A Melancholy river III – Putcher fishing

The remains of one of the last putcher ranks near Shepperdine in 2010

What makes history? I’m bound to say that I’m with Alice Oswald on this one. Her long poem “A sleepwalk on the Severn” looks away from connected and confected narrative “A caused B, therefore” – and gathers fragments; the flotsam and jetsam of real life and turns the overheard conversation, the bus tickets, dog ends and litter that flow past us like a river and fashions them into an evocation. History comes back to us after the event. In retrospect the ordinary – ‘the way we did things in those days’ glows with a last ray of sunlight before the sun drops below the horizon. Memory lends new life to the events.

I was sitting in a very boring meeting, gazing out of the window when a tractor and trailer passed slowly down the lane loaded high with salmon putchers, turned off and took the track down to the river Severn. It took years to realize that I might have been witnessing the last time putchers were set up. Of course they haven’t disappeared. They’re good to grow sweet peas up and I daresay they feature in the Chelsea flower show, but like cobblers’ shoe lasts and salt glazed gin bottles they’re more likely to be repurposed as decorative patina by interior designers.

Putchers go back to the 5th century, they’re a five foot long conical basket with a wide opening tapering to a point. They were set up in a rank and the ones I remember and in the photo were arranged in a V shape with the arms opening upstream to catch fish on the ebb tide which, with the poor visibility in the water the fish would enter and find themselves trapped in the putchers which were attached up to five high in the rank. There was another type of putcher called a kype which was longer and the hazel whips were woven tighter towards the end to trap smaller fish.

There was a small shack upstream from Shepperdine and near the ranks which were thicker stakes embedded in the mud. It was here that one of the last fishermen wove his putchers from hazel or withy during the tidal slacks. I met him on the riverbank one day and we had a long conversation in which he told me that he hardly ever caught salmon. He was an ardent royalist, and he said he always sent the first salmon of the season to the then Prince Charles, but the previous season the first fish was also the last. Nonetheless he packed it up and sent it to Highgrove, waiting in vain for any letter of thanks, which left him deeply disappointed rather than angry. The fish, he said were often marked with raw lesions which he suspected were caused by pollution in the river. Some time later I was taking to someone who worked for Imperial (Commonwealth) smelting and asked him if they dumped waste in the river. He freely admitted that they did, but said it was only gypsum, a byproduct of one of their processes. Nearby Albright and Wilson who made some very noxious chemicals, and a fertilizer plant also nearby almost certainly dumped waste in the river. Then only a few weeks ago we watched Michael Sheen’s documentary about the dumping of PCB’s around Wales. It emerged that some of this dangerous waste was being dumped further upstream in the river.

The river bank is wild, and cold winds sweep up the valley forming waves as they blow upstream. Birds gyre and tumble above. The water is bitterly cold, the tide menacing and ignores normal working hours; the mud is thick and glutinous – no place for an easy life. The putchers were emptied at low tide and before the great ecological silence, the salmon were sold locally at a subsistence wage and yet nothing the man said implied that it wasn’t a fulfilling life. Increasing regulation finished what pollution had begun and the only evidence of the practice, the ranks, were left rotting in the mud. I think he was the last one. It still staggers on in the Chepstow side being kept alive by the few remaining licence holders who still practice lave netting.

Elver omelette

Another form of fishing which once provided food was destroyed by industrial poaching and yet more regulation. Our local baker once told me how they would go to some secret spots with nets to catch elvers, baby eels. He described to me in detail the making of elver omelettes: break the eggs and beat them with pepper and salt, tip in the live elvers, cook and eat making sure they’d all stopped wriggling. The perfect breakfast for a young man with a bike and a net who’d been up half the night. But, like wild garlic, black headed gulls’ eggs and wild fungi they represented a lot of money to professional foragers and poachers. The elver population dropped like a stone as they were overfished and sent to Japan as a delicacy. Incidentally the baker, Brian, was one of the few remaining people alive who knew where and when to cross the Severn in the shallows somewhere around Arlingham.

I can see Brian now; a Severnsider to the core getting up at four am every day to make bread for the village. He began his career as a baker by making deliveries with a horse and cart as far away as Oldbury on Severn. He would slip away when the shop was opened by his wife – who came from the forest of Dean across the river – and take his dogs for a walk wearing a Loden cloth jacket and a cloth cap. In the winter he would go rough shooting with Les, the funeral director. He didn’t say much but what he did say had deep roots. The rooted people in the community were its soul; families going back generations and who, as you walked further upstream, would sometimes offer a hint of Welsh in their accents. The river is also a border – the border, porous, without barriers and gun emplacements or men in fatigues but when you cross the M48 bridge you soon realize you’re in another country.

The M4 bridge; Wales in the mist the Severn Beach railway line in the foreground.

A Melancholy River: Severnside I.

The second Severn crossing at Severn Beach, looking towards Chepstow

Maybe I’m being a bit unfair, labelling the river Severn as melancholic. That’s largely projection on my part. You can see from the thickness of the sea-wall that it deserves a lot of respect. The speed, force and sheer height of the tides makes the Severn a dangerous river to navigate. The second biggest rise and fall in the world gives it not just the appearance of power but also the sound of it. The unmistakable song of water on the move; riffling the banks as a farmer might roll a full head of grain between thumb and finger to feel the measure of the harvest; investigating the cornice of field edge here, a length of stock fence or a fallen tree. A fast flowing river is hungry.

But the Severn is also a tidal river as far as Gloucester. It breathes: rises and falls; rises and falls; breathing inwards and outwards twice a day every 12 hours and 25 minutes – constantly moving against the times of sunrise and sunset because the tide belongs to the moon, which is why the Severn is female and has been so since Celtic and Roman times. The tide flushes its banks for 25 miles as a river and a further 15 miles if you include the estuary where it meets the Bristol channel. But the Moon is in a constant elliptical orbit around the earth and so the highest and lowest tides – the springs and neaps – which cover a tidal range of between 12 and 15 metres, forty to fifty feet of variation at Avonmouth, occur according to the gravitational pull around full and new moon. At these times the funnelling of upstream tide on the river, particularly around Arlingham, meeting the downstream flow from beyond Gloucester, causes a surge wave known as the Severn Bore, twice a day for about 130 days every year. The biggest surges gather abundant spectators and surfers as the wave moves upstream. But there’s even more. On January 30th 1604 a tsunami wave over 25 feet high and travelling at 30mph barrelled up the Severn inundating villages and killing thousands of people. The churches at Littleton on Severn and Oldbury on Severn are built on raised ground and may have escaped the worst. In 2001 during the Foot and Mouth crisis I stood in Oldbury churchyard and witnessed the sight and smell of thousands of cattle being burned in giant pyres. So yes, I think some element of mournful is justified.

On the other hand, the Severn can be a great solace. Just as I would go fishing, if time was short I could always drive down to Shepperdine and walk up the path towards Oldbury. At dusk it is at its most mysterious as the lights come on across the river and the navigation lights indicate the safe passage for boats. Occasionally a skein of geese will fly overhead and once I was near the old Windbound when a hare careered up the field alongside and flew across the fence within feet of me.

The place I choose to call Severnside is a variable strip of land to the west of the A38 and the motorway. When we first moved to the area I was convinced that the locals were rotating road signs to keep people out. It has more in common with fen or wetland than anything else. Fields are small, drained by rhynes (pronounced reens) and small scale farming is the only show in town. It was once – and still is – a good place to grow apples, especially cider apples because the mass of water nearby acts like a gigantic night storage heater. Frosts visit the orchards less frequently than in the rest of Gloucestershire. Sheep still graze in the orchards. When I wanted some real peace I would cycle down there and drink in the isolated atmosphere. It’s easy to get lost in the multiple lanes and tracks but easier to lose yourself and your troubles.

The job was relentless, and I was the recipient of many confidences, not all of them good or comforting. People would share their troubles but they would also share their stories; stories that connected them and me back in history. Every pastoral visit, every wedding, baptism or particularly funeral would yield a rich harvest of stories which I rarely wrote down; but as time went on I became increasingly aware that without ever volunteering for the job I was becoming the Story-Keeper. As I grew close to retirement after 25 years, that sense of responsibility weighed on me more and more as the population changed from a largely farming, fishing and quarrying community to a commuting village which exploded in size to accommodate workers in the two (now decommissioned) nuclear power stations at Oldbury and Berkeley. A trajectory that was accelerating and which would never change. For ten years after retiring I felt constrained to keep quiet, but by now most of the old folks are dead and even the incomers who were’t averse to a bit of bullying and harrying have mostly passed on. The congregations in the churches I cared for were (largely) wonderful; the diocese did nothing but increase the workload. The river was my escape and consolation; it was big; vast and utterly indifferent to my troubles, successes and failures. I started to photograph the plants – never quite sure what they were called – the abandoned barges and the machinery that accompanied the drainage channels; the orchards and cider houses. It was my escape. The birds, the wind, the sound of the water, the larger ships entering and leaving the canal at Sharpness. It was OK to be a lost soul there, and so I’ve started to reunite some of those photographic memories with words. Even melancholy has its joys.

A Melancholy River: Severnside II.

A riverside culvert between the River Severn and the Sharpness Gloucester canal.

No I haven’t got the numbering wrong – Part One of what looks like it might be a series is yet to be written; I’ll do it today because like all writers I’m driven by the material which has been demanding that I set it down since I retired ten years ago

I’m not even quite sure what started my imagination boiling but it may have been this photograph, or rather me standing on the banks of the Severn wondering whether it would ever be possible to create image rich writing, linking words and photographs in a way that tells a story but leaves it up to the reader to decide where to start and where to leave. In those days, 20 years ago, The technology was difficult to use and demanded a skill set I never possessed and much more powerful hardware than I could aspire to.

But what I couldn’t show in a single photo was what was behind me on the riverside. It’s a raw and often windswept landscape up there on the Severn. At the point where it joins the Bristol Channel it’s a bleak industrial wasteland and the river itself is unreachable, hidden behind a railway line, giant storage silos, abandoned flour mills, a maze of conveyor belts and gas tanks. For the first mile or so north it continues in much the same way. Huge windmills rotate slowly and, nearby, a pair of gas power station chimneys steam and occasionally belch cumulus clouds that you can see from the motorway which runs two or three miles away along the ridge. You would have to possess a perverse imagination like mine to find much joy in it. There’s even a signposted “Smoke Lane”; there are cement works, lorry depots, warehouses, garages and tyre services and if, like me you have a long memory you could see where Imperial Smelting once stood; and the site of the Albright and Wilson chemical works that blew up after a paperwork mixup united two incompatible and dangerous chemicals; shut down the two motorway bridges and locked the occupiers in thousands of homes as the noxious fumes spread. Further on, the place where the Philblack (later Sevalco) works once covered the landscape with black carbon dust which is an important ingredient of car and lorry tyres.

Gradually as you drive further on, the river appears beyond a narrowing strip of shrubby grassland; the falling tidal flow brown and thick with the sediment it’s picked up on its long journey from the Pumlumon Fawr range in Wales where it begins, so I read, as a hard to find series of small springs. It’s as ugly as sin is alleged to be, and yet, maybe, I’m the greater sinner because I love it. These industrial landscapes are something! Every time I drive along that road I hear the voice of Bob Dylan singing Hard Rain.

I know, I’m not selling it very well but post industrial sites are my thing; dramways, abandoned coal pits, lead and manganese mines all have their botanical survivors and the aficionados who hunt them. The grim road continues north towards the two Severn bridge crossings, passing Severn Beach where birders find a great deal to interest them including Little Owls and all manner of migrating birds. Severn Beach was also, once upon a time, a destination where the single track railway brought thousands of visitors to paddle in the muddy water, bathe in the Blue Lagoon (well actually it was painted blue) and shelter from the wind in rented beach huts. There was even an amusement arcade and cafe owned by a traveller family that I subsequently got to know. One elderly lady I used to visit in Bristol had black and white photographs of the family beach hut on her mantlepiece.

This 25 year old picture of me was taken near the turnstile of the Aust Ferry turnstile where Bob Dylan departed for Cardiff on his controversial electric tour.

Onwards and northwards through Pilning, past the now closed but still a bit whiffy rubbish tip, the old road to the ferry terminal which, when the ferry closed become a favourite dogging spot (I’m told!), and into the more salubrious ruralities like Aust who refused to allow me to take responsibility their church after an unfortunate interview with the churchwarden and his wife who took an instant dislike to me. It was a happy escape for us all. The end of the M48 bridge was where my parishes began and ran upriver to the diocesan border to somewhere near Oldbury on Severn. I had skin in the game!

So why do I call myself Severnsider? given my lukewarm enthusiasm for its tidal estuary. Good question. Here- maybe – is part of the answer

One of the scuttled vessels at the Purton ship’s graveyard.

Behind the culvert in my first photo there is this hulk, plus many others, scuttled on the river bank. I used to go fishing on the canal. Pastoral work can be pretty punishing and after a particularly hard funeral – children for instance – I used to go there, more to sit quietly than to catch anything. Canal fishing is a difficult and specialised skill. In parish ministry you become the lightning rod for a lot of horrible situations and there’s no-one you can tell or talk to. The river runs alongside the canal at Purton and this mysterious collection of dead boats on the river intrigued me. In my imagination a catastrophic downturn in trade, or the coming of the railway or some other market crash led to the scrapping of the boats. There are lots of them and they make a melancholy sight which often chimed with my mood. Here are some more photos:

The real reason for this mas extinction event was that when the river broke its banks – as it often does – the destructive power and speed of the tide (the second highest tidal range in the world) threatened the integrity of the canal bank and by extension the canal itself. So these ships which included Severn trows, concrete and steel barges were towed to the spot and sunk in order to protect the canal. Some of the boats are now protected sites due to their age and rarity. My fascination with this stretch of the river never went away. There was more to it, though. My grandfather determined early on that I was going to read Dickens, and was always ready to lend me his own copies. Is it at all significant that the two favourite authors of my early reading life were HG Wells (hence the Potwell Inn) and Charles Dickens (hence the identification with Ham Peggotty, and upturned boats? These were the geographical heftings of my young imagination and so finding them in real life was a kind of homecoming. Magwitch, Peggotty and Polly haunted my dreams and still visit me now.

There’s so much more to write about the Severn and next time I’ll be remembering the last putcher and kype fishermen, ending a tradition that lasted from the 5th century, and elver omelettes of course along with a new and revelatory understanding of why the salmon developed lesions.

The Severn further upriver near Arlingham where you can see (and hear) the Severn Bore

Back in the kitchen honouring the rituals

Madame was once teased by her brother in law when she was in her pre-teens that her innards would turn yellow if she ate piccalilli. – the pickle which represents one of the dishes that came back with the soldiers and civil servants of colonial India (cf curry etc) and became a fully naturalised dish. It’s not to everyone’s taste of course, and it can be a bit fierce depending on how much mustard you include, but the combination of leftover veg from the season; diced cauliflower, little onions, beans, green tomatoes, carrots and courgettes bathed in a golden yellow sauce of cornflower, turmeric, mustard, sugar, honey and vinegar is a terrific way of using up the waifs and strays from the garden or the allotment.

The problem, every year, is that we haven’t quite finished last year’s. In fact we still cook as if the Potwell Inn has just been featured in the Guardian. We have a lot of stored food; probably more than the two of us will ever be able to finish up. The concomitant problem is that every year entails a frantic hunt for empty preserving jars and lids. The lids are important because the industrial acidity of pickles and chutneys can eat into them – so generally we use Kilner jars and renew the rubber rings, or the Italian Bormioli jars which have coated rust proof lids. Over the years we’ve amassed quite a collection of different sizes and every year we top up supplies of lids.

In the cupboard stores today we found masses of tomato sauces; passata; damson: plum; blackcurrant and redcurrant jams; bramble jelly; dower house chutney; green tomato chutney, and various experimental preserves involving figs; peppers; beetroot and anything else that manage to cling to a tree until the autumn. I think we might be channelling the grandparents and my mum, who, as the alzheimer’s took hold would go shopping and just come back with half a dozen tins of spaghetti hoops which had lodged in her failing memory. She was a fine cook in her day.

Live as if you might die tomorrow and farm as if you’ll live forever

Farming proverb.

Preserving is one of the great pleasures of autumn and early winter. Today Madame and I sat either side of the kitchen table chopping vegetables in companionable harmony. The deep winter feels less of a threat when the cupboards are full and the sheer pleasure of it led to a conversation about the allotment and whether we should keep it on after such a difficult season. The decision was reached in ten seconds (Yes!) and was followed by a discussion of the seed order and the decision to get a garden shredder to lessen the load of composting the waste. I think we’ve permanently turned our backs on bonfires to reduce our carbon footprint and so we’re going to spread the shredded waste as a mulch over as many beds as we can.

Retrospectively the season was desperately hard work, but come the end we grew a lot of food; picking the last crop of green tomatoes yesterday. I guess as we get older and creakier we can at least replace some of the manual labour with battery powered tools and raised beds. There’s one job that will have to wait for a day or two – Christmas cake and puddings.

Back home from Cornwall I was able to sort out the computer problem with the (eventual) help of a WordPress Happiness Engineer who just emailed and said “do this – 1,2,3”. Music to a non technical ear. We seemed to jump from summer to winter in the course of 175 miles although the heavy rain has cleared during the afternoon and the sun is shining. We’re due the first named storm of the season on Friday just in time to celebrate the Government’s batshit crazy decision to drill for gas which will do everything to damage the environment and nothing whatever to make life easier for us. The economy, is not the same as a mountain or a river it’s not an object it’s a concept; and whilst you can’t change the height of a mountain or the course of a river with clever arguments, you most certainly can change a concept by thinking clearly, formulating your aims and evaluating the best way of achieving them. If the earth is on fire, alternately with being underwater, we can decide what sort of world we would prefer to live in, formulate the best way of organising the economy to achieve it, and get on with it.

Crown Prince squashes and a couple of pumpkins – one for the grandchildren

Photographic postcript to Treloan Lane

I’ve written several pieces now about Treloan lane. Unfortunately, due to an ongoing problem with WordPress I haven’t been able to format them and add photos in the normal way. However I’ve been playing with some possible workarounds using a combination of Google Docs on my laptop and the Jetpack phone app and there’s enough to offer more photos in my pieces until I resolve things with WordPress and get some new login credentials. 

So below are a few photos spread out over around one and a half miles which encapsulate the lovely variation in habitat as you walk the length; between tarmac lane; metalled private road through the estate; a wide patch of trees edged with some beautiful Jack and Jill style drystone walls; a length of open  pasture; another length of muddy path with fifteen foot high hedges and wide verges merging with what must be an ancient sunken track with the polished bedrock showing through in places. At the end a left turn takes you through another footpath to the sea.

It’s a lovely place for a slow stroll. Keeping your eyes open – not so much for the rarities, but for the locals which are so well adapted to the microclimate the path offers – so much so that you can see the transition from inland to cliff edge in the plants themselves. If you walk east along the coastal path at the bottom you can pass through three at least NVC landscape classifications in a mile. Many plants are generalists, they’ll put down roots wherever they find themselves; but others are much more fussy. Then there are plants that cope with being trodden by hikers, plants that live in walls, plants that can withstand drought; plants that have been here since the ice age and others that came in by car tyre; naturalised strays from gardens and others clinging on to the edges of arable fields now drenched with chemicals. The closer you look and the slower you go, the more you see. The longer you just stand still; watch and listen the more birds you’ll hear and see; the more butterflies will flit past. What’s so special for me about Treloan Lane is the sheer variety of habitats plus the fact that we’ve been walking up and down it for maybe 25 years in all seasons and a double plus for the fact that it’s blissfully quiet. There are lanes like it on Mendip and others in various parts of Wales – marvellous oases in which to do some immersive learning. Anyway, here are some photos we took last week; mostly not of plants but of habitats.

Across a crowded pavement

Seaside Daisy

I really did meet someone who fell in love with someone they’d never met before, across a crowded room; or at least in that instance a crowded airport departure gate. The outcome was a bit messy so I won’t enlarge on the story any further. But is it, however, appropriate to use the expression in relation to a plant?  If love is redemptive, is it alright if the redemption looks back at a single pub lunch that was an unrelentingly miserable betrayal of cooking; the corpse of the idea lying dead in a shroud of soggy batter and a fish stew in a Cornish fishing village whose contents contained nothing but tasteless cornflower water and a handful of imported jumbo prawns. That is something that takes a bit of getting over. 

The god of surprises on the other hand must have had that redemptive moment in hand already as we walked back to the little park overlooking the bay. It won’t come as a shock to anyone who knows me, especially to Madame, that I’ve become a bit of a stalker in spite of all that I’ve written about trainspotter botanists recently. The Fleabanes are an attractive quarry precisely because they’re quite hard to identify. Some of them are regarded as weeds, but the upside is that some of them grow near us in Bath. I took a look in Stace IV (he who must be obeyed) and he lists thirteen species and subspecies, two of which grow in the pavement outside the flat and one in Charlie Stirton’s garden just down the road. The challenge is just that they have an inclination to cross-breed and unlike the ones that grow under supervision in a botanical garden, they rarely if ever show up in the same place and at the same time, and so it’s hard to get a detailed understanding of them. Of course there are a number of other Fleabanes that aren’t in the family I’m most interested in, so to be more precise I’m hunting the Erigerons – and that is the end of the Latin lesson. 

So I’ve found four members of the family within walking distance and there are a couple more slowly making their way up the river. But one I’ve never seen before is not often referred to as a fleabane because it’s commonly called the “Seaside Daisy”  and after my dyspeptic walk down the road from the pub – there it was! – growing and obviously naturalised alongside the narrow pavement. The pavement isn’t really that narrow but there are always builders vans and SUV’s which are too corpulent to fit their allotted spaces.  

Of course it immediately raises the issue about whether it’s a true native so to be clear: it’s not; it’s a boat plant you might say which – like most of the residents of the depleted local population – blew in from somewhere else like London or Birmingham. You know this because the local Spar shop sells sourdough bread and wines at £30.

Anyway, to return to the redemptive moment, the second I set eyes on it I knew exactly what it was – the photo is, as always, at the top. I can’t begin to express the pleasure of seeing that little outsider; outrider of a plant. A naturalized neophyte boldly asserting possession of a yard or so of someone’s garden.; someone who had the good taste to let it be. Somewhere down that little harbourside road there’s a gardener with vision, running a mission to those with eyes to see that even weeds and gnarly incomers have their beauty. I still haven’t forgiven the pub, but the takeaway memory of the day is of the seaside daisy; petals faintly purple like Michaelmas daisies, succulent salt resistant leaves in rosettes making the best of an Indian summer’s day overlooking the bay. Love at first sight. 

Spring is waiting in the wings

The little yellow flowered strawberry

We walked down Treloan lane again today in full autumn attitude. I would guess that with the strong winds we’ve been having here, half of the leaves are down and bare branches are the norm, silhouetted against an unexpectedly blue sky; a midwinter Chinese blue sky – pale cobalt as featured on the best porcelaine pots. Is this an Indian summer? We were in the cafe at the bottom of the lane when a couple of walkers came in. His T-shirt was soaked in sweat; it’s mid October so yes, this is a bit of an Indian summer.

I guess the default position for autumn would be to switch our attention from plants to fungi, but in spite of a lot of excitable pre-publicity, it doesn’t yet appear to be much of a bumper year for fungi. Our total haul today was a couple of small horse mushrooms under a tree. We left them where they were, mainly because it’s surprisingly hard to distinguish them from yellow staining mushrooms, and because they were heaving with maggots.

So all of our attention was on the basal rosettes and the few plants in flower. We were (as always) looking for promises of spring before winter really begins.  Years ago I was greatly cheered by realizing that the sticky buds on horse chestnut trees are real buds just waiting to open and release their lovely candlestick flowers and new leaves. These days, being old and full of words it would all be blah blah if I let it ; but I don’t want to lose that sense of excitement in the changing seasons. I’ve come to realize that the seasons don’t pass like a string of sausages but each one births the next. 

Of course there are always the usual suspects if you’re looking for a splash of colour on a walk. Could there be any scarlet and yellow to equal an elderly blackberry leaf putting on a final show of glory after the foragers have left? The red campions and herb Robert can usually be relied on for even a winter walk, and – well – dandelions; ubiquitous and difficult to nail down even for the trainspotter tendency. But it’s the “surely nots” that make us stop and kneel for a closer look. Yesterday it was a yellow flowered strawberry – deep within the undergrowth – and next to it a single fruit, bright red and ready to fall into the ground. It could have been the earliest or the latest celandine I’d ever seen until I noticed the fruit. We met a Danish woman on the same walk several years ago who insisted that at home they made jam with them but I wasn’t sure if she was thinking about Potentilla indica or the true wild strawberry whose fruit looks very similar. The yellow flower is the giveaway, but of course you need to have seen the plant through a whole season to know that.

It’s interesting to recall chance meetings in the same place. Yesterday we chatted to a couple on a bike ride who’d once worked at the big house which, at the time, was owned by a retired Chancellor of the Exchequer who sold it for £3 million. Recently, after a spell as a posh wedding venue it was sold for £12.5 million. In a gushing piece in Country Life it was described as “unique in owning a large length of foreshore”. It’s an interesting concept, and fascinating to reflect on whether a deed of title could add anything at all to the pleasure of sitting on a log and contemplating the sea. But whatever turns you on.  We also once had an amusing encounter with a couple whose local accent I recognised at once as from South Gloucestershire. As we chatted about our shared experiences near the river Severn they began to talk about a pretty dreadful character – the Vicar who’d taken the pews out – and we realized they were talking about me. There was an amusing moment when they did a full reverse ferret and we went our separate ways. 

Another yellow flower caught Madame’s eye. It was an uncharacteristically small nipplewort plant enjoying the last warm sunshine. I did a bit of research later to try to find out the origin of the name. So often plants have gathered names via the medieval doctrine of signatures which had a benevolent god designing every plant with a clue to its healing properties. The flask shaped flowers of nipplewort are a bit of an imaginary stretch – they look far more like the grease nipples on old steam engines to me, but my vocabulary of nipples is a bit limited. In short, though, the nipplewort was used for cracked skin and soreness in the past and even today it has a place in expensive face creams.

So aside from occasional flowers the main pleasure of the walk in autumn is the pristine rosettes and basal leaves of plants waiting their turn for spring. One of the most interesting things I’ve learned about nature is the succession of flowers in hedgerows. It is quite wonderful that the hedgerow in spring isn’t the static joy that we often see when we don’t look. It’s like one of those country circle dances where everyone changes places. The carrot family are the stars of the show as each appears, flowers and dies back allowing the next cousin to shine for a couple of weeks. Among the detritus, skeletal remains and leaves of the last season we found a multitude of shoots of three cornered garlic. 

Treloan Lane is one of our all time favourite walks. We’re getting a bit old for yomping across difficult tracks for miles but the enforced slowness brings its own joys. Small really is beautiful, and one and a half miles of Cornish lane can beat many more popular wildflower habitats into a cocked hat.

Slow down!

Druce Cranesbill, Geranium X oxonianum, probably ssp ‘Lace Time’ in hedge on lane entering Portscatho

This isn’t the first time I’ve written a piece under the title “slow down”. I did a search just now and I last wrote a piece under that title three years ago, but I’ve explored the concepts on many more occasions. It’s really no more complicated an idea than saying that the slower you walk the more you see; blindingly obvious but in a culture where our personal sense of worth is run by the clock, by targets and by personal bests, crippling to our inner lives.

However the antidote to this dilemma isn’t outsourcing our inner lives to TV celebrities on carefully curated road trips across the earth. You don’t need a full film crew, a fleet of SUV’s and a budget of £100,000 to find nature because it’s there, right next to you. Even if you’re sitting at a desk it’s there, growing under your toenails and eating your favourite woolen pullover.

By the way, in an effort to sound more like a proper influencer, dare I suggest that an 18th century Japanese raku bowl (available from me, of course) and filled with keratin rich armpit hair is the cure for clothes moths that everyone is talking about. No? possibly not, then.

Some “bonking beetles” on Hogweed.

Take a tip from a real expert – no not me – from a child. What do we (did we) find ourselves saying to our children most often? Wasn’t it “Oh do come on!” as we, ever anxious to keep to the unwritten itinerary of the day, try to rush them past something we regard as trivial, like a Dandelion, or some beetles on a weed – so we can get home and open a bottle as soon as we’ve got them to bed. I write from experience!

But children don’t see the world in the same way that we do, with our stratified hierarchies of significance. If we were to sit still for five minutes and think about the way we see the world through our overrated adult eyes we’d perhaps realize that we’ve been schooled in not seeing because seeing soaks up a lot of time and energy. We don’t see street beggars and poverty, we don’t see old people (it might be catching), we don’t see what’s happening in the world because it gives us a headache, we don’t see that society has become deeply and dangerously unequal. We especially don’t see the rapid erosion of nature. We don’t notice the starlings no longer fly in murmurations over Redcliffe church, we don’t notice that those lovely Mexican Fleabanes have been weedkilled or scraped off the pavements. In fact we’d rather think that the city would be a better place if we gave it a bit of ruthless tidying. Let’s divide nature into weeds and pests versus window boxes. Children don’t make that mistake so readily unless they’ve been incarcerated in front of the idiot’s lantern (my grandfather’s name for television). We live, mentally, in -left-over from the war – concrete pill boxes and see the earth through a slit just wide enough to poke a rifle through. 

But imagine, for a moment, becoming a child again and switching off the filters for an hour or two and seeing the earth as it is, even in its depleted current state, in all its glory. Let’s use the idea of seeing promiscuously. Everything, all at once, in a riot of sound and colour, unedited or curated by our parents, our teachers, our neighbours and by what we call common sense which may be common but it lacks much sense. A child’s world is full of glory.  I remember the spiritual director Kenneth Leach once saying in a talk that doxa is the (ancient) Greek word for glory, and so orthodox at its heart means “right glory”. The beginnings of a green spirituality can be found in those revelatory moments when the earth speaks, pins us to the spot to see some tiny thing filled with beauty. Beauty and truth are soulmates. 

Today we went down to St Anthony’s Head and sat on a bench situated on a huge and redundant gun emplacement looking across to Falmouth where we once lived for a year, and the Lizard beyond, one of my treasured plant hunting grounds. Something special grows there now and then. It’s an orchid called Autumn Ladies’ Tresses, Spiranthes spiralis. It hasn’t been recorded there for a couple of years and it’s rather late in the year to see it in flower but since we were there I had a hunt around anywhere I could see a possible spot, but nothing. Sometimes glory takes its time and we need to be patient; but patience is easy when you’re engulfed by the sound of the sea and the sight of so many happy memories. Madame said “it’s good that we can see this together”.  “Stop it” I thought, “you’ll make me go all emotional!”

Great spotted woodpecker outside the kitchen window.

Back in Treloan Lane

You’ll notice the difference in formatting in this piece. Apologies, I’ll correct it when WordPress restores my access to my own site.

Our journey down here was a bit of a nightmare. It wasn’t just the usual kind of rain but a malignant blanket of fine drizzle that forced us to use the fastest wiper setting, which drummed back and forth like a pair of demented festival goers. In heavy rain even the landscape and the roadsigns disappear as lorries pass leaving con-trails of greasy spray and we passed our usual stopping place and drove towards the next which was on the northern side of Bodmin Moor. The moor is a moody place at the best of times but this time it wasn’t snow, sleet or driving rain, it was like driving through a ghostly white tunnel. When eventually we found a service station, filling the tank was a literally immersive experience, being battered by the horizontal drizzle blowing in sideways. Luckily I was wearing my favourite, moth eaten oiled Welsh Black woollen jumper which kept the worst of it out and I steamed dry in the car as we drove the last eighty miles. Our destination was a hay loft which we’d seen being converted for a couple of years and we rented it on a whim after a long season of hospital trips and building work. 

We’ve been walking down this lane for years; it’s one of four places whose plants I know pretty well. One and a half miles each way, it combines tarmac, grassy path and a small section of sunken track – but its composition; sunken for most of its length between high banks, hedges and Cornish banks has obviously evolved alongside its surrounding culture as fishing declined and farming rose and then tourism came along and insisted that the access to the holiday cottages did not jeopardize the paintwork of the family car. Normally at this point I’d insert the picture of flail-mower butchery that greeted us a few years ago but a hiccough in WordPress has got me locked out and you’re reading this via a circuitous workaround which can’t cope with photos; so that demanded a bit of  change in writing style as I try to say with words what I would otherwise have served up on a photographic plate. I had a cataract removed five weeks ago and once the swelling had cleared up and the double vision resolved, I found myself in a startlingly new world. I’ve mentioned this to other people who’ve had lens replacements and it seems we all experience an almost psychedelic period of colour and sharpness. Even Sainsbury’s car park looked amazing in the sunshine. I was captivated by the sharp edges of the cars. As soon as I was cleared to drive by the hospital we came here to a characteristically misty and rainy Cornwall for a bit of R&R.

It’s in the nature of sunken lanes that they provide a sheltered environment for all manner of plants, insects and animals. Here on the lane there are some of the richest hedgerows we’ve ever seen. My biggest problem for several years was that the cataract in my right, dominant, eye meant that I was unable to clearly resolve the things I was looking at. I’d pretty much decided that this was due to a faulty prescription, but it’s obvious now that a semi transparent film covering the lens was the real problem. Back here in Cornwall I was hoping that my greatly improved vision would allow me to see as well as the camera linked to a large screen hi-res monitor. Wow! Now, with the inspiration of improved eyesight and the opportunity presented by WordPress problems has prompted another big think …… how can I better express in words what I see as we walk slowly down the lane?

But there’s a catch here because I normally use carefully composed photographs which are rich in technical information that I can take to the identification guides without exposing the complexities of the process. It’s a hidden scientific process based on data and measurements and precise observations – all as boring as a bad preacher on a rainy Sunday to the average reader because the photo doesn’t need to brag about its contents But the writer’s tools are very different; bafflingly metaphorical to a scientist; woolly and suggestive rather than descriptive. You get the picture I hope. We’re dealing with two different languages and cultures, like trying to describe love in a spreadsheet populated only by temperatures and breathing rates. 

So back to the lane where we stopped to admire a cone from a felled Monterey Pine, covered in foliose lichen, the living expression of a fibonacci spiral but not designed by a mathematician but rather circumstance and evolution. A little further up the lane the hedge is covered with Old Man’s Beard, now covering the hedge with a snowlike cloak. But stepping forwards from the path to take a much closer look, you can see the stunningly beautiful mop-heads of seeds whose feathery tops curl like punk hairstyles waiting for the wind to call them away to service somewhere else. Below them in the hedge a brave few Red Campions risk a flower; pale pink after a hard season. Ivy berries, terrific food for the birds and the bees are clinging like tiny green and black mustard pots to their vines. A little clump of Babington’s Leeks is still, just about surviving atop one of the Cornish hedges. They’re quite unusual and we were pleased to see them a couple of years ago. By this time we would have expected the bulbs to open up exposing the bulbils which grow shoots before dropping to the ground, This time they are dried up by the summer heat and drought. This little patch will probably die off unrecorded. As we stroll further down we see evidence of the first of the carrot family to appear in spring. Large green rosettes (and some with stems and leaves) are the promise of next year’s Alexanders. Later, returning up the lane we find some seedheads hanging on. They’re easy to identify because Alexanders, AKA Herb Gerard, is the only member of the family with black seeds. There’s Mugwort  growing along the length of the path – once used in brewing beer – hence the name – still in flower. Near the beach there are wild radishes and also sea radishes. Their leaves differ slightly, the sea radish has slightly thickened shiny and tougher leaves, like its neighbour the Sea Beet, but both have magnificent basal rosettes and slightly different numbers of seeds in their pods. Unfortunately for the purists they hybridize together freely – like the wild carrots – and it’s sometimes impossible to be sure which one you’ve found. Returning up the path after an ice cream we see an abundance of Winter Heliotrope which will flood the path with its peculiar almond scent in just a few weeks around Christmas. We see the beginnings of the Yarrow and the end of the Charlock; tall, crisp and dead against the sky and finally an exciting little find right at the bottom of the cornish hedge, with the stones catching the last heat of the sun – a small clump of Wood Calamint.

Did I say how much I love this place?

The miners and the herbalists of Cock Road.

Whether or not it’s some kind of syndrome I’ve never bothered to find out, but I’m a bit obsessive about lists, catalogues and picture dictionaries. The first book I ever truly loved – I can’t have been more than five or six years old – was a picture dictionary and recently I was shown an almost identical book in Welsh which I found very moving. So my memory is cluttered with a lot of fragmentary information on random subjects from embroidery silks, ships, artists’ materials and above all plants. I collect floras and Herbals these days but I rarely throw a seed catalogue away because I love the names of plants and their varieties. Cider apple trees are a particular favourite. Where else could you find a variety called “Slack ma Girdle“, which shares a group name with a number of cousins known as Woodbine, often but not always associated with Honeysuckle. As you see, the brain rot is advanced. Words are my crack cocaine.

All of which is a long-winded explanation to account for my memory of a Herbalist’s catalogue which I saw in the early 1970’s and which advertised a remedy called “Golden Seal” accompanied by testimonials which, unforgettably, gave a grisly account by a satisfied customer who had “coughed up a tumour” only a week after starting a course of treatment. And so it lingers in my mind among the uncatalogued memories in the folder marked “hell’s teeth!” However the problem with these unpursued thoughts and memories is that they bide their time and – like the devil – wait for an opportune moment. Opportunity knocked for Goldenseal last week after many years of gestation as I was cataloguing some photographs which I took in mid-Wales a couple of years ago of a Goldenrod plant which was abundant around the old gold mine at Dolaucothi. It’s at the top of this piece. Somehow my brain had managed to scramble Goldenrod and Goldenseal and so the plant with its deeply dubious reputation had got itself (virtually) filed in the wrong place – which didn’t matter until I thought about it. But you know what thinking does.

And so I moved from a casual word association to a determined search through the books and the internet to disambiguate the two plants which involved two fascinating diversions into law and history. Both plants were extensively used by First Nation and Native American cultures and both are still in use today around the world albeit for different purposes. They don’t belong to the same family; Goldenrod is as a member of the Asteraceae, Daisy family; and Golden Seal is in the Buttercups, the Ranunculaceae. Goldenrod is used to make a tea and is used as a diuretic and astringent. It was once called Liberty Tea by American settlers in the independence movement and was used among many other things for staunching bleeding or burns. Gerard of Gerard’s Herbal fame writes that it was taken as a medicine for stab wounds and cuts (one of its Somerset names was Woundwort which is a quite different plant) and Geoffrey Grigson – my favourite chronicler of English plants – reports that during early medieval times it was gathered and sold at fabulous prices (half a Crown an ounce) due to the amount of “stabbing and thrusting” going on. It fell out of favour and later on Gerard says you could by a hundredweight of Goldenrod at the same price. Given that it’s a 5 minute bus ride to the Royal United Hospital A&E I think I would give it a miss. Mrs Grieve gives it her approval in the 1930’s and relates a fanciful and alarming report of a boy who, following treatment passed 15 large bladder stones up to one and a half ounces in 1788. I don’t know what to think about the suffering involved were it true. It’s still sold and used for a range of purposes and even appears in the 1983 British Herbal Pharmacopoeia. It appears to meet most of the purposes it’s recommended for without dangerous side effects.

That, however takes me back to the starting point for this piece because Golden Seal (Hydrastis canadensis) has a wholly different history. My first encounter in a herbalist’s catalogue led to my misidentification and the horror stories about coughing up tumours. A very easy Gemini search established that KIngswood, now a suburb of East Bristol but back then still in Gloucestershire near where I was born, was a hotspot for Herbalists warehouses. None of them now exist in their original form, but it may be important to mention that Kingswood was also on the South Gloucestershire Coalfield and had its own mines and miners. It was said that the miners of Cock Road were instrumental in the sacking of Bristol Prison and burning down the Mansion House during the Bristol Riots while supporting the Reform movement. It was all to no avail; the middle classes who’d refused to turn out for the militia got the vote and the miners got pneumoconiosis (the Dust). Consequently herbal remedies for chronic lung disease including Tuberculosis which my paternal granny died from would have found an eager audience for the snake oil salesmen who were ever too happy to make a quick buck out of suffering. I’m not in any way against herbal (phyto) medicine, in fact I’ve found it interesting enough to mix up some basic simple remedies for myself but as any internet enquiry will warn you – it’s not always safe to believe everything you read online.

So back to Golden Seal; it too gets a positive mention in all of my herbals up to and including the 1983 British Herbal Pharmacopoeia, which means it’s been verified, tested and safe for use which, lets be fair, may still not mean its as effective as the treatment the doctor offers. What could never have been acceptable were the outrageous claims for anti-cancer properties made, up until the late twenty sixties, which have since then been regulated and banned in the UK. Golden Seal is normally prescribed for problems with the mucous membranes such as lungs, stomach and bowel disorders and like several other members of the same plant family was once used to progress childbirth – which means it should never be used during pregnancy. Many herbal remedies have been isolated and synthesised and now find a home in regular medicine but there are still people who think that phytomedicine is somehow closer to nature and less dangerous. In some cases that may be true but equally it may be a dangerous risk – which leads me to one final point.

Herbalists and their suppliers are now regulated to control untested use of potentially dangerous medicines -where the therapeutic dose may be milligrams away from the fatal one. But one area which lacks any kind of legal (or self) control is the internet and its battalions of influencers, who are often paid to promote dangerous procedures and products just as did the herbalists of Kingswood. I find it unbelievable that influencers can now promote lethal nonsense that would be illegal in print.

The wild world is a wonderful gift to us, and if and when(ever) cancer cures are found, the chances are they will have begun as an interesting plant compound or even an account in an ancient manuscript that provokes – as it did with me – a little bit of research. I’ve written before about the dangers of foraging and eating plants without adequate background understanding, and the same applies to herbal medicine. In untrained hands it’s as dangerous as connecting your household mains to the lamp-post outside. Come to think of it, that’s illegal too!