Tag: environment

A Melancholy River: Severnside I.

The second Severn crossing at Severn Beach, looking towards Chepstow

Maybe I’m being a bit unfair, labelling the river Severn as melancholic. That’s largely projection on my part. You can see from the thickness of the sea-wall that it deserves a lot of respect. The speed, force and sheer height of the tides makes the Severn a dangerous river to navigate. The second biggest rise and fall in the world gives it not just the appearance of power but also the sound of it. The unmistakable song of water on the move; riffling the banks as a farmer might roll a full head of grain between thumb and finger to feel the measure of the harvest; investigating the cornice of field edge here, a length of stock fence or a fallen tree. A fast flowing river is hungry.

But the Severn is also a tidal river as far as Gloucester. It breathes: rises and falls; rises and falls; breathing inwards and outwards twice a day every 12 hours and 25 minutes – constantly moving against the times of sunrise and sunset because the tide belongs to the moon, which is why the Severn is female and has been so since Celtic and Roman times. The tide flushes its banks for 25 miles as a river and a further 15 miles if you include the estuary where it meets the Bristol channel. But the Moon is in a constant elliptical orbit around the earth and so the highest and lowest tides – the springs and neaps – which cover a tidal range of between 12 and 15 metres, forty to fifty feet of variation at Avonmouth, occur according to the gravitational pull around full and new moon. At these times the funnelling of upstream tide on the river, particularly around Arlingham, meeting the downstream flow from beyond Gloucester, causes a surge wave known as the Severn Bore, twice a day for about 130 days every year. The biggest surges gather abundant spectators and surfers as the wave moves upstream. But there’s even more. On January 30th 1604 a tsunami wave over 25 feet high and travelling at 30mph barrelled up the Severn inundating villages and killing thousands of people. The churches at Littleton on Severn and Oldbury on Severn are built on raised ground and may have escaped the worst. In 2001 during the Foot and Mouth crisis I stood in Oldbury churchyard and witnessed the sight and smell of thousands of cattle being burned in giant pyres. So yes, I think some element of mournful is justified.

On the other hand, the Severn can be a great solace. Just as I would go fishing, if time was short I could always drive down to Shepperdine and walk up the path towards Oldbury. At dusk it is at its most mysterious as the lights come on across the river and the navigation lights indicate the safe passage for boats. Occasionally a skein of geese will fly overhead and once I was near the old Windbound when a hare careered up the field alongside and flew across the fence within feet of me.

The place I choose to call Severnside is a variable strip of land to the west of the A38 and the motorway. When we first moved to the area I was convinced that the locals were rotating road signs to keep people out. It has more in common with fen or wetland than anything else. Fields are small, drained by rhynes (pronounced reens) and small scale farming is the only show in town. It was once – and still is – a good place to grow apples, especially cider apples because the mass of water nearby acts like a gigantic night storage heater. Frosts visit the orchards less frequently than in the rest of Gloucestershire. Sheep still graze in the orchards. When I wanted some real peace I would cycle down there and drink in the isolated atmosphere. It’s easy to get lost in the multiple lanes and tracks but easier to lose yourself and your troubles.

The job was relentless, and I was the recipient of many confidences, not all of them good or comforting. People would share their troubles but they would also share their stories; stories that connected them and me back in history. Every pastoral visit, every wedding, baptism or particularly funeral would yield a rich harvest of stories which I rarely wrote down; but as time went on I became increasingly aware that without ever volunteering for the job I was becoming the Story-Keeper. As I grew close to retirement after 25 years, that sense of responsibility weighed on me more and more as the population changed from a largely farming, fishing and quarrying community to a commuting village which exploded in size to accommodate workers in the two (now decommissioned) nuclear power stations at Oldbury and Berkeley. A trajectory that was accelerating and which would never change. For ten years after retiring I felt constrained to keep quiet, but by now most of the old folks are dead and even the incomers who were’t averse to a bit of bullying and harrying have mostly passed on. The congregations in the churches I cared for were (largely) wonderful; the diocese did nothing but increase the workload. The river was my escape and consolation; it was big; vast and utterly indifferent to my troubles, successes and failures. I started to photograph the plants – never quite sure what they were called – the abandoned barges and the machinery that accompanied the drainage channels; the orchards and cider houses. It was my escape. The birds, the wind, the sound of the water, the larger ships entering and leaving the canal at Sharpness. It was OK to be a lost soul there, and so I’ve started to reunite some of those photographic memories with words. Even melancholy has its joys.

A Melancholy River: Severnside II.

A riverside culvert between the River Severn and the Sharpness Gloucester canal.

No I haven’t got the numbering wrong – Part One of what looks like it might be a series is yet to be written; I’ll do it today because like all writers I’m driven by the material which has been demanding that I set it down since I retired ten years ago

I’m not even quite sure what started my imagination boiling but it may have been this photograph, or rather me standing on the banks of the Severn wondering whether it would ever be possible to create image rich writing, linking words and photographs in a way that tells a story but leaves it up to the reader to decide where to start and where to leave. In those days, 20 years ago, The technology was difficult to use and demanded a skill set I never possessed and much more powerful hardware than I could aspire to.

But what I couldn’t show in a single photo was what was behind me on the riverside. It’s a raw and often windswept landscape up there on the Severn. At the point where it joins the Bristol Channel it’s a bleak industrial wasteland and the river itself is unreachable, hidden behind a railway line, giant storage silos, abandoned flour mills, a maze of conveyor belts and gas tanks. For the first mile or so north it continues in much the same way. Huge windmills rotate slowly and, nearby, a pair of gas power station chimneys steam and occasionally belch cumulus clouds that you can see from the motorway which runs two or three miles away along the ridge. You would have to possess a perverse imagination like mine to find much joy in it. There’s even a signposted “Smoke Lane”; there are cement works, lorry depots, warehouses, garages and tyre services and if, like me you have a long memory you could see where Imperial Smelting once stood; and the site of the Albright and Wilson chemical works that blew up after a paperwork mixup united two incompatible and dangerous chemicals; shut down the two motorway bridges and locked the occupiers in thousands of homes as the noxious fumes spread. Further on, the place where the Philblack (later Sevalco) works once covered the landscape with black carbon dust which is an important ingredient of car and lorry tyres.

Gradually as you drive further on, the river appears beyond a narrowing strip of shrubby grassland; the falling tidal flow brown and thick with the sediment it’s picked up on its long journey from the Pumlumon Fawr range in Wales where it begins, so I read, as a hard to find series of small springs. It’s as ugly as sin is alleged to be, and yet, maybe, I’m the greater sinner because I love it. These industrial landscapes are something! Every time I drive along that road I hear the voice of Bob Dylan singing Hard Rain.

I know, I’m not selling it very well but post industrial sites are my thing; dramways, abandoned coal pits, lead and manganese mines all have their botanical survivors and the aficionados who hunt them. The grim road continues north towards the two Severn bridge crossings, passing Severn Beach where birders find a great deal to interest them including Little Owls and all manner of migrating birds. Severn Beach was also, once upon a time, a destination where the single track railway brought thousands of visitors to paddle in the muddy water, bathe in the Blue Lagoon (well actually it was painted blue) and shelter from the wind in rented beach huts. There was even an amusement arcade and cafe owned by a traveller family that I subsequently got to know. One elderly lady I used to visit in Bristol had black and white photographs of the family beach hut on her mantlepiece.

This 25 year old picture of me was taken near the turnstile of the Aust Ferry turnstile where Bob Dylan departed for Cardiff on his controversial electric tour.

Onwards and northwards through Pilning, past the now closed but still a bit whiffy rubbish tip, the old road to the ferry terminal which, when the ferry closed become a favourite dogging spot (I’m told!), and into the more salubrious ruralities like Aust who refused to allow me to take responsibility their church after an unfortunate interview with the churchwarden and his wife who took an instant dislike to me. It was a happy escape for us all. The end of the M48 bridge was where my parishes began and ran upriver to the diocesan border to somewhere near Oldbury on Severn. I had skin in the game!

So why do I call myself Severnsider? given my lukewarm enthusiasm for its tidal estuary. Good question. Here- maybe – is part of the answer

One of the scuttled vessels at the Purton ship’s graveyard.

Behind the culvert in my first photo there is this hulk, plus many others, scuttled on the river bank. I used to go fishing on the canal. Pastoral work can be pretty punishing and after a particularly hard funeral – children for instance – I used to go there, more to sit quietly than to catch anything. Canal fishing is a difficult and specialised skill. In parish ministry you become the lightning rod for a lot of horrible situations and there’s no-one you can tell or talk to. The river runs alongside the canal at Purton and this mysterious collection of dead boats on the river intrigued me. In my imagination a catastrophic downturn in trade, or the coming of the railway or some other market crash led to the scrapping of the boats. There are lots of them and they make a melancholy sight which often chimed with my mood. Here are some more photos:

The real reason for this mas extinction event was that when the river broke its banks – as it often does – the destructive power and speed of the tide (the second highest tidal range in the world) threatened the integrity of the canal bank and by extension the canal itself. So these ships which included Severn trows, concrete and steel barges were towed to the spot and sunk in order to protect the canal. Some of the boats are now protected sites due to their age and rarity. My fascination with this stretch of the river never went away. There was more to it, though. My grandfather determined early on that I was going to read Dickens, and was always ready to lend me his own copies. Is it at all significant that the two favourite authors of my early reading life were HG Wells (hence the Potwell Inn) and Charles Dickens (hence the identification with Ham Peggotty, and upturned boats? These were the geographical heftings of my young imagination and so finding them in real life was a kind of homecoming. Magwitch, Peggotty and Polly haunted my dreams and still visit me now.

There’s so much more to write about the Severn and next time I’ll be remembering the last putcher and kype fishermen, ending a tradition that lasted from the 5th century, and elver omelettes of course along with a new and revelatory understanding of why the salmon developed lesions.

The Severn further upriver near Arlingham where you can see (and hear) the Severn Bore

The thing about Cornwall is it rains every day.

Greater Bird’s-foot trefoil

Rather like Wales but further south and therefore a bit warmer, Cornwall has its very own special kind of rain – like a tiny hole in a leaky hose it can soak you through in minutes and you never know where it’s coming from. When we woke up yesterday morning rain was beading up and running down the campervan windows, and just beyond was an impenetrable sea-mist. We turned as always to the Met Office to lift our mood but drew a blank. They referred to a “wobbly front” which is seemingly weaving a narrow band of misery across Roseland and northeast passing anywhere else we might think of escaping to. We made a cup of tea and sat in bed looking at the window. Driving home seemed, and remained a good option throughout the morning so we dried out the groundsheet, emptied the cludger, topped up the drinking water, blew up the tyres and packed away the table. Then we changed our minds (it was still drizzling) and I went down the field to take some macro photos of a plant that needed a closer look (see above) and suddenly for no reason at all we felt cheerful.

There’s an upside to rainy days in the campervan and that’s because it gives us an excuse to read books and do whatever we want without getting wet. So Madame read and I finally transformed my eccentric records into compliant form using AI and a staggering amount of memory and data. Then we ate pasta for the 73rd time this week and lived like students for a few hours. I absolutely love getting into a topic and hammering it. I can feel my brain straining and the synapses making novel networks until it feels like new life spreading through me; and no – apart from a syrupy and fiercely bitter espresso coffee first thing – (a holiday treat) – no recreational chemicals were involved.

Heath Bedsraw

Anyway I’m sharing this next photo because it’s a lot more representative of the tiny details that I spend most of my campervan time looking for. It’s just a bit of a leaf, but if you look very closely (the leaf is barely 5 mm long), you’ll see a line of tiny spike-like hairs and whether they point forwards or backwards is a determining feature between two species. The thing is that close-up examination with a hand lens reveals a truly exciting new perspective. Things that once looked identical look a bit different under 10x magnification; even more different under 20x and under a microscope oh wow! When I enlarge a macro photograph on a big screen when I get home I can see details that until the invention of the lens in the thirteenth century had probably never been seen by a human being. Many people tend to assume that science is driven by numbers and rooted in solid facts. In fact it’s driven by wonder and curiosity. It’s people with neither of those faculties who give science a bad name. We’re bedevilled by binaries and especially the ones that divide science from art. Mathematicians will willingly admit that theorems and solutions to old conundrums tend to come in inspirational flashes leaving all of the work to be done in proving the insight. They talk about “knowing” that a theorem is true because it’s beautiful or elegant. Philosophers agonise about mind/brain binaries when that may be an artificial division. Maybe they’re one and the same thing; mind, body, spirit, brain, even – dare I say – male, female, human and non human, native and foreigner. Fragments of a whole waiting to be reunited in a kinder vision – the kind of vision that a child is gifted with and is taught to forget.

When we were at Falmouth Art School the Head of Sculpture was something of a reclusive genius. Without ever exchanging more than a nod with him – (Ray Exworth was pretty terrifying) – he taught me one of my most important life lessons. He worked every day except (it was rumoured) Christmas day. Even as fashions were changing and it was taken as read that creativity was like a special gland that only some people had – so whatever they did would be art on account of the secret gland – Ray Exworth just worked. I fell upon Samuel Beckett’s words when I first read them ;

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Sitting here in the campervan lost in a sea mist, the ghostly voices whisper words of discouragement and I tell them to piss off and go bother someone else. There’s a blackbird singing outside and soon the voluble family of crows will start their day-long group chat. The last few remaining campers are all lingering in bed like us, waiting for the sun to appear. It may take a couple of days yet, after all this is Cornwall where it rains every day. Hotter fiercer weather is on the way and this holiday will soon fade as the solstice takes us towards autumn. We’ll revert to our late summer heatwave timetable on the allotment and rise early to weed and water.

Life really is very simple if we allow it. Take out greed, petty disputes, ambition, pride and fearfulness and that leaves space for pondering, for growing, harvesting, cooking and eating, loving and allowing ourselves to be loved, and following our curiosity and wonder wherever it might take us and inviting those discoveries to share our lives and help us to fail better.

A rainy day in St Davids

This is why we put ourselves through it. The harvest!

It’s the month, if not the day of reckoning on the allotment and two days before the solstice marks the turning of the seasons. After a terrible summer and regular visits to the hospital we almost gave it up, but we’re both so glad now we are both miles better that we didn’t. If you’re new to allotmenteering you need to know that as well as all the close to nature / mother earth stuff there are times when you would just like to walk away. Gardening – as I’ve often said – is a dialogue with the crops, the earth, the weather, the pests and the weeds and sometimes we can hardly get a word in edgeways. Lesson number one in allotmenteering is that you’ll never win them all. The price of fresh air and fresh veg is that you have to accept occasional failures and even (thankfully rarely) vandalism. The boards that edged our beds ten years ago have gone rotten in many places and would cost a lot of money to replace. The couch grass and bindweed that we vanquished by deep digging when we took the plots on have crept back because their rhizomes laughed at drought and just went deeper. So this autumn we’ve had to repeat some of the jobs we thought we put behind us for good.

Going organic is relatively easy if you just mean no chemicals, but no-dig can be hard if you’re dealing with weed infestations. We don’t let the perfect drive out the good and so this autumn we declared war on the weeds even if it meant digging some of them out. Fortunately, couch grass and bindweed – our biggest problem – are quite lazy and they’ve tended to use our wood chip paths as highways; making them very easy to pull out. However they also creep in from the edges and on to the beds and then we dig every few years. Yes of course the structure of the upper layer is precious, but the couch in particular produces chemical substances called allelochemicals which inhibit competition from nearby crop plants. Paths – it turns out – are great vectors of weed infestations and deserve as much attention as crop beds. Our paths were dug 18″ deep in the first place to provide drainage for the beds when filled with wood chips. They need topping up every year because the chips gradually rot down into rich black soil. Our soil is clay loam – we’re in a river valley so it’s alluvial and inclined to poach in wet weather. We’ve also got a spring running beneath several of the beds which can be as difficult as drought in the winter, especially for tree roots. One of my resolutions for the coming year is to have a go at water divining and see where they actually run.

As we refurbish the paths we use a heavy mattock – pictured on the left in the photo – to break up the surface and loosen the weed roots so they can be removed and burnt. Then we top up with wood chips and occasionally we go the whole hog and lay weed control mat on the cleared ground with wood chip on top. It’s one of those occasions when attention to detail is crucial and we try to remove every tiny fragment of rhizome.

The area in front of the greenhouse is getting the gold star treatment this year with a triple layer of cleared soil, cardboard, weed control mat and finally wood chip. The new autumn raspberry bed next to it has been given a thick layer of Jacob’s fleece from our friends in Brecon covered with yet more wood chip – we use many barrow loads of the stuff. Raspberries like warm feet. Last night we filmed the badger on the trailcam; digging away at the raspberry bed, presumably looking for the dead sheep. Apparently they will eat carrion if they’re really hungry, but this badger is as fat as we’ve ever seen. We’ve also recorded two cats, loads of rats and a pair of foxes. The rats are a constant nuisance but they’re creatures of habit and tomorrow, if the weather holds, I’ll be digging the narrow gap between the compost bins and the polytunnel to locate their nest and block it off.

The Mattock mattock design is as old as the hills and it’s used around the world for breaking up the earth before sowing. You might be tempted to get a lightweight version but the solid cast steel heavyweight is the one to go for, and don’t be afraid to give it some welly. As my grandfather always said, let the saw do the work and that applies to any tool equally well. Never economise on buying the best tools you can afford because they’ll more than pay for themselves in saved time, energy and painkillers.

We finally repaired the window of the vandalised shed a few weeks ago. We went to a specialist glass company and I asked the price of a single sheet of the wired toughened glass. The man on the desk said “before I cut it I’ll tell you how much it will cost” – it would have been well over £100 and I said I could buy a new shed for not much more. So we settled for a different type of toughened glass at a third of the price. Isn’t it a shame that we have to resort to such precautions against vandalism? Anyway it looks miles better than it did with an old compost bag flapping away in the wind.

Going back to the subject of digging, I’d really recommend getting hold of the two tools in the photo above if you’ve got very heavy or stony soil. The spade is quite expensive – around £50 and known as a groundbreaker. It’s very strong with a pointed, heavy and polished stainless steel blade and it was a revelation as we cleared the allotment. It really does make digging easier. It’s based on the traditional Cornish spade design which has a long straight shaft and no handle and is universally used by gravediggers who know a thing or two about digging deep holes in stony ground!

All the other tools will come with time, and you’ll learn how important it is to buy the tools and use the techniques that suit you and your own patch of earth. I’d suggest a wheelbarrow with foam filled tyres and a large capacity will be useful and then, as need arises you can buy all sorts of other useful tools – not just the hideously expensive, hand made, damascus steel Japanese trowels without which some gardening celebrities wouldn’t plant a broad bean.

And possibly the most important lesson is that plant breeders know a thing or two about pests and diseases and use their knowledge to produce blight resistant, disease resistant, pest resistant, and now drought resistant strains of all manner of vegetables. Don’t be sucked into the heritage vegetable trap as an automatic first choice. Don’t rush out and buy a Cox’s Orange Pippin just because it’s a heritage variety when there are much better yielding and better tasting varieties out there with greater disease resistance. Look around and take some advice because there are lovely old apples and pears out there that don’t need spraying every five minutes and won’t fall over in a dead faint when they get a bit of frost. And good luck – you can throw away those vitamin D tablets and get some of the hard stuff straight out of the sky.

Délicieux

Délicieux – “delicious” in English apart from its normal usage is also the title of a 2021 French/Belgian comedy-drama film directed by Éric Besnard, which charts the rise of the first restaurants in France just before the French revolution. We watched it a couple of nights ago and allowing for the odd historical inaccuracy, like moving the action from Paris to the Auvergne region, charts the fall of the aristocratic elite of the day and the subsequent redeployment of hundreds of highly trained chefs into parts of France that had no tradition of eating other than at home in the family setting. It’s a great film, up there with my other foodie favourites because sometimes when we’re sick to death of the murderous and cynical events on the news we need a couple of hours of relief. And it’s always good in any case to see the ruling classes humiliated and shamed even if it’s only in a film. Well worth watching and under a fiver.

Anyway, it made me sit up and remember how and why I started cooking in the first place. Mum was a decent cook with a small repertoire of favourites. By the time Madame and I got together I’d never tasted garlic, green peppers or any of what the supermarkets still describe as exotic vegetables. So when we moved into our first flat; I was 21 and Madame was 18, neither of us had considered how we were going to feed ourselves. I’d hovered in the kitchen and watched my mum cook; she showed me how to judge the thickness of Yorkshire pudding batter by the sound it makes, and I could make a passable bacon sandwich. My dad literally could not make a cup of instant coffee! Madame still can’t recall her mother ever cooking a meal and so confronted with starvation we agreed to take it in turns to cook and that’s never changed.

At the same time we were exposed for the first time to a different cuisine as soon as we went to college and started to meet new people from different social backgrounds who invited us to their homes and whose parents (who probably thought of us as amusing waifs and strays) invited us to eat with them. I fell in love with the whole thing but we could never have afforded to eat out, so the only way we could eat like our better off friends was to learn to cook. I bought books, slowly accumulated a few pans and after walking miles looking for ingredients, practiced. It never occurred to me to train as a chef; my whole ambition was to be a good cook. There was a shop around the corner that sold cookware and I would spend hours looking through the window at the Le Creuset pots. I bought my first ever carbon steel knife there and resolved never to make-do with inferior equipment – which meant that my skills and equipment were glacially slow to improve. It was decades before we could afford to travel and see continental food at first hand.

Our problem was that so many ingredients were simply unobtainable. We learned the location of bay trees, rosemary bushes and other herbs. Sage and thyme were only available in bunches as Christmas approached so we foraged for what we needed in the leafy streets and gardens and eventually got ourselves our first allotment. It’s a well rehearsed truth that olive oil could only be obtained in tiny bottles at the chemist. Luckily we had a deli nearby, run by a Hungarian refugee who imported foods we’d never seen or even dreamed of. We learned to grow some food and we were lucky enough to find neighbours who could show us how to dress the chickens, pheasants and rabbits that found their way to our door. The local butcher showed me how to humanely kill and pluck a chicken. When I was a community arts worker I learned to be careful about expressing any food preferences, because some of the young men I worked with would go poaching to order.

Today we were sitting at the table shelling the borlotti beans to store for the winter. At lunchtime we had a tasting of several varieties of apple that we grow and ate chunky bread. After a dreadfully tough summer we were on the point of giving up the allotment but Madame kept the faith and we’re back on track once again preparing the ground for next season. Against all expectations the fruit crop; sweet apples, pears, plums, damsons and cookers has been the best ever. The borlotti crop was the largest yet and even the potatoes held fast in the ground right through the drought. Chard, spinach and most of the herbs survived too, with minimal watering. The tomatoes and peppers suffered in the polytunnel but now at last the rain has come and the water butts are slowly filling. Storage is easy but harvesting water is a bit more tricky. The greenhouse roof faces east and west, taking most of the weather pretty well. The water butts there fill quickest, but the shed roof slopes to the north and its three barrels are much slower to fill. So the trick is to pump water from the full barrels to the empty ones so that every drop is captured. I can see that the dramatic climate change we’re experiencing is not going to reverse any time soon and so droughts, extreme weather and storms need to be factored into our planning.

So now we ache in places we didn’t know existed, but we grow closer each time we go to the allotment. The shared physical work renders the gym subscription redundant and the mental challenge of planning it all is rewarded at this time of year in the kitchen and at the table, and there really is some kind of spiritual dimension to it. The news is terribly unsettling, and the uncaring viciousness of so many people provokes paranoia and despair; but somehow the simple act of plunging your hands into the soil, or sowing and harvesting your own food have the strange capacity to heal those hurts. Our friendships among the other allotmenteers brings us together in a shared interest with a huge range of people and skills. Doctors; nurses; teachers and professors muck in with many others with quite different life experiences. The allotments are, in the truest sense, a university.

u4 hardly begins to express the richness of a remembered childhood.

u4, by the way, is the way that science now describes these photographs of a not very lovely patch of grassland on a wet July day in 2020, but before I get to that I want to talk about what a dialect usually means.

I was born in Gloucestershire and we’ve lived within twenty miles of Staple Hill for most of our lives – during which time the area has gone under three different county designations; whilst large industries, for instance shoe making and coal mining have disappeared leaving hardly a trace. Perhaps, for me, the saddest thing of all is that the local dialect has almost died as well. You could always tell where someone came from after you’d heard a couple of sentences. Bristol was particularly rich in local dialects so you could almost predict which parish people came from. All that “alright my lover” and “gert lush” nonsense that we hear when outsiders try to imitate Bristolian is fit only for second rate comedy programmes because if – fifty years ago – you’d walked up Two Mile Hill from the centre you’d have travelled through at least four distinct speech forms. The slum clearances and tower blocks mixed things up in the fifties and sixties but even as a child you could leave the hints of Somerset behind as you entered St Jude’s and Old Market and then uphill through Easton (incomprehensible to outsiders) , Barton Hill, St George, Speedwell and unmistakable Kingswood; beyond which Gloucestershire partially reasserted itself, and somewhere in altogether alien territory, there was Wiltshire. When I started going out with Madame, if I missed the last bus (which I did regularly), I would walk from the western boundary to beyond the eastern boundary of the City and stick my head around the bedroom door to say “alright?” to my Mum when I got home. My own voice was shaped by the rounder and softer vowels of the southern part of Gloucestershire and I’ve never tried or even wanted to disguise it. It’s the dialect of my childhood and it’s a thing of structured beauty, of arcades and landscapes and industries; of Methodism and mining and shoe making. I’ve always thought that to lose my accent would be to lose part of my essential being and if anyone has ever equated my accent with any kind of swede bashing stupidity I walk on by and leave them to their knuckle dragging idiocy. If I’m anything at all it’s one of Gramsci’s organic intellectuals whose roots lie in life and experience and whose reading and understanding is refracted through lived experience.

I suppose there is some kind of generic west country accent that will get you by in most places , but with the exception of one place I almost never hear the real thing. When I first visited the sawmill at Oldland Common – exactly halfway between where I was born and where we live now, I was served by a man who spoke the precise dialect of my childhood. I can’t begin to express how unsettlingly moving that was; like finding and losing something very precious that had no monetary value at all but meant the world to me; as if I were listening to a recording of my life starting in the distant past.

Rodway Hill was always a part of my childhood. We had picnics there and eventually I went to school there. On Rodway hill I had the first of many experiences of the oceanic as I laid in the grass watching the clouds and listening to the wind in the (as yet unnamed long grass). The flora were integrating themselves into my mind; becoming part of me. The hill itself is quite small but remains inexplicably protected from all the surrounding development. you can stand at the edge and look across to the dense post-war housing where I was brought up. When I was at school there I went out with a girl who (pre Beeching of course) caught the train back to Yate where she lived and I would walk down to the station with her and look at the sandstone cutting without much curiosity. But that landscape has structured my imagination and so every time I find myself in one of those strange and starved landscapes I feel as “at home” as I do in the sawmill ordering fence posts.

In July 2020 during lockdown I had the strongest urge to go back there and so Madame and I drove over in the rain and I took a series of photographs of the plants that caught my eye. That was the end of it until I made the madcap decision to catalogue all my random photos, name the plants and build a big database. Then last week I got to the Rodway photos and – because I know a bit more botany these days – I saw straight away that these plants were very different to a selection taken from, say, two miles down the road. It was as if the hill spoke in a kind of intangible dialect.

This discovery was provoked by the fact that there was a plant I couldn’t get my head around. All the phone apps told me with absolute certainty that it was Heath Bedstraw – Galium saxatile – Then, after a good deal of research I made the surprising discovery that Rodway hill is a small patch of what the scientists call acid heath, sitting on the cap of precisely the sandstone I’d seen but not understood, waiting for the train with my then girlfriend. Then after even more searching I discovered that my photographID’s were likely correct except for the fact that some of the flowers had five petals and not four, and some of the groups of leaves came in fours but not fives or sixes. After exchanging emails with our County Recorder I discovered that (yet again) plants don’t read textbooks and that my plants were within normal variation.

But there’s a kicker to this rather long-winded piece because it helped unravel the mystery of why I’m attracted to these particular landscapes. Why else would I feel so at home up on Mendip or down in Cornwall, on Dartmoor or on the Bannau if it weren’t for the fact that they speak with exactly the same botanical dialect that I learned on Rodway as a child. The top of Blackdown above Burrington is almost identical – with its sandstone cap above the carboniferous limestone. The reference to u4 in the title of this piece is merely the code for this specific habitat in the National Vegetation Classification (NVC) descriptors with all of the poetry, all of the memories, the longings and all the rest of the synaptic riches stripped out.

Maybe we would be able to grasp the meanings of landscapes and their flora by approaching them as dialects. The way things grow around here. Maybe we should occasionally take a break from Gradgrindian dogmatism of precise description and let u4 back into the sunshine like a pit pony released from darkness and sweated labour into meadows and heaths where lovely things grow in historic and vibrant cultural communities.

A very happy new year to you from the Potwell Inn

An oasis of peace behind the car park.

Marbled White butterfly sipping nectar from Red Clover in White Field today

Dyrham Park can get very busy – especially in the school holidays – I took a picture of the car park before lunchtime today just to give some idea of how crowded it can be with hundreds of visitors walking down the steep approach towards the house. But there’s one part of the grounds where you can pretty well guarantee a bit of peace and quiet. Today we spent over an hour there plant hunting and we didn’t see a soul.

White Field is a wildflower meadow where, in the late spring and early summer, you can find three species of orchid growing without leaving the mown paths. To be fair, it’s not particularly easy to find, tucked away behind the car park and technically outside the grounds behind a high deer fence, but it’s a lovely spot in which to learn to identify many of our most attractive wildflowers. But don’t leave your visit much beyond mid July because it’s mown off and the hay baled and taken away as part of a management programme. These wildflowers actually prefer poor soil and a single dose of artificial fertilizer could cause irreparable harm allowing rank weeds and grasses to choke out their more delicate cousins.

This was the first place we saw Marbled White butterflies and they really are very beautiful; but why here and not, for example on any old grass verge? The food plant – the one which the caterpillars feed on – is a group of grass species collectively called Red Fescue – which is common across the whole country but there are several other food plants as well. So it’s not the food plant alone but some other factor too. The butterflies display a preference for purple flowers and the distribution maps suggest that unimproved grassland is one important factor. So White Field fits the bill perfectly; unimproved grassland on Cotswold limestone with masses of purple flowers; not least Knapweed, Clover, Meadow Cranesbill, Selfheal and lots of orchids. The sad truth is that the butterfly is as rare as unimproved grassland and we’ve ploughed up and poisoned over 90% of our wildflower meadows in the last fifty years. Anyway, they were there on White Field in abundance today and they were a joy to find.

The field which on our last visit was golden and white with Rough Hawksbeard and Oxeye Daisies looked more brown and shriveled today, but if you looked between the straw coloured mature grasses there were hundreds of Pyramidal Orchids, Oxeye daisies, a few Rough Hawksbeard clinging on, Knapweed, Selfheal and Meadow Cranesbill plants at the edges as well as Birdsfoot, Clovers, Hogweed and Ragwort. Lots to look at and enjoy including Ribwort Plantain, Red Fescues, Timothy grass, Cocksfoot and loads of other grasses I’ve never got to grips with. Altogether a rewarding end of season walk with fabulous views out towards the River Severn and down as far as the Mendip hills.

Taking a leek to avoid a mutiny by Madame

I know. Sometimes my enthusiasm for creating long lists can be a bit – or very -trying because listing every plant we pass and then photographing it can make a seaside walk feel like crossing a desert. On Thursday there was a mutinous atmosphere that grew above us like a thundercloud. The secret of a long relationship is to know when to give up; so that’s what I did and we concentrated solely on one plant; a wild leek which is pretty rare but which happens to be a resident of our two favourite places in Cornwall – the Lizard peninsula and the Roseland peninsula. It’s a variety of the “normal” wild leek which is, in itself, rare; but this one is known as Babington’s Leek. The two are very close, and it’s only possible to distinguish them when they’ve developed those natty allium spikes at the end of their season. Wild leeks are full of seeds and Babingtons contain bulbils – tiny little readymade clones of the mother plant which drop off and take root in the soil around her. In the collection of photographs at the top, you can see the plant at various stages shown from two sites and I think the tiny bulbils coiled together in their filmy cover are just a bit sinister. They look like Medusa’s haircut. Ironically, you can buy the bulbils online and try to grow them in your garden so long as it provides exactly the right soil, seasonal weather and temperature and all the other conditions they need. Alternatively you could take your holidays here and enjoy them in their wild state like we do. The colony we photographed here on Roseland was strimmed off some time in the last couple of days in order not to scratch the sides of some grossly polluting SUV on its way to a holiday cottage. Grrrrr.

We’ve been so lucky with the weather; fourteen out of fifteen days of sunshine and I’ve been testing some AI plant identification and recording apps for a talk I’m doing in the autumn. None of them are perfect and some of them come up with some wonderful howlers. One recording app I was testing managed to lose 25 of my 102 identified species which, sadly, I hadn’t committed to paper. None of them except one were at all rare but it was enough to make me resolve to keep parallel paper records for the time being.

I’ve no idea how or why I’ve developed such an attachment to field botany; it kind of crept up on me when I wasn’t paying attention. Forbidden to do any serious surveys over the weekend, I decided to clear up my personal muddles with four closely related white wildflowers. Disambiguating two Stitchworts and two Mouse Ears all with similar – (same Campion family) – flowers sounds like an odd way of finding joy but they all grow close to the campsite and nobody would think it odd if I spent my time doing crosswords. Mission accomplished yesterday we were able to spend our time lazing around and watching our neighbours. Holidays seem to be very stressful and we’ve witnessed a few smouldering rows and a walk out; we watched some young women set out on a club night. They made me feel like Wellington before the Battle of Waterloo, who said of his troops that he didn’t know what they’d do to the enemy but “by God they terrify me!” One of them had an American Bully dog which caught sight of a rabbit, pulled his lead out of the ground and set off at such speed his lead caught around his owner’s leg, dragged her along the ground and damaged the skin on her leg. It was almost like being at home – but without the clouds of weed. Anyway nobody died, and the girls came back quietly at 2.00am.

I’ve delayed taking my medication until after we’ve gone for our long walks in the cool mornings and I feel miles better. Today we covered just under five miles and stopped for a healthy bacon butty at the Thirstea Cafe. On the way around I found three plants to record very quickly and slipped on the wet grass to do a kind of nine step polka down the track, whilst attempting to regain my balance. Thank goodness no-one saw me.

Behold – the new ones (for me) left to right; Wild Clary, Beaked Hawksbeard, Spotted Medick and Spear Thistle. Incidentally I now know the Latin names for all these – I have to, in order to record them; but the English names are much more evocative – see Geoffrey Grigson’s “An Englishman’s Flora” for an encyclopaedic view of all the poetic names.

What do you mean – what does it mean? Botany as a sensual pursuit.

The narrow road down to Percuil harbour with the hedgerow in in full flower.

I know there’s a process underlying the transformation of a spring walk in the sunshine into a list such as the one in my notebook yesterday. There’s another page for Wednesday with different plants on it and together they total 50 plants identified, recorded and sent off to the national database. The process must look hilarious to passers-by – old bloke on his knees, ferreting through the bottom of a hedge and talking loudly to himself as his partner walks on, oblivious to the one-sided conversation. A bonkers display of eccentricity. “Is he alright there?” I can imagine someone asking. “Is he lost?”

Well, in a manner of speaking I am lost. Ecstatic. Taken out of myself to another level of consciousness. I’m perfectly prepared to accept that I’m a bit of an outlier when it comes to plants. I know plenty of able bodied and perfectly sane (they might say) academics whose interest in plants can only be expressed in the incomprehensible private language of a Magisterium which exists to defend the McGuffin, or at least its McGuffin; plenty of others are available. It’s easier to learn Icelandic than discern the subtleties of polyploidy, or find the exact term to describe the shape of a leaf. I wish them no ill, I just wish they’d drag themselves away from their scanning electron microscopes and get out there amongst the plebs, (the) hoipolloi; the thugs, weeds and escapees; the abandoned pre-industrial feedstocks, the temporary residents doomed to rapid extinction, the ones threatened by foragers, collectors and developers and the ones that can give users visions, paranoia and even end your life in grisly ways.

My grandfather, who was both well educated and self-taught (they’re not mutually exclusive) had a set of encyclopedias; and one photograph has affected my whole life. It’s a photo of a bloke in a brown warehouse coat – ie working class; the properly educated scientist would have had a white lab coat – standing next to a pile of buckets, jars, beakers and test tubes each containing the correct quantity of some element or compound thought at the time to be essential to life. You might call it Frankenstein’s larder. The caption assured us that this was everything necessary to make a human being , except that the great mystery of the animating principle that drew them all together in the form of a living, breathing – let’s say – poet was not even hinted at. Although I never knew it at the time, this is a form of reductionism, which can be helpful if used properly as a metaphor for understanding complex phenomena; but lethal when used as a slam dunk proof that nothing is greater than the refuse from the pathologist’s table.

Yes to DNA if it helps us to understand the mysteries of relatedness in living things; yes to scanning electron microscopy when it helps us to visualise the pollen grain, the fungal spore and the bacterium; but plants embody so much more. Forgive me for mentioning my earlier life but to worship the partial and ignore the ineffable mystery of the whole is the classic definition of idolatry. We need to take that kind of science out into the world, on to the streets of a ne’er do well culture where it can have some sense knocked into it and its sense of wonder restored.

The supreme irony of all this is that so many people – insultingly known as ordinary – already get it. They go for walks in the sunshine and pause to look at the plants and flowers and absorb something important, as if there were an invisible energy there, flowing back and forth between the hedgerow and the walker. When I first began to encounter flowers and plants as a child I valued their immediate impact – bright as a Daffodil, blowsy as a Gladiolus, tarty as a Dahlia. The plants our Mum grew in the garden. Wild plants often lack that degree of egotism. These days as I learn more about them, I have come to love their complexity. The humble Buttercup has at least nine closely related forms; the Dandelion approaching 300 and don’t even mention the Blackberry . I don’t understand and can’t unravel a fraction of it, but that cloud of unknowing does nothing to diminish my joyful wonder at finding the most common plant hiding amongst its taller neighbours on the side of the footpath. Madame walks on the moment she hears me say HELLOOO in my best botanical voice, and carries on alone, while I’m chatting to my new friend.

I love the way that the plant world can even finesse a colour. This week the Stitchwort and the Cow Parsley (Queen Anne’s Lace is a much nicer name), are shining out from the hedge with an intense white that reproaches the very slightly creamy Hogweed and the distinctly yellowish Alexanders. As a not very accomplished botanical artist I really struggle to find a way of expressing the dynamic range of the hedgerows and meadows. The intense blue of the Germander Speedwell is not better than the pale blue of the Pale Flax; just another note in the huge overarching colour cloud. The colour, shape and pattern of plants are as much an inspiration to the artist as they are data to the taxonomist – look no further than William Morris, Claude Monet and Ivon Hitchens among hundreds of others. And the colours go beyond what we can see into the ultra violet. The honey bee may be seeing something very different than we do.

Taste and flavour are a whole new botanical delight. Let’s put gin aside for a moment; but even poets get in on the act. Here’s William Carlos Williams poem “This is just to say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

William Carlos Williams

It’s a fair bet that the plums in the fridge weren’t just large sloes. Which of us hasn’t tried to convince one of our children that the sloe is as delicious as any plum in order to teach them a memorable lesson in plant identification. There are occasions when the taste of a plant – like the real plums in William’s poem can transport you. As children we used to nibble the young leaves of Hawthorn – we called them bread and cheese. Yesterday I found some Scurvy Grass and I nibbled it. It tasted like fiery horseradish and I was immediately filled with the thought of a barrel of the filthy tasting pickled plant being served to sailors as a preventative for scurvy. With care, and above dog pissing height I often take a bite but never forage except for field mushrooms, oh and sloes which transform gin into something lovely if you’ve got the patience to wait – or sloe vodka which is just as nice but does it a bit .quicker

Smell and taste being closely related, the obvious candidate for this category would be Ramsons (wild Garlic) or Three Cornered Garlic but yesterday offered an altogether quieter but deeper pleasure. As we emerged from the footpath through the woods where we’d feasted our senses on Early Purple Orchids and bluebells, we stepped into a field beside the Percuil river that was full of Sweet Vernal Grass in flower. The books will tell you that the scent of Sweet Vernal Grass is “new mown hay” – and it is; except for the fact that 97% of the wildflower meadows that would once have been cut for hay have now disappeared in favour of Ryegrass and Clover leys. Hardly anyone makes hay in any case so to most young people the “new mown hay” smell is about as meaningful as the smell of moon dust. I’m lucky not to be in that unfortunate group because putting up with knackered knees and all the other indignities of age is the price of knowing that intoxicating perfume, described by the reductivists as Coumarin, because as a child my sister and me onced helped our grandfather make proper hay on his smallholding in the Chilterns. You could spray Coumarin on silage, haylage or concentrated cattle feed and it would still smell horrible. Sweet Vernal grass is the intoxicating perfume of Spring and on Wednesday it swept across us in sweet waves, evoking haunting memories of the lost sensuality of the historic countryside.

Perfumed field near Percuil

All of which brings me to sounds. When I was a teenager I used to cycle over to Dyrham Park, climb over the wall and just lie in the long grass of what’s still called Whitefield. If you want to know what a real wildflower meadow looks like you won’t find a better example this close to Bath. The sound of the wind in the grass and trees is one of the great pleasures of solitude.

So here’s to the benighted idiots of the past. The ploughmen and apothecaries, the wise women, the monks in the infirmaries and the witches; the alchemists, dyers and weavers, the poets and artists who loved plants and flowers but allowed them to be so much more than the sum of their parts. I’ve been filling in the records for all these plants, but apart from the obvious questions like what’s your name? how dare you record this plant you peasant? what’s it called? where was it? was it in flower? ……. I can’t find anywhere the most important question of all – what does it mean? – to you? to the earth?

Early Purple Orchid – smells of Lily of the Valley when young but then of blackcurrant (cats’ pee!) later on.

Pteridomania strikes the Potwell Inn

Priddy Pool
  • Priddy Fern List ST55F ( a quick way to describe part of an OS Grid square)
  • Apologies for the Latin – English names are second
  • Asplenium adiantum-nigrum – Black Spleenwort
  • * Asplenium ceterach – Rustyback
  • Asplenium ruta-muraria – Wall Rue
  • * Asplenium scolopendrium – Hart’s Tongue
  • * Asplenium trichomanes – Maidenhair Spleenwort
  • Blechnum spicant – Hard Fern
  • Dryopteris affinis – Golden Scaled Male Fern
  • Dryopteris carthusiana – Narrow Buckler Fern
  • Dryopteris dilatata – Broad Buckler Fern
  • Dryopteris filix-mas – Male Fern
  • Polypodium interjectum – Intermediate Polypody
  • Polypodium vulgare s.s – Polypody sensus stricta
  • * Polypodium s.l – Polypodies
  • * Polystichum setiferum – Soft Shield fern
  • Pteridium aquilinum – Bracken

Plant hunting is helped immeasurably by a bit of homework before you set out and equally with more homework even after you think you know what you’ve found. So this rather grand list was easily got by searching the accessible-to-the-public list and ticking off the ferns (Pteridophytes! As my mother used to say “the P is silent as in bathing” . So it turns out that in the little corner of High Mendip where we’re camping, there are 13 fern species (3 are hybrids – only separable by experts with microscopes) and yesterday in our short walk we found five of them – the starred names which are in the photographs clockwise from top left. None of them rare but some, much more common on the limestone rocks hereabouts – environment is a huge thing for plants. Whilst you might think that finding 38% of the available species isn’t bad for a half mile walk down a bridleway, they’re just the ordinary common species. The rarest fern that could conceivably be found near here is the Limestone Fern, but collectors are still capable of uprooting and stealing rare plants so their exact locations are withheld from general access.

The walk was exactly as planned on Monday. Cross the road and walk 250 yards to the entrance of a bridleway; walk very slowly down it as far as Priddy Pool, photographing any interesting plants, and then – depending on the weather, walk on to the churchyard and the limestone walls near Swildons Hole and then across the village green to the pub. The weather, though, was ferocious. The little spring expedition in our imagination actually brought with it 50 mph gusts of freezing wind and occasional pellets of sleet that felt as if they were lacerating our faces. 1000 feet of altitude makes a huge difference.

Down in the bridleway we were pretty much sheltered from the worst of it, and I got some good photographs of the crozier stage of some ferns as they emerge. They are wonderfully sculptural. We also found two very common flowering plants which were quite hard to identify. Yellow Archangel ought to be easy enough, but this one had silvery white spots on the leaves and so I used a bit of internet AI and chased it down to subspecies – probably a garden escape but it seemed fully naturalised.

Priddy Pool – and I mean the pool that adjoins Nine Barrows Lane is a truly magical place. There’s a certain ambiguity about the name because the plural – Priddy Pools refers to a couple of larger ponds in the Mineries nearby, now a nature reserve but once a lead mining area. My Priddy Pool – the only one named on the OS map – holds the water which subsequently runs underground at Swildons Hole. On July 10th 1968 we’d had two months worth of rain in two days, three thousand houses were flooded, eight people died and 24 buses were abandoned on the streets; and Swildon’s Hole took so much floodwater that the entire upper series was rearranged and the old 40 foot pitch (shaft) disappeared. Cavers who entered after the flood found an altogether different cave. It occurs to me that Priddy Pool, far from being an ancient natural formation may have been altered by 20th Century cavers to assist rescues when the cave was flooded. There’s certainly some stonework on the boundary with Nine Barrows Lane that was built there by someone. But now it’s just a lovely place to watch and listen to birds. Of course it could be a buddle pit or a sheepwash – someone must know.

Then as we came out on to Townsend we spotted a Forget me Not. Exactly as I had done with the Yellow Archangel I rather dismissed it as a garden escape with a toss of the head and curl of the lip – but I photographed it anyway because it was growing wild in a shady verge. Back in the campervan I looked up the Myosotis family in the Book of Stace and discovered that there are loads of them and that my suspicion of nursery bred plants was a bit over egged because there are ten legitimate wildies; three of them rare but the others, although they get grown in gardens often escape back into the wild. Another handy ID shortcut was to go back into the Distribution database and see how many of Forget me Nots have ever been seen in my grid square. That reduced the number from ten, to seven and then to an easily manageable two which were so different it was easy to choose the right one. By the time we reached Townsend our fingers were white and we were shivering, so we wandered back to the campervan and turned the heating up to tropical so we could properly enjoy a bottle of Provençal rosé with our sandwiches.

On the left the Wood Forget me Not – Myosotis sylvatica, and on the right Yellow Archangel – Lamiastrum galeobdolon ssp. argenatum

Anyway; notwithstanding the weather – which has been awful – wandering the bosky dells wasn’t the only reason for coming here. We needed to test out all the systems in the campervan to make sure it’s ready for the summer and happily – aside from a lousy WiFi signal which is only just about workable, the van is good. We, on the other hand, are sitting in it in the midst of a cloud with visibility down to 100 yards.