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
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.
I’ve worked in a number of places where making some kind of a judgement about people was necessary. Working in a prison, for instance, I don’t think I ever met someone who was fully guilty of the crime they’d been sentenced for. Even those who shared their crimes with me would almost always fail to mention the worst bits. As school governors we got so used to inflated references that we rarely took them into account. On one occasion a reference had been forged by a family member who was a headteacher. When writing references there was an accepted code that meant any reference that failed to recommend the applicant “without reservation” would almost always be spiked. Once, even on an appointment committee, we only discovered later that a teacher we took on a five star reference added at the last minute was inserted into the shortlist by his brother in law who used his muscle as an HMI. Perfect humans always turn out to be ‘human humans’. It was an arduous task to sort the sheep from the goats and we didn’t always get it right. Most of us hardly know the answer to whether we’re sheep or goats either, and so the business of writing a CV or a job application; training to be a lawyer or standing for parliament becomes a tremendous ethical struggle. Of course the really bad ones just lie about it and often rise to the top very quickly.
When my Dad died I didn’t feel able to take his funeral service. I never had any doubt that he loved me and that I loved him, albeit in our own fashion; but our relationship was quite challenging. He came back from war service badly physically and psychologically damaged, his mother had died when he was very young, his father was absent from his life for his early years – away fighting in Afghanistan (does it ever end?) So he suffered from agoraphobia, often drank too much and lived on valium for years. My mum became his unhappy carer. I was a very difficult and challenging adolescent and so it was all very reactive and neither of us was any good at it.
Anyway we eventually patched things up, largely through our shared interest in politics but when he died – the day after he asked me to shave him for the first and only time – (which became a sacramental memory) – I decided to let someone else take the service. But having heard hundreds of dishonest and misleading funeral addresses I wrote a couple of A4 sheets telling the real story, assuming that he would use it as a crib sheet and embed it into his address. He didn’t. He just read it out! and afterwards our oldest son said “That was the darkest sermon I’ve ever heard”.
Steering a middle course between reckless honesty and downright misrepresentation is one of the basic habits that characterise the virtues I wrote about yesterday – Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Courage. Truth telling without spite (Justice) is one of the leading virtues – so Aristotle taught – to achieve eudaimonia, flourishing. Thirty years in Parish ministry taught me that there were many things you should say in a funeral address and many that you should never – ever – mention. On one occasion I took a service for a notorious adulterer, whose son, during his address, brought the house down by saying that his dad was a great comfort to the ladies of the village. Piloting a course between the utterly bland and the offensive truth is a skill that not everyone learns. I became an authority on tasteless best-man speeches and woefully incompetent attempts at funeral addresses as well as attempts to deceive me. I developed a nose for fibs. The churchyard was full of saints and the prison was full of innocent men.
So how on earth can we be expected to elect virtuous politicians in a society that’s wedded to dishonesty and even applauds when they appear to get results? Or perhaps to add some nuance to the question – is it even important to elect virtuous politicians? and further to that question how is it that we have fallen into the habit of electing quite so many crooks and hopeless incompetents? Is it because we’ve convinced ourselves that they’re better at getting things done because they make difficult problems look easy by not overthinking. Aristotle had something to say about that too. For him the highest virtue of all was widom; sophia; contemplation. So however decisive and quick to act a politician aspires to be, if they’ve got a mind like a collapsed souffle they’ll be no good. But mostly the old adage that if it looks like a turd and smells like a turd it’s probably a turd, applies in spades to those seeking positions of power. Sheer cleverness isn’t enough. Prudence, justice, temperance and courage are an interwoven set of human dispositions that are not the same as stature or hair colour or whether you drive a Lamborghini. They’re learned habits that, with practice, infuse our lives and help us to flourish – and a flourishing human is easy to spot in the flesh; harder to expose when all we’ve got to go on is a social media profile; but equally you can’t describe yourself as virtuous if a five minute search on the same social media will contradict that claim with solid evidence that you’ve been downright wicked, thoughtless. mendacious and cruel. “Useful” doesn’t count among the virtues.
As we go through the polytunnel and tend our tomato plants in the summer, we can decide, with a high level of confidence, which plants are flourishing and which are not. Any farmer worth their salt will be able to run their hands along a sheep’s back and know if they’re good. So why is it that we’re so rubbish at detecting the same things in humans? Or am I just a hopeless romantic??
A little bit of greenback on these tomatoes – usually down to irregular watering.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 calledby 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.
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.
If you look carefully above the familiar Beech hangar known as the Nearly Home Trees, or more properly Cookworthy Knapp you’ll see the glimmer of a wind turbine propeller blade just peeping above the trees. I don’t know whose bright idea it was to allow it to be built there but it does little to enhance a view that always lifts our spirits when we return to Cornwall. In fact it’s not actually in Cornwall at all but still in Devon – providing a useful, if overworked, scapegoat to blame for the indignity. I feel slightly guilty about calling them “Nearly Home” because we don’t live here, but we’ve both loved coming down here for over fifty years since we lived in Falmouth for a year and fell in love with the place.
Since the first time we discovered the Lizard it’s been our go-to destination. We’ve camped here, stayed in cottages when funds permitted and brought the campervan down on many occasions. Writing and drawing have always been a part of the agenda, but photographing and recording some of the amazing plants have been added to the list so we bring a faintly ridiculous amount of kit here, up to and including the portable WiFi gear that weighs far less than the portable Remington typewriter I insisted on stuffing into my rucksack on our first visit. A second and equally eccentric corner of the bag was filled by an Italian aluminium coffee percolator. The last time we stacked our kit up in the hall our neighbour asked us if we were moving out.
Storm Chandra – the latest of three named storms has changed our idea of what’s possible while we’re here. In fact I don’t remember us having a “storm season” at all until quite recently but now it’s a thing, like the monsoon season and the hurricane season. No doubt Keir Starmer will be bending every sinew to discuss the climate crisis with the Chinese government; just after he’s signed off on buying a few more nuclear power stations and secured some juicy weapons contracts. How blessed we are to have such Nelsons at the head of the ship of state, (Sorry; that sentence was auto-corrected from ” such Nellies at the head of the shit of state”).
Anyway, our journey down was largely unaffected by the storm apart from fierce rain as we drove through Devon and a 30 minute delay on the A30 when traffic was funnelled into a single lane so that four blokes could dig out a blocked drain. We were so glad of the new windscreen wiper blades! There were flooded fields to the left and right of us almost all the way, but we managed to load the car in a dry spell and once we got beyond Helston it cleared up beautifully. Chatting to a lost delivery driver this morning he told me that the side roads hereabouts are still blocked by floodwater and fallen trees, and on the television news we learned that the Environment Agency hadn’t even begun to assemble their array of mighty pumps on the Somerset Levels until storm Chandra had made landfall. There was a worrying moment as we drove through Redruth, when we heard an awful noise and smelt something like burning rubber which thankfully turned out to be outside the car and leaking in. It looks and feels like a town where whole industries go to die. They voted against the EU down here but the new A30 improvements are a stark reminder of what a few billion pounds worth of help from the neighbours can do. So now there’s fantastic roads infrastructure for the bailiffs to haul the machinery and the jobs out of the county.
Anyway we’re here and in, and after the usual hour of curses and hand-to-hand combat with the mobile router we even have the internet. It didn’t take long to Google up what’s on locally and we’ve already signed up for a talk at the village hall on Monday about the Lizard Flora. There are two rare plants that we’ve been seeking for years – one of them – Spring Sandwort – also occurs on the Mendips and although we know roughly where they ought to be we’ve never found them. But they also occur down here on the Lizard and the reason is that it’s a plant that’s tolerant of the post-industrial mine waste that occurs from lead mining on Mendip and Serpentine on the Lizard which has large surface areas of the mineral. The other plant we’d love to find is Land Quillwort which, being not much larger than a 1p coin and also not producing flowers but spores is loosely associated with ferns and is one of the plants we have in danger of becoming extinct. The Lizard is the only place it grows. So – as my Mum would have said Hope springs eternal in the hearts of the faithful (actually Alexander Pope said that first but I prefer my Mum’s identical version.
Spring Squill (I think!)
One of the problems of identifying the Quillwort is that it bears a strong resemblance to the emerging leaves of the Spring Squill which also grows here – it’s just much smaller. We were wandering on the clifftop some years ago before we got quite so interested in plants and we met a woman who was scanning the grass as only botanists do. “What are you looking for?” I asked. You probably need to know that this was before I discovered how deaf I’d become. I was sure she’d replied “squirrels” and so not wishing to display my ignorance I asked “what sort? grey or red?” – “Spring”- she answered” and then the penny dropped. I hope you’ll also be pleased to know that just before we came away I got my third set of NHS hearing aids which are absolute game changers. Apart from being able to hold a lucid conversation with Madame (my mishearings were becoming hilarious), I can now receive phone calls, listen to music and even connect them to the satnav. Madame finds this bit troubling because now I shout at thin air and have conversations with people who aren’t there.
While I was waiting to intercept the lost delivery driver at the top of the lane I chatted to a ninety year old local man who was born here and still lives in his grandfather’s house. He looked as fit as a flea, and told me how he still gets pleasure from pushing open the door knowing that his grandfather’s hand had touched the same ironwork. The air must be pretty good around here.
