Captured by the spirit of a place

These lead mining rakes could go back to Roman times

Yesterday we drove back from Cornwall. It’s just over 200 miles to the most southerly point of the UK and with the help of a great deal of EU money it’s either a motorway or improved dual carriageway almost all the way down to Penzance. Even with the B road connections at both ends of the journey we can still do the trip – which used to be something of an adventure – in not much over four hours. I’m not a great fan of long journeys on motorways. They seem to lack any sense of where you actually are and for all their rapidity you can still sit in a traffic jam for half an hour while a couple of blokes dig out a flooded drain, negating any time saving. Anyway what’s so important about speed? To me, the feeling of boarding a plane in cold and rain and leaving three hours later it in fierce sunshine and blistering heat is a bit deranged. I once helped an old friend to move some beehives on to the heather on Exmoor and as we drove back we got stuck behind a tractor. “Oh good” he said, “I love it when we have to slow down”.

Anyway, as we came into Somerset yesterday the satnav chuntered away about delays on the M5 (there are always delays on the M5) and suggested an alternative route. I’ve never done it before but yesterday I thought – let’s give it a go and see what happens. So we followed the instructions and minutes later we entered the real world after three hours of tooth grinding boredom. The new route took us across the top of the Somerset levels by Brent Knoll which I’d never seen so close before, and onwards, passing a view of Cheddar Gorge which showed it off to perfection and then to the north of Blackdown passing Rickford Rising where the rain that falls on Blackdown emerges after travelling through the limestone rocks. Past the bottom of Burrington Combe, and into the villages of Blagdon, Compton Martin and West Harptree before crossing the reservoir and into Bishop Sutton. If we had any sadness at leaving Cornwall, this was a serendipitous reminder that many of our happiest memories are vested in the Mendip Hills.

I fell in love with the Mendips when I was seventeen and was introduced to caving by being taken down Swildon’s Hole. It was an awesome experience and emerging cold and wet after hours of scrambling through the cave the first breaths of Mendip air were always sweet. Madame never took to it and so my underground adventures were curtailed, but before we got together I would go up to Blackdown with my closest friend Eddie and explore the easy caves with – occasionally – reckless abandon. Our biggest problem was getting someone with an interest in getting cold wet and muddy who also had a car and was prepared to take us. It was rather like the inevitable compromises that aspiring bands have to make in seeking a half-decent bass player. Luckily, Madame liked walking up there and once we’d got an old Morris 1000 pickup she grew to enjoy hunting for plants and fungi; so we’ve thrived on Mendip air for many years.

I love Mendip, I love Cornwall, in fact I love almost anywhere with a complicated and even ancient industrial history that’s been overgrown by time. Although there’s almost no trace of it now, I was born on the edge of the Bristol coalfield. There was an elderly retired miner just up the street and I can remember passing the open cast mine at Harry Stoke when it was still open. Eddie and I used to play around the capped pithead of Parkfield colliery near Pucklechurch and the local hospital was named after Handel Cossham an unusually kindly mine owner, lay preacher and benefactor so, I suppose that laid the foundation for my inner landscape. My interest in plants that can survive in post industrial landscapes was born, like the passion for the old dramways (notice the soft mutation you linguists!) – in childhood. The moment I find one of these places I feel at home – whether here in Bath, or on Mendip or in Cornwall – I know where I am. Perhaps that’s why I love South Wales and its people.

I don’t know if all this explains how the Mendip Hills captured me, but the fascination wasn’t something I picked up late in life; it was there from the earliest days and I only had to stumble into it, almost by accident, to find myself there; to feel integrated (if that makes any sense at all). So here are some photos of the Mendips, of Velvet Bottom (who could resist that name?), Longwood valley, Black rock quarry, of high Mendip and Priddy above Swildon’s Hole across to Blackdown and Crook’s Peak which you’ll recognise as you blast down the M5 south of Bristol. Trust me – the walk up there beats arriving anywhere ten minutes quicker.

Rain and high winds make a perfect walk to Kynance Cove

We both love this place – any time outside the holidays, when it gets impossibly crowded. After the weather we’ve been having there wasn’t much chance of seeing anyone beyond a few walkers but for once, apart from one brief heavy shower the sun even came out, the café was open and everyone was very happy. There were no more than a dozen or so cars in the car park, and it was blowing a hoolie as we set out, knowing that once we dropped into the valley we’d be a bit sheltered.

As we were packing the rucksack I thought I’d give myself a rest from plant hunting. Neither of us had slept well, in my case because I’d had an unexpected phone call from a very old friend with whom I thought I’d lost touch and heard some unexpected news about three others who’d died recently. I didn’t sleep beyond 3.00am as thoughts of mortality circled around my mind. So we travelled light even though I knew that the likelihood was that we’d find some rare plants, because the Lizard is an absolute hotspot, and true to form we found some lovely plants including two national rarities and two more flowering exceptionally early. Here are the rare ones – I won’t say exactly where they are growing because they could so easily disappear from too much contact with boots. I don’t know if there’s any research on these particular plants, but certainly orchids plus many other species, growing wild, absolutely depend on mycorrhizal relationships with fungi and if they’re dug up by hunters they’ll just die without the extensive fungal network that keeps them alive. That’s quite apart from a potential fine of up to £20,000 pounds because this is a site of national importance. The Lizard is an enormous lump of serpentine rock, which is rich in magnesium and poor in calcium. The soil lacks nitrogen and is very thin in places so without help from the fungi, the plants would starve to death. Anyway here are the rare two – there are others but they haven’t flowered yet so left to right – Cornish Heath and Land Quillwort which is tiny and I’ve been looking for it down here for maybe 4 years!

The best way of finding these plants as always, is to join a natural history society and get someone to show you. The Quillwort is almost identical to several other common plants that also grow in the area and as a relative beginner I’ve spent many hours trying to learn about them. Anyway, it was almost just as much fun to spot a couple of relatively common plants – Three-cornered Garlic and Kidney Vetch in flower rather early. It’s always difficult to blame global heating, but even after the wet winter we’ve suffered, there are a few more early risers each year

There were Dandelions, Daisies, Gorse and Hairy bittercress also in flower. All the other locals are there in leaf, and we spotted Sea Beet, Buck’s-horn Plantain, Sea Plantain, Thrift and Wild Madder amid the heather and plentiful blackthorn. Here are some of them:

So yes it was a lovely walk, and we sat on a bench outside the cafe where, nearly 60 years ago we’d emptied our pockets to see if we had enough money for a shared cucumber sandwich. We spent the first night of our first ever camping trip together that year with our tent pitched up on the headland. It’s a very special place which – just look at the photos – has remained pretty much unspoiled – helped by the long walk from the car park and the steep footpath you have to take.

But as well as the sunshine, the massive waves crashing on the rocks and rebounding with a wild roar; as well as the fine mist of sea spray that fell on us like a veil from the wavetops and rocks; as well as the glimpses of deep green water through the curling white horses; we heard first and then watched two Choughs playing in the wind above the steep sided valley. That and the hot chocolate so sweet it almost burnt our throats helped down with a toasted tea bun. It’s the very essence of being in nature

I really should stop writing about Cornwall.

The tin tabernacle in Cadgwith

Another wet day in Cornwall – in Camborne they’ve exceeded the biblical flood by exceeding 40 consecutive days of rain. It hasn’t been a huge problem for us down at the southernmost tip except for the lanes – there’s only one really main road and the rest are pretty much lanes anyway and they are running with water; some right across and others at both edges but all the puddles are sheltering murderous suspension wrecking potholes. If anyone’s got a spare billion pounds we could do with some of it down here.

Anyway, the upshot of the long days confined to our rented cottage on the top of a cliff is that Madame has been doing a lot of internet surfing, and today she typed in my name into Gemini and discovered that I am the landlord of a pub in Helston whose wife was once a police dog-handler but who has sadly died. In fact, according to the infallible AI, several pubs in the neighbourhood are claiming that I am their landlord – which prompted me to ask her whether it would be OK to pop down to the Five Pilchards to see my virtual wife. Madame was not amused. Much as I love Google Gemini, it makes more false connections than a village gossip, and bigamy is still a crime.

Sadly spring has not sprung nearly as much as we’d hoped so neither the plant hunting nor the moth trapping have taken up much of our time and among other things – like writing this blog – we’ve been binge watching the old DVD’s we brought down. John Schlesinger’s “Cold Comfort Farm” is one of the funniest films ever, and Ian McKellen’s sermon to the Quivering Brethren as Amos Starkadder is an act of sheer joy. I’ve even (naughtily) started sermons myself once or twice with the words “ye’re all damned”; not forgetting to grip the edge of the pulpit and stare at the congregation with sheer malevolence for fifteen seconds. But we also watched Alec Guinness’s superb performance as George Smiley in John Le Carré’s Karla trilogy. The two BBC series miss out the middle book. It was a treat, and an acting seminar, to watch Alec Guinness playing such a morally complex character. The very last words that Smiley speaks as Karla is led away, when someone says “George you’ve won” and he replies “I suppose I have” made me wish I could hug him. It was so brilliantly done; the way he managed to express the sadness and loss of winning his epic battle.

All that ambiguity sent me straight back to yesterday’s post with the thought that I’d missed an important aspect of flourishing even though I did say that it’s by no means a primrose path. When, back in the day, I talked to parents about christening, I would often find that they had an odd idea that we believed that babies are born bad and needed to be made good by baptism. Something about washing away sins had taken root in the collective understanding. Frankly I think that’s a horrible idea, but even horrible ideas deserve a bit of thought. I talked yesterday about cultivating virtuous habits – Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Courage; but I didn’t offer any idea of what the starting point might be. The idea that we’re born bad and need to be made good which I described as horrible would be one place (but totally wrong I think). On the other hand I’d find it difficult to say that we’re born perfect at the top of a greasy pole of corruption because that’s equally far fetched and nasty. So what about a working definition of what we might call the human condition which pitches us somewhere near the middle point that Aristotle was so keen for us to maintain. Then we say that we can move up or down the scale by way of good or bad habits.

Each of the four or perhaps fifteen virtues which can, in combination lead us towards flourishing and fulfilment have their counterparts which can lead us in the opposite direction; unhappiness and suffering. As an example I could mention affairs. We’re all much of a muchness in the sexual attraction stakes; many of us have primary commitments but that doesn’t stop us from meeting others that we find attractive. In a very long career of helping people through crises of their own making, one factor comes to the surface almost every time. We rarely get ourselves into trouble in one giant act of folly. We do it step by tiny step and then one day it’s too late. The same goes for any kind of addiction; food, alcohol, drugs, erotic fantasies, fraud, thieving, field botany or hoarding rubbish. Thankfully I’m not a counsellor so you needn’t worry that I’m about to offer advice but I’ll just quote a line from an ee cummings poem –

where’s too far said he

where you are said she

Notice also that I haven’t mentioned any divine punishments or rewards. That’s because I don’t believe in them. None of the purported torments of hell can measure up to the guilt and shame brought upon us by our own perversity, although there are many occasions when I wish that Danté’s circles of hell which included special places for bishops, princes, corrupt politicians and not forgetting people who didn’t give a shit about anything or anyone. Occasionally I really wish that could be true. But there are always some wicked people who seem to get away with it. On the other hand I’ve sat with some horrible people who – as they lay dying – seemed to be suffering terrible agonies of remorse. Too late!

Conversely I think that the idea we should punish ourselves and live shadow lives in order to achieve the extremely notional rewards of heaven is also wicked. The way we live our lives can’t or shouldn’t be reduced to the spreadsheets and calculus of rulebooks. Is there anything wrong with muddling along and trying very hard to learn from your mistakes?

Looking out to sea in a gale from Kynance Cove café towards Lizard point. Hot chocolate – heaven; rocks – hell.

Doing the right thing in a headwind

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This is the old Lizard lifeboat station which, curiously, was built on Polpeor cove facing into the prevailing wind. Launching a lifeboat into a southwesterly storm must have been extremely hazardous and after 100 years of deliberation the station was moved to the much safer Kilcobben Cove where the drop into the sea is as steep as a fairground ride, giving the crew several minutes to contemplate the heavy seas in which they are about to be lowered. On the plus side it’s more sheltered from the southwesterlies. Just walking past the station always induces a profound feeling of gratitude for the present crew as well as those of the past who risk, and sometimes lose their lives in order to save the lives of complete strangers. This photograph of the old lifeboat station popped up as I was trying to fix a faulty connection in my laptop and immediately appealed as a perfect image for virtue.

I may need to explain a bit about a word used by the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, who lived over two and a half thousand years ago and who discussed what kind of life brought us the most happiness. His word – eudaimonia – is often translated as flourishing which seems to me to be a much better and more fulfilling state of being than mere happiness. Aristotle taught that eudaimonia, flourishing, is best achieved by the pursuit of virtues. He listed between 12 and 15 of them but they are often summarized as : (This summary is provided by Google Gemini AI)

  • Courage: The mean between cowardice (deficiency) and recklessness (excess).
  • Temperance: The mean between insensibility (deficiency) and self-indulgence/intemperance (excess).
  • Generosity/Liberality: The mean between stinginess (deficiency) and prodigality/wastefulness (excess).
  • Magnificence: Spending money well.
  • Magnanimity: Having a proper pride/high-mindedness.
  • Right Ambition/Pride: The mean between lowliness and empty vanity.
  • Good Temper: The mean between spiritlessness and irascibility.
  • Friendliness: The mean between being surly and being a flatterer.
  • Truthfulness: The mean between self-deprecation and boastfulness.
  • Wit/Wittiness: The mean between boorishness and buffoonery.
  • Friendship: A vital aspect of a good life.
  • Justice: The virtue of treating others fairly and lawfully. 

See how often the concept of moderation comes up in that scheme, and also notice that it’s a very different form of teaching from, say, the ten commandments or on any kind of intensive definition of right and wrong – the thou shalt nots. Notice also that none of these is underwritten by any kind of deity. Revenge and punishment is replaced by failure to thrive. Aristotle was also very big on cultivating right habits, on practice of the virtues until they became second nature. Virtue is a non religious approach to human flourishing based on the cultivation of wise and moderate habits.

The allotment – gym to the virtues
And your point is ….?

Well, my point arises from the depressing state we’re in around the world, and as a simple test for measuring virtue you could write a name, any name at the top of that list – a politician, a president, an industrial giant, a journalist , a teacher, a lawyer, even a former Attorney General – and work down the checklist of virtues putting a tick for every one that’s actually lived out rather than bragged about on a CV. You’re not going to wear a pencil out by adding ticks. . And the shortage of powerful role models is part of the reason that it’s so hard to live a virtuous life in this 21st century world and in consequence, why it’s so very hard to flourish because it’s so difficult to see virtuous people being virtuous. We never needed strong role models more than we do now and so often we’re on our own, making it up as we go along – like setting out from the Lizard in a kayak in a force eight storm. As my old friend and mentor Don Streatfield used to say “Everything in our favour’s against us!” That’s not an excuse for not even trying but it’s just a realistic appraisal of the cost of eudemonia, of flourishing.

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Kynance Cove today – thank goodness the cafe was open.

Appropriately enough, you might think, in view of the Government’s present difficulties, we decided yesterday to watch the box-set of Alec Guinness as George Smiley in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”. You might say “nothing changes” after reminding yourself of the spy scandals of Burgess, Maclean and Anthony Blunt; and yet Guinness’ masterful portrait of the quiet and thoughtful spy, George Smiley, would be an excellent example of virtue functioning in a headwind of dishonesty, violence, ambition, avarice and lies. It’s been making us all incredibly anxious. Perhaps I’ve been influenced by the quite wonderful arrangement of the Nunc Dimittis by Richard Burgon at the end of each episode which, almost tearfully, I decided I would have to be played at my funeral – in spite of no longer believing in that kind of god any more, and having never been any kind of faithful servant. I also thought that the Guinness version managed to cover a lot of moral and ethical ground without resorting to the usual tedious mix of psychopaths, car chases, explosions and gratuitous violence.

So I don’t think for a nanosecond that the remedy would be a religious revival, or stiffer punishments for lawbreakers. Aristotle’s suggestions already embody the moral and ethical core of all the main religions without the threats and sadistic sanctions being administered by a wrathful god. If we’re going to promote a green spirituality let it be consensual, non judgemental, rooted in relationships, especially with the earth. Let it be multifaceted, thoughtful and diverse and let it be rooted in the virtues. Let it be filled with music and poetry and song, and when we choose leaders let’s do on the basis of their virtue rather than their charisma or their wealth and power or on the worth to us of their empty promises.

 “Green spirituality” is a term that raises more questions than it settles. It is not any kind of fixed theological orthodoxy, which is so often suffocating waffle, but as a form of grasping at possible meanings in a modern spiritual crisis. In the face of advancing climate, economic, and political disasters, relying on rule-bound ethics or consequential ethics is insufficient. Instead, it suggests a return to “virtue ethics”—forming right habits and character through a way of life shaped by prudence, temperance, courage, and justice.

At its core, this spirituality is an attempt to find a way through the wreckage of a Western culture suffering from a loss of humanity. It emerges from the remainder of an experience—that part of life which refuses to be reduced to dimensions, probabilities, or logic and longs to be rediscovered in the whole of life. The spirituality of flourishing begins where the dogma ends, in a space made of love, wonder and gratitude. It’s not a primrose path, a post-hippy paradise of nice feelings. The Aristotelian virtues are more a marathon than a sprint and courage is not learned through peace and plenty.

Conclusion: The Mystical Remainder

Ultimately, green spirituality is an invitation to enter the mystery of existence. It is a call to move beyond the sacramental degraded into ritual and habit and instead embrace a life where the earthy, material, exhilarating phenomenon that we call Nature is allowed to speak directly to the human spirit. It is a quest for a state of being where one can “flourish” as a fully human part of a complex, dynamic, and interrelated system.

R.S. Thomas, one of my favourite poets lived on the Lleyn peninsula and was an inveterate walker and bird watcher all his life. I met him once; he had the driest sense of humour despite his grim reputation. One of his collections was called “The Laboratories of the Spirit” and contains the poem “The Moon in Lleyn” which could be read as a commentary on Matthew Arnold’s poem “On Dover Beach which I quoted a couple of posts ago. It’s a collection that explores the challenge of faith in a scientific and materialistic culture. Here’s a photo of his church and of the actual moon in Lleyn. He’s a wise and humane guide in a headwind.

Storm brewing – in every sense!

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Rain clouds gathering over Lizard point today

The weather in Cornwall has been pretty terrible since we’ve been here, but we’ve managed to get out for a walk on most days. So far it’s always culminated in rain, and most of the time it’s been blown in by storm winds. Last night it was so strong I could make out the somewhat orchestral sounds of the timpani as waves crashed into the cliffs and the shingle harbour below us, then there was what Matthew Arnold called “the melancholy soft withdrawing roar” of the waves retreating from the shingle beach; clattering and sharp, more brassy than soft last night, like a chorus of a thousand stonechats – and then the woodwinds battering and flickering around the windows searching for gaps to whistle in. There are times when we miss being in the campervan, but not last night. Yesterday morning we tried to walk across to the Caerthillian valley to do a botanical reconnaissance in preparation for another visit in spring, but we were beaten by the cold wind and retreated to the pub for fish and chips. Then I spent the rest of the day researching how so many rare plants manage to survive the soil round here, with high levels of magnesium (poisonous to most plants) low levels of nitrogen, and low levels of calcium. It turns out that the magic trick is to grow in conjunction with invisible underground fungal networks which have almost magical powers to search out water and convert the dodgy soil into food for the plants while blocking the baddies in return for a share of the plants’ photosynthesized sugars. It was an afternoon well spent I think, leaving me excited that at the very core of nature lies millennia of cooperation. The rarities simply couldn’t exist without each other.

Naturally the Lizard, beautiful though it is, is not the center of the universe and elsewhere, politicians are busily trying to reverse that process of mutuality and convert our once rich culture into serpentine dust. You should treat that last sentence as a metaphor. The current news is as depressing and disturbing as it could possibly be. I’m very used to seeing the degradation of Cornwall through neglect, but that attitude which was so apparent in the past where it was said that at the bottom of any hole you could find a Cornishman, but it was rarely mentioned that at the top there was almost always an Englishman stuffing the money into his pockets. Now the contagion is spreading through the whole country as decades of neglect through profiteering are too obvious to be covered up by corporate or government doublespeak. There’s an ugly mood afoot and it’s growing so quickly that even a quiet stroll down a quiet seaside lane is compromised and diminished by fearful thoughts of the coming storm.

A little list

Montbretia (Crocosmia), Winter Heliotrope, Hart’s Tongue fern, Tree Mallow, Pellitory of the wall, Common Gorse, Foxglove, Sea Beet, Nettle, Black Spleenwort, Alexanders, Sea Radish, Purple Dewplant, Sea Carrot, Hottentot Fig, Bramble, English Stonecrop (17 species)

When we say that the Lizard is one of the most biodiverse places in the country, that little (and very incomplete) list is only the beginning. I’ve seen many of them in the centre of Bath, and the seaside specialists pop up along the whole of the west coast. But this was just a brisk fifteen minute walk in the rain alongside a lovely Cornish hedge. If we had time and a great deal of patience we could find over 900 in just this small area. You can rightly feel as if you’re touching a great beauty here.

How to flourish and live beautiful lives in a hostile world should concern us more than it often does. As nature struggles from extractive farming, chemical desolation , carbon dioxide, global heating and polluted rivers we’re neither winners or beneficiaries of all that bogus productivity. We’re the victims. We need to demand more than lowlife chicanery from our politicians, the so-called tech titans and the client media who feed us poisonous lies. Across the green from us there’s a man who’s probably got severe mental health issues and regularly bellows “The earth is burning“, sometimes for an hour at a time. He’s not wrong.

Spring has definitely sprung here

It cost us a soaking, but we went down to Poltesco this afternoon to see what we could see and came up with these lovely spring flowers. There were more, but the rain defeated us even though it was glittering in sheets and drifts through the sunshine. Last night’s talk at the Village Hall brought back a thousand memories, not least because the speaker was using photographic slides which occasionally found themselves upside down or skipped past by the eager operator. The hall has just been refurbished so – to defeat all the stereotypes – it was warm and comfortable and there was a sound system that worked so well I could hear the speaker. The subject was the Lizard flora, and the speaker talked for 2 hours without any notes. It was a real tour de force that left me making frantic notes in the dark. They turned out to be illegible but I rewrote and researched the gist of it this morning and I’ve the beginnings of an accurate list of plants and locations.

In fact we’re here at quite the wrong time to see many of the local riches. I did a quick database search of a small area of the Lizard and where at home I might expect to find 250 – 300 species, here there are over 900. The result of hearing all that local wisdom and experience is that we now have a very clear idea of where to look and what to look for and we’ve already decided to come back with the campervan in May.

Full Moon, Snow Moon, Imbolc

Full moon tonight on the Lizard peninsula

Imagine a world with no calendars and no clocks; how would you cope with the passage of time? When to sow seeds? when to harvest? When to prepare for the long period without much fresh food? when to eat up stored food before it spoils. Of course the answer must be that you’d still have the sun whose day length waxes and wanes just like the moon does. The moon offers a different account of the seasons of great significance to sailors and fishermen but both mark the year. A solar calendar and a lunar calendar. The deep sky at night offers another cycle through the alignments of the stars. These are all natural calendars which align more or less with the seasons. The ancestors thought it important enough to build an observatory at Stonehenge.

Because those weasel words ‘more or less‘ highlight the difficulty that our imagined ancestors faced. When exactly do the days begin to shorten and when do they start to lengthen again? This, along with ‘when is high summer?’ and ‘when midwinter?’ is a matter of exquisite importance to the farmer and horticulturalist. However we’re not the same as those ancestors because we have atomic clocks and science and we live in the tailwind of the Christian centuries here in the UK. In addition we largely have very little to do with the growing and harvesting seasons. So we have a kind of rich sedimentary history of our relationship with time and the seasons are still as important to us emotionally as they were when we were tending the land and sailing the seas. Seasons without markers, without celebrations would leave a large part of our culture inaccessible.

Many centuries ago when St Augustine of Canterbury arrived here from Rome, he discovered a largely pagan society. The Romans brought Christianity to England and when they left they left a vacuum into which paganism flowed back. Augustine wrote an anguished letter to the Pope recounting the apparently pagan natives worshipping in non Christian temples. The Pope wrote back and said take them back and rename the pagan festivals with Christian saints’ names. I imagine the people didn’t care very much whose badge was over the door and the pagan festival was never truly lost. Christmas overlaid midwinter, and the Nine Lessons and Carols was always good for seeing the village unite, and so on. Easter was a bit of a problem because it was attached to an old lunar calendar festival called oestre (work that one out!). So we now have the residues of ancient paganism overlaid by Roman Christianity, overlaid by a newer Germanic form of paganism, overlaid once again with monastic Christianity, then the Catholic hegemony overlaid by Protestant Christianity and finally by modern agnosticism and scientific rationalism. The key point is that all of these continue to function actively (if unnoticed) within our minds.

Let’s be clear, I intensely dislike the term “paganism” because its negative and critical connotations attack a way of life which has never gone away. But when I used the word ‘sedimentary‘ I meant that these historical cultural layers never really go away; they still resonate and still awaken memories which are closer in time to us than we often know. Hands up anyone who went to a wassail in the last few weeks!

All of which is to remember a festival which is the process of being revived. True to form, in Ireland it’s a festival dedicated to St Brigid but it goes back much further. How, we ask, do we know that winter is ebbing and spring flowing. When we view the question through the series of sedimentary orthodoxies we see that it has various dates in modern times – Winter Solstice represents the shortest days, but when do we begin to notice days getting longer. Christmas is far too soon after solstice to see the days really lengthening. By the Spring solstice around March 21st it’s obvious and if you’re a farmer you might have missed the boat. But the pagan feast of Imbolc is enjoying something of a revival because even in the grip of winter storms, we can all see the days lengthening. We’ve turned the corner – and it’s today.

Kynance Cove – never disappoints.

The advantage of going on an organised field trip is that you can see all sorts of plants and have them identified by an expert. The downside is that the finds are identified by an expert and so you miss the best bit, which is to answer the question what’s this plant that I’ve never seen before called by going through the books and if it’s at all rare, eliminating every other possibility.

There’s an exceptionally rare plant that only grows on the Lizard in Cornwall called Land Quillwort- Isoetes histrix and we’ve been hunting for it for several years because it’s very tiny and hard to spot (about the size of a 5p piece), and it grows in winter and dies back in February – which isn’t a time that we usually come down here because there’s so much more going on in March and April. Booking a cottage in mid-winter in the hope of finding a single specimen is way beyond our pain threshold usually but the way half term worked out this year meant that the rentals go up from ridiculous to astronomic the moment the schools break up; so here we are battling the storms and driving rain refinding what seems to be the best candidate up on the clifftop. It’s a fussy little plant that prefers thin soils on the serpentine rock and positively thrives on being inundated with water for at least part of the year while laughing at droughts during its summer rest. So for whatever reason we’ve always rejected it in the past. It could have been a Spring Squill but that’s got big bulbs, or thrift but that only looks the same very early in the season and doesn’t have bulbs but tangled roots and you can often see the dried flower heads from last season. There’s such a short window of opportunity. But the date is bang on, the situation and environment are right and the location within the 10K map square came from the big database.

So today the ducks lined up, it stopped raining and the sun shone so we returned to the same spot; I had a better idea of what I was looking for and my confidence grew from 30% to 90% – which is as far as it ever gets! We’d found and photographed a Land Quillwort and – as always happens – once you’ve seen one you can find all the others. We also photographed Cornish Heath – another rare one which we’ve never recorded before although we’ve seen it and guessed it probably was. So two rarities on record – that’s a pretty good start to the year, and we sealed the day with a celebratory bacon baguette and mug of tea down at the beach cafe while we watched the enormous swell crashing against the cliffs. Life doesn’t get much better than this.

Back in the books, though, it was distressing to read in the biography of Linnaeus and Buffon that I mentioned yesterday, how Linnaeus’ followers followed his lead in locking women out of education and dividing the human race into separate species, then sorting them in order of their supposed intelligence, thereby building a spurious theoretical framework to support slavery, racial hatred and the diminishing of women. We are so easily bamboozled when religion and science get merged into a mule species that can go nowhere and cause nothing but suffering.

Liquid sunshine in Cornwall

This photo was taken on the road to Kynance Cove. We originally intended to go to Lizard point to photograph the sea state but when I got out of the car to swipe our National Trust card I was very nearly blown off my feet by the fierce wind, and so we thought Kynance would be the better bet; but the same thing happened there. We’re between so-called named storms at the moment but you wouldn’t think so. I don’t think we’ve ever seen worse sea conditions here in half a century of visits; no wonder there’s a lighthouse down at the point. We’ve had occasional breaks in the low cloud today but for the most part it’s been a lowering slate grey, laden with Atlantic rain which its been releasing as steady drizzle when it’s not hammering down. The cloud layer was so low at times that the gulls were occasionally disappearing into it. Not quite the light rain in the Met Office forecast. The sea spray, seen from the Kynance road was topping the cliffs over 50 feet high, and you could almost feel the impact of the waves dumping on the shore, through your body. The sea itself was roiling; white and foam flecked to 100 yards out. There were just three cars in the car park when we arrived and within a few minute we were alone; the car rocking in the 50 mph gusts. As ever there were a few crows playing in the wind but they were too far away and too fast to identify. There are Choughs down at the point and they’re the greatest acrobats of all – they can even fly upside down.

So we made our way back and had a cup of tea before we went down the steep path to Cadgwith cove and took more photos there. Lizard looked like an abandoned village but there were a few people standing on the Todden in Cadgwith. They seemed quite happy but an exceptional wave could probably have taken them. John Betjeman, in one of his travel guides once described Lizard village as having all the charm of an army married quarters. It’s not pretty but it’s a very functional place where it seems entirely appropriate that one of the bar staff in the pub, was wearing an RNLI pager. There’s a primary school, a couple of pubs and a doctor’s surgery but over the years the grocery store, the big greasy spoon cafe and the post office have all gone; along with all bar a couple of the serpentine turners in their shacks.

So no moths, no plants and hardly any birds today – which gave us more time for reading. I brought some big natural history books down but I just can’t stop reading a paperback by Jason Roberts called “Every Living Thing” which won the 2025 Pulitzer prize for biography. It describes the parallel lives of two pioneering botanists with entirely different views. Linnaeus, inventor of the binomial system for naming living things and Buffon his French rival. One of the takeaway points from this book is that although Linnaeus’ fame grew and Buffon’s faded, the latter may have been on the better track, laying the foundations for later developments like the discovery of DNA. Their disputes revealed the extent to which they were both moulded and directed by the religious and societal culture of the time, and for me at least, reveals what an unpleasant man Linnaeus must have been.

Below are some pictures of the Kynance road and Cadgwith Cove today.