Jackdaws, Breathing Earth… and Ballads of Belonging

Two herons were circling above our street. Long, languid, cramp-necked, they rose from the river valley and wheeled a pattern over the suburban roofs. The jackdaws on the chimneys showed little reaction in their blue-bead eyes. But they miss nothing – and they were watching, idly.

It is April. The jackdaws are nest building; trying out chimneys for size. They are both fitful and laid back. Secure in their familial groups, fussing over twigs, stalking the road for insects, they pick up anything vaguely useful as nesting material and carry it back, both purposeful and half-hearted, to their respective chimneys of choice. They have a ‘that-will-do’ attitude as they plonk down their finds, and then seem to change tack and become like obsessed artists, Jackson Pollock-like, bending over their seemingly random creations, arranging and re-arranging.

The chimneys opposite our house are favourites with our jackdaw-neighbours, sometimes for nesting, but mostly just as places to gather, survey the scene. It is touching to see the bonds each mating pair exhibit; how they remain together, life companions, all year round, mutually preening and sharing in meaningful jackdaw collusion.

These pairs are each part of the larger group which seems to revolve its days around these streets. From here, the members of the flock spread out in satellite manoeuvres, separating into small groups or pairs, but remaining constantly connected by lines of jackdaw communication and family bonding. Open a door or window, and a cacophony of jackdaw chat bounces in, via the corvid-telegraph.

Some evenings, I’ve looked out to see them calling each other to dusk-gatherings on the roofs. Obediently, they arrive in ones and twos, and land, poised and listening. Then, once each flock member is accounted for, a dominant jackdaw will say the word - and, as if on the beat of a single collective wing, they will swoop like a feathered shadow towards the woods to roost.

In The Rookery, a chapter from the deeply treasure-filled pages of Roger Deakin’s Wildwood, A Journey Through Trees, Deakin draws our attention to another chapter in another book – a favourite inspiration from his boyhood. He describes how, in his formative years, he would often pick up Konrad Lorenz’s King Solomon’s Ring and re-read, over and over, Lorenz’s account of ‘…how, beginning in 1927, he raised a whole colony of free-flying jackdaws at his home in Altenberg in Austria, with the object of studying their social and family behaviour.’ Over time, Lorenz identified and learnt to recognise a variety of words in the Jackdaw vocabulary. Deakin tells us:

‘Most interesting of all is Lorenz’s discovery of the subtle distinction between ‘Kia’ and ‘Kiaw.’ The first is the cry uttered in flight by the dominant jackdaws to urge the whole flock outward to new feeding grounds. The second is to urge them home. Thus, ‘Kiaw’ plays a vital role in maintaining the integrity of the flock when one meets another.

Most birds seem to keep their song quite separate from their language. The staccato alarm cry of a wren or blackbird is quite distinct from its sweet song. Jackdaws, however, incorporate their words into their songs to create, as Lorenz puts it, something more like a ballad, in which they can re-create past adventures or directly express emotions. Not only this, but the singer accompanies the different cries with the corresponding gestures, quivering or threatening like the lustiest performer passionately enacting a song. In a way, the jackdaw is mimicking itself….. but it may also, Lorenz thinks, be expressing emotion. When a marten broke into the roosting aviary at Altenberg and killed all but one of his jackdaw flock, the lone survivor sat all day on the weathervane and sang. The dominant theme of her song, repeated over and over, was ‘Kiaw’, ‘Come back, oh, come back.’ It was a song of heartbreak.’

- From Wildwood, A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin, published by Hamish Hamilton:

What ballads, I wonder, did the ancestors of ‘our’ jackdaws sing, before these houses were built? What world did they then describe? And did they ever call for it to come back, when it was lost?

According to old maps – and to the stories told to us by our elder neighbours – sixty, seventy years ago, this land, where our house now stands, was a margin of orchards, fields and market gardens – a ribbon of green stretching to meet the woods and river valley. In the pre- and post- World War Two years, new housing crept across the fields, spreading further and further outward from the city, leaving vigorous green gaps, and plunging watery valleys – and a new songline for the jackdaws to adapt to and follow. These houses, the tarmac, television aerials, the gutters and chimneys all grew to become incidentals of the jackdaws’ world, morphed by the birds’ use into look-out posts, nesting sites, drinking water catchments, navigable features of a landscape. Younger jackdaw generations grew up always having known these streets – perhaps singing a particular ballad that belongs just here, and to this time in its jackdaw history.

But maybe, that ballad too will soon be out of date – an ode to past times. Throughout these streets, fewer and fewer houses are keeping their front gardens. More and more people have paved theirs over as hard standing for cars. When we first moved to this house, our elderly neighbour had a garden that was typical of many around here – bursting with the fruits of his labour and time – and brimming with stories of his life, this place, this landscape. Over the garden wall, Jack would tell us those stories, in his quiet way, his words softly drawn out from his memories, and spun on the ballad-lilt of his West Country accent. All along the front wall, ever-increasing crowds of daffodils reminded him of the long-past day he had spent planting those bulbs with his toddler daughter. Each spring, that shared moment would renew over and over before the eyes of both dad and daughter – evidence of belonging; past, present and future. Beautiful rose bushes punctuated other events – birthdays and anniversaries; and fuchsias blazed colour along the margin between our two front paths, to guide our footsteps home. But several years ago, Jack passed away – and his garden, his roses, his daughter’s daffodils are now all gone.

But here, this side of the wall – though we don’t gift our front garden the time and effort Jack spent on his – we’re holding to a little mantra that keeping it, letting it breathe, gives something to the landscape and brings many rewards – not least a better view than the back-end of a car bumper from our kitchen window…

But best of all, is the wildlife it attracts. The jackdaws, along with many other birds, love our little “lawn”. It’s a ragged, hybrid mix of grass and “weeds” with messy edges and long sprouting tufts of grass against the wall, full of insects, whirring with grasshoppers in the summer – even a frog or two sometimes.

A few years ago, we were faced with the necessity of big disability adaptations to our house for our son. During all those long months of building work, the front lawn inevitably became torn to shreds by skips, piles of bricks and breezeblock, and afterwards we had to re-seed to restore the grass. It’s taken a couple of years for that to find its equilibrium – but, it won’t be long before, with encouragement and planting, it will have regained something of its old character. In the years just before our building work, springtime outbreaks of primroses and cowslips graced that ragged patch of green – and many a time, I would glance out of the window to see a passer-by given a visible lift as they caught sight of them. Their yellow exuberance hardly ever failed to raise a smile.

Smiles, interest and entertainment are often provided during my washing up hours, courtesy of the jackdaws, as they sidle around that small green space with their tip-and-stalk gait. They are both comical and deadly serious, both gentle and keenly ready for life’s difficult business.

The most arresting thing about them is their eyes – piercing blue and full of intelligence. They have a don’t-mess-with-me glint, whilst enclosing a whole world of tribal bird knowledge…

… all carried off with a demeanour that shrugs off the day’s moments with humour, whilst still pinning each one with close attention.

If we humans could pin the turning of the earth’s moments with that kind of close attention, maybe we would leave more room to lay them bare and breathing – to give the soil space amongst all the block-paving and tarmac – ready to open up to the circling of herons overhead, the glint of a watching bird’s eye, the blackbird wrestling with a worm, the daffodils planted by a child’s hand, guided by her dad to meet the earth, over half a century ago.

Perhaps we could tune in better to the very rhythm of living itself, and let our words and stories align with an old and – if we’ll let it – ever-renewing ballad.

The ‘blue-buzzed haze’ and passing days…

Amidst all the rain this May Bank Holiday weekend, Sunday 6th opened a window of sunshine – so we grabbed our chance, headed out to Westonbirt Arboretum…

And stepped through into this…

It’s so difficult, via a photo or words, to convey the sheer sensuousness of being amongst bluebells. Almost impossible to convey the intensity of colour, the subtle layers of scent; the stunning effect as you turn a corner and see them there, spread at the feet of moss-rimed oaks – or splashed across the grass, gleaming in the light…

‘And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes’

- Gerard Manley Hopkins

In the serenely beautiful video clip below, Robert Macfarlane sits in a Billericay bluebell wood and responds to these lines from The May Magnificat. He reflects on how he came to fully understand Manley Hopkins’ words, and to appreciate the accuracy of their imagery; how they capture that effect of ‘aqueous shimmer’ and ‘marine wash’ (Macfarlane’s own description) when you walk and sit amongst bluebells.

Reading Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places (one of the most deeply mesmerising books I’ve ever encountered) is like experiencing a kind of meditation – an underworld of deep thought. This clip is from The Wild Places of Essex - a televisual accompaniment to Macfarlane’s book, and part of the BBC’s Natural World series back in 2010. It gives a flavour of that mesmerising quality of Macfarlane’s nature writing, and provides a visual feast of ‘blue-buzzed haze’ (Gerard Manley Hopkins again):

Bluebells are one of the specialities of the British Isles, our (blue) icing on the biodiversity cake. More sparsely present in continental Europe and absent elsewhere, they are a national – a world – treasure. We are guardians of around half the world’s population of Hyacinthoides non-scripta. It’s so easy to take things for granted. Even within the very essence of the bluebells’ transience, we feel a trust in their never-ending return.

Trust, familiarity, noticing. Do they always go together? Today, in flower all around us, there’s a very common plant indeed – one hardly ever heeded – which is also putting on a fine display.

The bright yellow shaggy manes of dandelions are spread out in the sun, with the occasional seed clock counting its time until the breeze breaks up its perfect globe.

For me, it is a plant so bound up with my childhood; with handstands on scruffy lawns; with tree-camps on the wild edges of playing fields; with searching out its jagged, pungent leaves so beloved by pet guinea pigs; and with gently blowing the time away on the wind… There’s so much, even the most commonplace, that we would miss if it were gone.

‘Golden lads and girls all must
As chimney-sweepers come to dust’

…writes Shakespeare in Cymbeline. Those ‘chimney sweepers’ (dandelion clocks) are an image of passing time embedded, from our earliest days, in our consciousness and culture…

Here in Silk Wood (the arboretum’s ancient woodland) – this April/May window of emerging leaf canopy, and tree-scattered light, not only belongs to the bluebells – but is also the moment when the early purple orchids step forward and come into bloom. After carefully keeping a lookout for them in likely places, the first one we see creeps up on us from behind, jumping into my vision as I idly glance up from admiring an “elven doorway” amidst the moss.

When we follow the path round to the woodland edge, we find, as we did last year, that hosts of early purples are thriving in the grassy clearing maintained for their benefit.

And we discover more in other clearings and on the wildflower meadow rides, where we have also found them in previous years:

Early purple orchid, Orchis mascula

Earlier today, we noticed the leaves of other orchids emerging from the soil – common spotted:

…and twayblades:

We sit on a bench for a while, jumping to our feet when we hear the yaffling call of a green woodpecker immediately behind us. We don’t manage to get a glimpse of the “Yaffle,” but moments later a great spotted woodpecker lands in the tree above our bench. It’s very far up, but I point the camera towards it on maximum zoom, and hope for the best:

With the naked eye, and through binoculars, we get wonderful views of its black, white and red plumage as it fidgets and shifts along the branches.

Deeper in the ancient woodland, among tree stumps transforming into fantastic, fairy tale sculptures…

…we come across a single white bluebell

and a male orange tip butterfly is busy feeding nearby:

Orange tip butterfly (male), Anthocharis cardamines

On April Fools’ Day, on the same path – almost on the same spot – I managed to get this picture of a comma butterfly:

Comma butterfly, Polygonia c-album

And just around the corner, almost a year ago to the day, I photographed this rather ragged red admiral basking in the late April sun:

Red admiral butterfly, Vanessa atalanta

…whilst nearby, this beautiful peacock butterfly was feeding on those wonderful, nectar providing dandelions:

Peacock butterfly, Inachis io

Today, we are accompanied by the call of a chiffchaff, whilst all around, the birdsong is swollen by other recently arrived summer migrants, adding their voices to those of the resident birds. All along the edge of a plantation, there are clumps of stitchwort – and also water avens, bowing its meekly folded petals:

Water avens, Geum rivale

Lots of bugle is in flower everywhere and we find some red campion flowering too. And out in the damper, grassy areas of Silk Wood, lady’s smock – food plant for orange tip butterfly caterpillars – is also in flower. We pause to admire it, whilst two orange tips, a male and a female, flutter in courtship above the windmill whirls of pink flowers:

Lady’s smock (cuckoo flower), Cardamine pratensis

Tiny, fresh green hazel leaves are brewing energy for their future fruits, and the cherry blossom is still blousy against the blue sky. Last year, the blossom burst into spectacular, candyfloss profusion after the previous harsh winter – and gave a display that made the very earth seem to hum with bees:

On a high bank, a false oxlip is in flower, though now past its best… But, again, by the magic of time travel, a photo taken on this bank in May 2009 can whisk you back to when we managed to catch a previous year’s incarnation in a moment of full glory:

On the same bank, and on the arboretum’s downs, cowslips are in flower:

Cowslip, Primula veris

Beside some beech trees at the woodland edge, more twayblades are scattered profusely through the dog’s mercury, their flowers still bunched low, tight and closed, waiting their time.

And on the path where ramsons rule, their deep, damp wild garlic aroma fills the air. They are just beginning to unwrap their starry flowers:

– but soon they will fully reveal, in turn, their moment of stunning glory, when this path will be an avenue of billowing white.

Now, as the day – and our window of sunshine - begins to close, we watch swallows and house martins dash and twist in the sky. And a whole succession of moments lingers around us, blowing through the passing of the years – like the seed from those dandelion clocks, so perfect and waiting; playing their part in the cycle of things…

A Peace of Nature

‘Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees…. while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.’    John Muir

‘I am a little piece of nature.’   Albert Einstein

 

Utter calm. Often, it appears unexpectedly and by chances, stealing in when you think it’s somewhere else. It’s not easy to come by. But it was there that day – not in a deep, remote landscape, but in Bath’s Botanical Gardens, with the sound of the Easter holiday fun fair thumping persistently from Victoria Park.

That elusive peace enfolded us – my husband, daughter and me – as we sat on a bench, watching the spring sunlight pulse its reflection amongst the leaves over the pool, just letting the life of the gardens come to us…

In the early afternoon, with the morning cloud dissolved, and the blue skies of the preceding days restored, we weren’t the only ones enjoying the warmth and awakening earth in that hidden corner. Above us, by the ‘Temple of Minerva,’ where a natural spring glints the spare-coin offerings of passing wish-makers, a woodpigeon cooled itself in the cascade – and a dunnock splashed amongst the lower tiers of rock.

Earlier, the dunnock had sprung from the ground to the top of the bush close beside me, threading the air with its clear, piercing notes, marking its territory. Now, a male blackbird torpedoed the underside of the leaves overhanging the pool, picking off an insect as it made contact. As he landed, another male blackbird collided into his space, assessed his dilemma, twitched in an uneasy stand-off, stood his ground for a second and then startled away.

Blackbird photographed at the same spot by the pool in Bath Botanical Gardens, June 2010.

In the tree tops, blue tits swung and hopped from branch to branch, busy in constant conversation with each other. A couple of long-tailed tits emerged from a bush, like little pendulums balanced on the ends of branches. And then, above us in the vegetation by the cascade, we caught sight of our first orange tip butterfly of the year. It tumbled downwards, circled and then rose, like a visual representation of thought-patterns; playing out a dance of forgetting then remembering. And, all this time, the trees resounded with birdsong – enough to fill the mind’s focus, and to dismiss the thudding vibrations from the fun fair music and rides.

All around the gardens, the magnolia trees were in full bloom, their old branches twisting in a controlled, contorted dance. Holding up their flowers like cups offered to the sky, their petals spilled to the ground – and everywhere tree blossom buzzed with bees and drifted around us like pink snow. Earlier, we had lingered in the wildflower area – loving the chance to see snake’s head fritillaries. They were almost over with their flowering – reminding me that another year’s opportunity for a visit to Cricklade Meadow, to see them in the wild, would soon be slipping away…

But, for now, no matter; these park cousins are beautiful.

Snake's Head Fritillary, Fritillaria meleagris

Within the metal railings that encircle these gardens, nature is packed in, brimming with colour and variety, like the concentrated contents of a tin of assorted sweets. Sitting by the pool, the usual nagging inner voices and thoughts, for once, have shut up – for a brief time. It feels so good to sit here, in this little piece of nature, unwinding through the pulse of the day – and to unfurl, like the leaf buds around us, from the winter.

From our bench, we can glimpse the head and arms of Lee Dickson’s tree sculpture, Mankind’s Hand in Nature, similarly unfurling towards the sky through the vegetation.

Around seven metres tall, it rises from the ground, keeping alive the spirit of the sequoia from which it is carved.

The tree, one of the original twelve giant redwoods to be brought to Britain in the 1850s, sadly succumbed to honey fungus in recent years, and Lee Dickson, a local chainsaw sculptor from Radstock, was commissioned in 2001 to create the sculpture as a celebration of the tree’s life and place in the gardens.

And these gardens certainly are a place to celebrate life; to come to for peace and repose, and to fit back into nature’s cycles. We were here the week before too, with our son. Pushing his wheelchair as close to the railings as we could get, we watched the huge koi carp glide silently in the pool…

…and greeted a moorhen rushing through the light…

…before wandering through the gardens and Victoria Park, past the daffodils and blossom…

…past the flowering lesser celandine and violets…

…to Bath Abbey Churchyard to listen to the buskers.

On the Abbey’s face, the angels were engaged in their endless climb…

- and fall…

…on the ladder to heaven.

But it wasn’t a day for falling angels.

…Too much earthy life emerging – too much of the turn of the planet – all around and in our selves.

 

…And that seems an appropriate cue for a song that’s been our son’s favourite since he was tiny; his ‘magic song’ with the power to soothe like none other:

Follow the Heron by Karine Polwart

‘The back of the winter is broken
And light lingers long by the door
And the seeds of the summer have spoken
In gowans that bloom on the shore…’

It’s a beautiful celebration of both an outer and inner transition into spring. That cusp and co-existence of ‘ice’ (or in the case of today’s weather here, lots of rain!) and growing light… Enjoy!

A Day and an Eternity in Samuel Palmer’s ‘Valley of Vision’ – Part Two

…Continued from: A Day and an Eternity in Samuel Palmer’s ‘Valley of Vision’ – Part One.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

- From Auguries of Innocence, by William Blake.

In his biography of William Blake, Peter Ackroyd describes two events that happened in 1825, when Blake stayed in a cottage in Shoreham during a visit to The Ancients. One involved a trip to ‘a half-ruined mansion’ in search of ghosts, during which the party of friends were both scared and riveted by ‘a curious rattling sound’ – which, on further investigation by Palmer and Calvert, turned out to be the manifestation of nothing more than a humble snail climbing an oriel window. Ackroyd goes on to relate that:

‘Powers of another sort were more in evidence later, however, when Blake sat at a table in the cottage. He put his hand to his forehead.

BLAKE: Palmer is coming. He is walking up the road.

CALVERT: Oh, Mr Blake, he’s gone to London; we saw him off in the coach.

BLAKE: He is coming through the wicket.

Then, sure enough, ‘Samuel Palmer raised the latch and came in amongst them. It so turned out that the coach had broken down near to the gate of Lullingstone Park.’

- From Blake by Peter Ackroyd (Published by Vintage) – Chapter 28.

Almost two centuries later in June 2010, our second trip of the day was to the very same Lullingstone Park – or what is now the council run country park, part of the old estate adjacent to Lullingstone Castle. Here, after lunch in the café garden, we plunge out of the fiery heat of the afternoon into a cool winding out of trees along the River Darent. Some of the trees we meet along the way are venerable ancients.

They have seen some of our group before at various stages of our lives – me, during my childhood and young adulthood, my parents during theirs, my husband during our early years together. This is the first occasion these old-time trees have seen my children pass this way. Did they once watch Samuel Palmer and William Blake tread this path too? Did these oaks perhaps even make it into the artworks of Palmer and his friends?

Oak Trees, Lullingstone Park, 1828, Samuel Palmer

Oak Trees and Beech, 1828, Samuel Palmer

According to the British Museum catalogue, Samuel Palmer Vision and Landscape (from which the above illustrations are taken) the very name Darent ’…derives from the Celtic word derw meaning the river surrounded by oaks.’

These ancient trees have a heritage and legacy in this valley that stretches all ways in time…

My mum tells us stories of how she and her best friend often cycled out here from their nearby home town, in the early years after the Second World War. She squints at the trees and ruminates – “Yes, I remember this. We sat here and ate lunch, I think…” The trees are reference points to her memories, overlapping the past and present in her mind – like transparent photographic negatives – snapshots of ‘here’ and ‘then’ – one on top of the other. She tells us of how, back in those days in the 1940s, she remembers seeing the early excavations of the villa, still open to the elements.

Earlier, as we drove to the villa, we passed the river near Eynsford ford, and I was reassured to see groups of children, ankle deep in the water, colourful seaside nets and buckets or jam jars in hand, fishing for tiddlers – a scene that has replayed over and over, generation after generation in that spot. It’s almost a local tradition, family after family bringing kids to experience hand-me-down memories, as my parents brought me here to paddle and chase the shadows darting at my feet.

Back in Lullingstone Country Park, we enjoy the cool respite of the trees. The river is deeper, slower, more opaque and secretive here than back at the ford and the villa.

Shadow-winged groups of banded demoiselles flash like green-blue jewels over the water, landing on the flowering yellow flag irises to bask in the sun…

Banded Agrion (demoiselle), Agrion splendens - male. (Photo taken on banks of the River Avon, near Keynsham, 2010)

Banded Agrion (demoiselle), Agrion splendens - male. (Photo taken June 2010 in Victoria Park Botanical Gardens, Bath)

Blue sky, butterflies, light-gleams flicker through the leaves…

– and this year’s emerging generation of may flies bounce up and down like little yo-yos on strings, grasping their brief moment of airborne existence on this spinning planet.

Suddenly, the trees give way, and we are out into a driveway and at the gate of Lullingstone Castle. The blue sky bursts open – wide and limitless, and is written all over with the calligraphy of house martins, flashing white and black in curls and flourishes, eagerly read by our eyes. It is a joy just to stand and watch their exuberance, listen to their calls.

More flint, grown out of the landscape, rises up before us in the shape of the wall that surrounds the castle.

Like Eynsford Castle and the villa, it is the work of yet another generation shaping this landscape and the very stones of its soil. I remember that moment when, back on my 1970s school trip, we stood looking in at Lullingstone Castle, and were told the story of the silk worms here turning their mulberry-leaf-fuelled energy into the silk destined for Queen Elizabeth II’s wedding dress and coronation robes.

Amongst all this peace, and surrounded by the ebullient flight of house martins, it is sobering to think of a time when flights of a very different kind crossed these skies. Many World War Two pilots lost their lives in combat over this valley and the surrounding area. There is an Aircraft Museum in Shoreham, the work of which relates to this time – and I remember that often, when we drove past the memorial cross on Shoreham’s Downs, my parents would be prompted by its associations to weave an oral remembrance to the pilots who had fallen in our now peaceful corner of Kentish countryside. My parents once knew a very different Kent – of air raids and bombs.

A few years ago, in response to the oral history project my daughter was doing at school, my dad told us of the time when, as an awed and terrified small boy, he ran for cover as an aeroplane, machine guns firing, hurtled out of control over the high street of his hometown, just a few miles away from the Darent Valley. The pilot, on an air raid mission into British skies, had been shot by a defending Spitfire from Biggin Hill, and he had fallen across the button that fired his plane’s guns. Miraculously, no-one on the ground was shot and the plane fell clear of the town.

Another time, when my dad was about twelve, spending time alone digging the family allotment, he was left clinging to a tree as he heard the sickeningly familiar sound of a V2 rocket overhead, followed by its explosive landing about a mile away. Moments later, a six foot long piece of rocket debris landed in the lane close to the tree he was hugging for dear life. What a world of madness whirled around my parents’ childhoods. This Valley of Vision, and its quiet surroundings, brims over with stories. Life – and death – echo through its layers.

I think back to the time when the building of the M26 was imminent. Our inspirational drama teacher at school commissioned us with the task of creating our own play from our responses to the losses that would soon follow. She took our minds back to the cultural heritage of the Darent Valley, the people’s lives bound up with its landscape across the centuries. Samuel Palmer featured in our play – taking his place in the layers of our telling of the valley’s story, culminating with our own stories – and our fears and visions for the future. I think it was then, when the Valley of Vision, full of childhood memories, legacy and experience, suddenly presented itself as a vision of potential loss, that an awareness of the very real threats to our natural world first really hit home. It was another prompt to my ever growing restlessness to do something; another step towards rolling up my sleeves and getting involved in practical nature conservation…

In June 2010, we leave the Valley of Vision via the lanes that dip and weave through the huddled cottages of Shoreham where Palmer once lived.

Coming from Evening Church, 1830, Samuel Palmer

There’s a kind of ‘eternity in an hour’ to the passing of generations and the successive bonds we share to the landscapes around us; the cultural shaping of our lives in relation to the ancient hills and stones, the water and trees. Such places are vital for their own sake, for the natural life they support and contain. Their survival is also important to that core of the self, which for each person, in different ways, is bound up in the magic of those wild spaces; those places that remain a refuge both for the soul – and for vision.

In a Shoreham Garden, c.1829, Samuel Palmer

As the ancient tombs behind Lullingstone Roman Villa remind us, we may be – in terms of the huge workings of the universe – as ephemeral as the mayflies by the river, but the connections between us all; the layers we leave behind and build, memory by memory, foundation by foundation one on top of the other, the on-going traditions and relationship to place – forge a kind of eternity in each hand-me-down moment. In the Darent Valley, those memories have been laid down in flint and water – and in the mosaic of a villa floor, in the sweep of a fishing net, the glint of a damselfly, in the vision of an artist’s mind working through paint and brush – and in his poem, echoing down the ages from a page of his 1824 sketchbook to a 21st century blog:

Thee night shall hide, sweet visionary gleam
That softly lookest through the rising dew;
Till all like silver bright,
The faithful Witness, pure and white
Shall look o’er yonder grassy hill,
At this village, safe and still,
All is safe and all is still,
Save what noise the watch-dog makes
Or the shrill cock the silence breaks
Now and then -
And now and then -
Hark! – once again
The wether’s bell
To us doth tell
Some little stirring in the fold.
Methinks the ling’ring, dying ray
Of twilight time, doth seem more fair,
And lights the soul up more than day 

- From Twilight Time (Shoreham) by Samuel Palmer.

Late Twilight, 1825, Samuel Palmer.

- All art illustrations in this post are from Samuel Palmer Vision and Landscape (British Museum publication)

A Day and an Eternity in Samuel Palmer’s ‘Valley of Vision’ – Part One

The Darent Valley in Kent was Samuel Palmer’s ‘Valley of Vision,’ and a home for many of my childhood daydreams.

Open a book containing Palmer’s rounded hills, swelling moons, embracing trees; the inviting dip and curve of a lane – like the mind’s reach into promised discovery – and I am back there, caught again by the spirit of the place…

Samuel Palmer Vision and Landscape, by W. Vaughan, E.E. Barker & C. Harrison (British Museum catalogue). Cover shows The Magic Apple Tree, c.1830

Cornfield by Moonlight, with Evening Star, c.1830 - Samuel Palmer

Early Morning, Samuel Palmer - 1825

A Hilly Scene by Samuel Palmer, c. 1824-6

Once a week, every week all through my childhood, our little family car would wend its way along the road above Shoreham and through Eynsford, en route to visit my grandparents. From the back of the car, forehead resting against the window, I would drink in Samuel Palmer’s valley below, and let my imagination rove over the hills on the far side. A check-list of familiar scenes would unfold and recede – the memorial cross, carved into the chalk of the Downs in remembrance of villagers killed in World War One; the arch of the railway bridge; Eynsford ford – tugging enticingly at thoughts of bare feet, fishing nets and buckets; a hidden castle; tiled cottages with tiny doorways; a looming church tower; a school playground surrounded by fields, its trees gathered round like benevolent dinner ladies, inclining their branches to listen and keep watch.

In June 2010, three generations of our family were back there again – in the Valley of Vision. It was a hot, hot day. The sun beat down on our heads and glittered on the river. Butterflies shrugged the heat from sap-high leaves.

Our first stop for the day was Lullingstone Roman Villa – my first visit there since a school history trip back in the 1970s. My memories of that trip are of Eynsford Castle - muscular, flinty, uptight and stolid; a building blindly in league with our raucous imaginations. I remember the walk past the river, through the impressive arches of the railway viaduct…

…and towards the shed-like building which housed the Roman Villa at that time. After an hour or so spent echoing our amazement around that modern protective enclosure, we headed off for a nettle-stung wander through the woods, our teachers anxiously herding the intrepid souls who were each convinced they knew ‘the best way to go’ to catch a tantalising glimpse of Lullingstone Castle, before our return to school by train. I think I learnt more about history that day than during any lesson spent in the classroom. I felt it and touched it – saw for myself the layers that preceded, and yet somehow also surrounded, our own layer of time and earth…

…The Roman Villa has lost none of its magic this time round. It is like an ancient dream unfolding from the ground, full of the colours and form of past thoughts and footsteps. You can almost see the mind-turns of long-gone people etched in the evidence of their actions.

Mosaic depicting the mythical story of Europa and the Bull, Lullingstone Roman Villa

Mosaic panel in the audience chamber, depicting the story of Bellerophon, Prince of Corinth, on the winged horse, Pegasus, killing the Chimaera.

Four hundred years of occupation give the villa many layers all of its own. Painted water nymphs glance palely from the niches in the lower walls (a former cult room), their eyes gleaming with liquid knowledge we can only guess at. Standing on the footbridge over the river outside, it is easy to see why they are here. Easy to apprehend those ancient people’s sense of a presence of deity in the play of water and light in the river that was their lifeline.

Beneath that clear, cold water a bed of flints dices up the sunlight, damselflies glance it back at the sky like blue-green fire – and the water trembles in gentle folds, ever onwards in a renewing one-way journey.

This is a valley of flint and water – and, today, of sunlight; bright and transforming. The villa is built partially from flint; grown out of the land that surrounds it. The villa’s history is fascinating. It consists of successive additions to the building made by the many generations that lived in its walls. Here, the water nymphs, when first exposed by archaeologists, blinked in the light of the future, and were found surrounded by the collapsed rubble from the room which once stood above. When the archaeologists pieced together painted pieces amongst the rubble, they discovered a wall painting of figures engaged in Christian worship, plus painted Chi-Rho symbols – unique, unequivocal evidence of a house-church in Roman Britain.

The wall paintings are also a discovery of almost unique international importance. There are theories that, amongst the depictions of Roman legend and the literary allusions to Ovid and Virgil in the villa’s mosaics, there may also be secret allusions to Christ and Christianity, which perhaps date to a time when the villa family may have been wary of declaring Christian belief. The realities of the exact unfolding of the layers of belief here remain a challenge of interpretation. However, an adherence to a new, emerging religion is literally written into the walls, enmeshed there in the building’s fabric amongst earlier traditions and beliefs – perhaps also reflecting a mix that was still interwoven in the minds of its inhabitants.

Centuries later, a young artist, Samuel Palmer also felt a spiritual transcendence in this valley. Nature, he felt, brought him closer to God; the numinous was all around. The paintings that emerged from the years he spent in Shoreham glow with a mystical, visionary insight that locks on to the land and the significance it unfolds for him. Together with a small group of artists, which included George Richmond and Edward Calvert, Palmer formed the first brotherhood of painters in England. Known as The Ancients and based in Shoreham, this small artistic movement wanted to turn away from the industrial revolution and modernity, to return to spiritual values, connect art to nature, and to explore literary imagination and poetic rapture.

Neo-Platonism, the Bible, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Bunyan and Spenser all informed Palmer’s work. He loved Virgil (I wonder if he could have ever dreamed of those ancient, forgotten mosaics buried beneath his valley? Making hindsight connections now, it’s easy to weave fanciful thoughts of those hidden Virgilian allusions seeping up through the earth, to mingle with Palmer’s own Virgil-inspired visions in paint.) The Ancients were disciples of William Blake, finding particular inspiration in Blake’s woodcut illustrations to Thornton’s Pastorals of Virgil. In his 1825 sketchbook, Palmer wrote about his response to these woodcuts:

‘They are visions of little dells, and nooks, and corners of Paradise; models of the exquisitest pitch of intense poetry. I thought of their light and shade, and looking upon them I found no word to describe it. Intense depth, solemnity, and vivid brilliance only coldly and partially describe them. There is in all such a mystic and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the inmost soul…’

(A.H. Palmer, The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer).

In this tribute to Blake, Palmer seems to give a perfect description of what he, himself, achieved in his own work, revealing the bound up nature of aims, inspirations and leaps into the unique. The two men - though different in many ways - give us glimpses, through their respective art, of vibrant, questing minds somewhere out on the edges of the apparent, both peeling away layers to see what lies beyond, beneath, alongside – just out of our immediate line of sight, alive in the tensions of existence and imagination.

Continued in A Day and an Eternity in Samuel Palmer’s ‘Valley of Vision’ Part Two…

Samuel Palmer, Self-Portrait, c.1824-5

William Blake at Hampstead, c. 1825 by John Linnell (1792-1882)

- All art illustrations in this post are from Samuel Palmer Vision and Landscape (British Museum publication).

Ms Nature, Hollie McNish

I love Radio 4… Every morning, I tune in and wonder what gems it will serve up; what new perspectives, insights or nuggets of knowledge will gleam out at me across the airwaves that day.

One such gem was a piece I heard on Woman’s Hour towards the end of last year. It was an interview with performance poet Hollie McNish. From the moment Hollie began to perform her poetry, I was stopped in my tracks, arrested by what I was hearing. I loved the sit-up-and-take-notice, spin-round-on-perspective style of her work. And I loved what she had to say, her desire to speak out against the trends; to open up a clearer picture of what matters beyond the rush and madness and surface.

In Fruit and Veg (the first poem Hollie performed on Woman’s Hour) and in Beautiful: Victoria Beckham or a Flower (which I’ve since heard on Hollie’s website), she confronts the sheer waste and emotional carnage of an appearance obsessed, media-led world where so many young women feel they need to wreck their own beautiful individuality to conform to an homogenised ‘ideal’ – and where celebrity and surface-focused culture blurs vision, thwarts potential and obscures so many riches and possibilities

Ms Nature, which Hollie McNish also performed on Woman’s Hour, is a poem about such riches – and, for me, to hear it was one of those diamond of the day moments.

If you’ve ever sat in a wood and felt its magic, or just had to escape to where nature reconnects you – to yourself and to life’s heart – this poem will speak to you…

You can hear Hollie McNish perform Ms Nature and other poems (including Fruit and Veg and Beautiful: Victoria Beckham or a Flower) here.

Footprints and Giants at Westonbirt Arboretum

Come with us on a walk…

It’s 4th January – an opening chapter day in 2011 - and my husband and I are off to Westonbirt Arboretum. The Cotswold Hills today are a surprise. When we left home, the day was grey – not too cold, unremarkable. But, up here on the hills, the car is ascending to a hushed and crystallised world, the fields, hedge tops and walls hunched under a dusting of snow.

As we get out of the car at Westonbirt, we are met with a chill that catches our breath. I reach for my scarf and gloves, huddling inside my fleece and coat. Only then do I really take in the scene around me. What strikes me first is the quiet; the hunkered down feel to the day. The earth has its back turned to the chill, and the birds move, subdued and intent, nagging at it to give up some food.

Opposite the shop and Great Oak Hall, blackbirds and thrushes rush and hop, rush and hop, stabbing at the grass and flinging aside fallen leaves in search of invertebrates. Amongst them, we spot a flock of redwings, winter migrants from Scandinavia. Some are on the ground, others are gathered in the trees – and a pied wagtail is bobbing its way across the white-tangle turf.

The place feels almost deserted by humans this morning; only a scattering of people are about. Just the way we like it. All this space to ourselves! Our feet are already feeling like ice as we stop to bird watch, but the enchantment of the scene; the trees, the huddled ground under the sugar icing dusting of snow – the sheer quiet – is a lure that makes us forget the icy claw of the air. We enter the Old Arboretum and lose ourselves in a dome of green, flurried white. It is like stepping into one of those snow globes after someone has given it a shake, and all the glistening flakes are scattered thinly – the shapes of the scene quiet and resting after the mad whirl of white is over.

We are amongst the first humans to step on the ‘sugar icing’ – and we relish that sense of opening a freshly wrapped present as we start to explore. Many animals and birds have been busy here during the night and early hours of the morning. We find rabbit and deer tracks – and then suddenly, there are these perfect badger prints:

Badger (Meles meles) Paw Prints in the Snow

Later on, we walk round to one of the main setts, and find the snow around it marked by countless (very muddy!) badger paw prints of various sizes. Along one of their trails from the sett, there is a long, long churned up mark where the badgers have been busy dragging bedding from a leaf-filled ditch opposite. I imagine the brocks with those piles of dead leaves and vegetation tucked under their chins, waddling backwards as they aim their ample backsides at the mounds and entrances of their sett.

This winter must have been very hard on the badgers. The ground has been like iron for so long – impossible for them to dig or to find sustenance in that frozen confection of their staple diet of worms and other invertebrates.

Over the past year, we’ve been certain that we have badgers visiting our suburban garden. We’ve seen the signs – the patches of earth dug up, a latrine full of badger poo, a vague Brock paw mark in the snow one morning…

Also, our next-door-neighbours told us a while back that briefly, one night in the summer, a badger got stuck under their gate whilst trying to squeeze into their back garden. Brock made so much noise, our neighbours got out of bed to investigate, opening their door in time to see the badger break free, and head straight towards their duck house to feast on Jemima & Co’s feed.

Our neighbours opposite have long had badgerly visits to their garden from the woods behind – and now, excitingly, our local brocks seem to have added our side of the road to their regular foraging routes. We’re not lawn proud, so we welcome the scrapes and mini craters appearing now and then amongst the tussocks and under our hedge. It’s a dream come true to play host to the badgers. Now, it is our ambition to glimpse them one bleary-eyed night, if we can manage the long, window-side vigil in the small hours.

Back in Westonbirt, the chilly magic of the day continues with the tiny chink and chime of flocks of tits and goldcrests in the trees – and down on the ground.

We watch, enchanted, as a goldcrest, tiniest of birds, feeds at the foot of a giant sequoia, just feet away – and others flit through the trees in a constant, vital search for food amongst the pine needles. A couple of coal tits are busy amongst the fallen leaves, concentrating their efforts on the richer pickings of ground left snowless beneath the shelter of spreading conifer branches.

As an experiment (my husband’s a scientist – bear with him…) we stand right up close to the giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum), stepping up onto the brown mound of springy needles gathered at its feet and leaning against its towering trunk. While my husband applies his curiosity and logic to the effect of the warm air trapped in the big old tree’s branches, I indulge in a bit of tree hugging. Giant sequoia bark is so spongy and warm, and leaning against it, it is easy to imagine the refuge and comfort the birds could find roosting in its embrace. Standing there, the rise in temperature within the sequoia’s own micro-climate seeps up into my frozen feet, and the placid hum of the life of that old Hagrid-tree seems to fold around us.

There’s a lovely ‘feel’ to giant sequoias – those awe-inspiring trees named in honour of Chief Sequoyah, creator of the Cherokee writing system. They emanate grandeur, but also a sense of welcome and friendly ease. They are the sort of tree you want to lean your back against, letting your mind wander through the forest – head tilted back, looking up, up, up that soaring trunk, feeling very small and connected to earth and sky. It’s a pipedream of mine to visit the sequoia groves in the Giant Sequoia National Monument one day… This Hagrid tree is just a baby in comparison to those ancient leviathans, fully fledged in their native soil of California.

Back in Gloucestershire however, we must leave behind our sequoia central heating system, and rejoin the snowy path. We meet a robin, sitting quietly puffed up in a sheltered conifer. Quietly, my husband manages to get this photo of it – but the focus is blurry; the robin moves on before he can snap a better one:

Breaking away from the path onto the grassy rides of the Old Arboretum, we come across a large flock of coal tits – more of them than I’ve ever seen gathered together – foraging on the ground amongst the leaf litter. In true coal tit style, once they have found food, they hop-fly with it to a suitable perch to get on with the business of eating. As we stand there, it is like watching a series of tiny jack-in-the-boxes – or paper-light puppets on strings – as they yo-yo in brief alternating dances, their flight paths criss-crossing down-up, up-down. Occasionally, one or two break away and cross the ride, landing in the bush right beside us – and then flit back to rejoin the others, creating patterns on the cold-heavy, winter-white air.

Despite the bitter chill, we don’t want to tear ourselves away from this mesmerising coal tit dance of survival…but time is wearing on. All around us, the day is warming (very slightly!) towards mid-day. Our ears are now filled with the sound of the ever-increasing drip, drip, drip of melting snow. Everywhere we look droplets of water hang, bulging with bright light, and fall musically from the branches. We look at our watches. We have to be back in time for the kids’ return from school fairly soon – and now our lunch-time is approaching.

After a very welcome hot meal in Westonbirt’s Maples Café, accompanied by the usual pied wagtail working the opportunities for leftover food-finds on the decking outside – and also by a view of a buzzard, wing-hunched low over the valley, being mobbed by crows – we slide down the steep hill of the Arboretum’s downs, and then up again into Silk Wood.

The day’s theme for this side of the arboretum seems to be blackbirds and nuthatches. The nuthatches are gathered in various conifers, and the tree tops bluster with the urgency of their piercing calls. We are able to watch several as they edge head first down the trunks, prise food from the crevices and break open nuts with resounding taps against the bark. They are such exquisite little birds. I love their muted mix of soft-sky blue grey and salmon-chestnut blush. They are one of the many beauty-treats of any walk in these woods.

The blackbirds are all vitally busy with turning over and tossing leaves in search for food – but we notice that most seem to be in male and female pairs – like the ones in our garden. At one point, we hear a male give its alarm call – but with a slight difference. Instead of the usual burst of alarm followed by a wing flapping quick-exit, this develops into a constant chink, chink, chinking – and we look up to see him perched on a branch, posing with tail cocked in territorial bravado…just a branch away from a rather bashfully admiring female.

Between the urgent need to feed, some early spring behaviour is the buzz of the day for many of the birds filling the woods here.

That zingy feeling on the air, created by birdsong – and by a quickening in the wood, already humming with the promise of awakening – turns my thoughts to days ahead…when, like wishes unfolding from this bronze sculpture:

… the Arboretum will soon, again, look like this:

POSTSCRIPT RE. GOVERNMENT SELL OFF OF PUBLICLY OWNED FORESTS IN ENGLAND:

The Government wishes to sell our Public Forest Estate, of which Westonbirt, the National Arboretum is a part. You can keep informed on all the issues and developments – and get involved with the campaigns against the Government’s plans to transfer all of England’s publicly owned woodlands out of state ownership at Save Our Woods and Save Our Forests.

Yesterday (2nd February) MPs met to debate and vote on the Labour motion against the forest sell off… Everything about the sell off proposals and the so-called ‘consultation’ (a document which already assumes that the public forests will be privatised, and consists of questions on how it should be done) makes my heart sink like a stone… but also fires it up to do something in response. I wrote to my MP to express all my concerns and my dismay. Today, I see he voted with the Government.  The motion was defeated by 310 to 260.

But, it’s good to see that there were three Tory rebels, four Lib Dem rebels and some abstentions… MPs have been deluged with emails and letters on this issue. The public outcry made this debate happen.

At the time of writing, the petition against the forest sales has gathered over 430,000 signatures. If you haven’t already done so, you can add your voice to the petition by signing it at the 38 Degrees Website.

Darkness shedding light…

One night during the weeks approaching Winter Solstice, I took to bed one of my favourite books, Findings by Kathleen Jamie, and re-read its opening essay, Darkness and Light.

 

Settling down in that long night to lose myself in Kathleen Jamie’s clear-seeing prose was a small, anticipatory celebration of that magical tipping point of darkness and light. A welcoming of the special qualities of both, at a time of year that is like a retreat and an embrace; a time to reflect, take stock, evaluate and wonder.

The winter light filling those days around the solstice was something to celebrate. It had brought gifts of form and clarity; a glow that held things close. It had had a sense of enclosure about it – as if, in each day, we were held in a tight, intense moment; our attention gathered near to watch intently those things closer to home. Those bitterly cold, but gleaming days were parcelled up in darkness, wrapped in shaded edges that defined their very qualities. Precious and brief, the light they cast entered windows with a muted whiteness that was like the telling of a secret tucked in its shadows.

One blue, bright morning…

… I had stood bathed in sunlight at the top of our stairs, and watched as its beams passed through a crystal ornament standing on the window sill, transforming the walls with bursts of vivid rainbows. Each was a perfect, intense spectrum; those huddling colours like a magic spell conjured out of the chill.

In Darkness and Light, Kathleen Jamie writes about these days around the winter solstice:

‘Mid-December, the still point of the turning year. It was eight in the morning and Venus was hanging like a wrecker’s light above Black Craig. The hill itself – seen from our kitchen window – was still in silhouette, though the sky was lightening into a pale yellow-grey. It was a weakling light, stealing into the world like a thief through a window someone forgot to close.’

‘I like the precise gestures of the sun……everything we imagine doing, this time of year, we imagine doing in the dark.’

At around 4 p.m. on the night of my re-read, my daughter had called me urgently to the dining room window. A flock (we counted eleven) of long-tailed tits had jinked through the dusk to cluster on our garden fat feeders, their tails overlapping in elegant criss-crossing lines, their white and black markings exaggerated in the gloom, and their pink blush washed to sepia, as if caught in the glow of an old two-tone photograph. After a few moments of peck, shift, peck, flit, they huddled and separated and clustered again in a purposeful communal fidget. With urgent, constant communication they finished their hasty meal, and headed towards the big old trees in the gardens behind ours. Darkness was falling rapidly, graining the sky grey. They needed to find their roost for the night. The cold air was closing like a tight fist. Lights were beaming from the windows, spilling in pools. The long-tails flew beyond the reach of the light, seeking the shadows.

‘I imagined travelling into the dark. Northward – so it got darker as I went. I’d a notion to sail at night, to enter into the dark for the love of its textures and wild intimacy. I had been asking around among literary people, readers of books, for instances of dark as natural phenomenon, rather than as a cover for all that’s wicked, but could find few. It seems to me that our cherished metaphor of darkness is wearing out…… Pity the dark: we’re so concerned to overcome and banish it, it’s crammed full of all that’s devilish, like some grim cupboard under the stair. But dark is good. We are conceived and carried in darkness are we not?’

- Kathleen Jamie, Findings (published by Sort Of Books, distributed by Penguin Group)

In her essay, Kathleen Jamie takes us with her on her travels to Maes Howe on Orkney. Her hope is to witness the setting winter solstice sun beam directly along the passageway of the Neolithic burial chamber, casting its light onto the tomb’s back wall. What she sees there is a connection between ancient and modern – between human ingenuity, and our relationships to darkness and light – played out in a surprising way.

Even in the very midst of Christmas parcel wrapping, I came across another pertinent exploration of the nature of the dark, in Luke Jennings’  Blood Knots – of Fathers, Friendship and Fishing, which I had bought for a friend who loves fishing. I’d heard great things about the lyrical beauty of the book and its nature writing – and, unable to resist dipping into the first couple of chapters before wrapping it, I was soon captivated by Luke Jennings’ description of urban fishing at night. Fishing itself doesn’t hold any attraction for me, but as an amateur naturalist, I recognise the sense of focus and fusion with landscape; the close, relished mystery of wild lives – the mystery of life itself – unseen around us:

‘My world has contracted to a box of darkness: to walls, the towpath and the black of the water. As always, there’s the temptation to wind in the bait a little, to check that it’s OK, but that way madness lies, because you’ll never really know what’s happening down there.

Nor would you want to, because in an over-illuminated world, a world whose dark corners are in constant retreat from the remorseless, banal march of progress, this not knowing is a thing to be valued and enjoyed.’

– From Blood Knots by Luke Jennings (Atlantic Books)

During the Yuletide lead-up, I watched Rick Stein’s Cornish Christmas programmes on BBC2. In one episode, he interviewed Tim Smit, CEO of the Eden Project, who mused on the rich pagan and Christian mix of our midwinter festival, and also on the lighting of candles at this time. He reflected how there is something about candlelight that encourages words – makes us want to talk, share intimate conversation. It’s just occurred to me now, writing this, that the intimate sense of enclosure candlelight creates, is the same intimacy which that brief, parcelled-up light of winter gives to what we see around us. That sense of focus and centre, depth and pause. It’s a light by which to huddle, and share stories.

But the solstice also makes us look outwards on a whole planetary level – it can stretch our imagination far out to those huge workings of the Universe, the tilt and movement of the Earth, the progress of the seasons, the changes in our night skies…

In the November 2010 issue of the RSPB’s Birds magazine, there is a lovely article by Conor Jameson entitled Seasons to be Cheerful. In it he talks about the birds’ responses to the seasons – and about how many birds and other creatures ‘…make light of planetary distance and treat the globe as their home, and the galaxy as their sat nav.’

Conor Jameson goes on to say:

‘Each year, the Earth in a sense ‘breathes in’ from the autumn equinox to the spring equinox and ‘breathes out’ from the spring to the autumn. Time-lapsed footage of this really does make the planet look like it is breathing. Imagine then the world’s birds moving in response to that inhalation, that sheet of ice, snow and cold air easing them south in autumn, and drawing them back north again in the spring, at an estimated 5 mph, as it retreats.’

I love that idea – and the beautiful, all encompassing image it conjures…

This time of year brings many gifts – not least the thirteen redwings, blown in by the snow from the outlying fields, seeking food in our garden! On December 20th, they swept over our hedge and adorned our damson trees like elegant sentinels, their red-streaked sides in full blush against the white sky – causing both delight in our household, and ruffled feathers amongst the starling flock already perched on the branches! The redwings continued to fly round and round the gardens, tumbling into and out of our trees throughout the day – and on the winter solstice itself – adding more magic to that time. The winter before, the snow brought fieldfares to our garden. They stayed for a few days, ate the apples we put out for them, and enchanted us with their beauty:

As Conor Jameson goes on to say in his Birds magazine article:

‘A northern winter has much to cherish. Without it, there would be no fieldfares and redwings arriving in squadrons from Scandinavia, no geese from Greenland descending on our western shores, nor whooper swans on our eastern fields, magically, overnight. There would be fewer robins and blackbirds visiting our back gardens to see what we’ve got for them here in our temperate, ocean-insulated island group.’

On New Year’s Eve, I opened the front door at dusk, and was greeted by a calm mildness on the air that felt like an early out-breath from the Earth. On that breath, emerging from the deepening shadows, curled the leisurely, fluting song of a blackbird…

In those very last days of 2010, and in the earliest of 2011, the passing of the solstice and the slightly lengthening days awoke more and more birdsong. On January 2nd, I opened the bathroom window to let out some steam, and the room was instantly flooded by a cacophony of birds. And this week, I’ve noticed that the blackbirds in the garden have paired up, and the male is busy chasing off a rival (so, high drama on the lawn!) Two robins have also paired up, and are hanging around the garden together, and in February, frog spawn will adorn our neighbours’ ponds. Whatever the weather brings over these next few weeks, out of that bud of cold and darkness, spring is already unfolding…

Happy New Year!

Weirdstones and Owls – The Magic of Alan Garner

‘At dawn one still October day in the long ago of the world, across the hill of Alderley, a farmer from Mobberley was riding to Macclesfield fair.’

The lilt of those opening lines to Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen acts like a lure, making me – on this chill November day in the here and now – want to follow that farmer and return to Alderley Edge. I’ve journeyed there before in the pages of Alan Garner’s mind-shifting novel Thursbitch – but, as yet, have not read The Weirdstone…

A copy is waiting on my bookshelves, promising magic; a treat to come. But I also feel regret that I didn’t discover it during my childhood; that time of wide open doors when its magic would have overlapped my world completely, and become my dreaming reality.

I have, however, been able to open up that experience to my daughter, and to happily watch her overtake me in her eagerness to follow Colin and Susan on their adventures. I first discovered Alan Garner in my twenties when, intrigued, I stumbled upon The Owl Service in the tiny village library just a magpie’s hop across the road from the house we were renting at the time.

We lived, back then, in a landscape of river and reed beds, where the wheezing beat of mute swan wings passed overhead – and a wood, just a field’s width away across the railway, bristled with the drama of tawny owls.

That wood, a fragment of ancient forest, was a gateway to a vivid, vital, timeless world. On darkening summer evenings, we would follow the needle gleam of glow worms along the paths – and in the margins of the day, when sunshine and time met in a suspended hush, we sometimes caught glimpses of fox cubs or common lizards basking in their own worlds.

On the other side of the village stretched a mosaic of wetland, where geese patterned the sky, the occasional kingfisher sparked blue fire on snow in winter, and on warm nights, Daubenton’s bats dashed under the river bridge, snapping up prey.

Like all landscapes tend to do, it settled into my mind, even when unseen and unnoticed, as a presence – a kind of cloak around the day. It was present in this way when, with dog nestled under one arm, I curled up in our back room, close to the window which faced the tawny owl wood, and opened the pages of The Owl Service for the first time…

What spilled from that slim volume was something ungraspable, like a jolting light that would not be contained; a jagged, edgy, searing, elemental…something… binding words to place in a way that was like a spell of losing and finding, a half glimpsing – an instinctual knowing.

My daughter read The Owl Service this year, enthralled, gripping it with white knuckled fingers. One evening, she glanced up at me and said, in awed tones, “I love this book… It really makes you think.” Her eyes shone with the relish of the challenge. I could almost hear those mental doors opening to even wider horizons of possibility, and I could see in her eyes a dawning realisation of what boundaries literature can stretch, what edgy places it can let in (or out!)

When reading Garner’s books, it’s as if that presence of the landscape – that cloak of the day – stops being outside our window, or benignly present in our minds, and suddenly enters our house, startles us, scratches at the ceiling and walls like those legend-living owls in The Owl Service, and permeates our living room, removes all veneer. Whilst we read, we move out of the ‘long ago of the world,’ still bound to the here and now, but with all the vital connections between the ancient and the present haunting our deepest awareness.

Those things are internal and external – and eternal. And, in The Owl Service they are, in part, the playing out of the eternal pattern of the journey from childhood to adulthood. A literal edginess of edges between experience, possibility, past and future; doorways between worlds. And that is what he speaks to, this craftsman of words that are bound to the ancient continuity of the land and to our heritage; he speaks to those deeper elements that are both within and without us. Not clear, but instinctive, both disturbing and vital; words that return us to ourselves, and connect us to the land and its (and our) stories. 

It is fifty years since The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was first published, its golden anniversary falling, with an appropriate sense of magical portent, on 10/10/10. A special hardback gift edition (which I’ve only seen online so far, but am already feeling its lure!) has been published by Harper Collins to mark the book’s five decades of passage through so many young (and not so young!) lives, and a website linked to the anniversary celebrations explores its timeless, ever renewing appeal.

Legends, folklore, myths and stories draw us to the fireside. The mystery of landscape - and the words which express the bonds we feel with it - fit well the space provided by a pool of winter candlelight. There, the mystery flickers for us to examine it, whilst remaining as huge as the endless shadows that surround the flame.

As the winter solstice approaches, it’ll soon be time, I think, for me to link up with the long ago, set aside some winter hours before the year wears out – and follow that farmer to Alderley Edge…

Garden Wildlife Update

After time away on holiday, I’ve been back home a while now; returning to lots of catching up on family stuff – and to days still very much full of birds…

Each day, fledgling blue tits have hung around the seed feeders, finding their bearings in all the newness of the world, whilst tribes of adolescent starlings take a more head-on approach, dashing about in shows of anxious bravado. A pair of blackbirds has been busy with the job of nesting – the male singing and posing and posturing, fanning his tail to assert his territory between dash-grabs at worms, whilst the female intently gathers food.

Swifts, from time to time, circle in and out of the garden’s radar – and beneath them, our tiny patch of wildflower “meadow” is blooming, attracting all sorts of insects which in turn draw in the birds.

Last weekend, my own radar picked up the sound of very faint chirping from our roof – and within a day or so, it was obvious that a second brood of sparrow nestlings has hatched there. All week, the male and female have dashed in and out from under the roof tiles, bringing food to their increasingly vocal youngsters. And, yesterday, another house sparrow pair brought fledglings into the garden to hop about the patio, search for insects in the shrubs and to learn about the easy pickings from the seed feeders. 

I find it hard to convey just how brilliant seeing those fledglings has been for me… This spring and summer feels like a real sparrow-turning-point; not only are they back to take up their long missed place in our immediate birdscape, but they seem to be thriving here again – at long, long last! I feel I ought to put out some kind of celebratory banner! Fingers crossed that this may be an early sign of a reverse around here in the mystery decline of house sparrows. Maybe (fingers even more tightly crossed!) it could be good sign for their general future all around the country too? …Like the otters, are they making a comeback in Britain? I’m hoping, with the ever-onward spirit of nature conservation, that this will prove to be so… 

Meanwhile, with the sun blazing from a blue sky, a great tit has been sunbathing on the shed roof, wings spread wide to the light. A couple of days ago, the male blackbird brought a fledgling into the garden with him – and earlier this week the grey squirrel galumphed across our shed roof to land on our fence, his radar honed in on the bird feeders, planning raids.

I must try to get out in the garden at night for some bat watching soon – they usually pass over us just after dusk on the way from their roosts to the woods and river…

All I need now is radar to detect where on earth I’ve put the bat detector!