Month: July 2024

Cornish Tin Tabernacle makes the news.

Cadgwith is by no means one of the Lizard peninsula’s most threatened communities as long as you consider it as part of a larger area including Ruan Minor, Lizard Village and perhaps Poltesco. Between them they can offer an excellent pub almost on the shoreline (great Sunday lunch) and another in Lizard; both Methodist and Anglican churches, two schools; two post offices with a general store and café, a farm shop, a GP surgery which was still open this spring, a lifeboat station and a coastguard lookout run by volunteers; hotels, cafes and pasty shop, local arts and crafts galleries, probably the last serpentine turner in the county and some wonderful walks through a botanical wonderland. The small inshore fishing fleet is mainly run by part timers and – here’s the rub – there’s a superabundance of holiday lets. If you’re a plumber, or an electrician or builder; or if you’re happy to do a bit of cleaning you can earn a sensible living but as far as buying a house locally is concerned, you might as well resign yourself to a long commute from St Awful (that’s a local judgement, not mine) – or Camborne which is one of Cornwall’s most deprived towns. We tend to think of levelling up as a northern phenomenon but Cornwall has some of the poorest communities in the UK and like some parts of Wales, the only way up for many ambitious young people is also the way out.

If you’re a regular visitor to the Potwell Inn you’ll know that this part of South Cornwall is one of my favourite places on earth, most years we visit two or three times to hunt for plants; but you also need to know that simply liking the place, buying a Guernsey sweater and a hat with an embroidered anchor will not; will never make you a local. Upcountry is an unsettling and wicked place which necessitates passing through Devon and nothing good ever comes through Devon.

However, turning to Cadgwith once again, the tin tabernacle in the photo which is on the steep footpath from near the Todden and leading up to the car park is inaccessible except on foot. I took this photo in January 2022 – I’ve always loved these remnants of mission churches. We had one of them in Oldbury on Severn in the next-door parish to mine. There’s much more information about the Cadgwith chapel in the linked Guardian article published last week. The protesting cottage, also at the top of this piece is just a few steps further down the lane and reflects the majority view of the locals. When we grow old and forgetful it’s regarded as a personal tragedy but the mass influx of outsiders can just as surely drive out the community memories which are the glue that holds people together in shared experiences, and which is one reason why we were both so delighted to see that the little blue corrugated iron chapel has been given a grade 2 listing. Go inside and sit quietly on one of the blue pews and reflect on the courage of the volunteer lifeboat crew who, in 1907, went out to rescue 456 people from the stricken liner “Suevic” – and the vicar was a member of that crew.

Earlier this year we were having a pint in the pub on the Lizard and I noticed that one of the bar staff was wearing an RNLI pager. In Pembrokeshire last week we were on the Puffin shuttle bus going towards St Justinian when we had to stop to allow a car to pass and the bus driver stopped for a chat with the other driver – it’s that kind of bus route – and turned around to tell us that the man was, in fact, a member of the St David’s lifeboat crew; cue for a big cheer from the passengers! These things matter greatly. Community memories are hardwired into the whole landscape in these isolated places. Sustainable tourism demands a thoughtful attitude from those of us who are just visiting to ensure that we are not responsible for eroding and diluting those memories.

We’ll soon be back for another month in paradise – the campervan may be a bit cramped, but it’s like a holiday cottage on wheels once you’ve learned how to live like a submariner and put things away in the right place every time.

Looking over Cadgwith Cove from Inglewidden

“Send three and fourpence – going to a dance.”

Shaggy Soldier

It’s not a great photograph for sure, but the family name Galinsoga triggered the memory of a story my dad used to tell about a wartime message which began as “send reinforcements, going to advance” and having been passed by mouth from messenger to messenger finally arrived at headquarters as “Send three and fourpence, going to a dance”. The trigger, of course was the similarity, when spoken, between Galinsoga and Gallant Soldier.

As ever I turned to Geoffrey Grigson’s marvellous 1958 book “An Englishman’s Flora” which lists Latin and English folk names, county by county for hundreds of familiar flowering plants. Galinsoga is something of an outlier in the book because it lists only one name by way of explanation to describe these “thin, long legged, little flowered daisies, ray flowers white, disc flowers yellow – annual, naturalised little cockneys in a waste corner or uncultivated garden” and makes the link between the plant name and the 18th century Spanish botanist Don Mariano Martinez de Galinsoga.

Many of the plants mentioned in the book have dozens of local folk names which would (at least the Oxfordshire ones) have been familiar to my mother. Every time I open the book I get a pang to think of the loss of local dialects; it only took a few turns of the page to discover that in Gloucestershire the Spindle tree was known as Skiver – which isn’t a name I’ve ever heard. But what about “Single Gussies”, “Smear Docken” or “Son afore the father”? What about “Arse smart”? The rich and earthy poetry of plant names has all but disappeared by now. I remember an old man in Pucklechurch delightedly telling my young sister that the Dandelion she’d picked was really called “Piss the Bed”. I can see the point of the Latin binomials if a native botanist of Gloucestershire was trying to compare Pulmonaria (Jerusalem Cowslip) notes with a neighbour from Herefordshire who called it Spotted Virgin” – but there’s a wealth of folklore and pre-scientific medical wisdom hidden within the local dialect names. It’s a great book to browse and I’ve almost worn my battered paperback copy out – I’ll have to shell out for a properly stitched hardback copy one of these days.

He’s behind you!

Southern Hawker dragonfly

Oh I do love a traditional pantomime joke! I couldn’t resist taking this shot of a Southern Hawker Dragonfly on the allotment today, apparently stalking a Ladybird on the other side of the cane. We’d only just been talking about the absence of many of our familiar visitors during this very unseasonable summer, and then today we had 20C and sunshine, so they all came out to play. There were Damselflies in turquoise and ruby as well as this fierce but beautiful Dragonfly plus many other flying insects. We’ve even had our first newt in the pond.

The warm, wet weather has led to a plague of weeds and so since we got back from St David’s we’ve spent hours every day pulling them up. As it happens I really enjoy hand weeding so it’s not so much of a chore and – being a bit obsessive – I get a kick out of making a good job of it. The downside in the polytunnel today was that it was so very hot, approaching 30C with very little wind to stir the air. There was another find, as ever not in the least rare, but I’ve never seen it before. There are two members of the Galinsoga family in the UK – known by the English names “Shaggy Soldiers” and “Gallant Soldiers” this one was the hairier and scruffier version . The yellow flower also appeared out of nowhere – it’s one of the St John’s Worts this one the “imperforate” form, which is to say there are no little holes to be seen when you hold the leaf up to the sun. We think it must have come from a packet of wildflower mix that our son gave us. Madame remembers broadcasting the seed probably three years ago and it’s finally popped up in two places. Weeds are fun; very diverse and surprising, and Imperforate St John’s Wort is suitable (like Pot Marigolds) for making a very good antiseptic cream.

The other notable thing about the Dragonfly picture is how superior the focus, exposure and depth of field it is when compared with my phone camera. It’s a bit trickier to set up a shot than the point and press phone, but the reward is an altogether better and more useful picture. Sometimes the identity of a plant depends on a few glandular hairs that need really detailed shots.

After the tunnel was weeded I fed all the plants with liquid seaweed fertilizer and picked our first ripe tomato – delicious but only the one between us. Tonight we’ll be eating here with another of our sons – we’ve got three – and we’ve got our own home-grown peas, broad beans courgettes and potatoes plus home grown fresh herbs. Tayberries and strawberries for pud and a glass or two of wine I don’t doubt. We sometimes moan about the hard work and the bad backs; but the flavour of our own vegetables is outstanding – this is no place for modesty – and everyone should at least try to grow a few veg even if it’s just a few herbs and a tomato in a pot outside the front door. I promise you’ll want more. Last night we went over to Bristol to see our grandson in his year 6 leavers play – Robin Hood with some outstanding performances and lots of fart jokes. The fact that loads of dads turned up on the same night as the England v Holland match teaches something about love! Life can be very beautiful. Even the dreaded Chickweed – in the right place.

Clouseau gets lucky (eventually!)

Read on for the full story of accidental good luck

So we’re back in one piece from St David’s after two weeks of sun, biblical rain and gales. This souvenir photo is of a big moment when I finally found a plant I’ve been looking for, misidentifying and hunting for years. As you see, it’s on the side of a road – freshly surfaced with very sticky tar and gravel which got into my shoes and on my trousers – and regularly traversed at speed by eager tourists hunting for somewhere to park 20mm closer to the sea. Whilst I was on my knees and elbows trying to photograph the plant the farmer whose house I was outside drove out and asked if I was alright. Two carloads of eager puffin hunters paused and wound down their windows to see if I was alive – all in a day’s work for a plant hunter – but I was sustained by my excitement at finding a not particularly rare plant that over the past two weeks we’d walked miles looking for. I’d even been told that it was there by the local County Recorder but three holidays later I’d still never seen it.

Not being a mild natured and placid sort of person I’d taken the previous knockbacks to heart, gracelessly cross with myself but more determined than ever to nail it and on the very last day of the trip I was crossing the road next to the campsite to empty a heavy cassette of – you don’t need to know – when in the midst of the hedgerow chaos I spotted a single white flower clinging on within inches of the traffic, the tarmac and the predation of strimming. Here it is:

It’s a Dwarf Mallow – not a Common Mallow or a Tree Mallow or a Musk Mallow or any of the several closely related Mallows – including the Marsh Mallow (yes really!) that I’ve found in the past. But Malva neglecta. Who says field botany isn’t exciting! I reckon getting the pictures, closing the ID and cataloguing the plant was a lot more rewarding than hunting for seabirds that aren’t there and getting seasick for £25 a pop. I may be wrong but apart from the obvious dangers of getting run over and ruining a decent pair of trousers, that single chance encounter whilst holding an over-full cludger was one of those unforgettable moments. In fact I can remember the exact places where I found its cousins; the Musk Mallow in July 2016 on the canal side, the Tree mallows on the clifftops in Wales and Cornwall, the Common Mallows which gave me so much grief, on the coast path down to Whitesands beach, because they vary so much in height and general jizz according to their situation. So after miles and miles of walking, it turned out to be 100 yards from where we’d parked the campervan. I’m reminded of Robert Frost’s little couplet:

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I’ll forgive Thy great big joke on me.

Anyway, here – spread over at least ten years are some family photos

Musk Mallow
Common Mallow
Tree Mallow

Life in the very, very slow lane

The view across Rhosson towards Ramsey Island

As I write this I’m watching the picture load extremely slowly at the top of the page. It may not sound particularly glamorous to take a two week holiday in the midst of a bog/marsh/mire (all of them feature) but the advantage is that there’s a completely different flora here; one that I’m not very familiar with, so every walk is revelatory in some way. Yesterday, as is the manner of Wales, it rained and blew a hoolie all day and I spent many happy hours in the campervan, cataloguing and identifying all the plants I’d photographed. However the downside of a bit of remoteness is that the internet ran unbelievably slowly, and I don’t mean just less than the 100 megabits we’re used to – I mean 50 kilobits max. This is turning into that famous good news/bad news Chinese proverb because yesterday was also UK election day and so we spent the whole day sans telly, sans politics and sans anything that makes me bang my head on the wall. On balance it was better that way. Our friends in Bristol had an election party going on – attended by some high profile politicos. We’d bowed out because we were here in the campervan, but the party, they said this morning, failed to ignite because at the very moment Rees Mogg was ejected (cheers) Farage was elected (boos). And so for fear of being misinterpreted by the citizens of Clifton and Hotwells the massive explosion was not ignited. Then there were the supporters of Thangam Debbonaire who lost their MP and a few greens who gained one. Ah life ….. always complicated. We went to bed after the exit polls were announced but I still woke at 6.00am pretending to myself (unsuccessfully) that it didn’t matter.

Of course it mattered. And after a day processing the news it’s obviously better that a Labour government have taken over, and obviously better that the Lib Dems (left of Labour) did so well, and still obviously better that Ed Miliband has replaced Therese Coffey at Environment, and even more obviously better that a number of independents had shown the door to their labour predecessors over Gaza. It’s taken 24 hours for me to relax a bit and feel safer for the first time since Thatcher was elected in 1979. I don’t count the Blair government because Tony Blair was just Thatcher Lite, although Gordon Brown -aside from the hugely expensive PFI contracts – was in the right place. It’s so good to feel that at last the global environmental crisis might come up on the UK agenda, and that UK citizens have voted so decisively for ordinary decency over windbag oratory. Of course the knuckle draggers deserve their place in the sun and then we can all laugh at them and ring a rejuvenated NHS to warn them that they’ve come off their medication – but if anyone ever needed a full brain transplant it would be good to get hold of an unused model – a top of the range Farage for instance.

Here in the van,though, I discovered the cause of the internet breakdown (flat mobile router battery) and fixed it (turned it on); only to discover that it was the signal that was feeble. And so I write this with no expectation that it will escape the marshes of St Davids. But – message in a bottle style -I hope it finds you well. We sent postcards to our grandchildren and the Post Office staff in St David’s seemed almost absurdly grateful today. We also once found a Spanish lottery ticket in a bottle washed up in the bay across from here. I never did anything about it and it’s still tucked inside my first Welsh Dictionary. Hardly anyone speaks Welsh here.

This is the kind of place where I go after plants like a dog might go after smells. The new OLympus TG-7 camera is excellent with just a couple of quibbles. The GPS takes a while to log on to the satellites but if you leave it on the whole time it runs the battery down. But the picture quality is much better than my Pixel 6a. As ever I need to work out a suitable workflow. Today we rested in the warm sunshine. It was good!

Natural Music

Seed head of Jack go to bed at noon aka Goat’s Beard – Tragopogon pratensis

I was pondering the other night concerning our instinct to describe nature in terms of quietness, peacefulness , meditative tranquility – none of which (for me at least) even begin to express its dynamism, ceaseless movement, busyness and fantastic, inexpressible diversity. Not the disconnected series of aesthetic ooh’s and aahs of the kind that so many TV natural history programmes seem to promote, but something more connected. When we got rid of the idea of god creating everything, we somehow lost the matrix that held everything together. In any case the old idea was redundant and too useful to the wrong kind of people but at least there was a coherent story about where we fitted in. Now the prevailing ideology has exploded us into a billion monads. One attempt at a remedy is to reduce nature to an aesthetic experience. I completely understand where nature as art gallery is coming from and I’ve got many thousands of photographs to prove it, but when we’re out walking together searching hedgerows and marshes; muddy tracks and field edges for flowering plants and suchlike, the overwhelming feeling I carry is of rhythm and flow, of complexity, timbre and key; of pace and time signature; of dissonance and assonance and the larger divisions of …….. spit it out! of music.

I don’t want to inflate this metaphor like a party balloon until it bursts; but I want to hold it there while I write about being here in West Wales and about being human – but most of all being human in nature. I want to put aside any thoughts of saving the earth or restoring lost species and any long lists of rarities in favour of that hoary old retreat favourite – of being in nature. Being in the moment is all the rage, but for me that’s like trying to listen to Bach one note at a time.

Small Scabious Scabiosa columbaria
Sheep’s Bit – Jasioni montana
Devil’s Bit Scabious – Succisa pratensis

Do these three look the same? They certainly do if you’re walking too fast; but don’t worry because these three photographs were taken in three different places over a period of seven years, and you’d be vanishingly unlikely to see all three side by side in one place. If you’re curious to know, it’s all in the stamens. Learning the plants takes years and is full of blind alleys and wrong ID’s, but what that teaches us is that being in nature is a process in which no single place is better, cleverer or more virtuous than any other and also that every place is full of possibilities even if you could count the plants you could name on the fingers of one hand. Where I was today at a field edge and finding a Bugloss plant, I was flooded with endorphins, a runners’ high. This was the place – to pinch a line from TS Elliot – that

“You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid”

There are thousands of plants I’ve never seen and probably never will; but we mustn’t differentiate between the rare and the common as if rarity bestowed some kind of patina of significance. I’ve been out botanizing with some folks who fire Latin names at one another like paintballs and boast of their thousands of records. Each to their own, I say. Since we can only attend to the Great Symphony of nature with all our senses; of sound and touch and taste and sight and smell – and here I’d add memory and imagination because nature works so slowly that some of her works are beyond the reach of the conventional senses; then it follows that every part of our mind is engaged. It’s the complete opposite of emptying the mind, it’s allowing it to fill with something other than ourselves. Embracing the Great Symphony is the work of a lifetime; many lifetimes.

Sea Carrot

Take a typical hedgerow, for instance. Those weeds at the front – the ones with heads comprising many small flowers sitting at the ends of umbrella spokes. Unsurprisingly they’re not always the same plant, they’re a procession of cousins from early in the year; each one pushing past its senescent relative in glorious green livery – one of them has the English name Queen Anne’s Lace -flowering and then setting seed, signalling its own disappearance until the next year. Depending where you live you might see Alexanders first, and then Cow Parsley, Hogweed and then (a bit trickier) Rough Chervil or Wild Carrot – there are dozens of them – some exceptionally rare and subtly different but each one challenging the false idea of the a solitary moment in an unchanging natural world. Searching for a musical comparison I came up with Bach’s Goldberg Variations. One aria to begin with – that’s the family, the genus if you prefer – and then the thirty variations each using exactly the same notes but changing the tempo and key whilst maintaining the theme. Listening to the Goldbergs right through is something akin to following the life of a hedgerow through a season. But then there are the grace notes – like the Stitchworts’ little shining highlights; Bluebells, Campions, Dog Roses and Honeysuckle. Later there are berries and some of them are delicious whilst others might kill you. There’s a restlessness and dynamism in nature. Tides and seasons; the length of days and the rising and setting of the moon can never be stilled by putting a pin through them and mounting them in a cabinet, and neither can we step out of that fierce river because

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

Dylan Thomas

If the aim of meditation is to back out of the flow of life, then I can’t see the point of it. If the initial premise is that we are always prey to living a shadowy half life working all day and satisfying our delinquent desires at night in front of the television, then I completely agree that something urgently needs doing. But the cure isn’t to hide but to embrace the flow, to step out into earth life and add our own bit of the song to the natural music that birthed us and will take us back again when we reach our own senescence. So seeking, identifying but above all enjoying the plants, the birds and insects; the mammals and the fish for themselves and as part of our own nature, is – quite apart from making lists and showing off to your companions – a form of fully engaged meditation which leads us gently away from seeing nature as a business opportunity.

That’s what I mean by Natural Music.