Melancholy River IV. Cider

A quintessential autumn shot of the allotment site

I don’t know why I find this photo so arresting – so emotionally and metaphorically rich. I took it some time ago on the allotment site when the bathing of the tree in strong autumn sunlight reminded me irresistibly of a Samuel Palmer painting. That’s a clue to its power, I suppose.

To a horticulturalist it’s Malus domestica and the specific name “domestica” anchors its cultural existence within the household. The genus “Malus” derives originally from the Greek for melon and the Latin was eagerly pounced on by later Christian theologians who, when translating the Bible from the Latin (which in turn was translated from the Greek via the Hebrew) needed to find a name for the fruit that Adam and Eve frolicked over in the Garden of Eden; so “Malus” and “mal” (evil) were forever roped together in religious terms as apple, and Eve allegedly led to all our woes by whipping off Adam’s fig leaf and seeing the first recorded Cox’s Orange Pippin. Any further explanation of what happened next is unnecessary; except that’s not what the fourth-hand translation actually said. Much misquoted but rarely actually read the alleged crime was not eating the fruit but of eating from the tree whose fruit was the knowledge of good and evil. That’s to say it wasn’t really about a tree at all but an attempt by an ancient magisterium to impose a prohibition on freelance ethics.

Acquitted of its burden of guilt, the apple has thrived in gardens and orchards across the earth and divided into an enormous cousinery as diverse as the human race, not least around the areas bordering the River Severn with their apple friendly microclimate supported by the relative warmth of the river. Less frost equals more apples. But apples will only keep for a few months at best, and even with the assistance of cold storage bathed in inert gases and brought to ripeness for the supermarkets with a shot of acetylene they still taste nothing like a fresh apple picked warm from a tree. The best and longest life comes when they’re turned into cider. Severnside and the Bristol Channel areas of Somerset, Devon and the warmer climate of Cornwall are at the heart of cider making.

Severnside is a cider hotspot. If I can morph from gamekeeper to poacher, many a hedge still has a couple of large repurposed black fruit juice containers concealed within to avoid the attention of the Customs. I couldn’t possibly say how I know this obviously , but I speak as someone who can’t drink the cider because my stomach can no longer handle it. I mentioned a couple of posts ago that one of my teenage jobs was in a steel erecting company. We (they) made hoppers for the back end of cement lorries which were – if you look carefully – absolute marvels of rolling and welding. These guys were, may I say, bad. Later they moved into chemical engineering and power stations and ironically although I was banned from visiting nuclear power stations owing to my active CND membership I was able to work there as a junior gofer for a team of madmen. Some of them had worked on the first Severn Bridge and still bore the scars. One had a dent like the imprint of a tennis ball on his skull (falling bolt) and another had to drink half a bottle of rum before he climbed the steelwork because of his arthritis. The lasting legacy for me was my severe deafness and tinnitus caused by failing to wear ear protectors when sawing up RSJ’s. Back at the works we had 30 minutes for lunch and so we would sprint up to the pub, drink 3 pints of scrumpy and then sprint back to work to use dangerous heavy machinery. One day the landlord of the pub took me by the arm and led me behind the bar to show me something. The something was a hole right through the solid oak floor beneath the cider barrel we’d been drinking from. “You see that hole?” he said, that’s what it’s doing to your stomach – eating it!”. That was pretty much the end of my heavy drinking cider days although for years I would relish the occasional glass. Now I don’t drink at all.

Cider making is, if you’ve seen it being done, surprising. Cider apples have evolved not just for their juice but for their tannin which acts as a preservative in much the same way as hops do in beer. Cider apples are often very local, small, hard and completely inedible and yet they contain far more juice than you’d imagine possible. The extraction begins with chopping the apples in a machine called a scratter which can be a simple hand-cranked mill or something much bigger and powered like a wood chipper. We have visited a large (and very good) cider maker in Herefordshire several times over the years and last time we were there they were installing a huge continuous olive mill in which the olives/apples were chopped and pressed in a single non-stop operation. It was planned that the apples would be pressed in the same way. In large scale cider making the juice is treated with sulphite to kill the wild yeasts and then specialist yeasts are pitched into the juice. These yeasts can tolerate very high alcohol levels and so cider can be a deceptively dangerous drink for the unwary. I haven’t said much about the pear, but Perry, pear cider when well made is a beautiful drink which in its sparkling form can outdo any supermarket prosecco for depth of flavour, refinement and strength. A full sized pear tree is a sight to behold; tall and graceful and often going unrecognised in gardens and orchards. Our botanical neighbour Charlie told us how a vintage pear tree may have been cited as a way of stopping an unwanted supermarket car park up river from my old patch. He’s another enthusiast and we swap books and stories over our weekly meetings for coffee.

Recently there’s been a bit of a fashion for single variety ciders as the industry tried to go upmarket and away from its rather dangerous association with drunkenness (it was very cheap), and farm labourers for whom it frequently formed part of their wages. When Madame worked at a cider research station in the 70’s, a cider allowance was part of the wage for field workers on the payroll. Some large Severnside farms made thousands of gallon every year; most of it drunk on the farm. But as for single variety cider, it isn’t much more than a marketing ploy. I got to know one cider maker well while I was working on Severnside. He was universally known as “doughnut” – not because he was stupid but because on his first day at primary school in Oldbury on Severn his mum sent him with a white T shirt with a red band around the middle. And so Doughnut became his name for the rest of his life. He’d learned his craft from his father and dismissed the Kingston Black as a single source. He told me he always mixed varieties and always added a few sweet Cox apples. The truth is, when they were making such large quantities they were obliged to harvest from mixed orchards and I imagine that any additions to balance the batch were made on the basis of long experience. In the factory I mentioned above, the apples are brought in by lorry and unloaded into a washing pit before moving inside the building to be processed.

After scratting, traditionally the sloppy mash of chopped apples known as pomace or pomage would then be thickly layered between pieces of hessian sacking and made into cheeses; formed into a heap on the press and then pressed using human power using long poles inserted into the iron holes above the screw; or where it was possible, draught horses whose huge strength made the job much easier. Even on a small scale, the amount of apple juice that can be extracted from the rock hard apples is astonishing. Our friends in the Bannau Brycheiniog have an integrated hydraulic scratter and press which they run with apples from the many local varieties they’ve planted on their smallholding. The juice flows from the press and is gathered into buckets, poured into large wooden fermenting vessels and – traditionally – that was that. No special champagne yeasts were added but the natural yeasts on the apple skins were more than adequate to begin a vigorous, often noisy fermentation. We have a history of cider making in my family when my ancestors lived south of Bath. Two old aunts who my dad once visited made cider and after drinking too much of it he said he was driving home on his motorcycle when he realized he couldn’t feel his legs and so he drove into a hedge and lay there on the verge until he sobered up. He told me the fermenting cider made a sound like swarming bees.

And that takes me immediately to the darker side. Madame and I were at a party at the university one night when she was seized upon by a man who was a biochemist working on yeasts. It was an interesting conversation but not impressive as a chat-up line and he told her that if cider came on to the market today it would be banned because it contained so many dangerous compounds. In the end he became so boring she could only escape by pouring her drink over his shirt. However we often saw the dangers of rough cider – scrumpy -which, when drunk in excess would give its victims the shakes and ultimately kill them by damaging their livers. I’m sure that any toxins are well managed by large scale producers. One well known name in Hereford is locally famous because it was said that a real apple never passed through its gates, but only tanker loads of imported, necessarily pasteurised or sulphited juice arrived there. I once asked Doughnut why he like cider so much (by this time he’d lost his marriage, his job and his home and was living in a hostel); his answer “because it gets I pissed” says it all.

But on a local level, the old ways can still be found. There was a cider maker in a neighbouring village who would not sell cider on a Sunday; would not allow a woman anywhere near his shed, and who would always say “wanna wet” when I dropped by. A “wet” usually amounted to a couple of pints. His cider had few virtues except industrial strength; cloudy, sour and really only fit for cleaning silver. I had to stop going there.

In another of my parishes there was a thriving cider club who were keeping the tradition alive. They even managed to persuade the local pub to sell it under the name “Lifesaver”. I used to refer to it always as “Life threatener” but they were a tremendous bunch of people and they organised the best wassail ever, when – to the vast annoyance of my evangelical colleagues – I would go full pagan and bless the cider apple trees which Madame had supplied with budwood way back in the day.

They had built a kind of chariot in which the wassail King and Queen – elected in the pub by secret ballot – were hauled up the muddy footpath to perform their ceremonial duties. It was the greatest honour on my retirement party, to travel in the chariot, with a very embarrassed Madame, from the pub to the village hall. Leaving them all was a huge bereavement.

So apples have to be valued as a cultural treasure and not simply a local marketable product. Across the estuary region there are hundreds of local apple varieties. There’s an organization called the Marcher Apple Network which is succeeding in collecting and preserving many of these old varieties. They have an orchard in Powys which we visited and the photos below are of some of the varieties they grow there. This was all so nearly destroyed by the government policy which paid farmers to grub up their orchards so that the long era of the Golden Delicious could begin. Our middle son got a Saturday job hauling trees out with a tractor and chains until the farmer discovered he was only twelve and sacked him. For years we used his abandoned apple boxes around our own garden. This country started to import huge volumes of tasteless and valueless apple lookalikes drenched in chemical sprays and of dubious food value. I’m with Gerard Manley Hopkins on this one – “all is seared with trade bleared smeared with toil“.

But Severnside carries on with the old ways reduced to guerilla action. As the old ones die, there are just about enough incomers with the interest and passion to keep the rumour of another way alive. Skilled people who sample the polluted river, make putchers for gardeners; who love the landscape and slap preservation orders on threatened barns and abandoned wooden barges, who record the orchids and wild plants, who rotate the road signs to keep strangers out, who build drystone walls, and who made us welcome for twenty five years.

Feeling fragile!

April 2004. I haven’t aged a bit!

So 22 years ago, one of the children in an Easter workshop we were running came up with this painted egg. It came to light this morning as I was sorting through thousands more photos which, by reason of my disorganised non-filing system, had been marooned on a selection of removable drives and lurking in dusty corners of my study. For me, cataloguing and filing photos is up there with doing a tax return and so photos of Severnside were spread over a number of drives and my meagre initial haul in Google Photos is rapidly being dwarfed by newcomers. Wee hee I say, except so many of them are of rusty old hulks and grey days by the river – and my journey into the past released all too many glum memories from the muddy sediment of my recall – you may remember I wrote a couple of posts ago that one of the reasons I went walking on the banks was to put some mental distance between me and a difficult pastoral situation.

On the other hand I also found loads of photos from our european jaunts which reminded us of Corsica and France, Spain, and Italy and some mammoth car journeys back and forth across the Pyrenees. Presently we’re a bit confined by minor infirmities and hospital appointments and worse still, it’s autumn; the sunlight’s going out and this time of the year really gets to me. There was a time when I thought (hopefully) that this was some dark night of the soul which I’d be able to brag about; but when I presented it to my then spiritual director she dismissed it and said all I needed was some sunshine. She was right of course.

So, what with photographic memories, decreasing day length and an allotment that looks almost abandoned – I’m feeling a bit fragile. I wake up at night and have horrible nightmares . My roots in primitive Methodism assure me that a bit of suffering is really good for me but I think, no I’m certain, that’s bad advice. However I’m holding on to the childrens’ painted egg because it’s the best portrait of me I’ve come across. Thin skin, gritted teeth and fragile, with tissue thin hair and soft inside – what can I say? Prophetic comes to mind.

Anyway, here’s a happy memory from Collure where we discovered a local delicacy. They expose the local wine to the hot sunshine in giant carbouys where it oxidizes and thickens; turning into a kind of Madeira or perhaps balsamic and rather expensive –

and then a view from a villa we rented in the north of Corsica away from the crowds. we were on a steep sided mountain range on a road which simply petered out and gave way to a footpath. There was an overwhelming perfume of wild herbs and scrub as we walked up. There were olives, figs and myrtle and some beautiful butterflies which I think were Queen of Spain fritillaries. At night, down in the valley the Scops owls would call noisily for hours. The roads in the north on Cap Corse were so narrow Madame would adopt brace position for miles and much preferred the return journey where the precipitous drop to the sea was on my side. Our second trip there was rather marred by the scirocco wind which was hot, dusty and constant.

The mountains just beyond the back garden.

Tonight I’m cooking monkfish wrapped in parma ham with a brushing of basil/sundried tomato paste, balsamic vinegar and good olive oil – with a side dish of ratatouille from our own allotment. Some people turn to drink, but I turn to cooking. I know from long experience that this mood will lift and normal levity will be resumed.

Up the creek. An interesting discovery.

No, not on the Severn but on the Esk estuary at Ravenglass, Cumbria

Like buses they seem to come along four at a time! This whole business started off because I’d decided to write in longer form about the Severn Estuary. The first obstacle was that having spent last winter cataloguing and identifying plants (10,000 photos – and what do you call an uncatalogued photo? Lost!” So I gathered together my collection of removable drives and searched iCloud, Dropbox and Google photos, loaded the whole ghastly mess into a 2Tb removable drive and transferred the lot, very slowly, into one collection on Google Photos, hoping that at least some of the many duplicates would be binned on the journey. As a strategy it was a bit of a curate’s egg – “good in parts my Lord!” but I was aware that Google has introduced a measure of AI into the programme and is now cataloguing in a much more clever way. Somewhere in a Californian desert the lights probably went dim for a while as the snake digested the gazelle of my neglected collection.

So I found nearly all of my Severn photos; memories, memories, going back to the time before exif data but not quite as far as negatives. It was a bit like Christmas as I tested the system and typed in abstruse keywords and watched the laptop dollop lost memories on to the screen. Among those lost memories was the photo at the top of the page which I managed to take without paying any attention to the upright posts in the middle of the frame.

I should say that Ravenglass on the Esk estuary is a most wonderful place where I felt completely at home. The plants were tremendous with lots I’d never seen before. I was pleased to correctly identify a fungus spotted from 50 yards as a rusty and burst spray can of insulating foam, but that cost me a pair of muddy boots. It’s so windy up there that I expect the tiny post office keeps a supply of them for storm repairs. The Esk estuary feeds into the Irish Sea, and just a short train ride away you can see, but probably not wander freely, around the Sellafield site. The rest of the county should probably be thought of as post industrial, if not deeply depressed since the mines closed but Sellafield thrives, proudly displaying a roadside welcome to “Britain’s Energy Coast” which is a bit rich; it should read “Britain’s Clearing up the Mess after the Energy has been Extracted Coast.” But nobody grumbles because work is work and it pays better than standing up to your waist in water emptying fish baskets.

Which brings me back to the spectacularly lonely, and therefore lovely Esk estuary where you could pick enough samphire to feed a banquet were it not for the fact that it glows green at night as it emits low level radiation. It’s probably worth asking the local pub if they’ve got any spare dose meters, just don’t mention my name.

And those modest poles rotting in the mud are there for exactly the same reason as the ones in the Severn (the hot contents of whose two nuclear power stations is in the midst of being processed and stored at Sellafield. Small world eh?) The one difference is in what they – the weirs/traps are called. In Ravenglass they’re called “Salmon Garths” with very little difference from salmon putchers except it’s even colder up there. I fell instantly in love with the place. But remembering it this week made me wonder if I shouldn’t be seeking professional help for these obsessions because I’ve inadvertently found two more instances of old fishing practices on my hard drive. The first, or should it be the third is barely a mile away from where we were staying in cornwall a couple of weeks ago. I’ve got a small catalogue of fish trap photos from Froe Creek just off the Percuil river which doubled up as a mill pond, and yet another I know about but have only seen from the bridge across the Menai Straits to Anglesey called Ynys Gorad Goch (which translates to “Red Weir Island”).

I love that these brilliantly inventive ways of catching fish in a subsistence economy have travelled around not just Britain but around the world in an example of parallel evolution. Thank goodness they’re still there, albeit in ruins, and catalogued so that one day we could go back to them and see what they can teach us about low impact and environmentally friendly food gathering. Here are some more pictures: I really do like a bit of human company but I need to be in the mood! A very wise old priest once said to me while I was training “You’ve got to remember that availability is an ascetic discipline”. He wasn’t wrong. These places are very healing.

The Ravenglass and Eskdale steam engine is the icing on the cake. Now where’s my medication?

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.