Like buses they seem to come along four at a time! This whole business started off because I’d decided to write in longer form about the Severn Estuary. The first obstacle was that having spent last winter cataloguing and identifying plants (10,000 photos – and what do you call an uncatalogued photo? Lost!” So I gathered together my collection of removable drives and searched iCloud, Dropbox and Google photos, loaded the whole ghastly mess into a 2Tb removable drive and transferred the lot, very slowly, into one collection on Google Photos, hoping that at least some of the many duplicates would be binned on the journey. As a strategy it was a bit of a curate’s egg – “good in parts my Lord!” but I was aware that Google has introduced a measure of AI into the programme and is now cataloguing in a much more clever way. Somewhere in a Californian desert the lights probably went dim for a while as the snake digested the gazelle of my neglected collection.
So I found nearly all of my Severn photos; memories, memories, going back to the time before exif data but not quite as far as negatives. It was a bit like Christmas as I tested the system and typed in abstruse keywords and watched the laptop dollop lost memories on to the screen. Among those lost memories was the photo at the top of the page which I managed to take without paying any attention to the upright posts in the middle of the frame.
I should say that Ravenglass on the Esk estuary is a most wonderful place where I felt completely at home. The plants were tremendous with lots I’d never seen before. I was pleased to correctly identify a fungus spotted from 50 yards as a rusty and burst spray can of insulating foam, but that cost me a pair of muddy boots. It’s so windy up there that I expect the tiny post office keeps a supply of them for storm repairs. The Esk estuary feeds into the Irish Sea, and just a short train ride away you can see, but probably not wander freely, around the Sellafield site. The rest of the county should probably be thought of as post industrial, if not deeply depressed since the mines closed but Sellafield thrives, proudly displaying a roadside welcome to “Britain’s Energy Coast” which is a bit rich; it should read “Britain’s Clearing up the Mess after the Energy has been Extracted Coast.” But nobody grumbles because work is work and it pays better than standing up to your waist in water emptying fish baskets.
Which brings me back to the spectacularly lonely, and therefore lovely Esk estuary where you could pick enough samphire to feed a banquet were it not for the fact that it glows green at night as it emits low level radiation. It’s probably worth asking the local pub if they’ve got any spare dose meters, just don’t mention my name.
And those modest poles rotting in the mud are there for exactly the same reason as the ones in the Severn (the hot contents of whose two nuclear power stations is in the midst of being processed and stored at Sellafield. Small world eh?) The one difference is in what they – the weirs/traps are called. In Ravenglass they’re called “Salmon Garths” with very little difference from salmon putchers except it’s even colder up there. I fell instantly in love with the place. But remembering it this week made me wonder if I shouldn’t be seeking professional help for these obsessions because I’ve inadvertently found two more instances of old fishing practices on my hard drive. The first, or should it be the third is barely a mile away from where we were staying in cornwall a couple of weeks ago. I’ve got a small catalogue of fish trap photos from Froe Creek just off the Percuil river which doubled up as a mill pond, and yet another I know about but have only seen from the bridge across the Menai Straits to Anglesey called Ynys Gorad Goch (which translates to “Red Weir Island”).
I love that these brilliantly inventive ways of catching fish in a subsistence economy have travelled around not just Britain but around the world in an example of parallel evolution. Thank goodness they’re still there, albeit in ruins, and catalogued so that one day we could go back to them and see what they can teach us about low impact and environmentally friendly food gathering. Here are some more pictures: I really do like a bit of human company but I need to be in the mood! A very wise old priest once said to me while I was training “You’ve got to remember that availability is an ascetic discipline”. He wasn’t wrong. These places are very healing.
The Ravenglass and Eskdale steam engine is the icing on the cake. Now where’s my medication?
Back at the van I quickly identified them as Sneezewort (Achillea ptarmica) which gave me a burst of sheer pleasure quite out of proportion to a bunch of rather faded daisy lookalikes with downturned petals and odd, buff coloured centres. I honestly don’t think I’d be any more pleased if I’d found a Ghost orchid – well perhaps a little bit more pleased, but the real joy is in knowing the everyday. As someone said on the telly the other day – you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find the prince. Most of my princes have turned out to be garden escapes anyway. The everyday is where I mostly live and we’re surrounded by everyday plants, insects and animals that most of us are unaware of. I’ve developed the habit, every time I see a plant whose name I know, of saying hello. I don’t find it alarming, but passers by sometimes give me strange looks. I can’t get that moment of recognition out of my mind; a new friend amongst a host of strangers. Now I can name the Sneezewort it will call out “Hi” to me wherever I see it and I will say “Hi Sneezewort” back and I will feel a little more at home, wherever I happen to be.
