Turning the year, turning the compost

This week my Google Tasks told me I had to turn the compost heap. I assume I told it to tell me that at some point. I have two largish compost bays (minute in comparison to some, such as the magnificent compost-heaps-from-heaven at the community garden at Hospitalfield in Arbroath – you could bury a small house in each of their bays). I also have several bays and bins for leaves, imports of dung, and bulk biodegradeable materials in waiting, but it is the management of these two main piles that coincides with that moment when summer and autumn are subtly but surely dissolving into winter. For many reasons, I see winter as the start of a new year, and turning the compost always signals new beginnings, new plantings.

The first stage, actually, is barrowing and spreading all the finished compost in bay 2 onto beds and borders around the garden. This has been going on in stages for a couple of months, with sticks and undigested material being thrown back into bay 1. Bay 1 is starting to groan under the weight of future compost, as annual vegetable plants, bean and pea debris and a mountain of weeds from tidying up raise the height to almost unreachable. Once bay 2 is empty, everything in bay 1 can be moved over, introducing oxygen and stimulating breakdown. The topmost material is pitchfork stuff – or even just grabbing arms-full of dry debris and chucking it into bay 2. I try to put the most fibrous material in the middle, where the heat will be highest, making it in theory the best place to break everything down. If I can clean out the chickens just after all this top layer has gone on the bottom, the aromatic stew of chicken poo and wood shavings works as an activator.

The middle layer next, and it becomes more interesting. Here the brandling worms that thrive in the warm centre are busy at work, oodles of them, squirming voraciously in the decomposing mire. They are the visible agents of change, but unseen workers include many kinds of fungus and bacterium, at least as important. The middle layer is a seething mass of activity, and I make sure that on transfer to bay 2, the “working layer” maintains most of its integrity. Composter organisms are forgiving, though, and will migrate to the part with the right temperature if they find themselves compromised. Meanwhile, the garden robin and blackbird perch nearby, popping down for a feast of something whenever I pause to straighten and stretch.

Now the two piles are roughly the same height and I get into a rhythm with the pitchfork. The work is easier. I reflect once more how well yoga practice fits me for gardening – turning compost means twisting without injuring your back, and balancing on wobbly compost to reach the stuff at the back and sides of the bay. I work away getting the compost from the cooler edges into the middle and am left standing on a small pinnacle in the middle of bay 1.

Delving down the pinnacle, the number of compost worms decreases, and the ability to combine a twist with a forward bend comes into play…..work is getting harder again and I don’t want to suffer later! I start to turn out large numbers of wonderful centipedes. Centipedes are carnivores, not detrivores – they are not adding to the composting process, but hunting smaller creatures who live on bits of decomposing plant and humus. In the garden they are generally really good news, as they also eat the invertebrates who want to steal our crops. I try to catch one or two for a photo, but they are camera shy, and very, very fast on all those legs – as true hunters should be.

Photo by u0413u043bu0435u0431 u041au043eu0440u043eu0432u043au043e on Pexels.com

So, near the bottom of bay 1, the compost is as complete as it will be, and ready to use without being turned. I start to fill barrows of the good stuff, rejecting some unprocessed bits and pieces but not worrying too much – any unfinished business should happen in situ, over the course of winter. I dump and spread the compost on beds and borders. I don’t dig it in – no need. I have earthworms for that. It isn’t perfect, my compost. Eggshells hang about for ages, for example, and every autumn I dredge up a few well-rooted avocado plants which have grown from stones that never seem to decompose. (Neither do the skins). The heat given off by decomposition enables them to germinate. This year is no exception, and as usual I take pity on one, pot it up and take it into the warm greenhouse, where it will grow into an untidy, straggly, leaf-spotted pot plant with no hope of bearing fruit, and I will start trying to give it away to unsuspecting friends with more optimism than I have about its value.

The last few shovelfuls, the final pitchfork-loads, and lo! I discover that the sticks I placed at the base of bay 1 last autumn because in a whole year they had failed to become compost are still there, barely altered….. I spread them across the base, along with the 3 year old thick cardboard tubes from inside the new polytunnel cover… they ARE biodegradeable, and I WILL win this battle….one day! On the plus side, after years of running a nursery here when thanks to lack of time and the vagaries of some of our volunteers, my compost heaps produced more plastic than a supermarket, this year my accidental plastic input and retrieval is minimal – and I can re-use the two ties and labels. And only one unreconstructed plastic-reinforced tea bag, right at the bottom, since we have found plastic-free brands.

I level the top of bay 2, and cover it with carpet. I know that within weeks, heat will build up and by spring it will be less than half the height it is now.All is done, and so am I, yoga or no yoga. And yet I’m incredibly happy with today’s work. Compost-making is the heart of my gardening life, the most satisfying, the most compulsive work, returning to the earth the things of the earth. I hope I have a good few years of compost-turning left!

Not for Eating. Nor Collecting

There are different kinds of walks-with-mushrooms. My first, fifty years ago, were cataloguing walks, an academic exercise that became an obsession. A specimen of each would be removed and bagged (no smartphones then, and my Kodak Instamatic didn’t really cut the mustard, though I did try), taken home, pored over for hours to try to identify it, and then a spore print taken. This was all in the cause of a college Rural Studies project that I somehow never grew out of.

When I began to differentiate the ones I could eat from the poisonous ones, foraging AND cataloguing walks happened – a basket for the ones I knew I could eat, and another for the unknowns. Many remained – and remain – unknown, something which used to really bother me. However much later when I was regularly leading foraging walks, I realised that so long as I could recognise the “edible and good” fungi and the poisonous and dodgy ones, most people were happy if we could pin the “small brown jobs” down as far as a genus.

I still take huge interest in identifying weird or remarkable specimens that I’ve never seen before, but these days I’ve discovered the pleasure of walks-with-no-purpose-with mushrooms. This walk, meandering along the River Tay from Dunkeld, had no particular object but to be captivated by the surprise and beauty of the fungal kingdom – so often misrepresented, under-valued, the importance of which is not understood by the majority of humans.

First came a phenomenal display of Fly Agarics, the mushroom of the shamans, too exquisite to pass by, shouting their wares, nestling in ground which was once birchwood. Their mycelium is always entangled with the roots of birch; from the beginnings of plants on dry land they have needed each other. They start as big white crusty buttons, the red skin of the cap breaking through the veil to leave those fairly-tale white “spots”. The cap expands, the spores fall. One was nearly as big as my head.

Troops of Bonnet mushrooms, various types, marched over fallen trees and gossiped in crevices of stumps, glistening in the sunlight. Shiny black excrescences of Witch’s Butter erupted from dead wood. Amethyst Deceivers – which I could have picked for eating but didn’t – showed all their colour range from vivid purple to washed-out grey. In the leaf-litter, the Destroying Angel, related to the Fly Agaric but far more deadly, glowed purest white. Such a potent name for a poisonous mushroom!

Across the track lay a small segment of a huge fairy ring of an enormous mushroom commonly called the Giant Funnel Cap (check the size 8 boot in the photo for scale). This took me immediately back to those student Rural Studies Days, when I first saw this mushroom in local woods, in a ring that was actually measurable. From the fresh fruiting bodies came a strange, un-mushroomy smell. I took one home, identified it easily and, as the book said edible, fried it in slices. It tasted like its smell – like nothing I’d ever encountered. To this day, I’m still trying to work out if I actually like it! But size-wise, they are easy pickings, and it’s fun to estimate the equally astounding diameter of their fairy-rings and plough through the woods to try to find the mushrooms on the other side of it.

This walk wasn’t for foraging, for worrying about what I was looking at, and I haven’t bothered to tease apart the various fairy bonnets. Old habits die hard, but really, I don’t need to know!

When you know winter is coming…

The turn of the season is felt, not so much as a drop in temperature or the way the need for warm socks and waterproofs creeps up on you, but in the way the woods smell different. Decaying leaves, leaves still on the trees but for whom decay is imminent: the smell, for me, of being 11 years old and at a new school, where our introduction to Biology was the invitation to compile a Biology Scrapbook over the course of a year. Diligently, I collected all those leaves on the point of rotting, pressed them in encyclopedia volumes, and learned, when I next opened the books to mount them, the subtle distinction between the smell of sycamore, poplar and oak leaves in autumn.

Today, a soggy Saturday in October, Five Mile Wood smells again of the Biology scrapbook. Weaving in and out of the olfactory hamper of autumn comes the odour of wet grass, heavily trodden, and the varied aromas of dozens of species of fungi, seen and unseen. It is raining, softly but insistently, the rain bringing its own subtle influence on how each smell is perceived, like a wash applied over a freshly executed painting. Beech leaves, nowhere near inclined to fall, glisten with rain. I am challenged to keep the rain from running down my neck, challenged by the chill in the air, challenged by the distraction of mushrooms, all of which breathe of magic, and the resulting lack of time that cut this walk a wee bit short.

I won’t bore you with more gratuitous gloating about the basket of edible mushrooms I took home to dry or make into fungus and ale pies, nor with more photos of the ones I can identify! But today, the woods presented me with an excitingly unknown fungus, the likes of which I’d never encountered in decades of mushroom-hunting.

(Actually, the woods do that every time I go foraging, for there are many, many mushrooms I cannot differentiate. But as I know they’re not on the “edible and good” list which is tattooed into my brain, I indolently dismiss them as “small brown jobs”. Which they usually are.)

Today’s find was different, a real unknown unknown, to quote Donald Rumsfeld. Bright orange-red balls popping up through the grassy banks between the path and the ditch; I first mistook them for discarded tomatoes. But they were fungi, no question, and when I cut one open to help identify it, it was hollow, with pale coloured ribbing inside. I had never seen anything like it, but as it was so distinctive, I expected identification to be straightforward.

So far, I have not found this species in any of my books, and have drawn a blank from the social media mushroom groups from whom I begged enlightenment. Someone said they’d once seen something similar, but yellow, only got distracted by all the edible ceps nearby. Easily done! I have contacted the Tayside & Fife Fungi Group, and wait in hope. I will find out…. Perhaps someone reading this will have the name, and be laughing at my ignorance?

Reflections from a Narrowboat

Moving – scarcely as we are – at something slower than walking pace, the beech trees at Farnhill this early morning are reflected with precision in the still, opaque water. Here in the bows, the faraway engine cannot be heard, and barely a ripple anecdotes the boat’s gliding passage. Gnarled, knobbly roots cling to sandy banks, equally above and below the waterline, making dense and mysterious holes of darkness and nudging great trunks upwards and downwards at matching speed.

Though we pass each tree at a ceremonial pace, none bow, none scrape. There is no concession, no acknowledgement. The suspended branches scarcely move. Body of tree fires into its mirrored trajectory skyward and earthward, as if all its electrons had simultaneously collided on the grey-brown meniscus of the canal.

Into the open, and we hear the awakening traffic on an adjacent trunk road. But the commuters and their noise are from a different universe. A shimmering sleight of time and speed separate them from us. Thistledown and tall spent grasses, immobile, catch the light, all shades of cream and grey.

And that most imperturbable of birds, the heron, cranes his long neck to the minutest degree from the bank, but also declines to move.

Aliens invade Tayside?

I wanted to walk from Cairnie Pier near St. Madoes west to Inchyra on the Tay estuary. My old map (old being the operative word) said there was a path, but it says that about a lot of stretches of the Tay along the Carse of Gowrie that it would be nice to walk, and it’s often mistaken. Google Maps hinted that if you got really, really close to the ground, there might even be two paths, but it wasn’t committing itself. At Cairnie, the existence of a small car park looked promising, and I found the great river hiding among its own reedbeds as usual, lapping quietly at a little inlet whose stones oozed mud. Fishermen’s paths trailed off in both directions.

It was drowsy-hot, an afternoon of hoverflies and docile wasps, intent on the many flowers that lined the path. The river is a conduit for all kinds of unexpected vegetation, which thrive in the tidal mud and lovely untidy, unsanitised, hedgebanks and verges. The yellow buttons of Tansy pop up everywhere along the Tay, together with the silvery Mugwort, a long-ago Roman introduction, allegedly a cure for sore feet. Warm and spicy, the scent of Himalayan Balsam over-rode the scents of native flowers, and its spectacular flowers trumpeted a welcome to pollinating insects. This “alien invader” has been around a good while, anywhere near to water, and it’s a Marmite plant. Speak to any beekeeper and she will wax lyrical about the “ghost bees” who return somnolent and satisfied to the hive, covered in its dense white pollen. Speak to most mainstream ecologists and they will say it’s invasive, outcompetes “our” native flora and has no place in “our” countryside. I love its other name – Policemen’s Helmets – does anyone remember when policemen wore helmets? The top and bottom lips of the flower are encased in a helmet-like fusion of the other petals. I’ve happily pulled it out of ancient oak bluebell woodland, but I can’t say it bothers me too much today. I munch a couple of the peppery-pea tasting unripe seedheads, out of duty.

But then arise the forbidding, towering structures of a harder-to-love alien. Giant Hogweed, introduced by gullible and novelty-obsessed Victorians to adorn their fancy gardens. Apart from its spectacular, H.G. Wellsian-Martian structure (still being extolled by lecturers when I learned garden design), it is low on redeeming features. It is truly rampant, flowers and seeds everywhere and delivers serious burns to anyone brushing against it in sunny weather. It’s a property called phytotoxicity, and today the sun was shining and I passed gingerly.

Far more attractive, and indeed glorious were the bright yellow, sunny Monkey Flowers, coated in tidal mud, and the clumps of tall Rudbeckia, both garden escapes, that sway gently in the breeze up the river. They are dotted all along this stretch of the Tay. I remembered another sunny day talking with David Clark of Seggieden – a great botanist and a man who so loved this river – about whether they “should” be there and what exactly was native anyway, since both of us could be labelled aliens ourselves. We agreed that neither of us were fanatical about racial purity in plants or anything else, but weren’t fond of Giant Hogweed, nor the next invasive alien to show its face on my walk, the Japanese Knotweed. This monster would out-compete the miles and miles of Norfolk Reeds themselves…..oh wait, did I say Norfolk Reed?

Yes that’s right, the incredible Tay Reedbeds, home to rare marshland bird species and a complex, life-affirming ecology, are the result themselves of the introduction of a “non-native”.

My fishermen’s path had petered out, and an attempt to reach Inchyra along the edge of a field also met with failure, so I drove back towards St. Madoes and took a side road left. Thus I reached Inchyra, a beautiful little village of low houses, pretty gardens and derelict farm buildings looking, as they always do, as if a quick afternoon’s work would put them back into service. From this hamlet, crouching among tidal lands as if in terror of sea-level rise, I found a wild garden overlooking the estuary and across to Rhynd, and small moored sailing boats bobbing in the rising tide.

Here was a seat, to the memory of a daughter of a local family, and I sat in complete peace among the reeds, with flowers – native, non-native and all the gradations in between – blessing the air with scent and colour. Even the busy tractor across the water hummed to itself. Rain was forecast; I watched silver-lined thunderclouds pile up on themselves, shift and mutate, and then dissolve again into the blue sky. It was so good to be here.

When it seemed the clouds were getting serious, I found a path that ran beside Cairnie Pow, giving me a good circular walk back to the village. The pow is a local name for a drainage channel, often of ancient origin, that was created to free the fertile soils of the Carse of Gowrie from being marshland. They litter the Carse, and give a sense of being neither quite on dry land nor in water. This one tracked parallel to the path I didn’t find earlier from Cairnie Pier, and then swung left at the point I’d almost got to, where a host of overhead power lines had got together for a gathering. They sky darkened, and the air, hot and still full of the damp scents of flowers, smothered the senses. Young trees, planted by the nearby farm, gave welcome shade. A big, old house rose out of the marsh with no obvious gateway or entrance. It looked dark, empty, full of tales and secrets. I wondered, made up stories in my head, began hearing things and holding imaginary conversations with people who did not exist. Perhaps it was as well that heavy, ponderous raindrops deterred me from more exploration that day.

Finding Ferryden

Ferryden by William Alexander Burns (1921-1972) Photo: Glasgow Museums

It’s often the places you didn’t mean to visit that become the ones you will always remember. It happened to me this weekend. Dropping our daughter off in Arbroath for a summer school gave us the perfect opportunity for a weekend mooching around Angus, camping overnight, visiting favourite haunts and exploring ones we didn’t know so well. So, out from Arbroath (reluctantly missing one of the favourites, the pie shop, on account of a planned visit later to another, the chippie) and a bask and paddle at Lunan Bay, my number two go-to beach for restoration of equanimity and sea watching. The tide was higher than I’ve ever seen; words were spoken of exceptional lunar activity sooking the sea up high then dropping it again, along with torn up seaweed and the corpses of seabirds. Less beach than usual then (and therefore more people per square kilometre); the dog confused by reaching the water’s edge so soon, but gratified to find long tangles of bootlace weed which he proceeded to bring to us to hurl into the surf. Heaven knows how much seawater he guzzled retrieving them, but he was happy.

Heading vaguely towards Montrose, because that’s the way we always go, unravelling a dog-eared and out of date Ordnance Survey map and checking the terrain on Google maps, we took a notion to go to see the Stevenson lighthouse at Scurdie Ness. To get to the coastal path which would take us there, we decided to park at Ferryden. Lying on the estuary of the River South Esk, opposite the unappealing industrial sprawl of waterside Montrose, it wasn’t a place we’d ever bothered to visit before. But what a lovely surprise – who knew!

Crouching three or four deep, back from the harbour wall were the small, varicoloured and practical houses that once belonged to fishermen; front doors on the first floor and accessed by stone stairways up the sides or fronts of the cottages. The roadway between the first row and the water was a free for all – someone was in the middle of chopping wood, children played and neighbours gossiped. Pots and planters of flowers and vegetables spilled out from house to road, and there was clearly some neighbourly competition in the landscape design and artistry of the stretches of wall belonging to each house along the harbour. Almost every house had a seat, table, bench or furniture of some kind marking their spot. Ramshackle sheds and crumbling huts rubbed shoulders with homes and bits of old boats. From the wall, washing lines extended out over the water, children’s clothes, bright towels and lines of smalls bouncing like bunting in the sunshine. The washing was reeled out and later retrieved by a pulley system which I’m guessing was once used to dry nets, and I suppose they have sturdy storm pegs to avoid knickers blowing out to sea in a gale.

If we’d been in the East Neuk (of Fife), or a Cornish tourist honeypot, I suppose I’d have taken photos. Ferryden doesn’t present as “quaint” or a tourist attraction, despite the inevitable interpretive boards, and it would have felt rude. So sorry, no pictures! We guddled our way up to the coast path and had a lovely walk to and beyond the lighthouse, which got bigger and bigger as we approached until it was overwhelming. The hot sun released the scent of thistles, while ragweed and clumps of Keeled Garlic jostled in flower. Down on the little rocky beaches, my mother joined me in my head to exclaim, as she ever did on seaside holidays, at the winkles, periwinkles, limpets and small darting creatures in rock pools, and to gently tempt the waving tentacles of plump sea anemones and feel them sucker briefly onto my little finger. I collected pocket stones, which I did not add to the wonderful collection of painted and decorated stones on the wall by the path, left by residents and visitors.

Back to the old fishing village of Ferryden and its quirky charm, we had a campsite to find and it was past six o’clock. Was that really the smell of salt and vinegar wafting over the South Esk? Montrose this time for the fish suppers!

Not Ugly.

Midsummer, June, and roadside verges, hedgerows and path edges are brimming with life and good things to eat. Well, they should be, if you’re lucky, and some fusser hasn’t gone forth with strimmer or spray gun to transform the riot of green and gold, the effusion of flowers, seedheads and shoots to bare brown, sad-looking blankness or close-mown, stressed-out grass. I can never comprehend the small suburban minds of householders who would rather gaze out on monochrome than the living proof of life on earth. It’s one thing to keep your own verge tidy, and occasional cutting can increase the range of flowers, but it’s galling when people attack verges opposite or near their houses but which they don’t actually own. I confess, I get quite bitter about it.

During the 2020 lockdown, I embarrassed my family by taking to task a poor, misguided woman who was wielding herbicide along the route of a long-distance footpath. Granted, it was a stretch bordering her own property, and right enough, as she protested, she wasn’t killing everything…..

No, she was only killing what she called “the ugly, untidy species” that she had no use for. These were Dockens (have you ever looked at the intricacy of the flower structure in the Dock family?), and Hogweed. That’s where I really saw red.

NO!!!! I don’t mean “Giant Hogweed” (Heracleum mantegazzianum), an invasive non-native plant known to cause serious skin burns and out-compete other plant species. Even I acknowledge that’s a nightmare, albeit a spectacular one. I mean Common Hogweed (Heracleum sphondylium ) a soft-leaved, far smaller native plant, with edible leafstalks and, at this time of year, the most delectable “broccoli” or unopened flower heads. Very few people have a skin reaction to this plant (far fewer than do to tomato plants for example), and I look forward to eating the broccoli every June.

“But it’s too tall, too big, too ugly and the bees and butterflies don’t visit it!” I was told. So then, we eradicate all the living things that we personally don’t like the look of, do we? What is ugly, anyway? Do we have to apply our personal prejudices to plants, other animals… humans? Sadly, many people do…..labelling leading to intolerance leading to hate crime leading to… genocide? And if a flower is constructed to be pollinated, not by the human species’ cosy favourites of bee and butterfly, but by beetles, flies or (perish the thought) wasps, does that make them useless, unworthy or ugly?

No, it darned well doesn’t. If Hogweed, Dockens or any other species becomes a weed in your carrots or undermines your potatoes, fair enough. It’s not because they’re ugly, they’re just doing what they are supposed to do. But leave them in the waysides that are their habitat. Before anyone gets horticulturally imperialistic ideas locally, I’m gathering hogweed broccoli. Just trim away the leafy shoots to prepare. Sauteed in butter with a little water and sprinkled with lemon juice and salt, they are a summer treat.

All prepared for braising or battering…..

Last night I made hogweed pakoras – coated in spicy chickpea flour batter and deep-fried – to go with the curry. I meant to take a photo for the blog, but suddenly, they were all gone. I need to get some more. Long live hedgerow delicacies!

May: Late, but Pink!

There have always been a few pink ones, tantalisingly rosy in the distance, exquisite in proximity. Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna), also known as May, the mainstay of the rural hedgerow and the exuberant, wild lace that dominated the countryside in late spring, until money-obsessed agribusinesses ripped out the vast majority of the hedgerows and hammered the rest into stunted wedges that never got a chance to flower – it’s genetically variable when it comes to flower colour. Traditionally pure white – Housman’s “high snowdrifts in the hedge”* – but look closely and the suspicion of pink usually lurks around the outside of the petals.

This year, our local hawthorns stayed tightly in bud all during the cold, frosty and then wet weather of April and most of May. I was despairing of them opening in traditional time and thinking of renaming the shrub “June”. I found a single flower open on 21st May, but it was the end of the month before they felt safe enough to come out of hiding, and already their companion shrub, the broom, was going over. But now….. they astound, they soar, they are alive with insects….and, for whatever reason, they have emerged in all shades of pink. It’s like wading through raspberry ripple ice cream, sneezing with the outrageous amount of pollen and drowning in that pungent, not-quite-nice but not entirely nasty, scent.

What a sight to hold drunkenly in your mind’s eye, until May – or June – comes again!

*’Tis time, I think, by Wenlock Town,
The golden broom should blow;
The hawthorn, sprinkled up and down
Should charge the land with snow.

Spring will not wait the loiterer’s time
Who keeps so long away;
So others wear the broom and climb
The hedgerows heaped with may.

Oh tarnish late on Wenlock Edge,
Gold that I never see;
Lie long, high snowdrifts in the hedge
That will not shower on me.

from “A Shropshire Lad” by A.E. Housman

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……

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