Tag: birdsong

Back in the Bannau Brycheiniog

A scenic view of rolling hills and greenery under a bright blue sky, framed by trees and shrubs in the foreground.
The view from the door of the campervan

I use the Welsh name of the Brecon Beacons because that’s what they’re called, and those who object to the correct name are all too often readers of the kind of newspapers that think their role in life is to incite incandescent fury against foreigners of any sort. We have a favourite campsite here that’s close enough to home to be extremely accessible and also fabulous for walks and wildlife. We drove in yesterday and had a brew up and then listened to 13 species of bird in barely half an hour. Dare I make a list? – Blackbird, Chiffchaff, Robin, Grey Wagtail, Mistle Thrush, Blue Tit, Dunnock, Blackcap, Garden Warbler, Wood Pigeon, Goldfinch, House Sparrow, and Raven – all without getting off my chair. Then the braver among the birds swept in while we cooked and ate every crumb of cake that we’d left there for them.

We are escaping from a difficult week with the builders who are treating our black mould; or rather not treating it because they have the habit of scarpering whenever an easier or more profitable job comes up. It’s been five weeks and goodness how many emails and they still haven’t fixed the shutters after they broke them. There was a building firm in Swindon years ago who operated out of a Morris 100o van and called themselves “Bodgit and Scram”. I imagine their slogan was You know where you stand with us!

Anyway on Wednesday we’d been invited to a “Founders Lunch” at Spike Island, the increasingly well-known artists’ studios on the floating harbour in Bristol where I was to make a short speech about how we’d set it up fifty years ago. Madame and I had put an ad in the local paper and asked any artists in the area who needed a studio to join us at an open meeting and we were astonished at the numbers who not only came but were prepared to pay rent on our imaginary studios while we looked for somewhere cheap enough to build them. It’s a long story that travels from flat broke to manageable overdraft and from fractious meetings to – well, probably even more fractious meetings because creatives don’t readily work cooperatively until there’s no alternative. Strangely and beautifully we went back on Wednesday and were greeted by many old friends who’d been tracked down by Bruce and Novvy Allan and discovered that the original artist-led community of our dreams is still alive and kicking. It was a powerful moment to be reunited with a part of our own history which we’d moved on from many years ago. As I said in my speech – it made me feel very proud and very old! Travelling by train – it’s so much quicker – we decided to walk over to Spike Island passing the house we lived in while I was curate at St Mary Redcliffe and then caught the M2 metrobus back to the station after the event finished. It was a beautiful sunny day for walking and after the speeches which encompassed past present and future plans we had a lovely meal in the cafe – prepared by Josh Ecclestone and his team, and some equally good sparkling wine from the Limekiln Hill vineyard. We don’t drink any more but in this instance I drank half a small glass of their biodynamic wine and it was big – if you know what I mean. It was a lovely thank-you. I haven’t kept in touch with the project as much as I should, in fact the last time I heard from anyone connected with it was a solicitor’s letter from a company I’d never heard from threatening to sue me for 1 million pounds worth of damage by a frozen water pipe in the old building. I replied and said “go ahead, I haven’t got two halfpennies to rub together” and the matter was dropped.

Anyway, here we are again in God’s Own Country taking a day’s break before we go for a walk tomorrow to look for interesting plants. In Spring, every plant looks beautiful before the insects, rusts, galls and smuts get to work. Either way they’re fascinating and remind me – as if I needed reminding – that nature is in constant motion and nothing, no-one, lasts for ever.

Clusters of white flowers with pinkish centres surrounded by bright green leaves, growing in a natural setting.
Hawthorn in its pristine state before the “catastrophe of life” takes hold.

Orion over Buckland Hill

This weekend we took the campervan to the Brecon Beacons for a couple of nights – just to test all the repairs we made over the winter. I know I write a lot about Snowdonia and Cornwall and if you follow this blog you’ll know that many of my favourite places are wild, lonely and close to the sea, but there’s another side to my landscape yearnings and it’s right here in Breconshire. I took the photograph from the campsite in Pencelli, just up the road from Buckland Hill. It was so clear I was completely foxed for a while as I tried to find my way around a sky unexpectedly full of thousands of visible and perhaps millions of invisible stars – so numerous and so beautiful they felt like a kind of blessing. I know it’s fanciful but sometimes I can almost hear them singing an ethereal Spem in alium by Thomas Tallis transposed many octaves upwards. I guess I hear them through my heart. You might think that’s all a load of spam in allium but this place has that kind of effect on me. It excites me to know that J R R Tolkien stayed for a time in the village of Talybont, immediately below Buckland Hill – while he was writing “Lord of the Rings”.

Top centre is Pen y Fan in mist

The (definitely non politically correct) smell of wood fires never smells sweeter and more homely than here between the river Usk and the hills and peaks like Pen y Fan. The Buckland of the saga jumps off the page in the narrow strip of small farms between the River and the accompanying Monmouth and Brecon Canal under the shadow of the misty mountain. The sounds of sheep, and the early spring birdsong all add to the music. I saw my first kingfisher here many years ago. The Mallard in their breeding plumage never looked more incandescent and for a few hours, instead of walking head down looking for plants I could have leaned on a gate and just gorged on the sounds. Even as we drove towards Abergavenny we spotted a Kestrel hunting the hedge alongside the road as well as a Buzzard and a red Kite. The three raptors were just a taster of the riches to come. This landscape is far closer to my personal psychogeography than all my other post industrial hotspots, roaring seas and austere mountains. Celandines in abundance announced that Spring really is here and we drank pints of magic to celebrate in the local pub.

Finding any kind of lyrical inspiration these days, demands we mine it from granite with our bare hands. Every dark hole has a poet at the bottom of it.

Royal Oak at Pencelli – highly recommended for paroled melancholics

Autumn song

Heron spotted on the River Avon on Saturday

If you’re a regular reader you’ll know that I’m not a fan of the recent changes to the seasonal calendar brought in by the Met Office. I know it’s tidier to begin the season of Autumn on September Ist and then rotate the rest on a three monthly cycle; easier but plain wrong. For me the seasons will always be marked by the solstices and equinoxes. Messy but holding tight to the astronomical events surrounding the hours of daylight. Last Friday saw the autumn equinox at exactly 2.03 am marking the moment of equal day and night and from now until December 21st the hours of darkness will get progressively longer.

Nature is, by and large, pretty orderly in her seasons too and so we instinctively recognise them by the quality of the light, sounds and smells. I’m interested that these phenomena actually seem to speak to us. Our absorption in the earth and her seasons means the bare sensation, of a birdsong for instance, becomes encrusted with memories. The smell of newly turned earth in the Spring evokes in me a powerful memory of Good Friday when, according to tradition, potatoes were planted. I think of a steady queue of customers at Palmer’s Seed Store and the smell of National Growmore fertilizer and Mr Flook the fishmonger in his wellingtons and yellow oilskin apron.

So these accretions of memories make simple things like listening to a singing Great Tit into a deeply embedded, often emotional, complex. Scientifically, and some would say factually, it’s just a singing bird with a Latin name representing something so common as to be beneath a birder’s dignity; but in the far greater field of meaning it’s as affecting as a Nightjar like the one that kept me awake much of the night, camping in France, or the Nightingale that I heard on a retreat near Ilfracombe one evening as I walked in the grounds.

But to get back to the Great Tit and the Autumn Equinox, something profoundly odd happened on Friday morning. I was helping our youngest move some last belongings out of the flat he’s just left. It’s been a sad few weeks because his relationship with his girlfriend has broken down and everyone’s been walking on eggshells. Anyway I was parked up in a place I shouldn’t have been, close to the old flat and keeping a sharp eye out for Parking Wardens who are pretty ruthless here in Bath. Then, as he carried the last load across the road, with his bass guitar in one hand and a bundle of clothes in the other – he looked just like the cover of the Bob Dylan’s “Freewheelin” Album sleeve. I would have been sad to see him that way except that as I sat there in the car with the window wound down, completely out of the blue I heard a Great Tit singing its two note ‘saw sharpening’ song, somewhere in the trees above. It’s a song I associate so powerfully with Spring and new beginnings that it felt like some kind of omen. “Stupid, irrational, meaningless emotional nonsense” say the ghosts of the old Logical Positivist philosophers, and “Hear Hear” say the materialist scientists, and yet ……. and yet?

Nothing I’ve ever come across shakes my understanding that language – whether human language or the subtle languages of mammals, birds and insects; or flowers, or the incomprehensible silent language known as the “Wood Wide Web” – that language is more like a coral reef growing in a sea of meanings, with living ideas on the outside and deep within, the whole history of human speaking, singing and dancing. The simplest level of reference in that unexpected out of season birdsong is probably the least interesting.

It’s been a long hot and dry summer and so it must have been the case that the bird I heard was singing out of season because in this settled weather a second brood was still “thinkable” and “do-able“. But he said much more than he intended. That Spring embodying song on the very day of the Autumn Equinox was a portent of new beginnings, a sign of environmental crisis, a reminder that Nature has her own ways and heaven help us if we ignore her signs.