Statutory Exercise into Prehistory

It’s a favourite cycle ride, a circuit of under an hour, with all the hills at the start and you can almost freewheel home, if you go clockwise. A bright, sunny Easter day and a chilly wind; dusty ploughed fields and the great pleasure of almost empty roads, as the pandemic lockdown disrupts the “joys” of motoring.

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We cycle up through forest research sites and broad swathes of farmland towards Tullybelton, the hamlet whose name may derive from being the field where Beltane (May Day) fires were lit when older and more nebulous gods were remembered. We detour to Little Tullybeltane Farm, where a tall pillar points incongruously at the blue sky, and a buzzard mews and hovers. The track to the farm is neglected and lined with abandoned pieces of rusting metal; there is no plaque, no sign, no clue why it warrants such an imposing monument – and no invitation to explore.

Yet here – allegedly – the ruins of a turnip shed are all that’s left of the birthplace of one Robert Nicoll. From here he walked to school in Bankfoot, stopping to write poetry on the way. He was a peasant lad, a precocious child, the “boy poet” of Auchtergaven who died way too young, the one whose genius may have surpassed that other more famous bard, Robert Burns, with whom he had much in common – had he lived longer. But Nicoll was also a firebrand, a radical advocate for reform, a passionate speaker and fighter in the cause of human rights. Here is his monument, and not enough people know why it’s there.

He was 23 when he died.

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Leaving Tullybeltane behind, we coast along the Ordie Burn, where wood anemones shimmer in the sun and the wind’s behind us. Bumblebees career in and out of gorse flowers and dive between us. A determined walker out on her statutory exercise waves hello from the proscribed distance as we whizz by. We stop at the old graveyard at Kirkbride – though there is no kirk now and the headstones are in a sorry way. The names are all familiar, local ones: Nicolls and Fenwicks, Petries, Dows, Wylies and McFarlanes. I’m caught by the name Catherine Fenwick on a 19^th century stone.

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A Catherine Fenwick once lived in our house. She inherited or was gifted the feu from James Wylie of Airleywight (another reformer in his day – though did he “sell out” when he became a gentleman landowner?). Later, I check the deeds – we hold the parchment originals – and this Catherine Fenwick died seven years later than ours. Our Catherine lived longer…is it her shadow we constantly see flit by the kitchen window? Strange to think that both of them probably knew Robert Nicoll, whose mother was a Fenwick…. How intertwined we all are.

Kirkbride…. The church of St. Bridget, or just Bridget, or Bride, or Brigid…..Celtic Goddess of water. I can almost feel the Beltane fires. Nearby was St. Bride’s Well, said to have healing properties causing people to drink from it on the first Sunday in May (Beltane flames again) and “walk sunwise round it with joined hands, and lay down branches of rowan”.

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We find no well, but up on a rise is the standing stone of Pitsundry, said to mark the place. There was within living memory a water trough under a hedge there, supposedly fed by the well. No hedge today, just barbed wire; it’s dry as dust and hard to imagine why there’d be a well on top of the hill. But when I check the maps later, I find a spring marked very close by.

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While I’m exploring, another lockdown cyclist tells Andrew (from a social distance of course) that the Pitsundry stone lines up with others on the Muir of Thorn, the other side of the A9. That checks out on the map too, more or less. When we freewheel back into the boundaries of our village, it feels like our journey was further, deeper, more entangled with ghosts, than the quick exercise circuit we set out upon.

My favourite Parliament

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I’m infatuated with the much-maligned Corvidae, or crow family. There’s a stag-headed oak at the top of the Brae where they hang around as winter drags on, reminding me always of the poem “February” by Edward Thomas:

Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed
The speculating rooks at their nests cawed
And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flower of grass
What we below could not see, Winter pass.

A couple of years back, a pair of crows made a nest in the big sycamore tree that dominates the top end of my garden. In 2019, they returned with their pals. There were five nests under construction before my bird expert neighbour confirmed that I was wrong, Andrew was right, and these were not crows, but rooks. I had a rookery! Seven pairs nested last year, and the cacophony of feeding and fledging times was a raucous delight.

Last month, the rooks came on a visit. It was shortly following one of those weirdly named storms that have been the scourge of late winter here, and there was very little evidence left of last year’s colony. The rooks, about ten or a dozen of them, sidled about all day from branch to branch, engaged in some heated debate. Bits of twig were moved about, for no apparent reason. Several birds were seen bearing off the last remnants of a nest to some other location. Then they all flew off.

The collective noun for a group of rooks is a parliament. I can see why. That day, the debate went round and round in circles, no consensus was reached, and the parliament was either adjourned or illegally prorogued while certain individuals went off, presumably to feather their own nests. Although the odd rook came back to cark dismally during the next week or two, I thought that was the end of my rookery. A decision had been clearly made that the cost of rebuilding and renovation was too high and too risky, and they’d be better together with the big rookery at the other end of the village, established as long as humans here can remember, and probably longer still.

(I’m really, really trying not to be allegorical here, but it just keeps happening.)

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However, last week they returned, and resumed the debate with alacrity and much carking and cawing, retiring into the division lobbies in the neighbouring fir tree whenever the wind blew. Samples of twigs were brought in for inspection, passed around and tested for strength and engineering capacity. Rook nests are built near the top of a tree, and construction is meticulous, more complex than it looks, and uses only the right materials. Fortunately, rooks are among the most intelligent birds on the planet. In hopeful enthusiasm, I pruned the remaining pear and apple trees and left the twigs lying under the sycamore for the parliament to debate. They ignored them.

I could see the parliament was beginning to divide on party lines – lots of parties, each consisting of only two birds. Rooks are monogamous and mate for life. If this parliament consisted largely of last year’s babies, they were choosing their partners. Older birds were teaming up with theirs, and after a year of (presumed) abstinence, were making up for lost time. The branches rocked and see-sawed. Loud carking was sometimes interrupted by a melodious burble like a badly-tuned harp. The debate sounded more purposeful, and a nest began to appear.

I’ve been trying to fathom whether a parliament of rooks works collectively on one nest at a time. I can find no reference to such behaviour, so probably it’s just my fond imagination that sees the construction of a rookery as a kind of avian barn-raising. But there seemed to be twigs coming in from all directions, borne tenderly in those heavy grey bills and placed on or near the nest.

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Yesterday, a second nest was well under way. This morning, there were the beginnings of a third. I met four of the construction team in the stubble field as I was walking the dog. They were gathering bills full of short pieces of straw and flying directly to the building site. So much for the basket of dog hair I put out for them to line nests with! Maybe the blue tits will make use of it. I went out to check on progress just now, and counted ten birds in the tree, at least another ten supervising from the air, plus two fat wood pigeons fornicating aimlessly as they do. I’m pretty certain there’s at least one nest in the fir tree too, as two rooks dived in there, trailing long bits of stick behind them.

The other collective noun for these birds is a Building. I think my small (but fiercely independent) parliament has assessed the weather damage and consequences of climate change, has debated in full its response, has gone out to build or retrofit its housing stock using the best materials for energy conservation and the best techniques for sustainability. It’s stopped jabbering about targets and is now a Building of Rooks.

Other parliaments may wish to take note.

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(Rook at Slimbridge, by Adrian Pingstone)

February: Five Mile Wood

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Dreich doesn’t begin to cover it. Weeks of rain, sleet or snow, and the wood is wet, dank, chilly. One storm has passed, another is forecast, and a group of multi-stemmed birches, green with lichen and algae, droop and wait despondently.

I take the rutted cycling path that skirts the woodland edge. Under the tall, fiendishly straight Scots Pines, many scattered beech saplings nestle in their winter boleros of retained leaves. Beech mast is everywhere, but I do not see the older tree from which it has fallen. Beech seedlings tend not to come up near a parent tree, but somewhere there must be a Mother.

Snow lingers crystalline along the clay-bottomed ditches where black, cold water lurks and trickles. There’s a pond under the pines which so looks like it was formed by an explosion I call it the bomb crater. No signs of frog spawn yet. Several tracks and paths meander where animals come down to drink. Duckweed covers a third of the surface; in the increasing rain thousands of ripples intersect and make diffraction patterns over the other two thirds.

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Birds – except for a robin – are silent and glum. A flock of pigeons clatters off towards the field; freshly ploughed, it offers them nothing but the stones that lie heaped in the field corner. How many decades or centuries of cultivation have contributed to this pile? This side of the fence, someone a long time ago arranged stones round a favourite tree, where they remain, moss-covered and half-buried. Larger rocks with wavy patterns etched onto their surface erupt in groups from the forest floor, scarcely distinguishable from the stumps of felled trees. Moss, lichens, algae democratically envelop all.

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There are charred-looking remains of mushrooms by the path. I think they were Blackening Russulas, an abundance of them. I follow their orbital trail and suddenly find myself under a towering old beech tree, with many spreading branches and a hollowing trunk that makes a chimney of dead wood and fungal rots. Swings hang from two branches; insects and other invertebrates burrow into the soft core of the tree and make their homes. The woodpecker will soon come calling for her dinner, other birds will nest and shout from the canopy. I have found the Mother of Beeches, and of much else besides.

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Five Mile Wood and Taymount Wood are former Forestry Commission plantations just north of Perth. They have for a while been transitioning from industrial timber production to a subtle integration with the wild, and people are part of that wild change. The Commission have put them up for sale, and local people have formed West Stormont Woodlands Group. We are hoping to implement a community buy-out. You can find out more about the plans and group activities at http://www.weststormontwoodlandgroup.org.uk Over the coming year, I intend to write a monthly blog post “Words for Our Woods”about the wildness of the woods, in support of WSWG. This is the first.

Transient

For days now, maybe weeks,
Snow has been coming and going.
Not letting go, not quite in control,
Like the viruses keeping us all on edge.
It lies poised on grasses and winter berries,
Between water and ice, catching rainbows,
Sliding off roofs, dissolving under footfall.

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If this were January, we say,
We’d know what we were in for.
The snow would lie, intransigent,
Till we’re sick of it and grow bitter-eyed,
Nonchalant in our cars on frozen roads.

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We don’t know what to expect, now,
Of weather. Of self-styled leaders, we expect the worst.
They rarely disappoint.
We, in stone houses with no ambient warmth,
Switch off the odd light,
Turn down the sinful boiler,
Shiver in extra jumpers, even though
We know we’re alone, while off they fly
In chartered jets: to gorge and gabble and guzzle,
And trade in carbon neutral bullshit.

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Snow melts,
But rides in again on wild winds
To lie, and freeze, and then trickle away
In the unforgiving sun. And we
Must rise, and gather storms around us
Like blankets. Walk out, speak out
And keep on, and on, regardless.

A Dear, Green Place

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I wake up under the ridiculously high ceiling of my daughter’s flat in Govanhill (honestly, you could fit a whole other floor between me and that ceiling), and it’s that not unheard-of, but always slightly surprising thing: a Fine Day. In January. In Glasgow.

So I go down to Queen’s Park under the low sun, and join all the people, taking shortcuts to Shawlands or Battlefield, grimly jogging, exercising a cacophony of canines, or gathering to hold deep discussions on the slithery paths where the morning’s frost has turned to melting ice.

I look for wildlife. There’s plenty, but until you tune in, you’d think it was all rainbow-hued, pouting pigeons intent on fornication and the many opportunist members of the crow family. Magpies bustle under municipal shrubs and into rampant ivy (arguably the park’s most significant contribution to wildlife habitat), and busy themselves with piles of beech leaves, pretending to have a purpose.

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Crows loiter in trees with intent, fingering – or beaking – sticks and twigs, considering their suitability for Lovenest 2020.

I skirt the wildlife pond, where coots, moorhens, mallard and the remaining cygnets of the Mute Swans entertain small children. Up a green slope, and a sunken track, so deep in mud and the soggy consequences of the previous weekend’s torrential rain that had some of us dancing in puddles, it could double as a Devonshire hollow road. Fallen trees accrue fungi and insects; Queen’s Park here has shed its Paxton municipality.

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In the wilder, scarcely managed woodland, I hear birdsong – the noisy robin, the piping and sawing of blue and great tits. I know there are long-tailed tits – they visit my son’s bird feeders – but they taunt me shrilly, staying out of sight. A treecreeper works her way up a lime tree trunk. Dunnocks and wrens flit, silent and absorbed. Huddled among the trees on the Camp Hill slopes, the Queen’s Park Allotments make a city within a city, a shanty town of sheds and frames and variously glazed or translucent edifices where lush crops are started early by proper gardeners, and foxes – I can smell them -.find food and sanctuary.

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Higher, and I reach the Iron Age fort that crowns the hill, where grey squirrels scamper among the beech-mast, and humans have lived for centuries. The big stones in the middle of the ramparts may be what’s left of the Camp that named the Hill – during the Battle of Langside in 1568, famously lost by Mary Queen of Scots’ army and which sent her to to seek, and not find, refuge in England. But Glasgow named the park for her.

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A grove of young fruit trees just below the viewpoint with its flagpole are decorated with dark tartan ribbons, the remnants of last year’s wassailing. I wonder if they will get wassailed this year. The Philosophists of the Flagpole converse earnestly, perched on the backs of the frost-wet seats. Someone hands me a leaflet. It is from Extinction Rebellion.

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The day before, Glasgow City Council had announced its intention to be carbon-neutral by 2030, despite the challenges of its transport system and heating those high-ceilinged, big-windowed tenements. That’s 15 years before the target set by the Scottish Government. Will they do it? They will give it their best shot, and count the benefits before the costs. XR will say there’s no choice.

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We look out over this beautiful city, this dear, green place, bounded and made human-scale by its surrounding hills, dotted with parks and humming with energy that comes from its people. Smoke gushes from a single factory – I think its the brewery opposite Glasgow Green – and a motorway crashes through. They’ll need to sort that. I think, that if anywhere can do it, Glasgow will.

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The Bluebell Wood in Winter

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We’ve always felt a sense of ownership of our local bluebell wood. It’s the place we take visitors, a secret to share with loved friends and relations. Over the years, it’s become quite renowned, at least in May, when the ancient oak woodland is carpeted with bluebells. People have always flocked to it then, to capture images on camera, to bring children and grandchildren, or just to stare in amazement, breathing in the scent of bluebells that stretch far and wide.

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Maybe not so picturesque, but it’s equally magical in other seasons: when the bracken grows up fresh and green, or in its autumn gold, and in winter, when the silence is tangible, the bracken is tawny-brown and the shoots of bluebells lie just below the soil.

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The sun is low and carries no warmth; it pierces the sweet sculpture of bare branches and paints the carpet of mosses under the fir trees with iridescent green and gold. It lights up the crumpled and disordered fern fronds as if with fire.

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Every oak tree is adamantine and statuesque, posing in naked dignity. The scattered ancient, crumbling beeches also look invulnerable – but that’s an illusion. Every so often, one of them keels over or dumps half a split trunk. Dark, ponderous yew trees here and there are enigmatic about life and death.

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At the top of the rise, my favourite tree is a multi-stemmed silver birch, which stands against the sky as if it were painted there. For me, this is Stephen Hawking’s tree. I was on my way up that hill in March 2018 when I heard that he’d died. I sat by the tree and digested the news, sad, but making a mental salute to a brilliant mind. I don’t have many heroes, but Professor Hawking was probably one.

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A few years ago, the landowners put the bluebell wood up for sale. That’s when all the folk who’d felt ownership and connection came out of the woodwork. Suppose it was bought by someone who respected neither its status as ancient woodland, nor the long-established right of access? In the end, although a community buy-out would have seemed fitting, it was bought by the Woodland Trust, thanks to a fortuitous legacy. Sighs of relief were followed by the formation of an enthusiastic volunteer group.

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There have been changes, of course. Re-routing of paths to avoid visitors being knocked out by a falling beech branch, a hard line on invasive non-native species that threatened to engulf the bluebells themselves, the eviction of the deer from inside the deer fences to permit oak tree regeneration are just some examples. A car park – inevitable, perhaps, but no ornament… but at least it’s been surrounded by fruit trees.

And a massive planting project of new trees in the adjacent fields that formed part of the sale – thousand of trees, safely behind new deer fencing but accessible via solid gates. Work in spades for the volunteers, for years to come.

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It’s rhododendron-bashing day tomorrow.

Death Of A Star

The other day, a friend told me that my second-favourite star might be dying. Betelgeuse is already a pensioner as stars go; possibly over nine million years old. Age is a bit meaningless when you’re talking about stars though. The Sun, our nearest star, we think of as present, alive, omnipresent. But light from Betelgeuse takes about 600 years to reach us on Earth, as we prance around our own star, and that means that, if the signs are being read aright, Betelgeuse is already gone. We are just observing its decline 600 years later.

silhouette of trees during night time — Photo by Free Nature Stock on Pexels.com

It was Christmas night, on the way back from the midnight service in Dunkeld, that I last saw Betelgeuse. The night was clear and frosty. We pulled off the back-road, switched off the car lights and walked into the icy air. A fox barked in the distance; we were silent, awestruck. The Milky Way strode across the sky, Sirius, the Dog Star, was blue indeed. I began pointing out the names of constellations I knew, and making up the ones I wasn’t sure of, because I can never do enough stargazing for all the names to stick. Betelgeuse is easy, because of its reddish hue and its position as the right shoulder of Orion the Great Hunter. I was a bit nonplussed, because it wasn’t as obvious as usual, but thought no more of it till my friend told me the news.

It’s red because it is something called a Red Supergiant (a sign of ageing in stars). And it’s getting dimmer and dimmer, a state which is said to indicate a loss of mass. With twenty times the mass of the Sun, Betelgeuse has a way to go, but the eventual pattern is an expulsion of dust leading to the star’s explosion as a supernova. If that happens (and it might not, yet, at any rate, because Betelgeuse is a “variable” star, whose brightness goes up and down in cycles), it will create a show of light brighter than the moon, capable of casting shadows on Earth. It might even be visible by day. And then it will be gone.

sky space dark galaxy — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

On many levels, I’d miss Betelgeuse. The physics of supernovae is going on constantly all over the universe, and one day it will happen to our Sun as well. Stars die. But Betelgeuse is a vividly recognisable part of a much-loved constellation I associate with the depths of winter (as well as being the star around which the home planet of Ford Prefect orbits*). Constellations may be unscientific and artificial, but they paint pictures through which we navigate our ignorant way through a universe too fabulous to designate merely with letters, numbers and formulae. Michel Serres, in The Five Senses, says that if we abandon the naming of stars and constellations “night has lost its giants and animals.”**

What will Orion, the Great Hunter, do without a right shoulder?

“The thing once called a star is classified, distinguished and divided into new families…..designated by a corpus of codes and categories, by a collection of calculations and theories……things simply called stars hardly exist any more.”**

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I love the science of the universe, but I also love its art, its language and its inspiration. Much as I’d like to see a supernova, personally I hope Betelgeuse is just being variable and brightens up again the starry nights of winter.

*Adams, Douglas: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Heinemann, 1986)
** Serres, Michel: The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (in English: Bloomsbury Academic, 1985)

A Conversation with Winter

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What happens now? I asked of Winter.
There is no heat in the sun’s rays. Trees are naked.
Fierce winds carry shards of ice. The voices I strain to hear
Are silent forever now. What’s the script?
What am I meant to do?

Winter, with a scarce-felt fracturing of frost,
Smiles a chill smile, whispers in the wind:
There is nothing you are meant to do. Who knows
How things will be? Be still. Wait.

But I am cold to the bone.
Silence echoes around me.
I chase cold sunbeams,
Look for gold in rainbows and find none.
How will I out-run the freezing of my heart?

I do not know, says Winter,
But I’ll be with you when
You go down to those cold corners
Where under snow and frozen soil
Quiet fermenting and slow gestation
Tick by unperceived;
Where in water beneath the ice, life softens,
Grows drowsy,
Where transformation is incremental
(Too slow to see, too distant to hear)
And seeds swell, shape-shift and shrug off
Chains of dormancy, shattered by cold,
And all is movement in stillness.

See the fire igniting in the ice?
This is not the time of dying.
It is un-reckoned with beginnings.
What happens now? I cannot tell you.
But I will warm you while we wait.

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The Passing of Winter

The winter solstice bonfire wouldn’t light, at first. fire1

Days of heavy rain had soaked the pile, even though it had been cut months ago and the wood was dry enough inside. And much of it was elder, cut back from the hedge and reluctant to catch.

It smouldered, there was smoke, a few sparks, a sad crackle. More paper, more matches, noises of discontent and futility: “it’s too wet, it’s the wrong wood, there’s too much air, there’s not enough air, it’s too late, it’s too dark….”

Three fire witches emerge, with a lighter and boards of something rigid and corrugated. After a judicious dissection and re-formation of a corner of the giant smoky tepee of lank vegetation, and the application of a lighter, the fire-witches address the heap with repeated sweeping bowing gestures, wielding the boards to fan the fire.

The fire catches. It spreads through the pile. Over the tracery of sycamore against the night sky, the smoke billows white and tenuous into the dank, chilly air of midwinter. Brilliant flames shoot skyward. The year, this year which promised and gave so much loss and so much gain, turns slowly, creaking out its bewildering, blistering, beguiling existence through the night, as the fire burns steadily, in spite of the wet, unsuitable fuel.

fire3 It burned on through the following day as well. I tended its last hour as dusk fell, turning in the straggling twigs and prodding the embers buried in the ash back to life. I watched the light fade, and soft rain start to fall, suppressing anxiety as I waited for children to arrive for Christmas, heart aching. And though no returning light is yet discernable in these misty, damp days and nights, for sure the year has turned.

Yule, Christmas, Solstice, New Year…….here’s wishing you all the best. May all beings be happy and at peace.

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Last Flight

I said I chose not to fly again , except in an emergency. This race to see and speak seems to be emergency enough. I look for the quickest way south. I choose to fly. As the little propellor-plane taxis along, I suppress thoughts of Indiana Jones films and think, this may be my last flight.

It turns out to be a flight like none I’ve had before, a child’s magical birds-eye flight, skimming over a clear, unusually cloud-free landscape at a height where details can readily be identified, and anything not visible is imaginable. I note the snow on the Stirlingshire hills as they retreat behind me. Snow puffs and scrapes across the highest hills of Galloway, and streaks the mountains of England’s lakeland.

I watch the strange, human patterns of fields and settlements. It all looks so much older from the air, like something that has grown organically; haphazard, unplanned. It is the random cracked glaze made by fire on an ancient cauldron, imprinted on glacial landscapes by millenia of human occupation.

I see how nearly bare native trees and unplanned woods snake along river valleys, and cluster beside routes that connect only in a roundabout way; wandering paths and roads that go round things. By contrast, the dark plantation forests of Sitka spruce are bald and angular and the reparations of modern forestry design have done little to alleviate their awkwardness. They still do not fit.

When I next look out, we are passing over Wales. Snowdon and its consort peaks are proud, triumphal, dazzling white and icy, but dark hills lie all around. An extinct Welsh volcano, crimped with snow, broods over a green plain of farms and fields. Its crater hides a cache of snow from all bar those who fly over it. On the Black Mountains, the snow seems to trace the contour lines. It’s like looking at a giant 3D map or one of these models you find in landscape interpretation centres.

Here is an Iron Age landscape, a Celtic domain. Hillforts rise above farmland, the timeless strongholds of Arthur, Merlyn, Caractacus and those who went before. This one has six ditches and ramparts, etched in snow. Its neighbour has only three. And there, quarries and open-cast mines with their working terraces create an optical illusion of hillforts turned inside out.

How green are the valleys, with their wandering rivers and the streams of towns and villages that run along them, made silver by the sun shining on roofs and streets, their buildings, estates and conurbations making swirling patterns of dots and squares. Way off, Swansea nestles in hard among its cockles and laverbread and all its lovely words, and below lies the black, coal-rippled sand of the South Wales coast.

Crossing the Severn Estuary, the bird’s-eye landscape fades. Features become shadows, obscured, hazy. Cloud lies over Devon and Somerset, a ponderous, doubtful fog. But beyond the unknown, to the west, another landscape beckons. I cannot tell if it is sea or sky, dark streams of cloud or a distant land; lost Lyonesse or the islands of the blest.

aircraft airplane aviation dawn — Photo by Christine Renard on Pexels.com

(I didn’t take any photos on the flight. Even if I had, they’d not be of any use, since I’ve left my phone on a bus!)