Tag: Brecon Beacons

Aaaargh! Spring – please slow down, just a bit!

Clockwise from top left- the canalside view with Pen y Fan in the background; then Common Dog Violet, Wood Sorrel, Maidenhair Spleenwort, Ramsons, Greater Stitchwort, Reflexed Stonecrop and what I think must be bracken growing very close to the water. There were many more – too many to list without annoying Madame!

The rewards of Spring are everywhere at the moment, notwithstanding the cold nights which are keeping our tender plants blocking the hallway as they harden off. There’s so much going on I hardly know where to begin. On the allotment – after the usual despairing survey of the weeds, the waterlogged ground and the mounting sense that nothing good will ever come of it; we got our heads down two or three weeks ago and felt instantly better. I’m a bit suspicious of the received wisdom that gardening is good for the soul. Couch grass and Bindweed could test the patience of a saint and I’m certainly not one of them. At the weekend while Madame sowed, I finally cleared the asparagus bed which had been on probation for ages and we knew it had to go because it was too far down in the frost pocket on our sloping site plus the asparagus had been weakened by repeated invasions of Asparagus beetle and couch grass from the unattended plot next door. Four barrow loads of weeds and feeble/floppy/extinct roots later I had a backache worthy of a third rate wrestler but a decent empty raised bed much enriched by previous additions of seaweed, compost and sand and with around 18″ depth of topsoil. We’ll grow carrots there this season. We’ve thrown so much money at the asparagus bed over the years, we could probably afford to buy fifty bundles of Chinn’s finest English and still be in pocket.

I was greatly assisted by two almost hand tame Robins who were obviously feeding chicks. Between them they took away many dozens of larvae, centipedes and other insects. Interestingly they weren’t very interested in worms; certainly not as keen as a blackbird would be. I was dazzled by their capacity to hold two wriggling bugs in their beaks and still pick up a third without dropping the first two; they were far better pest controllers than any chemical insecticide.

Inside the polytunnel the experimental crop of broad beans is thriving in the absence of any really hot weather, and the strawberries, all taken from runners in late summer, are flowering and setting fruit. Of course this means we’re already watering inside the tunnel; but the 12V water pump we bought last summer has already showed its worth and helped us avoid carrying heavy watering cans back and forth.

The photos above were all taken on a short trip to the Monmouth and Brecon canal near Brecon during the week. It was here, many years ago, that I saw my first Kingfisher – so beautiful in the sunshine that I thought I was hallucinating. We had hoped to go for a pub lunch with our friends who keep a smallholding almost 100o feet up on the hill, but they were in the middle of lambing so we had a picnic lunch there while they went outside every twenty minutes or so to keep an eye on a ewe in the midst of a long and difficult lambing. Fortunately the ewe and her twin lambs all made it through, although I think that will be her last time. Farming can be heartbreaking as well as hard work.

“A difficulty is a light, an insurmountable difficulty is a sun” – Paul Valéry

Is it too perverse to say that I love naming plants? and the harder they are the greater the reward when I finally get there. I’m exhilarated by the explosion of plants in the spring and early summer, and it’s agony having go forego plant hunting for allotment duties, but there’s no alternative so we just get on with it. I was pondering where this love of plants came from, and during one of my regular 2.00am wakeful sessions – it happens a lot – it occurred to me that I owe a huge amount to Henry Williamson (I’ll come to the reservations in a moment). Of course I read Tarka the Otter and the other nature books, but I also ploughed my way through four volumes of “The Flax of Dream” and fifteen volumes of “The Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight”. I was probably the only person who ever ordered them all up from Bristol Central Library in many years. Above all, I loved Williamson’s ability to describe wild plants in their landscapes; their names – English names – embedded themselves in my imagination and make the discovery of a plant in a hedgerow into a celebratory event, even fifty years later. Latin names and taxonomical exactitude; whilst essential for research, are feeble by comparison with the poetry of use and history.

But one of the greatest sadnesses of my life has been the discovery that so many of my literary and artistic heroes dabbled with and even collaborated in extreme right politics during the nineteen thirties and forties. TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis were all seduced by the big lie. Discovering that Williamson was an admirer of Adolph Hitler irrevocably shut down my relationship with him, and I’ve never read a page written by him since; but the influence of his natural history writing still remains – it’s just forever tainted by the association.

Anyway, turning with relief to spring again, some flowers that you’d think were easy to identify – are more than a bit fiendish; not least the violet which comes with seven close cousins six of which you could easily bump into in the South West. No alternative, then, but to turn to the books or the apps. But when it comes to fiendishness, nothing comes close to ferns and for me, at the very beginning of this love affair, a chance encounter across a crowded room can lead to hours of agonising – just like the real thing (I’m told!).

As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader, I’m exploring the dizzy world of Artificial Intelligence in wildlife apps, and particularly in identifying plants. If you’re fortunate enough to know what a data point is – I wasn’t – it’s a single unit/dollop of data. If you’re still attached to pencils and paper, your notebook might contain a few hundred data points. A field guide could hold tens of thousands, but AI robots, though are voracious readers and can consume and store billions of them. Not only that, they can index and arrange them in pretty much any way you like.

So before we all get carried away by the idea of wildlife AI apps remember that the whole industry is based on text. I’ve been playing with Google Gemini but other flavours are available. These text engines can be based on anything up to (I believe) 8 billion data points – that’s a lot of text and a huge fund of examples to work from. The existing wildlife apps are still wallowing in the relative shallows and so they can be unreliable at the moment. I had three obviously wrong fern identifications (back to the books) while we were up on the Mon and Brec. They’ll get better very soon I’m sure. The Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland have access to over 50 million full records, and Kew Gardens are digitizing their entire herbarium records. iNaturalist also has something huge like 50 million although not all of them are verified, but even if all these records are verified and scanned in – which would be a huge volunteer operation – they would still be far fewer in number than the mighty text warehouses. Machine learning can achieve seemingly miraculous results but I don’t think we’ll be making human identification redundant any time soon, so don’t throw those field guides away!

Just to finish, though, I thought I’d wile away an hour asking Google Gemini to do some silly things for me. Question one – what are the distinguishing features of Dryopteris ferns? after ten seconds a very sensible answer. Then I asked it to write a sonnet on the subject of dust and once again a technically perfect but aesthetically clunky, sub Tennysonian sonnet emerged. Then finally I asked if it would re-write one of these posts in the style of Phillip Marlowe. The result was hilariously funny but quite unprintable here, being vulgar, deeply sexist and full of bad language.

Thank your lucky stars it’s just me writing this one!

Back to the Bannau Brycheiniog

The view down the valley last Tuesday morning. Sometimes the whole valley fills with clouds below us.

Fascinating though it may be to revisit the Camino journal after 13 years – (in fact I’m finding it pretty painful going) – life goes on at the Potwell Inn with the last of the tomatoes to be processed into two sorts of passata; one roasted and the other simply simmered with onion and indecent amounts of butter. It’s been an odd year, but we’ve now pretty well replenished our stores with a big crop of tomatoes from the polytunnel and our biggest ever crop of aubergines. Our only real failure was the broad beans early on and we’ve resolved to sow next year’s crop in November rather than wait until the spring reveals its hand. The asparagus bed failed yet again to rise to the occasion and so I’m afraid it’s going to come out in the autumn. It’s in the coldest part of the allotment and that may have something to do with it; but for the last three years we’ve spent out more on saving the crop than the value of the harvest and we can’t afford the indulgence. The surprise crop of the year was the Tayberry vine which gave a lovely crop of berries; and the apple trees which all fruited for the first time since they were planted.

The trip to our friends’ smallholding on the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) was partly to celebrate Madame’s birthday and partly because it’s a joy to spend a few days there with our friends. There’s always work to do on a smallholding – fencing, feeding animals and suchlike – but this time we helped to butcher a couple of two year old sheep (AKA mutton) which had just come back from the slaughterhouse. Vegetarians may prefer to look away now but as a meat eater on a modest scale, I have no moral difficulty with eating organic, free range sheep whose lives are entirely natural and whose lifetime travel takes them just ten miles to a local slaughterhouse.

Butchers – I mean real butchers – are highly skilled at what they do. As for me, confronted by a quartered carcass, it was a matter of trying to remember where all the joints come from and what they are supposed to look like. Three of us worked as a team in the kitchen and reduced the carcasses to joints, cuts and mince and enjoyed playing silly games whilst avoiding chopping our fingers off. Then we made a vast pot of stock and boiled all the bones down while Nick and me made trays of faggots – that may need translating for some readers – basically meat patties made from all sorts of offal; we only used the liver and hearts. By the time we’d finished we had four leg joints, four shoulder joints, 15Kg mince, 4Kg diced, 4 hocks, fillets for stir fries, leg steaks, racks, whole loins, 32 faggots in gravy, a gallon of stock and 36 blocks of dog food using every left-over scrap of meat from the bones.

I always feel, when I’m writing like this, that I should explain or defend hill farming and the killing and eating of animals. There’s no denying that intensive farming is the source of terrible cruelty and much avoidable pollution; but to equate what goes on in a 20 acre hill farm with what happens when two million chickens are crammed into sheds is a bit of a debater’s cheap shot. I go back to Michael Pollan’s wise motto – eat food, not too much, mostly vegetables. The consumption of ultra processed foods has been shown to be the cause all manner of illnesses and, if we all took to eating ultra processed vegetarian and vegan food we’d soon be totally enslaved by the gathering disaster of the food industry’s war on healthy eating, quite apart from swelling the profits of the industrial grain giants and the growers of palm oil and soya beans. Of course the killing and eating of animals raises all manner of ethical issues but we’re far too prone to exporting the hard questions as far away as possible. Buying your meat shrink wrapped and trimmed doesn’t detract from the big moral question of killing it in the first place. The taking of life is a big deal and so we should try never to eat more than we need, and endeavour not to waste any part of it.

We came home to the Potwell Inn with meat for the winter; we had dined on the freshest eggs you’ll ever see and we also brought a fleece back. Kate has used them for weed control, composting and also for lining hanging baskets. Nothing ever goes to waste on the smallholding. We’ve known them for over thirty years and from day one we treasured our fellow inner peasants. It takes a certain kind of personality to get so much pleasure from shaking plums out of a tree. I also fell in love with their Welsh terrier Dilys and proposed to her secretly but she rejected me, saying she was already suited.

Anyway, that was a long day and the following day we gathered plums, identified moths from the overnight trap and baked bara brith. Moths are attracted to a strong light and then they drop down into the depths of the box where they find egg boxes to spend the night before being identified and released in a manner that minimises the risk of them being eaten by birds. The wall outside the kitchen is used for feeding birds throughout the year and it’s fascinating to see the variety – most of the tits, nuthatches, robins, yellowhammers (increasingly rare) and finches too. At night we listen to the tawny owls and in the early spring there are cuckoos – it’s the last place I heard one, four or five years ago; pure joy. A family of field mice live in the crevices of the wall and pop out nervously from time to time to grab some grains.

Then finally, before driving home, we had a dip in the pool; filled with rainwater and warm from the combination of sun and solar panels. Paradise indeed!

The taste of magic in the Bannau Brycheiniog

Pen y Fan hiding in clouds from the Monmouth and Brecon canal on an icy February morning in 2017

Just out of interest, Bannau Brycheiniog translates as Brychan’s Kingdom; Brychan being the fifth century king of this mountainous area. I’ve written frequently about this place because I love it to the core of my being. It’s a National Park but by no means a huge one; near to the Eastern border with England, more or less defined by the River Severn; a contested border which includes the Welsh Marches and Offa’s Dyke. A wayward and wandering line that’s been fought over for centuries as armies marched back and forth from Roman times onwards in search of gold and latterly for slate and coal, but whatever the quarry, the spoils were taken out of Wales and only the spoil heaps were left. The reversion to Welsh place names is one more skirmish between the Welsh and the colonisers; less spectacular than the burning of holiday cottages but no less fiercely fought for.

But we’re not here to pursue old rivalries. We’re here at the foot of the Bannau to rest and recuperate from hard work on the allotment and to adjust to a change in medication that’s left me feeling as if I’m recovering from the Flu. We have close friends who now live about 1000 feet up in the hills above Llangorse lake and we’ve been coming to this area for more than 30 years and watched as they worked a smallholding while working full time, and improving the cottage from an abandoned bothy to a family home.

So yesterday we lazed in the sun and then in the evening we went with our friends over to to the Three Horseshoes in Groesffordd for a meal and a couple of pints of a local light beer. Needless to say we had a brilliant evening because our interests overlap almost completely and predictably we talked about growing food, keeping animals, the relative merits of lamb (3/10) hogget (7/10) and mutton (10/10). We talked about beer and vegetables and favourite recipes and families and we all reassured ourselves that we hadn’t changed a bit in decades and laughed as if we would all live forever. We took one of the outdoor sheds with a spectacular view between the roofs of the village, across the valley to Pen y fan. The food was excellent and almost too unusual for pub food, we left with a couple of good recipe ideas and feeling that the expense of eating out was justified. The Three Horseshoes, predictably next door to a long closed smithy makes a good living in the most inaccessible spot, hidden deep in the middle of the village where it’s almost impossible to park. We chatted to the owner and he said it was because of their good reputation – and he was right. A delightful and affable landlord who thinks enough of his chefs to name them on the website.

We arrived home (at the campervan) as it was getting dark and sat outside watching the stars come out and listening to the evening sounds. To our great joy there was a wheezy snuffling and a couple of hedgehogs appeared, paused to take a look at us and shuffled off into the hedge again. We haven’t seen hedgehogs for something like 10 years. Way across there were tawny owls and all the usual roosting birds. It felt as if the thin thread holding us down to time and place, had broken and we were wandering in a more ancient time which came with all its literary associations.

Firstly, of course, Buckland Hill which is just down the road will be known to any lover of Tolkien who stayed here at Buckland whilst he was writing Lord of the Rings. We’ve walked miles of Offa’s Dyke, and I’ve loved Geoffrey Hill’s “Mercian Hymns “ set in the time of King Offa and which gets less difficult as I get older and feel the music rather than concentrate on the words. Madame has just finished reading A J Cronin’s “The Citadel” which is partly set just across the hills in the mining valleys. And then on an impulse I dug Bruce Chatwin’s book “On the Black Hill” out of the Kindle Library this morning. This has been one of my must-reads for decades, and I’ve actually got two paperback copies at home. Each of the three I’ve bought while we were up here and never got past about chapter three for the oddest reason. There’s a real “Vision Farm” below Offa’s Dyke facing Capel y Ffin and we once had a long and hard walk up Hatterall Hill, along the dyke and down past The Vision (you’ll need to take a map and a GPS to find the track down) and after crossing the Honddu river, back up past the ruins of the church built by Joseph Lyne, Father Ignatius, back along the opposite ridge and then dropping down the steep path turning left at a hawthorn tree, to Llanthony Abbey.

But I mentioned the fact that I’d always abandoned “On the Black Hill” after a couple of chapters, for an odd reason. It’s simply that the writing is so rich I never want to move on with the narrative, and so each page is an object of meditation. I finish the first couple of chapters and it’s if I’ve eaten a huge banquet and don’t want or need to eat for a week. Obviously this is a bit disruptive to the narrative flow. Cheap fiction does the exact opposite, using a narrative torrent to hurry you across the ludicrous improbabilities of the characterisation. Give me Bruce Chatwin any day, but I’d love to have the stamina to finish it.

One of my parishioners had a Welsh farmer as a distant relative, and she told me that this irascible man had married in a local church, started to drive his bride to the new marital home in the pony and trap . Somehow, on the way they’d had a fierce quarrel and she had got down from the trap and walked back to where she came from, leaving the bridegroom for good. A very Chatwin-esque yarn. I wonder if he’d heard that story independently?

Where wild means wild!

How about watching a family of long tailed tits; great tits; several robins; nuthatches; blue tits and a wren in about ten minutes of pure rapture, looking out of the kitchen window – 900 feet up a hill on the Brecon Beacons? Autumn gets to me – that’s no secret – the reasons are so obvious that I’m not even bothering to rehearse them here; but there always comes a time, often a single day, when the black dog slinks away and feel I’ve turned a corner.

I haven’t written for a while but that’s not because I’ve been sitting in the corner weeping silently (not my style) – but because we’ve got the allotment largely under control, and we’ve spent hours and days fungus hunting. I’ve been interested in them for years but this year we’ve gone into hyperdrive; photographing, identifying and recording these beautiful and fugitive life-forms. Fungi live on decaying matter; they also share resources with plants and trees and – at this time of year especially – are the tangible evidence of the ever renewing web of life beneath the fallen leaves.

My friend Nick who graciously let me play with some serious machinery.

And so we came up to stay for a couple of days with old friends on the Brecon Beacons where they keep a smallholding. Feeding the pigs and the chickens, moving the sheep around and helping out around the place – oh and eating the freshest eggs and the best organic produce; planking and planing seasoned oak from the woods; keeping the stove going; cooking together with food grown and raised less than a couple of hundred yards away and talking, talking, talking. These are truly – and I’m avoiding the therapeutic cliché – renewing activities. In between showers, the sky cleared and the sun shone through the raindrops, illuminating the landscape with pinpoint jewels of refracted light.

At night the Tawny owls called to one another over the sound of the springwater filling the cistern outside our bedroom in a musical series of spurts and sputters. Even the sound of a dog barking down the valley in the darkness engorges the imagination. The autumn ground was a pointillist painting in ochres offset by dazzling yellows and reds and buzzards and carrion crows called overhead. For three days we escaped the tyranny of linear time and allowed ourselves to be embraced by the greater and lesser cycles of sunrise and moonrise; season and lifespan.

Sheep on the horizon – looking as if they’re about to charge us

Even the farmhouses have their span. In the year I was born, just after the war, this cottage was derelict, and for the past thirty five years we’ve watched it come to life under the care of our friends. It’s been a home, playground and a natural history mentor to three generations of children and their friends. If intuition and imagination aren’t included among the senses how we are ever to understand how neighbourhood, community and mutual aid, along with an understanding of our vulnerability and finitude are the foundation to our flourishing. Yesterday evening we sat in the old parlour and talked by the light of the only remaining gas mantles I know of. The mantles themselves now cost something like £14, but this isn’t a life of self indulgent luxury – their car has done 220,000 miles.

On Saturday we visited a couple of community projects in the village. One of them was an orchard run by the Marcher Apple Network which is a voluntary charitable organisation set up to preserve traditional apple varieties from the Welsh Marches.

They have collected and grafted all sorts of almost unknown apple varieties on to modern rootstocks and have begun to set up a DNA database so they can be identified and propagated through grafting – as a service to the future. I have to confess to scrumping a few, and trust me, they’re not all utterly delicious! One of Madame’s first jobs after leaving Art School was working as a trials assistant in a cider research station and so she was in seventh heaven as we walked around photographing some of the apples for our records. While we were there a couple of young people from the local community run pub were picking up windfalls for the apple bobbing at their Halloween party. This village is rich in community projects. You’ll see below why some apples have rudely descriptive names such as Goose Arse and Pig’s Snout

Possibly one of the ugliest apples I’ve ever seen.

Then we went up the hill to a community run woodland which we scoured for fungi and found quite a few we’ve never seen before. One of the best things about being a relative beginner in any field is the fact that even very common and well known species are exciting first time finds. A fungus like the Panther Cap – deadly poisonous – takes on a whole new reality when you’ve got down and dirty photographing it in a rain soaked woodland. Our friends were generous enough to scout the wood for new fungi for us to see – we had a ball – and then finished up down at Llangorse Lake drinking tea in the cafe as the clouds gathered over Pen y Fan.

So what could be better than eating with friends? Well cooking with them surely comes to the top of the list. I cooked one of my party pieces – Carbonnade Nimoise, and with a free run of the food stores we used some hogget leg steaks. Hogget is lamb in its second year, so it comes between lamb and mutton. Most butchers give you a funny look if you ask for it but it’s worth searching for. It’s more expensive than lamb because it’s been fed for an extra season but the flavour is marvellous. Oh what a weekend!

So here are a few of the fungi we saw – they’re not named because we need to check and double check, but they are so beautiful that they need no justification at all.

And yes, the one at the bottom is almost certainly a Panther Cap – greatly to be avoided when you’re foraging! In fact its neighbour in the centre is almost as bad. The lesson is – never forage unless you’re with someone who really knows what they’re doing (so don’t ask me!). And if you recognise the only innocent one in the ID Parade – good for you. And I hope you’ve had as much joy from finding out as we have.

As for us, we drove home contentedly with a couple of big bags of fragrant sheep daggings in the back of the car. It’s an acquired taste I know, but they’re better than Chanel Number 5 for arousing a compost heap!