Comments on The Nature of the Universe
Asking questions about nature, the universe, and where we fit into it all
Just published this on theuncontrolledgarden.wordpress.com – but think it might appeal to readers of Comments on the Nature of the Universe as well.
Just follow the link: https://theuncontrolledgarden.wordpress.com/2023/03/31/aphid-season-ahead/
One day to the equinox; officially the first day of spring. It rains, a sullen, dreich miasma and the horizon is drowned in mist and low cloud once again. No cloud of cheery celandines yet line the ditches; no coltsfoot flowers; no green dazzle of new growth erupting from the tired, forlorn and hang-dog leavings of winter stems of grass.
There was a start to spring, a couple of weeks ago, when the sun was gentle and warm and the birds practised their calls. A blue tit inspected a nest box, and rooks set-to in earnest up in the rookery tree. Today, the only sound is the drip-drip-drip of rain. And even that’s muffled.
In the soggy brown fields, where the cover crop was optimistically ploughed in a fortnight ago, soil trickles away downhill in the empty furrows. No fuzz of pink from swelling buds tints the distant birch trees, no lighter hues on the sycamores and maples. On the hazels, the merry festoons of bright yellow and cream catkins are turning brown, but no buds are opening to take their place.
Spring’s not here. I rake in the squelching soundscape of a muddy woodland walk for the chiff-chaff, first of the warblers to arrive in March, but he is not here either. I wonder if this is the day I have for so long dreaded and feared – the “what if” day. What if the the birds of summer do not return? What if I never see another swallow? What if the flowers of spring are, finally, poisoned to death? What if nests fail and nestlings starve for want of insects and worms?
I do not want to follow this thought. Spring is late and it makes me weary and anxious. My elderly dog plods on, keen to get back in the dry, tired, arthritic legs dragging, stumbling at times yet still showing interest in sticks, at least on the way back. I think, will spring come in time for him to enjoy it, to sit in the healing sun and watch the world go by, an old dog at the end of life but still game?
On the way home, I find some of those precocious hawthorns in the depth of the wood which always burst into leaf prematurely and give me my ritual mouthful of hedgerow “bread and cheese”. Today it tastes of even less than usual, but I chew away, get in the door, dry off the dog and put on the kettle.
At least there’s tea.
It was a cold day of freezing fog and dull skies here on the Perthshire fringe of the Highland Boundary Fault, impenetrable and forbidding. So I went to Kirkcaldy with Andrew for the ride, and because if we’re looking for better weather, Fife or Dundee are our go-to destinations.
While he was busy pruning trees at Ravenscraig walled garden, I marched down the hill to Dysart harbour, and set off eastwards along the coastal path. Visitors to Fife usually end up either at St. Andrews or the picturesque East Neuk fishing villages, giving the old coal mining settlements of west Fife a wide berth. But I was deeply embroiled in a crime novel by one of my favourite authors, Val McDermid, at the time, and wanted to inspect the haunting locations described, where fictional things had happened and fictional people had so convincingly disappeared, for myself. In so doing, I soon met the ghosts of this once-thriving industry, and the sensed the buried but unforgotten lives of the coal towns and their protagonists.
A brick arch in a collapsing stone wall, a desire line path passing through it towards some dilapidated buildings, was all that marked the site of the Lady Blanche Colliery. I walked quickly along the fringe of the beach, where great outcrops of red sandstone, eroded into surreal shapes, looked soft enough to sleep on. Coal seams are found as a layer in a fairly predictable array of sedimentary rocks; where you find this sandstone, you are going to come to layers of shale and mudstone and where they end, you are likely to find the black stuff; ancient plant material from the Carboniferous, compressed by the weight of the rocks and the seas that came to swamp the landscape. Coal. You still find lumps of it, wave-worn, on Fife beaches. Through the middle of one gingery sandstone outcrop a channel had been dug seawards, emphasised by two sturdy walls. Something to do with the mine, or the fishing? I’m no engineer, and couldn’t work that one out.
The path veered inland and upwards, skirting a barren-looking stretch of eroding land. I smelt the Winter Heliotrope before I saw the flowers and the foliage that cloaked the steep cliffs. It’s a garden plant, that when it escapes, does so in style and quickly naturalises, especially in difficult sites and thin soils. It is so sweet-smelling you feel for it, flowering away in January when pollinators are scarce, and self-respecting native Scottish wild flowers are keeping their powder dry. But a little further on, I found wild ivy with some flowers on, too, draping itself luxuriantly over sheer cliffs. It usually flowers in November and December – valuable late nectar for bees – and by January bears ripe berries cherished by wild birds. But this was Fife, remember, and Fife does things differently. Already, the temperature was rising and a watery sun floating in and out of tangibility above the Firth.
On the very edge of Dysart, I found a striking monument to the miners of the Frances Colliery, bearing the names of all those who had lost their lives there. I found myself muttering the names out loud to myself. What a life it was for miners and their families, the precarity, the solidarity, the tragedy. Something often romanticised, yet here was the bald truth; people died, regularly. Among the names, one jumped out. Agnes Coventry, died 1911. What was a woman doing to get killed at a coal mine? Later, I found out, from the fabulous Durham Mining Museum website, that Agnes had been working at the picking table “when bending under a revolving shaft to reach some dirt which had been lifted off the tables, her clothes were caught by the shaft, and practically torn off. She was removed to the hospital and appeared to be progressing favourably, but she collapsed and died late the same day from shock. The shaft was cased in, but one of the boards which had become loose had been removed and not replaced.” Coal does not just claim its victims underground.
At the top of the cliffs, the path skirted a sinister looking industrial estate, and passed the winding gear of the old colliery, towering over the landscape and lives it once dominated and frowning down on what was now a shimmering sea where strings of cormorants stood drying their wings on half-submerged rocks. The sun, between streaks of cloud, coupled with the uphill climb to tell me I had too many layers on. I took off the thick, fleece-lined woollen jacket under my impenetrably water and windproof coat and stuffed it, protesting, into my rucksack.
There were great stretches of January-whitened grass and sunken hollows between the path and the cliff edges, badly fenced off, punctuated by warning signs declaring it the property of the Coal Authority. In the distance, several walkers had ignored the proclaimed dangers and were wandering along established desire line paths or admiring the sun-kissed view back towards Dysart. What lay beneath their feet? I ventured through a gate onto the headland for a bit, but soon returned to the path, spooked by signs about sheer drops and risk of landslip.
An extraordinarily long and winding set of concrete and stone steps led me back down to sea level and a length of tangled woodland. A solitary raven cronked bad-temperedly overhead at my intrusion into its territory. Before reaching the village of West Wemyss, the path became a rough and potholed concrete track, passing under a turreted wall whose strange arching windows with their keep-out-of-my-land metalwork permitted a peep into the overgrown Wemyss Chapel gardens. Near the harbour was a more homespun and inclusive space. Named as “Alice’s Fairy Garden” on the map, it seemed to be a melding of community projects – artwork and murals, flowers, strange odds and ends aimed at the fairies, and a memorial to “our West Wemyss Van Lady” – whose body was discovered in a campervan in the village car park in 2022. The moulded red sandstone cliffs and overhangs were the backdrop to this little patch, and to me they spoke loudly, with streaks of wind-blown layers and bedding planes, and the contortions wrought by the erosion of this soft, mellow rock.
I walked on, hugging the shore to Wemyss Castle, but I was running out of time, and there was a café in West Wemyss that I was glad to return to for delicious soup and a pot of tea, before retracing my steps (yes, even the forbidding stone staircase), past gangs of nosy seals and far more people, now that Fife had fulfilled its promise of sunshine and winter warmth, to Ravenscraig. I stopped on the beach to gather my personal stone from Fife, and found one that encapsulated the properties of the big sandstone outcrops in miniature.
Wemyss Caves, and the stretch from Buckhaven to East Wemyss, will be covered in the next few weeks. It was an eye-opening walk, a thought-provoking one… that centred not only on a landscape but the people who have been, and are, part of it. I don’t know many ex-coal miners, but I do know a few. They are straightforward, confident, cheerful and clever people. They make the very best gardeners and growers.
Early morning, sunny and dry. Silence, save for the mutterings of a river almost out of its banks and racing to reach the sea. Ground solid, unyielding – the type of hardness where you trip up on embedded clods and frazzles of vegetation hiding in the whiteness of a fourth consecutive deep frost – on ground already frozen solid by over a week of snow-half-thaw-freeze again.
Walking along the south shore of the Tay on a winter’s morning kind of ensures you won’t be in the sun very much, no matter how it dazzles the eye. In any case, the river has merrily engulfed the lower fishermen’s path that hugs its margin, so we walk, me and the dog, on the higher ground beneath the limes of the castle drive. Where are all the birds? I wonder. Not even the ubiquitous wood pigeons are out braving the cold. We pass an eroded river gulley and went down the steepish bank to the lower riverside path, joining at the point where it rises above water level and becomes what must once have been an elegant stroll for visitors to the castle. Fishing on the Tay is big business, and not affordable by ordinary people (unless you live in Perth and have the right to fish the stretch within the city boundary). We pass fishing huts on both banks that would make acceptable homes for small families. All locked up, today. No one but me and the dog.
Now I’m closer to the water, I start to notice a large number of white birds swimming rapidly downriver. What are they escaping from? Then I realise the white birds are actually lumps of ice, breaking away from the frozen banks and joining the ice and snowmelt that, with extended periods of rain, has made the river so massive today. A couple of gritty black-and-white ducks obstinately battle upriver, against the flow. What strong legs they must have! They veer off into a little eddying backwater on the opposite bank, and I see other water birds lurking there, taking a break from morning chores.
Beaver have been along here recently, but I struggle to fathom their purpose in felling one solitary tree, up the beach from the tumbling water. Maybe just hungry, or doing a bit of coppicing for future regrowth food supplies. I think the water birds could use a few more beavers to create respite backwaters.
Skirting a long curve round the back of the castle, I pass between forbidding walls of rhododendron bushes. Although they provide some shelter and a small stretch of unfrozen path. they block the view. I spend too much time trying to eliminate them from an ancient oak wood to appreciate their aesthetics. I guess they may provide good roosts for birds, though I still don’t see any.
The core path takes a long, curving route by a bend in the Tay, high above the river and nearly to Birnam before it joins the castle main drive which will take me back to the start if I go left. Closer to the castle, the trees are less scrubby and include many spectacular examples of exotic species, such as Noble Firs, Coast Redwoods and towering Pines. It becomes a landscape of avenues – tottering rows of limb-dropping beeches, stately Sequoias in orderly, sentry-like placings, frowning yew trees in sombre ranks, new avenues planted in recent decades to replace older ones that refuse to lie down and die. Best of all, to me, are the ridiculously shaggy and spreading avenues of old lime trees – each hiding in its own twiggy skirt of epicormic growth. In spring, they provide me with juicy, tender leaves for salad, and intoxicatingly sweet-smelling flowers in summer to dry and make into a sleep-inducing tisane.
As I walk between and under these vibrant specimen trees, I suddenly realise birds have started to chatter, and mixed flocks of finches, secretive tree-creepers and purposeful, hopping blackbirds are awake and accompanying me. Gazing up through the close pine trees, I can just see avian silhouettes flitting busily.
There are paths that could be taken to make a short-cut through the castle garden. Scottish access laws, some would say, give walkers a perfect right to take them, and no doubt some do. I’ve lived in a tied house on an estate where summer visitors frequently asserted this right to take a short cut to a beach through our garden, where we had small children playing and hens free-ranging – and on at least one occasion, hens were killed by loose, uncontrolled dogs. So personally, while I’m proud of our access laws, I think we should respect the privacy of residents and remember those laws also require the walker or cyclist to act responsibly. I’m fine with taking a long way round. The core path eventually passes in front of the castle at a distance (more avenues!), and I note the large, standing stone nearby, like an iceberg itself in an open, frost-enveloped field. It has no name. Does it link with other, less ancient perhaps but curiously-named stones in the area? One day I’ll hunt down the Witches’ Stone (well, this is Macbeth country!) and the Cloven stone….. but not today.
Today, I dawdle back under the limes to the gate, salute the mighty Tay with its miniature ice-packs, and begin to think about breakfast.
Regular readers will know I often write about my garden, or the wildlife that inhabits and manages it better than I could ever do. I know a lot of people would have the screaming ab-dabs if their gardens got into half the state that mine does… but for me the need to support the widest biodiversity and my personal love for every other species trumps the sensitivities of the bug-killing, grass-shaving, patio-manicuring brigade. And I’d like to make some converts rather than just be rude about them!
So I decided to create a new blog of short sketches and ideas dedicated to the joys of not being in control of your garden and the fascinating more-than-human friends you might meet in it. Here’s a taster of WHOSE GARDEN IS IT ANYWAY? which you can find at theuncontrolledgarden.wordpress.com
“I started gardening with a notion that what grew in it belonged to me, or to my family. I believed that I was the person who got to choose what grew in my garden. Carrots here, poppies there, grass in between. I welcomed wildlife though – birds could come to the bird table. Frogs could come to the pond. Of course!
But pigeons, snails, mice….. er, no. And the multiplicity of insects and invertebrates just worried me. Were they Good, or Bad for “my” garden? I didn’t know. When I decided to study horticulture professionally, my tutors taught me “Plant Protection” which meant the Pests and How to Destroy Them. A nodding glance to predators and nothing about pollinators. The soil science tutor had a more holistic perspective, but was a bit of a lone voice.
I always preferred the wild flowers to most of the garden ones – although I liked both. So “weeds” got away with a lot in my garden, even though it made me feel slightly guilty. In between lectures, though, I read about companion planting, and comfrey, and composting, and met Lawrence Hills of the Henry Doubleday Research Institute (now Garden Organic), which was nearby. Over time, my perspective changed, and so did my garden!
Now I have a rambling wilderness which I love from January to August and then feel defeated and stressed out by, until calm is resumed around the middle of October. No chemicals, no dig as far as I can stretch the compost, which is the powerhouse of the garden. I still struggle at times and backslide into nervous control-freakery.
But I have one certainty: This is not my Garden. And I am not in control.”
(I will continue to write on the nature of the universe here too. And adjust both sites, especially getting rid of the annoying ads once I’m convinced I’ve got it set up right!)
It began by shedding branches in every storm, this multi-stemmed beech tree. Being a beech, whose toxic leaf-litter successfully manages to put off any tree or shrub (even its own offspring) from growing under its canopy, there is plenty of space for the branches to lie. For a few years, it was my go-to place to harvest the beech-specific, edible, incredibly slippery Porcelain Mushroom in late autumn. This year, the fungus appears to have exploited all the suitable fallen branches and moved elsewhere.
No shortage, though, or other fungi. They peer from behind the remnants of bark, congregate on dead wood, splash colour over the domain of the doomed beech tree. Now, whole trunks are falling, large brackets appear near the snaggy top of the one remaining trunk, piles of branches and fallen debris cover the ground. Meanwhile, leafy twigs still emerge from parts of the tree – it’s not dead yet!
Is a tree ever dead? Though branches crash down, timber decomposes, bark is shed, these are all the signs of a massive construction programme. The mushrooms and bacteria are building soil. The mosses, lichens, ferns and flowering plants are taking hold and creating gardens. Invertebrates in their thousands are moving in, chip-chipping away, getting in, getting under, uprooting, making a tree metropolis. Birds and small mammals home in on the seething busy-ness as if to an urban food-market, finding homes in the piled deadwood and tree-openings. Human foragers like me, and other large animals such as roe deer, visit for breakfast mushrooms. In spring, chickweed wintergreen and wood sorrel will cautiously return to woodland lighter and less toxic.
As the tree slowly, and apparently, dies, it shouts louder and louder with life,
The little wood that lies an easy walking distance from my house is juvenile. It was planted maybe twenty-five years ago, mostly with hazel trees that have grown with multi-stemmed enthusiasm, peppered with birch and rowan, interspersed with tall sycamores and oak trees, now starting to muscle their way above the copse. Blown-in elder, and suckering blackthorn garland the woodland fringes. There are literally thousands of small ash seedlings covering much of the woodland floor; few-to-no surviving older ash trees. I wonder how these babies will fare in the aftermath of ash die-back disease. A large proportion are annually grazed out by deer; there are hares and hedgehogs hanging out in the top part of the wood, and I’ve seen red squirrels using the wood as an aerial highway. They, and other small mammals, feast on the hazelnuts in winter. This year, I heard and saw flashy jays on the rampage, and I’m seeing hazelnut stashes which may be their doing.
I’ve always referred to the wood, with unintentional and misplaced territorialism, as my larder. It contained the best patch of nettle shoots for soups, teas and pesto for miles, though these have now shifted as the shade has increased. In early summer, an army of Common Hogweed supplies me with chunky flower-buds to make my favorite pakoras or to braise as a vegetable. One day, I may be obliged to harvest the seeds to make flour; it’s as well the species is expanding its range. About the same time, elderflowers are picked for cordial or champagne, or just to eat. As summer winds on, the patch of feral raspberries in the clearing start to ripen. This year, they were pretty poor though, as are the ones in the garden. I’m not sure why. Competition from the broom, perhaps, whose yellow flower buds go into my May salad bowl.
I harvest the hazelnuts haphazardly; the trees I used to pick from now bear their nuts too high for me to reach – I either wait for the profligate mammalian and avian foragers to knock them to the ground or I gather from smaller trees, self-seeded from nuts none of us ate, or from trees on the edge. When I have enough and they are shedding their frilly petticoats, I shell and roast them to get the lovely chocolatey smell. Usually, about half the shells are empty.
The hazel wood is also the store I visit for the likes of washing-line props, bean-poles, and pea-sticks. No need to cut these poles, as regular storms bring more down; the forest floor is littered with useful sticks for every purpose, not least, lighting the stove. Children collect the long ones and build them into dens.
Today, I’m collecting rowan berries for the sharp, rich red jelly we’ve always had as a family to accompany Christmas dinner, and thereafter, everything else. The young rowan trees bear copious fruit, but I have my personal favorite trees, where the berries are larger, a feistier red or more juicy. I note the elderberries are nearly at picking stage, too – a winter essential for medicinal elderberry vinegar, or, mixed with hips from the wild roses along the field edge, a soothing syrup. Likewise, there is a particular hawthorn bush that has fruits large and sweet enough to stop and nibble at while contemplating the sunset or sheltering from a cloudburst. They make good liqueurs.
I gather a couple of Brown Birch Bolete mushrooms as well. It was a fair few years ago now that these edible fungi began to appear around one of the multi-stemmed birch trees. I don’t pick many, and am always watching for new patches of fruiting bodies as the mycelium spreads to other birches. It’s been fascinating watching how the fungal flora in the little wood has gradually established itself as the trees grew, and fungal threads found their roots, to embark on that precious, beneficial relationship that entangles both and is called the mycorrhizae (“fungus-roots”). The species I find have changed over the years, and will continue to do so. I hope more edible species will arrive soon. The Birch Boletes I don’t have for breakfast will be dried for the winter.
Will it be a good year for sloes? There have been crops from the blackthorns on the field edge so fantastic I’ve stopped making sloe gin for a while. Maybe time for another batch. The blossom was there in March, so I’ll check it out. If there are sloes, I’ll wait for the first frosts to make them tingle, and see if the birds have spared me any.
Later, when the leaves fall in tawny profusion, and the rose-bay willow herb from which I selected early shoots in spring for fake asparagus has shed its seeds, when the air starts to nip and my breath makes clouds, I’ll harvest the peace of the woods, the melancholy inertia, the stand-and-stare compulsion of fractal twigs and branches and the patterns on bark.
And perhaps pick curly, frosty old flower-stems of the willow herb to decorate the house for Christmas.
Day descends As we descend the Stumbling hillside, dark With gorse and broom. Voices lower, whisper, cease, as steps Grow cautious, hover, become still. Wait. Listen. Breathe. White orchid, luminous, rises out From the gloom of dusk, distracts From the strain of aching to hear. So, unsought, barely registered, A faint new sound creeps from shadows . They move invisible up from the valley, Calling unseen from scrub and bracken. They thrill the air. We are caught; Transfixed, alert, Skewered by sound. Against a sky that reels From peach to turquoise, wrapped in night, One arcs upward, coasts, swoops, Swings and folds to right and left, Dives into darkness, rises to light: Swirling master of the night air. Magician of dusk, and all the spaces Between night and day. Flash of white. A call that Seeps in like the shiver of cold air. Night falls. Night bewitches. Night jars.
Thanks, Jo Lear, for the photos. I don’t know how you did it!
Although I was born and grew up in a London suburb, awareness of nature was hammered into me, partly by my family, partly by primary school, where the “nature table” was obligatory in every classroom and was always piled high with artefacts, and partly by the nature books that lay around the house. It was while poring over these behind the sofa that I began to learn my flowers.
My favourite was entitled “Spring Flowers of the Woods”. To start, I relished the beautiful hand-painted illustrations, and, later, when I read that the woods were full of flowers in spring BECAUSE leaves were off the trees thus allowing light for the flowers to open and the pollinators to amble in, it was my first glimmer of ecology, and the entangled ways of nature. I came to recognise and seek those exquisite, archetypal spring flowers such as primrose, wood anemone, wood sorrel, mercury and violet.
Today in Five Mile Wood, on a damp and overcast day, I greeted some of them. In the broad strip of mixed broadleaved and conifer woodland to the south, violets a-plenty sprinkled themselves over the dead leaves of birch and beech, growing on old stumps and under windthrown trunks. Sometimes they congregate with Wood Sorrel, whose edible, trifoliate leaves draped from spindly stems, and finely-veined, nodding white flowers are one of the (many) most beautiful things on earth. Wood Sorrel grows here only in scattered communities. I have the impression these colonies are networking towards each other, perhaps via the hidden telegraph of soil-fungal communication.
I have not yet found Wood Anemone here, which is surprising, but intriguingly, there is the merest germ of a bluebell wood, if you know where to look, and they are beginning to flower. (photos were horribly blurry, and I shan’t burden you with them. Everyone knows what bluebells look like.) Bluebells are said to be a sign of ancient woodland (which Five Mile probably isn’t) or at least a settled woodland ecology. I do not wish to unsettle them!
As the ground rises, that ecology morphs into something more akin to acid heath (there are certainly signs that at least part of the central area once held deep peat, signifying raised bog, perhaps). Two flowers in this habitat – not stars of “Spring Flowers of the Woods” – gave me great pleasure. One was the blaeberries that line the paths and snuggle up to trees here. They are now in hard-to-spot flower. Tiny, beautiful dull reddish bellflowers (look closely!) which will turn into the fruit of this our native blueberry and provide good walking snacks in the summer. It’s a treat to see this wild harvest crop doing so well; it was somewhat decimated by the last clear-fell. (Do we understand well enough the changes we force on a landscape by our actions? Do we care enough?)
The other is gorse. I have a very soft spot for this riotous, prickly native shrub. So many plus points does it have: nitrogen fixing, baby tree protecting, wild tea providing and a redoubtable habitat for spiders (see here) among others. What’s in a few scratches? A week ago, cycling round the wood at speed (to be honest, anything over 6mph is “at speed” for me even on an electric bike), I did incur a few scratches….. but it was like moving through a mist of warm coconut, the delicious gorse flower smell made powerful by the bright sunshine and muggy air. Today, it was fainter – but thanks to the slightly unnerving vigor with which gorse is spreading across the path, I could still catch it. Divine!
Primroses seem to be absent, as well as the wood anemones, but there was this unexpected relative – Primula denticulata, the Drumstick Primrose or, locally in Angus, the Kirrie Dumpling. Native to Himalaya, this has not, I suspect, got here on its own! If I were a hard-line ecologist, I’d uproot it (and find a home for it in a garden). I’m not, but there might be a good argument for collecting the seed before it spreads itself about. Or not?
Now the Irish yews are surging skywards, thrusting out dark flames of leaf and stem.
They are slow, but it’s been over a decade now, trickling from flame to flame.
There is a blurred line
where a century of tidy head-height tinkering ended, and a tight sea of brooding, black-edged green foliage has broken through, and swept away order.
The yews erupt, as stone crumbles and falls.
Birds roost in them at twilight in scores, warm, undisturbed, by gale or snow.
Behind the safety fencing, beyond the do-not-pass and danger signs,
is a place where no man goes.
Gravestones lean, tip and tumble; make new, safe alcoves, tunnels and tiny shelters for unregarded lives.
Grass rises, dances with nettle and willow herb, falls, forms dense mats and decomposes slowly.
Rhododendron Elizabeth, first red fire of February, sprawls and spreads and flowers on, uncorseted.
But most of the orderly and well-tamed shrubs they planted by the paths and over loved ones shrink and cower now
beneath the onslaught of bird-borne buddleia, bramble and insidious sweet elder.
Secrets are kept here among the dead. Trysts are made
between fungus and flowers, moss and bird, animal, alga, insect, lichen and all
the free flow of life invisible, multiplying, dividing, swarming, with the Irish yews, making universes from perceived dereliction.
Sanctuary now, holy ground, as never before.
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