s too cold to detect the rich coconut smell from them which can be almost overpowering in high summer, but the gold dazzles against the grey landscape of February or keeks through the smothering snow. Gorse has been used for many purposes, from feeding tough-mouthed horses in winter to sweeping chimneys. It’s a nitrogen fixing plant, like all the pea family, and imparts fertility to the soil. Burn it, and the alkaline ash is good for cleaning soiled linen.

The flowers themselves are used to make a yellow dye, and whether it worked or not, some dairies insisted that feeding gorse to milking cows made for a rich yellow butter. I don’t use gorse for any of these, but I do make gorse flower tea. It looks wonderful swirling around a glass teapot and you might catch a breath of that coconut smell. Don’t expect to taste it; it’s a very subtle (or absent!) taste. If you look hard you may find early shoots of nettle in the woods to give the tea some substance.

But don’t pass the gorse on to anyone else – allegedly, making a gift of gorse guarantees you’ll end up fighting. It’s the woods’ gift to me in February, and I will have no quarrel with the woods.

**A CHALLENGE FOR FEBRUARY: WHOSE WOODS ARE THESE?**

I think the woods are used more now than I remember in over twenty years, Evidence for that lies not just in who you meet, but in new tracks veering off, in small acts of clearance, in scattered pieces of art, in well-maintained articles of recreation like the new swing in the picture. Using the woods implies a sense of ownership, a vested interest, a certainty of relationship. A future.

But are we all buying into this? And will that feeling of belonging translate into an actual belonging? If Five Mile and Taymount Woods are to be taken into community ownership, it’s essential that community identifies itself, makes itself heard and provides the evidence of its existence that will count.

This month, West Stormont Woodland Group will begin a Community Consultation on the proposals the group has been working on for the two woods (or, as it’s widely seen, the one wood with a gap in the middle). Of course, Covid restrictions have forced the consultation to be mostly online, but this shouldn’t be seen as a problem – taking an event online in my recent experience amplifies and multiplies its reach and scope. There is a new website dedicated to the consultation, which launches on 22nd February; details can be found at http://www.weststormontwoodlandgroup.scot ,on Facebook, or by emailing contact@weststormontwoodlandgroup.scot

The challenge is to get you, me, all members, all non-members local to the communities around the woods, all of us starting to think these woods might be ours, to contribute to the consultation. Spread the word!

*Quoted from the opening lines of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost.

Here comes the Sun

The mute swans stand in the middle of Stare Dam loch, looking at their feet in puzzlement, as meltwater sluices over them. They bend round to look beseechingly at me as I stand by the wooden jetty, as if to ask why this strange divinity has been bestowed on them, and why they cannot swim in water as usual. Then with determination they undertake a rather slippery swan take-off from whatever the surface of the loch is, and wheel around the trees in the reassuring sky.

The sun roars through into the morning like a rocket. Speed of light. It burnishes the bare trees and their wavering reflections in the loch, shrieks and shatters the shards of once indomitable ice. Water trickles unseen, seeps from frozen ground, sings in quiet rivulets.

An old song burrows its way into my head, and will not leave. The ice is slowly melting. I stand, eyes closed to the sun, and feel the breeze that no longer lacerates with coldness. I hear the whirring of the bemused swans, the first territorial song-stakes of the woodland birds. It seems like years since it’s been here.

Back at the house, the speculating rooks are at home, sitting in their parliament in the sycamore and debating which of last year’s nests have foundations sufficiently stable to re-use. Twigs start dropping. I think there are more rook members than last year.

Not all of the calamities and sorrows of the winter will disappear with the snow. But some will diminish, I think, and some will be easier to face. The snow has retreated from bits of lawn. The winter aconites open, and dazzle.