Blackberry tourists

IMG_5878It’s almost silent here on Lleyn, apart from the odd lazy bee, a robin singing in a minor key and a duck in the field next door. The sun is shining as it it can only shine in the autumn and every leaf is gleaming  in the warm air.  Even the hawthorns seem to be doing some last minute packing for a cold winter, they’re so heavily decked with fruit the colour of sealing wax.

It’s impossible not to fall in love with this place.   Yesterday was a bit of a write-off as it was raining most of the time and we were exhausted from what seems like three weeks of travelling, but today the sun is shining and we took a leisurely wander around our favourite places just to say hP1080800i. The tide was falling at Porthor and we walked along the beach, inspected a few plants on the way down and photographed seaweed for me to paint as soon as I can get the piano out of my workroom. But I had higher things on my mind and so we stopped off at the pub next door to RS Thomas’s church in Aberdaron to book for Sunday Lunch. I did meet RS once at a reading, but I knew Jim Cotter, one of his successors, in the parish much better. He was a courageous and radical parish priest who was always in hot water for following the Gospel rather than canon law, and I found his grave up on the clifftop church at Llanfaelrhys close to RS’s widow and son.  That, however was not the higher thing I had in mind.  Cake, particularly National Trust cake was the object of my desire so we rattled on up to the cafe at Plas yn Rhiw.

‘Plas’ is probably the smallest and most lovely garden in the whole of the National Trust.  It’s up on the hill overlooking Porth Neigwl – mistranslated as Hell’s Mouth – a lovely bay but properly hellish for a sail ship in a storm. So we had tea and cake accompanied by more insects and more silence before we went off to buy fresh crab.

Sadly fresh crab was not available today.  We always stop at one particular house where we can often buy it very cheaply. It was here, in the spring, I was given an impromptu tutorial  on how to sex a crab by a delightful elderly lady who ran over the whole thing for me so I’d buy the right ones next time. However, today she explained that ‘he’ had not been out for a couple of weeks because of the terrible weather but he was ‘out crabbing right now”.  “OK”, I said, “I’ll pop back tomorrow”.  “Oh no, I’ll give you my phone number,” she said, rummaging around for a piece of paper. “I’ll put it in my phone”, I said, ” I’ll put you down as ‘Mrs Crab'”. “My name’s Menna”.  “Menna Crab?” I said. “That’ll do” – broad smile!

On the way back we talked about what makes this one of the most magical places we know, quite as magical as Velvet Bottom on the Mendips, and Lizard and Zennor in Cornwall, and I think the common factor may be something as counter-intuitive as mining. Each of these areas has a history that you can almost taste in every stone. Rhiw, and especially the area below Jim Cotter’s grave was one of the biggest manganese mines in the country.  In Priddy and around Velvet Bottom they mined lead in Roman times; in Zennor it was tin and on Lizard serpentine. Everywhere there are the slightly melancholy remains of industrial building, spoil heaps and gruffy ground completely reverted to wild nature.  The sort of random and unplanned nature that makes every step a botanical adventure.

But there was one further connection to make, and it came to me unexpectedly while I was searching in my mind for some kind of commonality between these disparate landscapes, and I think it was because I was brought up in the midst of an exactly comparable post-industrial landscape – only in my case it was the remains of mining and clay, used to supply brickworks and pipeworks.  For me there’s the sense of childhood enchantment which emerges when I enter exactly the kind of place I played in as a child.  The old dram road, the ruined pithead works of the South Gloucestershire coalfield, the brickworks at Shortwood where my friend Eddy and I used to crawl up the abandoned chimney flues to look up at the sky. These landscapes are inscribed not just by their natural history today but their human history in the past. It’s true of every landscape of course, but these are the ones I understand at a deeper level.

Here they call us ‘blackberry tourists’ because so many outsiders come in on weekends like this to harvest the hedgerows. There’s still a lingering, almost imperceptible resentment at the English who’ve moved here and you can’t blame them.  Our friends tried to buy a cottage here years ago and found themselves thwarted at every move. But I don’t want t live here, just come here two or three times a year to breathe and feel the silence.

 

 

 

A new widget

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I’m inclined to think that we bloggers are better at talking than listening, and having banged on for a year at some (130,000 words) length on any subject that interested me, I realized this morning that if this blog is to be any more significant than a bunch of egotistical blah blah blah it needs to offer the opportunity for more engagement and more feedback.

I’ve long wanted the site to have its own email address so that readers could respond privately without having to use public comments or likes, but I’ve been wary of compromising our privacy by handing out my own addresses and being swamped. I realize that this could be risky but I’ve taken every precaution to keep the ‘contact@severnsider.com’ channel separate, and I hope and anticipate that this will add something to the whole experience of the Potwell Inn. After all, whoever heard of a pub where you had to listen to the landlord without being able to join in a conversation. So now there will be two ways of joining in, the ‘comment’ button for stuff you don’t mind sharing with everyone, and the ‘contact’ button for anything else. I can’t promise anything more than a slow response, but I will try and respond and I’m always pleased to receive constructive ideas, criticism  and further thoughts.

That, at least, was the intention when I woke ‘on a mission‘ this morning.  “It’s time” – I thought and I charged into action. Not being a computer geek I should have realized that nothing is as easy as it seems and I finally made it work ten hours later, which rather took the shine off my glorious optimism.

I’ll put up a ‘proper’ post later if I can find the energy, but meanwhile I hope you’ll find this a useful opportunity.  Do let me know if you agree, I get the sense that there’s a community out there which is struggling, like me, to make a lucid and useful response to our climate and ecological crises by living differently – hence the endless reading, the allotment and the emphasis on food.

We’re now in North Wales for a little while in our exploration of the regions and their different farming challenges. We seem to have been (I suppose we have been) travelling for weeks, but nothing has shaken my conviction that there is a way through this mess.

 

Tomato festival

Yesterday was a bit wet, but the tomatoes seem unbothered and we needed to get them processed as quickly as possible so I was up at the allotment to pick them before breakfast and it was pretty much lunchtime before I managed to grab a bite to eat. Last year we invested in an inexpensive hand cranked passata machine and it really helps when you’ve got a lot of tomatoes to deal with. We don’t bother to skin them, just rinse them off to get rid of dust and insect leavings, and then chop them into pieces. Then we pass them through the machine, returning the residue  around four times to get the last bit of flesh out. Today’s batch of tomatoes weighed around 10Kg and made up 9 litres of finished sauce – it’s a Marcella Hazan recipe, very simple, just simmered for a couple of hours with six peeled and halved onions and 500g butter. Last year we experimented with bottling some of the produce because our freezer is too small to freeze all the tomato sauce and passata  we need for the next year. The bottled sauces were incredibly useful and kept well in a dark cupboard, in fact we finished up the last bottle a couple of weeks ago. Marcella Hazan and Anna Del Conte are two of my favourite writers on Italian food.

Any allotmenteer will know that you can get tempted to grow all sorts of things that turn out to be somewhere down the list of useful or favourite vegetables. We’ve discovered that good stock, fresh herbs, and prepared sauces like pesto and straight tomato are a tremendous ‘go-to’ resource on busy days and so we give some priority and growing space to them in the planning stage.

I love this time of year.  With a bit of luck we’ll be harvesting the seaweed in a short while, and thinking about charging the hotbed with a new load of fresh manure ready to beat the winter cold. So it’s not just the things that we’ve grown ourselves, there are all sorts of freebies in the hedgerows, not least the sloes and this year I think we’ll make some rose-hip syrup too. The storecupboards are slowly filling up with preserves, jams and pickles – it’s a very comfortable feeling as the nights get colder and longer.

Winter is civil engineering time and there are still a number of jobs to do like plumbing all the water tanks together and covering the compost heap.  It’s also a time for reflection on the last season.  We’ve already decided to move the strawberry bed into a more accessible place, and reposition a number of gooseberries and blackcurrants to give them more breathing space and light. Today I cut off the last of the maincrop potato haulms and covered the rows with black plastic until we’re ready to dig them. There was weeding and clearing away dead leaves to catch up with after our time away, but nothing much to worry about. We came home with boxes of veg to keep us going for 10 days.

We’re going to have a bit of a bash to increase our repertoire of vegetarian dishes, and decrease our meat consumption which, to be honest, has been declining anyway because we can’t afford the kind of meat we’d prefer to eat and I’d rather do without than support intensive farming with all its impact on the earth. No philosophy today, you may be pleased to see, but just the sense of profound thanksgiving for the gifts the allotment brings to us with very little credit to us or our skills.

Is talking to the trees a load of blather?

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Home again after a long drive back from the Western Lakes in Cumberland, with an overnight stop in Yorkshire catching up with friends there. A week ago I wrote about our impressions of a depressed economy as we approached Ravenglass from the North.  Leaving by the southern route, we caught the full majesty of the fells as we skirted around the other boundary. The whole area could be called by any number of names, because calling it “the Lake District” implies that the lakes are the principal feature whereas I’d say that the fells win hands-down.  The lakes themselves, (leaving aside the rather menacing Wastwater) are fully occupied as tourist attractions which somehow diminishes them as the extraordinary environments they are. Many of the peaks are busy in the summer with walkers “doing the Wainwrights”, and compared with the remoter parts of the Yorkshire Dales, they lack peace and tranquility. There’s a whole vocabulary to describe various features of the Pennines – words like ‘moor’, ‘fell’, ‘crag’ and ‘dale’ don’t mean much until you’ve seen first hand that they represent distinguishable features in the landscape. Our trip started in the South Pennines, in Slaithwaite (pronounced ‘slough’it”, and then we spent a week in the Dales at the head of Swaledale, followed by a week by the sea at the edge of the Western Fells. Each is a very different environment, and each of those environments is affected in different ways by the economic and ecological collapses that threaten us. I’ve been reading, catching up with the scary thought that we don’t have much time to act.

But home again, it was good to be back. We quickly get into a familiar routine when we return from one of our trips.  There’s always watering to be done, seedlings tended and the allotment inspected.  I feed the sourdough starter which I never keep in the fridge because the cold favours the production of acetic acid which I don’t care for – I prefer the fruity, apple flavour I get when it’s left sitting on the side.  It’ll go for a fortnight if it’s well fed before we set out. On the other hand we do keep the kefir in the fridge, and again  I strained it when we got home and drank a full glass.  When it’s been standing you might call it a bit of an acquired taste, a bit ‘character forming’, but I find its rich astringent flavour and slight effervescence really refreshing.

Up on the allotment, the only serious casualties were the grow-bag tomatoes which were laid low by blight.  The other outdoor tomatoes which are very blight resistant looked terrific and I’ll be making the first batch of sauce for the winter tomorrow. Best of all (although I’ll never eat them) are two large plants of Habanero chillies which are ripening well making 100% success with the chillies this summer in spite of the strangest weather.  We feasted on mashed potato made from our own Red Duke of York which make the best mash ever, our own carrots and today we picked more sweetcorn which the netting had saved from the badgers/rats/deer all of which seem to have a liking for it. Naturally there’s a pile of weeding to catch up on but the winter crops are all looking good and healthy.

All of which leads me to my cryptic remark yesterday “If nonhuman beings become extinct how will we know who we are?” I was perched on the step of the van ready to leave when I wrote it quickly because it seemed important at that moment.

The past two weeks have given me the opportunity to do some serious thinking and reading about our relationship with the natural world.  The name Arne Naess keeps coming up, so I’ve read a couple of essays and books by him and about him, and in the process I’ve come to understand a great deal more about what’s become known as ‘deep ecology’. While I was searching for some of his books I came across the following review:

In particular, it would have been helpful if Naess had explained more fully his notions of metaphysical holism (we are part of nature and in some mysterious way “one” with it), biospherical egalitarianism (all living things have equal intrinsic value and an equal right to live and blossom), and Self-realization (we grow and fulfill ourselves by identifying with, and promoting the blossoming of, all other living things and ultimately Nature/Reality as a whole). In the end, these and under crucial aspects of Naess’ ecological thought largely rest on unsupported “intuitions” that many readers will find puzzling at best.

Part of a review of Arne Naess’ book “Ecology, Community and Lifestyle”

My remark yesterday shows how importantly I’ve come to regard the view that we’re all one.  But the reviewer seems to be asking for something more like a philosophical ‘proof’  that these ideas are more than ‘intuitions’ which clearly come a good way down his list of validating arguments.

There are a number of ways of approaching this objection. Firstly, without intuition neither science or mathematics would get very far. It’s almost a cliché to observe that many of the greatest theories in both disciplines come from insights that then need to be subjected to careful tests (experiments) to see if they are ‘true’.  The original insight isn’t the theory, it’s a postulate – a kind of ‘what if?’ statement.

Anotther approach to the objection would be that the reviewer’s difficulty with ‘unsupported “intuitions”‘ is, in itself, evidence of a closed attitude towards allowable arguments. Our lives are full of intuitions and we act on them all the time without worrying too much about their proveability.

Living as if the ‘what if?’ statements which have been gained not just by unsupported intuitions but by the factual evidence of our collapsing ecosystem are true, is an entirely ‘supportable’ response to an idea that didn’t just pop out of the blue.

The anthropocentric view of humanness demands that we humans are at the apex of some kind of evolutionary thrust (the iron laws of history) that make us the only show in town, able to subject the whole of nature to our will.  The emerging evidence suggests that’s the way to extinction because we are not “lords of creation” but ‘part of creation”. Taking that insight on board and shaping our lifestyle by its precepts is a big leap but we’ve already taken much of it aboard already. Surely it’s not such a revelation to understand that human language (especially western versions) is only one among many others.  When we ‘read the weather’ by gazing at the clouds and sensing the winds we’re accessing a nonverbal language.  When I look at the plants on the allotment and try to understand whether they’re thriving or poorly I’m kind-of speaking ‘plantish’. When I see chemical foam at the base of a waterfall I may be talking ‘earthish’. I was once thrown out of a fly-fishing club for suggesting that one of their waters- which was the outflow from a reservoir –  was polluted.  They said it was an attack on the reputation of the club????

What ‘deep ecology’ suggests is that we should accept that we are a part of a mind-bogglingly complex community from single celled organisms like bacteria and fungi all the way through the plants to the primates of which we are but one (probably the least pleasant and most stubborn).  It goes on to suggest that this complex system is so finely balanced that a sudden change to one part can affect all the others and make the system sick.  Our western ‘default’ position is to look for another new technology to save the day – we’re a culture that wants to save the planet but only if we can keep our cars and aeroplanes and cheap food. If Arne Naess is for changing things peacefully and non-violently then I’m with him.

 

 

Behold

I was on a retreat many years ago where we were invited to take the hands of someone we’d only known for a few hours and say one another’s names out loud with the word ‘behold … n … It was a very powerful experience to recognise the difference between seeing someone and beholding them. So when I saw this hedgehog last week I remembered the retreat and my scientific and naturalist interest in it soared into a different realm.

If nonhuman beings become extinct

how will we know who we are?

Sadly, not an unknown fungus!

IMG_6090We were birdwatching down on the estuary today when I caught sight of this curious object.  From 20 yards it looked like a fungus, but sadly it turned out to be just another piece of plastic waste – in this case a polyurethane foam canister leaking foam as the canister degrades in the salt water. I’d have carried it home if it weren’t for the fact that it appeared to still have enough propellant left to make it explode. IMG_6087

Strangely, I looked up from taking this photograph just as the sun came out further up-river and I caught sight of the chimneys at Sellafield a source of much less visible but even more deadly waste. However, far from making me more melancholic than usual, the sight of the chimney stacks and the squelching mud under my feet reminded me of the Severn estuary alongside which I spent 25 years as a parish priest. The paradox of these industrialised estuaries is that notwithstanding the nuclear power stations, (two on the Severn), chemical works and endless industrial sprawl the migrating birds kept on coming, albeit in smaller numbers as the years went on. All this, I’m anxious to say, is not to say a word in defense of these industries whose existence is a painful monument to our anthropocentric culture. In the case of the nuclear power stations we can’t demolish them anyway because they’re going to be dangerous for decades if not centuries, but the chemical works and some at least of the huge industrial complexes should perhaps be left once they’ve been cleaned up, as memorials to and reminders of the time when we nearly destroyed the earth. I can imagine schoolchildren on educational visits looking with horror at the relics as their function is explained, while all the while waders of all kinds will re-populate the cooling ponds and  peregrine falcons nest in the steelwork. The people who worked on the sites will be commemorated not as the perpetrators of these ecological crimes but as the expression of a failed culture, egged on by all of us.

Meanwhile, we ambled along the familiar landscape stopping from time to time to look at distant birds and abandoned boats half-submerged in the mud while the grey clouds broke from time to time to let a patch of sunlight through.

Later we cut back inland and climbed to a higher vantage point to look back towards the sea which is normally hidden by the sand dunes of the Drigg nature reserve. So we walked accompanied by mixed feelings.  The relative abundance of curlew was a real tonic for us because in our part of the world, like the cuckoo,  they’re rarely heard.

We’ve been up here for a fortnight now and the only thing we’re getting used to is the weather – it rains, it seems, most of the time. The upside is that we’ve become very used to packing our waterproofs and disregarding the weather.  We’ve learned a lot about local walls – you could almost work out what county you’re in just by looking at the walls, and we’ve enjoyed being spoken to by complete strangers, it’s true what they say. Tomorrow we’re crossing back across Yorkshire for our last overnight stop. And here are some local wall styles to puzzle out –

Fatal temptation – looks like a free lunch!

I suppose this photo might have all sorts of hidden gems in it – there may be a rare moss or liverwort there but what caught my eye were the innocent loking Amanita phalloides var alba  which could look a bit like  ‘wild mushrooms’ but are really Death Caps.  They’re usually a vaguely yellow or greenish on the cap but this is  the variety that looks most like a field mushroom. Two things ought to warn you of danger immediately – firstly Field Mushrooms don’t have that name by accident, they grow in fields. Secondly, Death Caps have white gills, not brown.

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We were in Eskdale, walking back down from the spectacular Stanley Force which lies on on a tributary steam to the River Esk. “Force” seems to be the local name for waterfalls – and when you see one with this power it’s altogether appropriate. It’s about 60′ according to the guidebooks, but I’d put the depth from the lip at nearer 40′, maybe 60′ from the top of the gorge. Either way round you wouldn’t want to fall from there. When you look up at it there’s a tremendous sense of exposure, but actually the path isn’t nearly as bad as it looks, notwithstanding the warnings everywhere. The biggest challenge was driving rain; the whole gorge looked and felt like a chillly tropical forest. Fabulous bryophytes there.  I don’t know much about them except that when you look at them through a pocket magnifier they’re absolutely beautiful.  The last climb up to the viewpoint was a bit of a scramble but what with the noise and the height it was properly exciting. One of Wainwright’s favourite places, they say – but then everyone who wants to sell an ice cream in the lakes makes the same claim. There are a number of newish footbridges in place to cross the beck, and without them the whole enterprise would be a bit of a desperate scramble unless you were prepared to wade across. As we were walking up someone spotted a red squirrel, but despite moving as quietly as we could we never found any. On the way back we met a man who’d been up the fell in May and had found Mountain Ringlet butterflies there – sady, life’s just too short for me to do it all! The Western Fells are very beautiful, it’s a shame they’re so far from our home.

IMG_6074But that wasn’t all we did today because we’re staying in Ravenglass and that’s at one end of the narrow gauge Ravenglass and Eskdale railway line that runs up Eskdale to Dalegarth, the starting point of our walk.  We’d chosen to go today because it was forecast to be sunny and dry. However we’re in the Lake District which has its own climate, and it rained heavily on and off all day – luckily we took our waterproofs and enjoyed the challenge.We travelled up the line in a little carriage, but coming back we rode in one of the open trucks which was much more fun, open to the weather and the spectacular views. I was born and brought up next to the main line north from Bristol and the sheer smell of engine smoke and steam sets of a firework display of childhood memories.

 

Is it wild or isn’t it?

IMG_6043This holiday is turning into a prolongued commentary on the books I’m reading in the wet and windy evenings here in the Lake District, and the photo is completely out of focus, I know –  but it was this little flower that caught my mood and crystallised some thoughts I’d been mulling over earlier.

The flower is a particular favourite of mine and its vernacular name is Fox and Cubs – Pilosella aurantiaca, an irresistably pretty member of the Daisy family.  I’ve only ever seen one other plant and that was on a village playing field near Portscatho in Cornwall. But it’s not particularly rare and in fact it’s another garden escape, first planted in gardens in 1629 – according to Harrap’s Wild Flowers (recommended) and first spotted in the wild in Europe in 1793.  So we’re not talking Japanese Knotweed!

In the background is Muncaster Castle which was  there in 1258, so it’s been long enough for a naturalised plant to take up residence, although I doubt very much if that’s what’s happened in this case.

So that’s the flower and the castle and now the book, which is called “Deep Ecology – living as if nature mattered” by Bill Devall and George Sessions.  It’s a primer of extracts and a commentary on most of the main philosophical threads of the environmental movement in general, and in particular a ‘deep’ ecology that goes beyond conservation in its generally accepted  sense; and so “wildness” is one of the concepts that gets explored in great detail. We spent today at the castle and part of the experience was to visit and watch two displays of owls and vultures being flown. I’m not keen on zoos, but there was no opt-out at the ticket desk and so we went with the crowd and saw the caged birds and also watched them flying in the displays. Ironically (or perhaps not), among all the rarities, the one bird that tugged most at my heart was a Tawny owl that sat in its cage and called persistently. We often heard Tawny owls when we lived in the countryside, and the very first night we moved to our flat, we heard a Tawny calling outside as if to say “don’t worry I’m still here”.  It’s amber listed in the UK , and I’m sure it was only there because it had been rescued but ….. all that space and woodland around and it was in a cage. IMG_6041

It was a fabulous place to sit and watch the birds flying so close that we were warned to duck if they were heading directly towards us. I was trying (displacement activity)  to use the display to watch the birds – there were owls as well as vultures – and to admire and understand the way they were using their wings so differently but my underlying feeling was that there was something sad about these magnificent creatures being kept in cages for much of their lives. I was involved in a silent conversation with the keepers whose commentary was largely concerned with conservation. Vulnerable and threatened species of all kinds may disappear altogether if we don’t do something.  Breeding programmes, game reserves and all the available bureaucracy of grant aid and legislation are turned towards the preservation of these species but I can’t help feeling that it’s us who have to change. We’re still inclined to think of the natural world as being essentially there for us – for our education, leisure and entertainment; as a resource for geneticists and drug companies, as a raison d’être for conservationists, rangers and wardens, but we rarely understand them as existing entirely in their own right within a family of which we are only a part.

If we want to save these creatures we  – WE – have to stop exploiting and destroying their habitats, not gift aid a tenner to a charity at Christmas. Do we care about them enough to relinquish our cars, feed ourselves differently, stop kidding ourselves that mass tourism into ever more remote areas brings much needed development, preserve our remaining wild areas while turning a blind eye to deforestation in Brazil so we can go on eating cheap meat.  We, collectively, are the biggest threat to wildlife on the planet and the planet needs us to turn around.

Of course the other threatened species on display at the castle was the building itself. My heart goes out to the owners who must struggle every day to keep the show (and their ancestral home) on the road. I confess I’m a bit of a propeller head when it comes to drainpipes, I’ve seen some beauties over the years, and among the (cheap) cast iron downpipes outside the building there were some beautiful hand-made lead pipes.  Clearly the hand-to-mouth restoration of the building is being done one drainpipe and one ceiling at a time.

So how do we resolves these issues of preservation and conservation? There’s a growing thread of purism in the conservation world that demands huge reductions in human populations and industrial growth, with the re-creation of vast amounts of ‘wilderness’. It is, some say, a spiritual issue. If that means that we have to change our culture at the very deepest levels of our being then I totally agree, but not if it means forcing the solution on to the most vulnerable people on earth, because we are all too often the cause of their poverty.

Is the orange daisy lookalike wild or cultivated? Does it really matter in the great scheme of things?  Is a sperm bank or a seed store in the permafrost the best way of addressing the extinction crisis? – don’t be silly! Is a castle worth saving when there are millions of homeless out there? Well why not build some (eco) houses rather than forcing the owner to sell it off to a hotel group and leaving another family to be housed and most of the present staff unemployed.

We have seen the problem – it is us!

Good birding weather

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If it looks cold and windy in the photo that’s because it is! Ravenglass is a pretty exposed place in a rather wet and windy part of the UK.  However the Potwell Inn is made of stern stuff and today we put on our precautionary waterproofs and set off to explore the coastal path as it winds south down the tidal estuary to the place where the Esk joins the Mite and the Irt – that’s a lot of rivers, a whole landscape of tidal mud and sand and a birder’s paradise.  It’s also a very good place to discuss a divorce if you only brought one pair of binoculars. Luckily I’d decided not to wear my Breughel style peasant hat which muffles my hearing, and I put on the Tilley “Outback” which I wear without corks. It is very vulnerable to strong winds unless it’s lashed down with the chin strap, and so it spent part of the time floating away from me in a pool. Hatless, I was able to listen to the birds (which requires no expensive technology) while Madame scanned the horizon. The evidence that this is a superb feeding ground for waders is everywhere in the countless empty shells littering the shore in drifts.

Birdwise this probably isn’t the best time of year, and with such a wide area for them to range across we really needed a telescope to be sure what we were seeing. Way across the river I spotted what might have been a Common Tern,  but couldn’t be sure.  A juvenile black headed gull was forlornly following an oystercatcher around in a strange holiday romance, but we watched and heard a curlew, masses of oystercatchers, gulls, a little egret and many other waders we couldn’t identify, not to mention a couple of distant possible carrion crows. I’d love to have spent a couple of hours there with a decent telescope.

What was especially good for me was the highly specialised plant environment, and I found a massive stand of Samphire (Glasswort), Sea Mayweed, Sea Aster, Sea Purslane and Annual Seablight.  The Samphire immediately brought the thought of foraging to my mind.  There’s a theory – often called ‘the tragedy of the commons’ that suggests that when a valuable or saleable common resource is found it’s inevitable (human nature?) that someone will strip it out for profit and without regard to it’s survival – “If I don’t take it someone else will”. Not so long ago the authorities in charge of Epping Forest had to ban fungus foragers who were stripping the forest and selling their plunder to high-end restaurants. It’s a practice that appears to demand regulation, policing and possibly sanctions.

It seems, though that ancient and primal societies had little difficulty in maintaining their ecosystems because their cultures were non-dualistic.  They didn’t regard the natural world as property to be exploited at will by the strongest, but saw themselves as being a part of the whole and responsible both for it and to it. They would have viewed our economic system as a form of madness.  To the statement “If I don’t take it someone else will” they would have asked “But who would do that?” It would be as silly as stealing money from yourself. I could go on but I’d rather post some photos of the plants and habitat here.

Sea Aster

Peggoty

 

 

I suppose I should own up to the fact that my attachment to these bleak and windy seaside places is probably the responsibility of Charles Dickens, and in particular the character of Ham Peggoty who drowned while trying to rescue the appalling Steerforth, (the inspiration for the character of David Cameron who found in politics the perfect outlet for his gifts). I grudgingly admit that Dickens’ tendency to big-up the qualities of the deserving poor while monstering the undeserving rich is – well, a bit overblown – but my malleable young mind was filled with heroism, and the melancholic thought that an end-of-terrace post war house fell a long way short of an upturned boat on a beach.

If the Gradgrindian tendency ever understood the power of literature and music to mould and move us, they’d outlaw it in an instant, but mercifully I was free to be corrupted by Dickens and HG Wells and – because television is, or can occasionally be an art form too, by Ted Willis and Dennis Potter; as great a bunch of lefties as you could hope for.

So here we are near another beach that’s about as far away from Yarmouth as it’s possible to be; the wind is blowing a hoolie and we’ve been kept in the campervan by continuous rain – so I can write to my heart’s content on the free wifi and even try out some of the features of the programme that I’ve never used before, for instance linking to Google pictures and justifying the type. It’s almost exactly a year since I started writing this blog so (statistically at least, and 130,000 words later)  I must be a survivor. It’s also exactly four years since I handed back the keys of the church where I was vicar for 25 years with the words of the bishop ringing in my ears – “I didn’t really know you, but I hear that you’re a bit of a legend” . Who believes gossip? I ask. It’s enough to drive a man to take on an allotment.

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Back in the real world we’ve got two pubs here, and the oldest (so they say) postmaster in the country who regularly falls asleep in his chair after lunch so it’s best to buy stamps in the morning. What’s especially good is the fact that we have four environments wrapped into one place.

We have the epic big-sky estuary, the convergence of three rivers, with sand dunes and mud flats – a birder’s paradise; then there’s the saltmarsh specialist plants around the edge mostly past their prime now; the farmland surrounding Muncaster Castle which has been tended for so long that the mature woodland reminded me of my grandparents smallholding in the Chilterns; and finally there are the the fells pressing in all around us. There are even the remains of a Roman bathhouse.IMG_6019 

However I was reminded once again that plants don’t read textbooks and can change dramatically with different environments. If you read the previous post you’ll know I was feeling a bit disconnected from field botany as we drove across, but yesterday we couldn’t walk along the coast because of the high tide so we turned inland and walked up part of the Eskdale Way towards Muncaster Castle.  Apart from the unexpected stand of mature beeches, I found and identified many of the usual suspects but was stumped by a much leggier and taller Tormentil than usual, growing in the hedge, and a clump of tall daisy-like plants I don’t remember seeing before. 2019-09-03 11.05.03Back at the van I quickly identified them as Sneezewort (Achillea ptarmica) which gave me a burst of sheer pleasure quite out of proportion to a bunch of rather faded daisy lookalikes with downturned petals and odd, buff coloured centres. I honestly don’t think I’d be any more pleased if I’d found a Ghost orchid – well perhaps a little bit more pleased, but the real joy is in knowing the everyday. As someone said on the telly the other day – you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find the prince. Most of my princes have turned out to be garden escapes anyway. The everyday is where I mostly live and we’re surrounded by everyday plants, insects and animals that most of us are unaware of. I’ve developed the habit, every time I see a plant whose name I know,  of saying hello.  I don’t find it alarming, but passers by sometimes give me strange looks. I can’t get that moment of recognition out of my mind; a new friend amongst a host of strangers. Now I can name the Sneezewort it will call out “Hi” to me wherever I see it and I will say “Hi Sneezewort” back and I will feel a little more at home, wherever I happen to be.

Later in the day a Facebook album appeared with pictures of the vegetables our son had gathered on our allotment in our absence. Hope there’s some left for us!