dovegreyreader scribbles

This and that...

Where on earth do the weeks go when you are happy and content??

I don't ever remember time flying by quite this fast before. It's Monday and then the next thing I know it's Sunday again, and the Fiction Uncovered announcement seemed weeks and weeks away when I booked my train tickets for London, and now it is upon us this coming Thursday.

But whilst it flies, nicest of all is the whole notion of having time to do exactly what I want to do when I want to do it, and yesterday that involved much hovering around NASA TV watching the hastily planned space walk to repair a faulty pump that was leaking ammonia outside on the International Space Station. I find it hard to believe that they are working out there on something that is travelling at 75,000 miles an hour or so, but all is good, I shouted instructions and the lads got the gist, got the new pump round the right way on the P6 truss (imagine getting it back to front and having to unpick it) and all is working fine so mission accomplished. Cdr Chris Hadfield, who has done much to enlighten and inform many of us who have been following his daily pictures of earth from space, returns to earth this week and I am not sure what I am going to do without his daily pictures. But here's to a safe journey, and let's hope the queue at passport control isn't overly long and that they can get the duty free past customs. 

And let's hope the weather for re-entry is better than this; the storm that took the blossom off our apple trees earlier this week heading away from us to Ireland, but see too how the clouds sit perfectly over the English mainland clearly outlining its shape. A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.

Talking of space, I am going to be on the dark side of the moon in terms of internet and computer access this week as I will be on my travels towards London from Monday onwards, so dovegreyreader will be having a little rest. I have more great reads ready to share but I want to be around to chat in comments with you all... and thank you so much for the Life After Life discussions. I am inspired enough to be taking a new view on Kate Atkinson's writing, and she is another author I plan a Start to Finish read with, so I will taking Behind the Scenes at the Museum for my travel reading this week.

And in the wake of The Great British Sewing Bee post and all your comments, I have sourced a nice skirt pattern (amongst others) from Sew Essentials, flicking through the virtual catalogues I discovered new-to-me Kwik Sew patterns, so the task will be commencing on my return.

In the early hours of Thursday morning I can announce the Fiction Uncovered selection so look out for a blog post then. I will be heading for the celebrations with the authors and guests various that evening before heading home on the sleeper train. I have booked a cupboard cabin on the Night Riviera, about which I am stupidly excited. 

In the meantime feast your eyes on this fabulous colour video footage of London in 1927, and then try and stop yourself wanting to read Mrs Dalloway once it has finished. Of course if you hate Mrs Dalloway you won't have that problem, but I have started it again already.

"In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.” 

The Great British Sewing Bee.

I'm wondering if any of you here in the UK watched The Great British Sewing Bee??

This the recent series where amateur sewers took on challenges as they competed to be named Britain's best home sewer. Ann was a worthy winner but I'll admit I wasn't quite sure how the series would work.

Might it be like watching paint dry...

Can you make sewing as interesting as baking on TV...

Can you introduce some stress and meltdown to add to the viewer's interest...

More to the point could Claudia Winkleman, and her canopy of a fringe, carry it off.

But no matter, I love Claudia, she's a breath of fresh air and clearly not a seamstress herself so brought her usual self-effacing wit and humour to the proceedings, whilst judges Patrick Grant (Savile Row tailor) and May Martin (W.I.) cast a critical eye over the resulting garments. I'd be quaking in my boots if the pair of them turned anything I had made inside-out, so when I get back to it I might impose the discipline of a few French seams on myself rather than let the washing machine fray the raw edges into submission.

I was quickly engrossed and ultimately I think Claudia's fringe might have been the only slightly annoying accessory to the whole series. Was I alone I wondered... half hoping that Patrick would pick up the Fiskars and tailor it just a little...

'Well Claudia...the aim is for a neat and tailored look so we must finish your edges properly.'

The stress was readily induced by giving contestants about ten minutes to make a ballgown. In fact that task was allocated about seven hours, ( I would still have needed a long week at minimum) and it was fascinating to watch the different approaches. Those who spent half the time prepping, tacking and making toiles ( a mock-up in cotton fabric) before the scissors came within a mile of the fabric, versus those who leapt right in and guessed, and the subsequent triumphs and disasters. Those who were calm under pressure, those who crumpled into a heap of tears, and they were hardly in a situation where, if it went wrong, they could shove it in a bag and turn it into cushion covers in five years time. I could feel myself wilting inwardly in spirit as someone unpicked a back-to-front something (oh, the times...) 

I have no idea about the cumulative effect on the nation, or sewing machine sales, but I do know that every Wednesday morning all I wanted to do was get out a paper pattern, smooth out the fabric for cutting and fire up the Bernina. All I would need in that case was...well a paper pattern and some fabric. I fancied making a flippy summer skirt or two, home-made Boden-style, and how easy that would have been years ago, but how impossible it seems to be these days. 

Where to buy paper patterns is the first hurdle. Online, yes, a possibility I discover, but that doesn't feel right at all. I have to go and stand in the shop at the sloping shelf, and leaf my way through the dog-eared corners of the enormous Simplicity, Butterick and McCalls catalogues, and keep an eye on that woman over there who is hogging the Vogue. Then of course I must brave the woman behind the counter with her glasses on a gold cord, and the 'This CANNOT be exchanged' stamp.

Certainly there is nowhere within a reasonable distance from here now, though I had felt sure (wrongly) that John Lewis in Exeter would have stolen a march on all this and stocked up with a little pattern department, and with dress-making fabrics too, so that was a wasted trip. And then dressmaking fabric seems obsolete too, acres of furnishing fabrics but who wants to go out looking like a Parker Knoll armchair. The whole industry seems to have wound down into a sad and sorry decline here in the West Country at least, and may need to crank up again if this series carries on.

But no matter, this is me after all, I have never thrown a paper pattern away, there'd be something in the loft. When I got the box down I realised that I get it from my Mum because she didn't seem to have thrown a paper pattern away either, and I had inherited them.

Just browsing the box was like a journey through a history of my clothes...

To the right, my first ever party frock. Mine was yellow and had that wonderful stiff lining that buoyed the skirt out. 

Then, branching out on my own machine, I made every permutation of this lot, including that rather 1980s Dallas-style dress on the right which required 5 3/8 yds of suggested fabric... Crepe de Chine, Voile, Georgette, Crepe or Lightweight Cotton. I remember I chose something cheesecloth-like and was in a state of advanced and picklish turmoil from the off.

The obvious problems about using them again are style and ...ahem... pattern size. I am not huge but I know I will have altered the Size 12 patterns to a very snug fit forty years ago, and I'm not sure puffed sleeves and flared skirts are ready for the comeback yet.

But its not just my wardrobe. I know the 1980s passed in a blur of childbearing but I was delighted to see that I must still have found time to sew because there are plenty of more recent children's patterns in the box, and does anyone remember Lewes-based company Clothkits??

Quirky chidren's clothes and in days of yore the pattern was marked on the fabric so all you had to do was cut and sew. I wondered what had happened to them and I am delighted to see that Clothkits have been re-born.

I must confess I would cheat horribly back in the day because they were expensive. I'd buy one kit, make a paper pattern from the pieces and then proceed to make loads of them to my own fabric specifications and child-sizes various. Thirty years have passed, I should be let off for good behaviour.

I am no further on with my summer skirt, except that  as I watched the programme I did realise that, thanks to my Mum's tutelage, I could probably have tackled many of the set tasks and so why not draft a pattern from an existing skirt. It has all re-kindled my 'alteration' courage too, so half a waistband completely unpicked on a pair of new Craghopper walking trousers, the firmly entrenched but unwanted elastic removed from the back, and the whole rejoined to make a much nicer garment. Bookhound walked in and said 'You have three minutes left for this task,' which admittedly did phase me momentarily, but I feel sure Patrick and May would be delighted with my efforts.

Anyone else out there making their own...

Anyone inspired to start..

 

 

Beating the Bounds ~ Rogationtide & Rammalation Biscuits

Bank Holidays were always the occasion for the Church Youth Club to go on a Ramble, so who knows what perambulatory traditions we were inadvertently clinging onto as we made our way to Box Hill, or walked from Dorking to Friday Street every year.

I get so confused about Bank Holidays now but we are having one here in the UK today ... and this isn't the Whitsun one.

Rather disgracefully, for something even as a lapsed Anglican I feel I should know, I've had to look it all up. 

The May Bank Holiday used to be on the Monday after Pentecost, or Whit Sunday which falls seven weeks after Easter Sunday, but I discover it was shifted to the last Monday in May after a trial from 1965 to 1970, none of which I knew or could recall. Today is the more recent holiday we captured from Scotland in 1978 apparently, which they had been celebrating since the nineteenth century.

But anyway, all that aside, this year it is also falls on Rogationtide and I have had to look that up too 

The traditional day for beating the bounds of the parish was Holy Thursday (Ascension Day) 40 days after Easter. The rogation days fall on the four days from the fifth Sunday after Easter which itself falls on the Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox. In different places these may be called Cross Days, Gang Days or Grass Days.

Rogationtide is the ancient festival to invoke a blessing on fields, stock and folk emerging after a sequence of natural disasters in fifth century France. By the eighth century in England it involved parishioners 'ganging' after the Cross around the edge of the parish.This helped everyone to remember the boundaries before maps were commonplace. Along the way prominent trees often became places for preaching ­ Gospel Oaks. Locations of various landmarks - stones streams, hedges, ponds were impressed upon the children: in the past by ducking them, ritually beating them and then giving them a treat.

Herbert offers the following reasons to beat the bounds: 
1) a blessing of God for the fruits of the field:

2) Justice in the preservation of the bounds

3) Charitie, in living, walking and neighbourliy accompanying one another, with reconciling of differences at that time, if they be any:

4) Mercie, in relieving the poor by a liberal distribution of largess which at that time is or oght be made.

The enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries which 'fixed' so many lands into common, field and bounds killed many of the perambulations. But where they do survive they prove a wonderful way of getting into the countryside, different domestic customs are still practised or have been revived in secular ways to offer a friendly way of looking at the place from its edges, checking its corners are in good heart whilst getting to know people. On returning 'home' you may be lucky enough to be offered ganging beer and Rammalation biscuits.

So over the next few days, and hopefully before the rain which is forecast, I have a little bit of Parish boundary to walk solo. A = home, turn left out of the gate and walk along the lane a few hundred yards and the Parish boundary is uphill through those trees somewhere before I will turn left along to the woods, and back down our green lane to home.

I will invoke a quiet blessing of the fields but I won't be doing any preaching, or ducking and beating of local childer, and any considerable distribution of largesse may well be curbed by not meeting anyone in need of any, though I'll keep an eye out. At the lower corner of the woods I will pass our spring water supply so I'll say a quick word of thanks for that. Though we now have a bore-hole so are no longer reliant on it, we still use it outside a great deal and always like to know it is there and bubbling away and as you can see it is piped a long way underground to reach us.

In nearby Lydford, the parson on a nineteenth century perambulation apparently declared...

'Now we must make a shout here that we may recollect the bounds.' The people then Huzzard and took off their hats.' 

So perhaps just a little gentle Huzzarding and tossing of the hat will be called for.

I have made the biscuits in readiness, though any recipe for Rammalation-specific ones (which I assumed to be a derivative of 'perambulation' ) proved elusive. However in an old cookery book, compiled for a local charity by the Young Wives group I belonged to many years ago (when I was a young wife,) and which I was about to throw out, I came across an easy recipe for Matron's Biscuits. I liked the sound of them, had all I needed in the larder and they have proved a great and very moor-ish success, so I have declared these to be official Rammalation fare..

6oz S.R. flour
4oz margarine
1/2 tsp baking powder
3oz sugar
1 dessertspoon syrup
Vanilla essence

Melt margarine, sugar and syrup over a low heat then pur onto flour, baking powder and essence.
Mix well with a wooden spoon.
Put onto greased trays in spoonfuls, flatten slightly with a fork.
Bake at 170-180 degs for 15-20 minutes.
Leave on trays for a couple of minutes before transferring to a wire tray to cool.

You too can make some, or alternatively please just help yourself to one of mine. 

 

Vintage Colour

There was a Vintage and Textiles Fair in Tavistock Town Hall yesterday. They seem to be the newest big thing, the whole nostalgia industry generating big money and the town was vibrant and buzzing, and the sun shone.

I didn't buy anything mainly because I'm decluttering not accumulating, and also reaching the point in this whole vintage market lark where it all looks far too familiar and I see things I have haplessly got rid of in the past...and I stand there and think 'How Much!!'

But the colours and the array of 'stuff' is a feast for the eyes, lots of bright-sparkling pretty and too good not to share with you...

...and this little fella for the Australian contingent...

The May Queen

The first Saturday in May only meant one thing when I was a child... the May Queen celebrations.

I thought I'd share again my defining moment as a Rosebud escort (pink sash) to the Mitcham May Queen. This before graduating to a Buttercup (same dress, yellow sash) the next year, and pending promotion to the cohorts of Lily of the Valley (same dress, green sash)  the year after. This all before out-growing the dress and thus escaping the senior echelons of the Forget-Me-Nots (blue sash) and doubtless eventually hitting the heady heights of May Queen Lady-in Waiting. I think you needed to at least be related to the Mayor to stand a chance of attaining the highest office, so no chance of that.

I discover (thank you Steve Roud and The English Year) that this was almost certainly a nineteenth century invention, 'a re-modelling of May Day along Merrie England lines', and an attempt to bring back 'the real spirit of the lost golden age'. The May Queen chosen to personify the season, dressed in royal, bridal and fairy traditions (ours wore a purple velvet cloak of which I was extremely envious) and seated on a throne aboard a float, while the rest of us processed behind this sort of minor celebrity who through the year would open fetes and fairs and generally look pretty.

Like Steve Roud I can't believe that this is a tradition that will hold much sway these days, but it was clearly something that flourished in 1950's post-war Surrey.

Things to note ...

The weather and the short sleeves.

The dress made by my Mum, which I adored, and I can even remember the fabric with its tiny raised white dots.

The hair. Mine was a straight as could be. I would have gone to bed with it in tightly wound rollers/curlers the night before and hardly slept a wink. Words can't describe the bees-knees joy of having curly hair for a day...when it chose to go through a curly phase of its own volition when I was a teenager I hated it.

The doll's pram, my pride and joy. I expect Brenda, Susan or Ann were tucked up in there.

So I am intrigued... did anyone else do anything like this or was it just me??

Beating the Bounds ~ Hedgerows

Having narrowed down my sphere of paying-close-attention to a mile in each direction from home, I am watching everything with a much keener eye. I can really recommend this approach, especially for someone like me who is always wondering what might be over the next hill and then can't stop themselves from going to have a look. Nowadays nothing would induce me to venture forth because I have too much of interest to see nearer to home, and it is also Rogationtide next week, so the proper day for Beating the Bounds, and I have a bit of Parish boundary ready and waiting.

My hedgerow watching has been aided immeasurably by a little book I came across in the library and which no one seemed to have borrowed since 2008. I have now had it for the maximun three reservations so The Living History of Our Hedgerows - A Guide to Dating Hedgerows and I must soon part company. For such a small book, forty-eight pages. there has been a huge amount of Did You Know material with which to drive Bookhound to distraction.

I had no idea that Saxon ploughs needed a wide turning circle for their oxen which is why their fields were long and thin with curved sides to cope with that, and apparently, when dating a hedge it is often field shape that will offer the first clues. They won't have any sharp corners and if the fields are 'S' shaped it will be a reverse 'S' because the ploughs always turn anti-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere...no I'm not quite sure why either...can someone explain that??

Nor did I know that names like Hay, Hayes, Hayne and Hey are all parts of place-names which mean 'enclosed by hedges'.

Land-sharing in the Middle Ages involved dividing fields into strips, which I did know, but not that they measured twenty-two yards wide and two hundred and twenty-two yards long, ancient measurements still familiar today as 'chains' for cricket pitches and 'furlongs' for horse-racing.

By this time Bookhound has meandered off to clear out the shed which has resident rodent activity, and you would all be every welcome to wander off elsewhere too if I am having the same effect....except you'll miss a really good Did You Know bit coming next.

You know how you often see a row of trees in the middle of a field??

This one is just along the lane and I had often wondered...

Well, apparently, when a farmer had earned enough money to buy more strips of land he would plant a hedge (usually hawthorn, meaning hedge-thorn) and plant an oak tree every twenty-two yards. Perhaps these hedges have disappeared but the trees live on. 

The familiar rule for dating a hedge, based on a formula derived from considerable research, is one new species every hundred years measured over a thirty metre length. Lesley Chapman recommends doing six separate counts for six thirty metre lengths, avoiding gates or adjacent woodland and then taking an average, so that's my next task on a fine day. Except now I realise I'm going to have to buy the book because there is a really helpful chart in the middle for filling in as you count, and much pictorial detail about species, along with useful information about the red herrings that can have you barking up the wrong tree and lead you right up the garden path etc....quoting a few salient pointers here...

...Hawthorn dominance may indicate a fairly new hedge not yet colonised by other species, or an unintentional hedge because it grows so fast and is unlikely to be eaten by animals. 

...Hazel is an indicator of former woodland, and of great age of the hedge.'

...Ash was deliberately planted for tool handles, so if dominant indicates a deliberately planted hedge.

...Beech and Sycamore were popular in the eighteenth century, and deliberately planted for their appearance.

... There appears to be a maximum number of possible species in a hedge because there can only be a certain number, about thirteen of fourteen, that like the same soil.

...If you see Primrose, Bluebell, Dogs Mercury and Wood Anemone together in a hedge it is probable that it was once a wood.

...Dogwood and Field Maple will only grow if there are at least four species well established, if present you can conclude that the hedge is over four hundred years old at least.

... A badly neglected hedge will lose some of its species. This has implications for dating, for example lack of manpower because of the Black Death when one third of the population died, therefore the hedge may be older than the number of species suggests. I wondered about the impact of the Great War too.

Maybe the biggest surprise of all though came when I read about Spindle.

Do you remember this little hedegrow phenomenon a couple of years ago when great swathes around us here were festooned in webs which we eventually discovered were the intricate labours of the Spindle Ermine Moth..


 
Well, this is what Lesley Chapman has to say about the discovery of Spindle in a hedge..

'Common in Southern England it got its name from its use in making the hand spindles used for spinning wool. It has very hard wood useful for knitting needles... a hedge will have to be six hundred years old before Spindle can grow in it, as it needs thick shelter for its seedlings.'

So, unbelievable though it may seem, that could make some of our hedges fifteenth century before I even begin, and expect me to go into knitting needle production any day now.

 

 

 

Related articles

My Spring Nature Table reading...

Beating the Bounds ~ Berry Wood

April Come She Will...

One of my very favourite Simon and Garfunkel tracks from the Sounds of Silence album... remember that one, heavens did those songs make an impression or what, though gone are the days when I could play that opening guitar riff.

And in the olden days too, when we used to make wine (didn't we all in the 1970s) tradition had it that April 23rd was the day to pick dandelions for wine. Now we no longer have those demi-johns bubbling away in the corner of the kitchen, but just the week before the 23rd we were pronouncing it a rubbish year for dandelions, not one to be seen, yet there they were, carpets of them miraculously appearing on the very day.

April is trying very hard to succeed down here though it is still might chilly, but finally some long-awaited colour is creeping into the hedgerows...

Daisies on the grass (I hesitate to call it a lawn this early in the year), dandelions looking gorgeous, if only they weren't weeds, Devonshire Violets, Celandine, a solitary Bluebell up in the woods, the precursor of zilllions in about two weeks time, Periwinkle, Gorse blazing out around the field hedgerows and there in the middle, apple blossom thinking about what to do next.

And still banks of primroses...

In other news...sometimes the clouds are as mesmerising as the view, and yesterday was a good day for nice clouds hovering over greening fields...

 ...was this a dog I saw trotting over...

Things popping up down your way yet??

 

Chimneys...

I was doing some clearing out the other day.

In fact I am doing clearing out almost every day at the moment.

Drawers, cupboards, bookshelves, entire rooms, nothing is spared my de-cluttering eye, and I came across a letter from C, an elderly neighbour of years gone by. She had kept in touch with us since moving to Wales with her little dog Spring, leaving the row of terraced cottages in Tavistock where we had been at No 6 and she had been at No 2, and though her writing had become increasingly illegible, and the thoughts very stream of consciousness so quite hard to follow, it was always good to hear from her.

C was a true country woman, born and bred in Cornwall, tall and slender with a bronzed and weather-beaten face, and I have vivid memories of her waving to me as I pegged the nappies out on the line and she would be setting off on her old push bike, with Spring trotting alongside, for day long cycle rides along the lanes and across the Moors. Back she would come with the basket full of 'things' she had picked up along the way, an interesting stone, some flower seed heads, a giant puffball.

We moved here and C eventually moved back to her homeland of Cornwall, and in one of those chance encounters life throws your way we bumped into her down in Truro a couple of years ago celebrating her ninetieth birthday with her family. She didn't really recognise or remember us, even though she still wrote, and we haven't heard in a while so I fear the worst.

But back in 1995 C had written to us, as was her wont, on a piece of scrap paper with a reminder to herself about something crossed out, something else about compassion and cruelty to turkeys scribbled through, and a poem printed on the back. We had been in this house about a year and C had come from her home in Wales to visit that Summer...

Dear All,

Thank you for such a true welcome. It's been a happy reunion.

Do come my way if you can uproot yourselves....

We had taken her for a walk up Rocky's field to the back of the house, though all the extra bits hadn't been built then, but this is the view she would have seen ...

...and looking at the letter again I feel sure she had meant for us to read the poem on the reverse, and ashamedly I am not sure that I had paid much attention at the time.

I have done now, and, thanks to C have discovered Ruth Bidgood, a Welsh poet I think I will enjoy and must explore...

Chimneys

Far away, we saw three chimneys in the trees
across the valley, on a little hill
beyond the first hill's shoulder.

Shading our eyes from the sidelong evening sun,
we gazed and guessed till we could almost see
the roofs of the beast-house, stable and barn.

No smoke rose from the chimneys, we said at first,
but soon we swore there was smoke, so alive the house
seemed in the dying sunlight.

And afterwards, alone, I searched on maps
to make the house more mine by knowing its name -
and found there is no farm on the hill,

no house of any kind, not even a ruin.
What trick of the sun and shade put chimneys there
for us to find and talk about?

And is the evening more real than the house?
Now both are gone, it seems a fine distinction
that one was and the other was not.

Remembering, I build the evening again,
the plunging valley and the little hill,
and look! there are chimneys in the trees.

Ruth Bidgood

 

Beating the Bounds... earth & sky watching with @Cmdr_Hadfield

One of the real bonuses of living in the middle of nowhere here in the Tamar Valley is the absence of much light pollution beyond our own, and over that obviously we have complete control. 

We have been very careful not to instal arc lights that could be seen from Plymouth, though we can see the city-glow over the distant horizon. Nor did we want lights that flick on as you walk past because every passing cat/fox/badger would set those off, so we have various circuits of lights running on low energy bulbs around the outside of the house which suit us fine. The pitch dark is most welcome on a star-spangled night because we can skywatch in our own private planetarium, or most recently we can Space Station watch.

Chris Hadfield is the current Commander of the International Space Station, a Canadian astronaut who has taken the art of social media into space with him, tweeting and updating Facebook with the most astonishing pictures of the planet that I have ever seen. 

I have 'borrowed' some because I know many of you may not be tweeting facebookers, and I can't bear not to share them, so I hope I don't get shot.

Who could have known how exquisite the Australian outback looks from 400kms above the earth...

It makes me want to go and make a quilt right now. 

And just look at Prince Edward Island, Anne of Green Gables country..

It would be easy to become parochial when you have set your boundaries of exploration for a project like Beating the Bounds to that mile radius around the house as I have, so I will admit that I was thrilled to see this shot of Plymouth, (the Breakwater clearly visible in Plymouth Sound) the River Tamar and Dartmoor...

There's us up on the left somewhere.

So as well as considering what may lie beneath my feet, I am looking up above too, at what is over my head, and thanks to NASA that now includes the Space Station passes.

You can sign up for an email from NASA, which, based on your country and postcode will alert you to an imminent ISS pass in the night sky above you. If you haven't seen it yet you are missing something simple but special... there is something very extraordinary about seeing this bright light travel across the sky before your eyes, and to think there is a little world of work and research going on up there, with people inside.

This is the best my camera could manage but you get the gist...

Though only visible for three to four minutes before it disappears, the ISS is easy to spot once you know what to look for, basically the brightest fastest moving 'star' in the sky, and the NASA e mail will give you bearings so you know exactly where to look. We now greet it whenever it passes over us on a clear night, and as I stand and watch, and take in the beauty of Chris Hadfield's pictures each day, it has become a daily exercise in thinking both above and beyond the ordinary and the earthly. To look up, but also to look down on earth in this way really stretches and extends my perspective and the bounds of the imagination, and I for one will really miss his updates and observations when Chris returns to earth next month.

And here's a short video from Chris Hadfield explaining how he takes the shots using a great big floaty camera. All hail Commander Chris, and thank you.

Air Mail gifts and a bout of Berry-itis..

I have been the happy recipient of not one but two lovely parcels from Australia in recent weeks. The first from...

Taking a break from his job in the Outback, the Kayaker spent some time in Melbourne visiting a very old family friend recently.

A lasting wartime friendship of the Tinker's with a fellow boy bugler gained us an honorary Aunt and Uncle after the war. If anyone has the Tinker's little memoir Bugle Boy, check out the cover photo and it is the lad on the right, whilst the Tinker is on the left.

Arthur and his wife Joan were childless and doted on my brother and I as children, then they headed off to Australia on the £10 ticket in the 1960s, settled in Melbourne, though never losing touch with us, and always sending us a parcel at Christmas, eventually including presents for our own children too. I have always seen it as a wonderful kindness and we love the little influx of Australian gifts each year so we really did owe a lot of thank yous. With this in mind the Kayaker went to visit while he was there, and stayed on for a few days, as well as taking a turn around the city and finding me a library, a bookshop and some gifts... bless the boy.

And my thanks to Jude who sent me a wonderful parcel of these..


I have already done some of this...

Mouthwatering and just about salvaged enough from darting hands to make a Spiced Almond Cake a la Mary Berry. It didn't look anything special until you cut a slice and reached the layer of marzipan that is baked in the middle, gone before I could even take a picture.

More almond recipes and suggestions gratefully received.

I have given in to an acute bout of Berry-itis at the moment and am baking my way through her little book  of cakes. 

Copies are available for about £3 on 'you-know-where' and this has to be the best value cake recipe book around. 

Somehow it feels incumbent upon me to really finally perfect the Devonshire scone, and Mary to the rescue. I'll admit I was quite pleased with this batch...

In fact...go on, find some clotted cream and jam, and help yourself. 

 

Beating the Bounds... standing and staring.

This feels like a good day to do some standing and staring.

Firstly hearts go out to Boston, and to everyone over in the U.S. It has been shocking and horrific to watch events on the news, and you are very much in our thoughts at such a difficult time.

Secondly, we have had a bit of a strange and difficult week here in the UK too with the death of Baroness Thatcher. Today is the funeral, and for all those misgivings that so many may have about her politics and her legacy, I am praying that the day can be managed with the gentle dignity and respect that I personally feel we owe to the dead, and those who mourn the loss, whoever they may be. Much has shocked me deeply in recent days.

Nuff said..here's what I have been staring at this last week or so.

Understandably I haven't had much walking time of late but the joy of Beating the Bounds is that from wherever I stand, and without moving an inch, I can probably stare as far as my bounds anyway, and there has been plenty to look at.

Ploughing is beginning in earnest and it is always mesmerising to watch the field outside the bedroom window being quartered and halved as if being painted...
 
Flocks of seagulls appear from nowhere...

and disappear just as quickly. As the crow/seagull flies we are probably only twenty miles from the sea but they are not our usual visitors, we'd be unlikely to see one perched on the bird table.

We have also had a very exciting visit from the Barn Owl Trust.

Some of you may recall that as part of the West Devon survey our garden was chosen as a good location for the siting of the one fully funded barn owl pole box that had been made available.

We love having it in the garden and live in hope of a resident in the Branwolery (thank you A.A.Milne) but sadly the annual inspection revealed some twigs and a few pigeon feathers, so we've had a squatter, but not the real thing. We do know it can take years...

Nor could we even report a barn owl siting in recent months which is even sadder, and we fear maybe connected to loss of local habitat... the ploughing of that front field last autumn to provide a game crop of maize for the local shoot may not have helped. The rough grass that had been there since we have lived here was ideal for barn owl foraging and that was the field where we would most often see one. To compensate we will just have to let our garden grow even wilder.

We live in hope so if you know of any homeless barn owls please do send them our way. All mod cons and we have been known to fling dead things up there to tempt them in when the weather is really icy.

More importantly, wherever you are in the UK, if you spot a barn owl the Barn Owl Trust would like to know. It was our contact over this daily sighting in our garden that started our connection with them and we are delighted to be doing our bit, but numbers are declining rapidly and that is a huge worry.

So, any interesting nature sightings your way...

Our first swallow arrived on Sunday evening and was scouting out the nest over the front door, any sign of them at your end...

 

 

 

Little Nell update & the Sprocker Operatics

We are finding it hard to believe that both Little Nell and Magnus will be a year old next month. In comparison to dogs, cats seem to grow up and get sensible and independent so quickly, whilst dogs seem to take for ever; charm and frustration in equal measure whilst exhausting you in the process. We were in our late twenties the last time we house-trained and socialised a puppy, and I remember how we relished taking Ben our beautiful wall-eyed Border Collie out at every opportunity.

Perhaps it's the house training and socialising three children in between that makes the difference, but sadly now it shows..

BH :'She wants to go out....'

Silence...

BH: 'Oh you're asleep in the chair...I'll take her....'

Me: 'Don't let her eat the cat food.'

BH: 'Oh you're not asleep...'

So Little Nell from this...

to this...

and with a great deal of this because we picked the one that shows the dirt...

and now, we think (and hope) almost fully grown, to this...

A nice petite size and we have emerged on the other side of the house training / chewing phase with much of the house intact. 

Her days are now spent snoozing out in her kennel and run, next door to the boys (which includes her dad Rusty at the moment,) or dashing around the garden 'helping' Bookhound while he does logs and things, or the daily walk to the woods and several jaunts up and down the lane, before coming in for the evening with us, and then sleeping indoors. We keep thinking we'll leave her out in the kennel to sleep at night...but then go all soppy and worry she might be scared.

The puppy crate at night was such a success, but quickly outgrown, so Bookhound constructed a sort of gated bed area in the space under our stairs (I let him out occasionally).  In goes Nell at about 10pm and we don't hear a peep until we get up the next morning.  

One or two things have become essential items and this is one of them...

Ghastly isn't it, and I daren't wash it because I think it might lose its magic attraction. 

It was a stuffed fox which rather surprisingly is called Foxy, she learnt the name very quickly, bonded with it instantly and then proceeded to carry it round with her and take it to bed every night. We just say 'Find Foxy' and she does, heading off to her bed like a very well-behaved toddler with her cuddly friend. Nell is most definitely a 'carrying' dog and is happiest out on a walk with a ball/frisbee/dead rabbit (DROP!!) in her mouth. She certainly knows the difference between right (goooood girl...waggy tail...biscuit maybe) and wrong (baaaaad girl...squirms on floor and slinks off to bed...biscuit no chance hurrummmph).

The other essential item is this...

I am sure you would all agree that if there is one thing a girl doesn't like it is her ears dangling in her dinner. Searching around for a bowl that she couldn't tip up I came across this, billed as a Spaniel bowl. And blow me down the ears hang either side and we have said goodbye to the crusty-lobed look.

And finally, quite by chance this week, we discover that we have a singing dog (we've always wanted one), keen to channel her inner Dame Nellie Melba to the sound of Bookhound's harmonica. The Sprocker Operatics have us in stitches...

Anyone else out there doing, or remember doing, the first year of a puppy thing??

Anyone else have a singing dog??

What should we teach her to sing next??

 

 

The Hyacinth Question..

"If, of thy mortal goods, thou art bereft,
And from thy slender store two loaves
alone to thee are left,
Sell one & from the dole,
Buy Hyacinths to feed the soul"
- Muslihuddin Sadi, 
13th Century Persian Poet

I wonder... would you mind if today we have a conversation about hyacinths?

And more specifically why I just might not swap bread for hyacinths, because what on earth has happened to the fragrant flowers of the past??

I did my usual array of forced bulbs in pots and bulb vases to see us through Christmas and into the New Year with the intention of providing some glorious colour and scent...

All progressed well..

Some I even did that very decadent thing, which I had seen in flower shops in London but never quite been at ease with, of cutting and putting the stems in a vase.
 
Except I have to be honest, lovely to look at but they all smelt vile from the off, rapidly descending to putrid.

Every one ended up being viewed outside the kitchen window because none of us could bear it, a sort of strong musty and dare I say hint of incontinent aroma. I thought it may have been because the bulbs were forced, so had bought two lovely pots of deep blue ones last week; later ones which seemed to smell fine close up.

Now admittedly this was from B&Q, and they were only £2 each, but give them a day and we couldn't stand it a minute longer. The Tinker bravely sat his out for about four days before giving in and consigning to the garden.

So is it just me or is it the bulbs...

Have you noticed it too...

Am I doing something wrong...

Are there any varieties that can fulfill the promise of that beautiful scent...

And do you chop them off and put them in a vase, or does that feel like a crime to you too...

 

The final brush strokes...

So here are the last of the pre-moving in Tinker's Cott pics, and it went to the wire with the last lick of paint going on at 7.30am on the day of the carpets. Every inch has either been painted, or cleaned to within an inch of its life with a toothbrush, and along the way we laughed (sort of)  at the remains of Offspringette's navy blue ceiling, and the Kayaker's painted wave wall...and now I know where the Gamekeeper dropped all those spent air gun pellets (behind the radiator in his bedroom.)

In the oddest moment of synchronicity with children, the most useful items in my decorator's armoury were the two remaining ones of these...

The very last of the Harrington 'Gold' terry towelling nappies. 

Talking of gold, If this was the Olympics we have painted a marathon and I win Gold for skirting boards, I mean who on earth invented them, aren't they dreadful to paint when you have to cut in with care on the wall above, but don't they look lovely when they are done...

Bookhound wins Gold for absolutely everything else, but also for painting all the very difficult bits, and the bits that make your arms ache and the bits that I got fed up with...

and this is what the sitting room still looked like the day BC (Before Carpets) and with old underlay still to be removed...

But what a wonderful transformation new carpets are...


To be honest, having set ourselves such a tight deadline I think we could all have cried with relief when we saw it and the Tinker's furniture has gone in like a dream.

And there has been a big improvement on the staircase. The walls had been lathered in Artex since the original renovations back in the 1970s and we had just lived with it since we moved in in 1994, whilst knowing (and dreading) that it would have to come off one day because old stone walls need to breath. So we (the Royal we...I stayed well out of this one) invested in a steam 'thing' which persuades the stuff off the walls (you needed to see the mess to believe it) and it is now back to the original plaster.

Meanwhile these two just slumbered on throughout, and as you can see Magnus has finally charmed at least one of the Dowagers with his subtle and nonchalent style...

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Update...

Tinker's Cott - update...

Happy Easter...

I usually post a lovely picture of primroses and violets on Easter Sunday...this one...

But I thought I can't keep dragging that old bunch of flowers out year after year, I really should go and take a new picture. Except I haven't had time to go out and look properly, and in any case I don't think the primroses are quite this plumptious yet, it's been far too cold.

So anyway, searching around for a bunch of something else I could present as an Easter offering I came across this bunch of sleeping cat...

I'll leave you to rearrange and figure out what bit belongs where etc.

If you celebrate Easter I hope you have a gloriously peaceful day.

If you don't I still hope you have a gloriously peaceful day.

After such a busy and exhausting few weeks we plan to just 'play' for the day, especially as the clocks have gone forward and the day will fly by, it will be tomorrow before we know it. I doubt I will get much further than the sofa because I have a very lovely book on the go which I haven't read since I was about thirteen, and which I am enjoying enormously all over again. I am not giving you any clues about the title (no, it's not on the sidebar) because it's a secret which I will write about on a very topical and appropriate day soon.

Oh alright...here's an edited snippet of a clue that will send you in completely the wrong direction, but someone will still guess it I'm sure...

'When ****** had fallen off the pier at the age of six her mother went in thirty feet after her, sixteen stone, royal blue afternoon dress. A straight dive, like the dive of an ageing mammoth. The reporter from the West Worthing News came to make a story of it and said to Edwina, 'Your mother swum the channel didn't she?...'

How about you....good book on the go for the holiday weekend??

Mission Accomplished...

Dear Blog

We did it!

The Tinker is in, and we only have about thirty boxes left to unpack and then he will be properly in. He is loving his little abode which is very quickly starting to look like home.

My thanks to the Happy Campers for posts this week, and for all your comments, especially about To Kill a Mocking Bird; I am planning a re-read in the light of all your insights. Coming early next week the other Happy Camper has written a wonderful report on Hilary Mantel's talk at the Bath Literature Festival, you won't want to miss it, our 'ilary was on top form as was the Happy Camper with some brilliant note-taking, for all of which I am very grateful.

Meanwhile this evening, settling down to write a blog post with some pics, my computer socketry has developed an earth leak and keeps tripping out the electricity for the entire house. We've narrowed it down but it's a daylight job so I write this in haste from my iPad via Blogsy and I hope it works, more to follow. For sure you will want to know just how many miles of skirting board I have painted this last week, and how much time I have spent thinking what a stupid idea skirting boards are anyway...until I see them done and think how lovely they look.

I hope you are all settling in for a lovely restful Easter weekend, predicted to be the coldest on record here in the UK, but with three woodburners on the go we plan to take no notice of that little detail, we have cake we'll be fine.

Did you all have hot cross buns today??

We did, and also remembered that last year we sat out and ate them under the apple trees as it was so warm...

 

Posted with Blogsy

The Library

'The library had changed a good deal, she noticed. The old wooden desks had gone, and the newspapers in the racks. There were low vinyl seats that an elderly person could get in and out of comfortably. There were modern pictures on the wall, sunbursts of yellow and orange, and a part marked  ' Children's Play Area'. Children did not play in it, but ran about, loud and healthy. Fluttering notices on a cork board advertised yoga classes and Community Welfare Programmes, play groups and Councillor's Surgeries. People talked quite unashamedly in ordinary voices; there had been only an odd subdued whisper in the past, in the old days when Clifford used to step down to get a detective story, and she used to ask for a nice mystery from Miss Williams on the desk.'

If you have read Every Day is Mother's Day by Hilary Mantel, you may recognise this as Evelyn's trip to the library to borrow a book on 'how to deliver babies in an emergency', and her thirty-year old tickets being met with 'a strange sideways look' from the 'fat girl in a fluffy pink cardigan' behind the counter.

I never fell out of love with the library, the Tinker and I used to spend every Saturday morning in this one after all..
but I will admit that I had stopped using my local one for quite a while until recently. Had it 'disappeared' in that time I would have been desperately sad, but I am ashamed to admit I am not sure I would have had the enthusiasm or the energy to protest, or march under a banner.

But all that has changed.

I am a born-again library user.

Should Devon Libraries even think of closing Tavistock Library down now I'd have to wedge myself in that letterbox you can return books through when they are closed, and they would have to suffer the consequences. Actually someone may already have tried that because when I went to post a book through the other day the letterbox was out of action 'due to vandalism'.

It's the online catalogue and specifically non-fiction that does it for me.

I'm doing a lot of local history research for Beating the Bounds at the moment...incidentally is it research or research ??

I'm doing some research??

Research??

Oh never mind...I'm doing some looking up.

So I think of a book, or read of several in a bibliography and head for the library catalogue. I have reserved some corkers from something called The Stacks, which sounds dusty and cellar-like and probably has the poor librarian donning overalls, gloves and mask and muttering 'oh for goodness sake' until they find it. But my need for Epidemics and Diseases in Devon was great if I was to discover why several local children, buried in the churchyard over yonder, had died in or around 1864.

Can you believe that such a fascinating book had never been borrowed?? I'll bet they were about to throw it away. Anyway my money's on scarlet fever, diphtheria or cholera all of which seemed prevalent locally at the time.

The online archives also give me access, via my ticket number, to the Times digital archive along with forty-eight local and national newspapers from way back when, and a score of other really useful things, and I spend ages poring over it.

So now I have extended my remit. I already belong to Orkney Library and now I have joined Cornwall Libraries too, so the potential for confusion is great, and compounded last week when I realised my Cornish books were overdue and I couldn't get to Launceston to renew them.

No worries, I'd do it online.

Except somehow one of the books wasn't on my online account list. How I had managed to not check it out, when I know I had put it under the machine, and then exited the building without the alarm sounding remains an unsolved Cornish mystery.

No worries, I'd ring the 24 hour renewal line.

Half an hour later and I was no nearer renewing the book and had probably spent ten times the fine on the phone bill.

But look, what was this I saw on my screen..

Ask a Librarian

Local chat is available between 9am-5pm Monday – Friday. Outside of these hours please use the link to the Enquire National Service.

Well how enterprising of Cornwall Libraries. It was a Saturday but I  would probably be 'chatting' to someone who had the system in front of them and could sort it, because I have a fear ingrained from childhood about my pocket money disappearing on overdue library book fines, let alone the thought that I had pilfered a book, so I typed a message into the box...

Date: 11:33 2013/03/09

Chat Transcript: Hello, I am trying to renew a library book online but it doesn't show up on my loans. Have also checked my husband's card in case I used his and it doesn't show up there either. Can you help? It is due back today

[Librarian 11:34:13]: Librarian 'Valeri (24/7 Librarian)' has joined the session.

[Librarian 11:34:24]: My name is Valeri, and I'm a reference librarian in Connecticut.  I'm reading your question right now to see how I can help you...

[Lynne Hatwell 11:34:59]: Right...thank you. I was expecting someone in Cornwall!

[Librarian 11:35:36]: I'm sorry, but I do not have access to that system.

[Librarian 11:35:53]: I recommend that you telephone the library directly during regular hours.

[Lynne Hatwell 11:36:01]: ah, OK no worries then

[Librarian 11:36:11]: Thank you for using the service. Please contact us if you need further assistance.

I might just go and join Connecticut Library now as well.

So which one do you belong to, and do you use it??

And how do you cope with my only qualm... the dead 'things' or indeterminate 'material' that may be gluing pages together??

 

 

 

Beating the Bounds ~ Berry Wood

'There is a ring of beeches on the hill
Lifting to the quiet evening sky
Layered tracery of green and grey,
Voicing reed - like in the hill - wind's sigh
Tales of long ago and far away.
Beneath them lies the valley wide and still....'

Margery Lea On a Hill in Shropshire from These Days (1975)
(Quoted in Silva - The Tree in Britain ~ Archie Mills) 

Looking at our beechwood from a different angle recently I came up with what I thought was a truly original and clever thought.

This is another view, of what is actually called Berry Wood up there on the top of the hill, and which sits very nicely within my Beating the Bounds square mile. It is on private land but we have access because just on the edge of the wood is the source of our spring water supply, piped underground down to our house.

The view that day reminded me a little, and then a lot of that first sighting I had of Ely Cathedral some years ago, as it floated into view across the Fens of Cambridge. 

Yes, I decided, there is definitely something cathedral-like about our wood.

We have been trying to work out how 'our' wood survived the storms of 1987 and 1990 when so many others nearby were decimated. This wood, just outside Tavistock, which we used to live very near, and now pass on every journey home from town, was a similar picture of eye-catching symmetry until that night, and how devastated we were to see it the next morning. Even now, twenty five years on, it remains a ragged sorry sight, still in recovery...

Somehow our wood survived. Perhaps it was not quite in the direct path of the storm at its fiercest, who can know.

There is a calculation that involves measuring the girth of a beech tree at about eye-height and then doing some fancy maths to arrive at an approximate age for the tree, and on that basis we reckon some of ours are about a hundred years old. Not ancient, but old enough for us to imagine the planting taking place on the brink of the Great War.

Roger Deakin calls them 'The Sacred Groves of Devon' in his book Wildwood, and it's not hard to see why, or how our little clump could be seen as one too.

We enter by its west door...

...and without realising it I realise that we respect the silence, talking in hushed voices as we walk the natural naves and aisles. Even if we call the dogs we somehow do it sotto voce....we wouldn't dream of shouting up here.

Looking upwards only reinforces the likeness to a Cathedral as the web of branches that spans the 'roof' weave myriad natural designs...

More reminders of Ely Cathedral...

At certain points the trees soar upwards endlessly, seeming only to reinforce the likeness... the lofty grandeur of a Cathedral nave...

 I mean its obvious...surely all Cathedrals were modelled on this...

Ely...

St Magnus on Orkney...
 
Exeter, nearby to us here...

I thought again of the soaring 'tops' of Berry Wood and was very thrilled with the originality of my analogy....I'll write a blog post about all that I thought, I'm right on it with this idea.

That was until I picked up Beechcombings by Richard Mabey and discovered that the analogy and comparison of beechwoods to cathedrals is as old and well-worn as my wellies.

Not so original then, but never mind, it still holds true.

We wander up to the woods every day with the dogs, and debate whether this tree or that has only just fallen down or has it been there a while... we can never decide. Did we see it last time or didn't we...

and on one particular day we watched the stormlight without..

Whilst behind us, a different world within, dazzling sunlight to the rafters...

'There is forgetfulness within this ring,
Where memory's steeped in calm and thought is stilled.
For they the secrets of old earth enfold
Within their shadowed forms whose crowns are filled
With lustre of the west and evening gold,
And in the listening silence seem to sing.' 

 

And we are watching the ground very closely indeed, because our very own stained glass is starting to peek through...

In fact by May these green shoots will be our very own peal of (blue)bells, resonant and vibrant enough to grace any well-respecting Cathedral.

I can't wait to see them this year.

 

 

 

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The Wild Places ~ Robert Macfarlane

Beating the Bounds.

Standing and staring...

Beating the Bounds... the Churchyard

Down the Deep Lanes ~ Peter Beacham with photographs by James Ravilious.

On This Day... Roger Deakin

Happy Mothering Sunday

I think I use the same picture every year but I love it, and though it's a bit ahead of itself this year as the primroses are only just starting to proliferate along the lane, they do make a nice virtual bouquet. It always reminds me of the little posies we were given at Sunday School to take home.

So a happy Mothering Sunday (here in the UK but please do feel included wherever you are) to anyone who 'mothers' or cares for (or about) someone else (which I think should include everyone) and special thoughts too for those who, for whatever reason, have a mum-shaped gap in their lives.

It's a gap which can often seem so huge on this day of all days.

So please do enjoy your virtual primroses and violets, put them in some water straight away (probably dunk the stems in some hot water...Curzon might be along to advise) and have yourselves a peaceful and gentle day.

My Wild Places ... Moor

'In a land as densely populated as Britain, openness can be hard to find. It is difficult to reach places where the horizon is experienced as a long unbroken line, or where the blue of the distance becomes invisible...'

So says Robert Macfarlane in his chapter entitled Moor, in The Wild Places..

'Openness is rare but its importance is proportionately great...whenever I return from the moors, I feel a lightness up behind my eyes, as though my vision has been opened out by twenty degress to either side.'

A copy of Crossings Guide to Dartmoor, all 500 pages of it, has sat on our shelves for as many years as we have lived nearby, which is heading for thirty-seven now.

We quickly realised when we decided to settle here after marrying in 1976, that Dartmoor was going to become a favourite place, and though it has waxed and waned in our attentions, and the time we may free up to go walking there, we do drive across high Dartmoor frequently and always love it for its remote beauty and vast open spaces.

For many years it was of course my working patch too, hours and hours spent driving to see new babies on remote farms along muddy tracks in that pouring rain so unique to Dartmoor (very wet, very windy, instant death to any hairstyle) opening and shutting umpteen gates only to find no one home.

...or having to be towed out of muddy ditches which didn't seem to be there when I parked up, but an hour long visit and a torrential storm later and my car would be surrounded.

... or fending off the very eager attentions of the farm dogs as I load up with my baby scales and bag and other clutter, thus arriving at farmhouse doors with a succession of muddy paw prints, or worse, up my trouser legs.

...or parking up with my lunch at one of my secret places and just staring at the view.

The year of the foot and mouth was terrible... just knowing we couldn't stop and have a leg-stretch even if we wanted to made us appreciate it even more. 

So over the years we have accumulated a good collection of books about Dartmoor and no collection is complete without a copy of Crossing's. Published in 1909 it is still considered to be one of the few definitive topographical Dartmoor guides, and I imagine it to be the walkers' equivalent of the Bradshaw's train guide that Michael Portillo has been using in his recent TV series.

William Crossing was born in Plymouth in 1847 and from an early age fell in love with Dartmoor and clearly couldn't ever be far from it. Emigrating to Canada to work, the young Crossing was back home by the age of twenty, and for the rest of his life lived and breathed the moor, walking or riding across it and recording his journeys in close detail whenever he could and in all weathers. Poor as a church mouse and barely making a living from his writing for local newspapers disaster struck when in mid-book all his papers were inadvertently destroyed. I weep enough about a lost blog post when I somehow press the wrong button...poor Crossing must have been distraught. William Crossing died in 1928 and is buried in nearby Mary Tavy churchyard in a grave with a view of the moors which are less than a mile away.

But what a revelation the book has been. I have barely glanced at it since we've had it until now, but on a recent outing we parked just above Peter Tavy and walked up to White Tor which meant we passed Stephens' Grave and I needed to know more, so Crossing's was the obvious place to start. 

'Stephens' Grave marks the site where a suicide was buried with the barbarous rites once customary. George Stephens was a youth of Peter Tavy, and was driven to take his life by the unfaithfulness of the girl to whom he was betrothed. It is said that at the moment he was laid here some linen that was hanging out to bleach at Higher Godsworthy was caught up in the air and never more seen.'

Other sources offer variations of that explanation with added extras such as George was really called John, that it happened in 1762, that he killed the girl with deadly nightshade first and I am guessing that discrepancies will always be the case with Crossing's. But how unusual it is to come across such obvious human traces, and a memorial out on the moors too. Jay's Grave is another with an equally poignant story attached. I like a bit of legend so I am going to stick with Crossing's for our re-discovery of Dartmoor, and with a bit of Eric Hemery's High Dartmoor mixed in, another book I will write about soon.

The views from Stephens' Grave (you'd pay good money and still never get permission to be buried there today) and White Tor looking across to Roos Tor and Staple Tor (I think) were breathtaking. That ridge is the one we have in our sights to walk very soon. Vast and limitless, ours and ours alone for an hour or two, not a soul in sight and easy to let your spirits soar as you walk...

...and of course, need you ask, Nell loved it too.

 Final words to Robert Macfarlane quoting Wallace Stegner..

'...we need wild places because they remind us of the world beyond the human....they can give people a sense of bigness outside themselves that has now in some way been lost.'

It is certainly good to be finding them again... any vision-extending 'openness' out your way??

 

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The Wild Places ~ Robert Macfarlane

Counter Irritation

Have any of you tried and failed to buy something from a pharmacy of late??

Are pharmacists the new traffic wardens??

It was the Gamekeeper who started with it, Bookhound who ferried it home after spending the day out on the shoot with him, and eventually it was obvious I would get it too, and now the kitchen worktop looks like a mock-up of the counter in Boots and the house has that odeur of camphorated embrocation about it.

Incidentally, aren't all these words so wonderfully vintage and interesting in these days of boring old gel rubs ... liniment and embrocation and linctus and ointment and pastiles 

So every type of dry, then tickly, then chesty cough symptom catered for this last week with every sort of over the counter 'remedy', though I say remedy with some hesitation because it's all about symptom control and just sitting the thing out really isn't it. It's bound to be viral too so no point in wasting the doctor's time unless it lingers and goes bacterial, which I hope I'd recognise. Finding the lost but suddenly very precious jar of Vick Vaporub at 3am one morning was a triumph born of desperation.

But it's the cough...have any of you had this one??

The constant hack but interspersed with lightningly quick onset of the tickly throat moment that without warning sends you into paroxysms of an uncontrollable choking cough that means you can't really go out because heaven forfend it should happen in the street. Someone would call an ambulance or do the Heimlich manouver for sure..it's ever so dramatic until I have it under control.

So after eight nights of this Bookhound was dispatched to purchase some linctus, preferably something with a cough suppressant thrown in...and I know I know, it's much better to carry on coughing or you get a chest infection, but I have pulled so many muscles I didn't know I had that it's like watching someone with St Vitus Dance once I start.

When Bookhound rang from the supermarket pharmacy to say he had listed my symptoms with the pharmacist and the recommendation was that it was good to cough, and that I must see it through and carry on coughing... well I can't really repeat what I croaked and gasped down the phone.

'Well he won't let me have anything now, I'll have to go somewhere else...'

'Tell them less at the next one, in fact tell them nothing' I suggested.

'Have you got a temperature? ' Bookhound asked, when he rang me from the next Pharmacy.

'Well I wouldn't know, tell them we don't have a thermometer and the woodburner's lit, it's just this *%$^& cough.'

'Good well apparently you can have some magic stuff called Dextromethobromy something or other.'

'I'll have a gallon,' I said.

When he arrived through the front door you'd have thought it was Class A drugs and that I was doing cold turkey as I fell on the latest purchase (don't ask me what this has all cost) of dexathingyoojemaflip and some really very nasty pastilles.

I had joked about applying a poultice and stitching myself into a vest until May but someone had also mentioned applying Vick Vaporub to both feet and putting on socks at night. I looked it up and indeed the Vick + socks thing gets a mention but with no explanation. Well in desperation I would have tried anything to get a cough-free night so nothing ventured, nothing gained etc I did it thinking perhaps somehow the vapour wafts on through.

The whole subject of counter irritation now shifts from getting slightly annoyed at the pharmacy to the principle of creating a secondary irritation to relieve one elsewhere. Not a medical theory I have ever really given much thought to or know much about, but as my feet started to ...well how best to describe it... sing warmly is about the closest I can come, though not in a disharmonious or unpleasant way at all, suddenly the tickle in my throat subsided too. Reading around it would seem the principles of counter irritation are still very much in fashion and research is revealing some interesting theories about the brain's responses to it.

Now I have no idea which worked best... time, the linctus or the vaporised singing feet, but I slept like a top for seven hours so I'm not really that bothered knowing, and will just have to carry on with both for the duration.

So any more home remedies to try??

Our dear old tin Wright's Vaporiser, with its night light and stone block for the liquid coal tar long gone (and I see now classed as 'vintage' and fetching £25 on eBay) and I have already done hot water with honey, lemon and turmeric (that combo's on the 'no' list as a result) but anything else you swear by??

And are pharmacists taking over from veterinary nurses and dental hygienists as the new traffic wardens ...and with sincere apologies to any of you who earn a crust at any of those jobs, I feel sure you are all the exceptions to my new rule.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

'An invasion of light...' ~ Kathleen Jamie

Every mid-February
those first days arrive
when the sun rises
higher than the Black
Hill at last. Brightness
and a crazy breeze
course from the same airt-

This quote from a poem entitled The Dash, from Kathleen Jamie's latest collection The Overhaul reminded me.

I had read Kathleen Jamie's book Sightlines last March. If I was on a desert island Sightlines is one of the books I would want to hand for the way it makes me notice things I never have before, and in there a piece entitled Light also about those February days...

Every year, in the third week of February, there is a day, or, more usually, a run of days, when one can say for sure that the light is back. Some juncture has been reached, and the light spills into the world from a sun suddenly higher in the sky.

It was March and I had missed the day for 2012, but I wrote this on the page...

It has now been confirmed that in 2012 the UK had something like 172 days when more than 1mm of rain fell. We could barely remember a dry day, and Nell and Magnus, now both eight months old, had known no other than wet. Day after day we have traipsed around after muddy paws, Magnus, eighteen years younger and more sprightly than the Dowagers, showing us exactly how high and across what an agile cat can climb. Nell meanwhile acquiring a plimsoll line of mud around her middle and needing a daily hose down before coming back indoors, and our boots likewise hosed off and lined up to dry every day in front of the Aga.

Frankly it has been relentless, and with an energetic puppy to house-train and walk regularly, a very hard winter of work after enjoying those few rare days of summer we had...oh for some dry.

We have been all eyes for those days of Light.

Slowly the evenings draw out and it is possible to walk dogs at 5pm...then 5.30, but still it rained and the sky glowered down on us.

And then suddenly, on February 14th, no sooner wished for than granted..

and we walked to the woods with the sun on our backs and it felt warm... almost hot...

and Magnus spotted it too, eschewing the basket for the sun puddle on his little mat on the kitchen table...

'...and though scalding
to our wintered eyes
look, we cry, it's here.'

I'm sure we still have days of cold and wet to come but have those days arrived your way too...

And if you are in the Southern Hemisphere does something different happen, but still you sense that change... 

 

Beating the Bounds... the Churchyard

There are several churchyards I can draw into my Beating the Bounds Parish walkabout and  I have posted pictures of this one before, St Mary's Church, Sydenham Damerel. A tiny Adam-Bede-like church that we can see from our kitchen window, the church rebuilt after a catastrophic fire in 1953, and even on the dullest grey day still bathed in reflected light inside as I walked across to it recently.

With a beautiful yew avenue through which I can look across to home, and a churchyard steeped in history and back-story it is a truly atmospheric place. 


Yew incidentally I gather (from the book about hedges I have borrowed from the library) was often planted in churchyards because it was thought to keep out the plague.

I usually invent the back-story as the fancy takes me but for the purposes of Beating the Bounds I am hoping to find out something much more accurate, and as I walked around the churchyard in the rain on a quiet Sunday morning, I spotted something I hadn't noticed before.

How I had missed this war grave right by the path in the past I really don't know, or perhaps it is just that after all that Edward Thomas reading I am more keenly tuned into it all...

27th January 1944 and of course, in this case, I don't need to invent a back story because sites like this one make it very easy to find out ...

RAF Bomber Command sends 515 aircraft to attack Berlin overnight

Perhaps J.F. Richards was on one of those sorties, but delving a little further I find connections to Shropshire, a full name of John Francis (via that service number) and a war record I can't access without joining something and paying a fee, so at that point my inquisitiveness for what really may have happened grinds to a halt.

But I will pursue it with the microfiche for the local paper in the library and see what more I can discover because I suddenly feel the enormity of it all...that I can stand in a tiny Devon churchyard and make that connection with history, and a young pilot who lost his life in the same week that Mathilde Wolff-Monckeberg wrote this from Germany...

'Thousands sleep in the bunkers every night, not having a roof over their heads. It is amazing how these poor human beings manage to create something, some kind of homestead, out of the rawest materials...the siren starts its howling and now everybody is pushing, stumbling, squeezing through the narrow entrance into the bunker...'

And that could have been written from anywhere...Coventry, Cologne, Exeter, Liverpool, Berlin or in Mathilde's case Hamburg in On the Other Side : Letters to my Children From Germany 1940-1946 published by Persephone Books.

As Peter Beacham suggests in Down the Deep Lanes, (the book I borrowed from the library and then had to buy) the churchyard so often taken for granted as the space to pass through on the way to the church, but dealing with continuity as much as finality...

'Left to their own devices older headstones come to rest at various improbable angles, cocking a snook at the last enemy but also nicely mirroring life's relationships...some headstones even look like families or groups of friends talking to each other... they look miserable when forced to stand to attention in ordered ranks...left alone they testify to the diversity of the human spirit.'

So true, and I reckon this little huddle are having themselves a really good yarn.

 

Related articles

Down the Deep Lanes ~ Peter Beacham with photographs by James Ravilious.

Beating the Bounds.

Devon and more drifting snow...

...drops. 

With thanks to Curzon for such a clever idea...

Snowdrops in a vase standing on a mirror ...

Down the Deep Lanes ~ Peter Beacham with photographs by James Ravilious.

What eventually happens here, by the end of this blog post, isn't really supposed to happen, but this is me, it was bound to.

I have started dropping into the library regularly in pursuit of more local knowledge for my Beating the Bounds project. The local history shelves are well-stocked with a folder of information for each village, Parish records, old tithe maps, mine surveys and countless reference books plus there is a little table over in the corner by the microfiche machine that fits me perfectly. I can also access vast online newspaper archives including The Times, from home and using my library card number, so I am in clover with it all right now.

As you would expect, there is also a jolly good shelf of borrowings on the Shire, so I carted home this great big book entitled Down the Deep Lanes by Peter Beacham, who has provided a commentary to the photographs taken by James Ravilious 1939-1999 (son of Eric).

 
Back in February 2010, Bookhound and I stumbled upon an exhibition at the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro... James Ravilious - An English Eye, Photographic Images of West Country Life and we were entranced.

Many of the pictures have become iconic as in this one which also sits as a gift card on my shelf ...

Apropos of a minimal connection, but in the interests of full disclosure because  I have found the photos in the same batch...we ate this at Charlotte's Tea Rooms in Truro on that day...

and we bought some of these on the way home...

So anyway I saw Down the Deep Lanes and remembered the exhibition, and I borrowed it before Christmas, quickly realising what a completely 'me' sort of book it is.

The book is a journey down the deep lanes of Devon, taking its title from the final line of Last Load, a poem by Ted Hughes from the Moortown Diary collection which I am also reading through this year...

... And you go, and over the whole land 
Like singing heard across evening water 
The tall loads are swaying towards their barns 
Down the deep lanes. 

This is off the beaten track Devon, not the part we live in, this is the Taw and Torridge end of the Shire, but very like it for its hidden beauty and everyday-ness.

'A single lane is a nature reserve,' intones Peter Beacham as he draws in all that is lovely, but also much that may be perceived as less so in his opening chapter. John Betjeman bemoaned the encroaching presence of the telegraph and electricity poles back in the 1930s, Peter Beacham sees them, much as we now do, as wonderful perches for birds of prey, and I am instantly reminded of my daily three mile drive with the little Gamekeeper up to the village school. We would always take bets on whether we would see a buzzard perched on the fourth, or would it be the fifth pole along as we drove up the hill, but we always saw one, every day. I am quite pleased about the poles for the broadband too; we are the furthest from the village exchange, right on the furthest boundary of the Parish, and as we follow the poles along the lane and the 'gently looping wires' that keep me in touch with all of you, we turn into our gate at the very last one and know that the signal stops here....and we also know it can all go horribly wrong if a cow decides to use a pole as a scratching post in the middle of a field.

I can't tell you how delighted I was to see a chapters entitled Lane, Farmstead, Field, Orchard, Cob, Corrugated Iron, Chapel, Churchyard, Belfry and more... a celebration of the uncelebrated aspects of ordinary life. The persistent face of rural England that remains timeless and untainted in the face of radical change. It's not about wallowing in nostalgia either, it's about what is still existing and functioning as well as it ever did, pragmatism overruling progress, and so much I recognised as I read and looked carefully at James Ravilious's beautiful black and white photographs.

So I read it twice and then the email reminder came asking for me to renew the book or take it back.

So I renewed it online and read it for a third time and dreaded the moment...

Then the next email came asking for the book back...

It was no good, I couldn't bear to part with it, so in the end I have had to buy one of my own, and I am grateful that the Beaford Arts Centre, which holds the James Ravilious archive, had some for sale, and in a sightly cheaper paperback edition.

As I said, this is not what is supposed to happen at all, I am clearly a hopeless borrower, but I will be Beating the Bounds with my own perambulations to my Wild Places alongside the inspiration that Down the Deep Lanes offers in the months to come...plenty to think about there.

 

 

On This Day... Roger Deakin

The late Roger Deakin, who died far too young in 2006, would have been seventy today, and in his honour we are going to talk hedging, a subject of which Roger would most certainly have approved and on which he most certainly has something to say.

A small group of writers of Roger Deakin's ilk, with their keen eye and astute observations of so much that I hitherto seem scarcely to have noticed, let alone understood more deeply, are proving more influential to my reading than I could ever have imagined. I would place Roger's book Wildwood, which I have finally finished after a six month very slow meander through it, near the top of the list. These books are opening my eyes to what is in front of them and when I read the chapter entitled A New-laid Hedge in Wildwood recently it all chimed... I know of what he speaks...

'I know of nothing more saddening than a machine-flailed hedge. It speaks of the disdain of nature and a craft that still dominates our agriculture. Even after years of benign neglect, plashed hedges stand as monuments to the best traditions of good husbandry.'

We do love the hedgerows along our lane with a passion, to the point of feeling a little possessive and protective of them, ours is the only house you come to as you drive along that first mile and you will only pass one more by the time you reach the little row of cottages at the other end.

That makes it all ours really doesn't it.

I can't pretend to know much about hedge-laying, or how-to, though I discover there is a National Hedgelaying Society devoted to the preservation of the craft. It's all about keeping the stock in the fields, providing shelter for them and supporting the healthy growth of the hedge, which if left untended will eventually revert to a row of trees.

I do know a little more now thanks to Roger...

'I began at the left-hand end, working along the hedge to my right and laying the cut trees and hazel stems to my left. I cut through each stem as close as possible to the ground with a diagonal stroke of the billhook that severed the stem almost right through, but left the bark and enough connective tissue to allow the sap to flow. Once cut in this way, the stems or trees are called pleachers....'

 

And we screeched the car to a halt driving home from town last week at the sight of this newly laid hedge, a rare sight indeed.

This is winter work to be done when the architecture of the hedge is most clearly visible; labour for a waning moon when the tide of the sap is low apparently. And who knew that there were differing styles of hedge-laying across the country. Sadly our hedges are now the victims of the regular massacre that Roger speaks of. Expediency and a different form of land stewardship and conservation being the main aim, whilst time and labour spent making hedges look nice and traditional would hardly be a priority on a busy farm nowadays. We stay indoors whilst it is being done or risk losing an eye as the branches become lethal shrapnel, jettisoned in all directions, and when we walk out afterwards the lane is a carpet of razor sharp splinters, death to bicycle tyres and the hedge itself a mess of sharp, jagged ends.

All a far cry from the swish of the billhook.

But there has been progress and the cutting is regulated to avoid crucial phases in the life of the hedge, which is resilient and somehow seems to recover quickly, and once done and repaired it has to be said the lane look very neat and tidy from afar. This is how it is looking at the moment, and perhaps thanks in some part to some meticulous hedge-laying many moons ago.

Imagine then, if you will, our horror when the council turned up to do their once a decade resurfacing of 'our' lane a few years ago, and started the project with a massacre of the hedges at the beginning of June when they were looking like this...

...just as the birds were nesting, and the wild flowers were approaching their full glory and would then set seed for the next year ...well we nearly cried, and in the name of all that is Roger Deakin we did our level best.

It was all about having access for the tarmacing machine apparently, and though we made many desperate phone calls to the county highways department, the RSPB and the environment agency... you name it we tried, it was all to no avail.

I suspect Roger would have gone and camped on the steps of the council offices or something.

In fact it was more than a massacre because the contractors were brought in from outside, so not the farmer who usually does the work and does at least understand the nuances of the growth. We watched in despair as the hedge was flailed back to the soil and the foundation stones in places, and started to disintegrate before our eyes; the birds disappeared for the remainder of the summer and we can still see the spots where the hedge has never properly recovered. This being us we did keep on...and on...and on... out of principle and until the council reluctantly sent a solitary worker in for about an hour to rebuild the parts that were collapsing.

But as we walk in the winter, when the skeletons of the hedgerows along our lane and around the fields are laid bare, and seeing through to the bones of the hedge, it is if we are granted a little window onto a visible social history, and easy to spot where the hedge-layers of old may have been at work.

'Very old laid hedges can be works of the hedgers art: a kind of tree jazz, improvised down the generations..' says Roger, and I would most definitely agree. I almost want to sit at this one and play a tune..

 ...and spot the stock peering through at us...

So there you have it, a quick Monday morning session on hedge-laying... bet you weren't expecting that, and here's remembering the inimitable one and only Roger Deakin on his seventieth ...and with much gratitude for my eyes now wide open. 

Any more Roger Deakin fans out there??

 

In Devon... drifting snow...

...drops.

 

The Winter of 1963 - what do you remember ?

Through this week fifty years ago, the winter of 1963, and the Big Freeze continued. With snow forecast in the next few days across the UK, and the country doubtless grinding to a halt, and news people standing out in flurries trying to make out its really deep and chaotic and there's no grit etc....well it's all enough to make me cast my mind back. The snow had started on Boxing Day and apparently we didn't have another frost-free day in the entire country until March 5th

On February 4th fifty people spent the night stuck in a train on the edge of Dartmoor, and forty lorry drivers had to take refuge in a school near Okehampton.

We weren't living in Devon then. Though I was born here we had moved to Mitcham in Surrey in 1957, by 1963 I was nine and I have been trying to remember that winter, and the cold and just how did we manage??

We didn't have central heating or double glazing for a start, and I am sure it was paraffin heaters or freeze, and there was definitely ice on the inside of the windows. We must surely have had power cuts and candles??

I can clearly remember the snow compacted on the pavements for weeks on end.

I remember that school rarely closed, and if it did we had no idea it had until we got there because very few people had phones. We would just find the school gates locked. This would be after waiting ages for a bus, so we would turn round, wait ages for a bus home and ... well we would think nothing of it as far as I can recall.

I am almost certain this might have been the year my mum bought me a pair of these new inventions called 'tights'. Mine were Brettles royal blue, very thick and the boys at school immediately called my 'inky legs.' 

If this wasn't the year I got the tights, then I was definitely standing waiting for the bus for hours in sub-zero temperatures wearing knee length fawn socks.

Oh yes, and I remember milk frozen in the bottles on the doorstep and pushing the lid off.

And that us about all I can recall, so now I am intrigued, can you jog my memory ... what do any of you (and you'll have to be over a certain age) remember about the winter of 1963??

And while you are remembering here's a very clever little film about the railways through that winter...

Beating the Bounds.

Bear with me today, this is going somewhere and we should get to the point eventually, I promise, but I wonder if you remember a scenario a bit like this from your schooldays...

You'd be tucked up in the warmth of the Sixth Form Common Room at break time having just come out of an A Level English lesson, and in would troop a group of red-nosed, wet and dripping A Level Biologists...

'Oh what have you been up to?' we'd ask as we looked up from strumming our guitars, possibly still trying to perfect that opening twiddly bit from April Come She Will, or perhaps we had moved onto Anji by then.

'We've been making squares out of wire coat hangers and throwing them on the ground, and then we have to log every thing we can see in the square.'

'Right...lovely ...you're on your own with that one' we'd say, thanking our lucky stars that we'd opted for Arts subjects and thus stayed dry, and we'd strum on.

It wasn't all C F Dm G7 though because I had stupidly opted for A Level Geography too, so the Easter Field Trip to Bude and the Raised Beach Incident was probably looming.

This was the Geography teacher setting us the million dollar question standing with her back to the sea on the cliff edge at Bude..

'So who can name this geographical feature??'

Expecting silence she was rewarded with an entire chorus..

'It's a raised beach,' we all chimed in harmony.

The look of shock on her face at our translation of classroom learning into actual topographical identification was nothing short of profound as she moved on, shaking her head in disbelief and thus failing to notice the sign behind her (and facing us) that read ..

Raised Beach...BEWARE cliff edge unstable.

But anyway, it was the looking closely at maps and what may lie in a boundaried space that made me think of the whole coat hanger thing. Roger Deakin mentions something similar in Wildwood and it all segued nicely with an idea that had shaped up after my reading of Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways, and then The Wild Places.

We are so very fortunate here in the Shire. We can travel a short distance by car and see so much, but how well do I really know what is close to me. I walk it all the time but how much history am I missing, and Monday's post about the mine at Wheal Concord was a case in point.

So I decided last summer that I would throw a big coat hanger of a square mile around our home and look closely, very closely and see what I found.

Please do not ask me the original dimensions of the coat hanger that then became one that covered a square mile will you. It is for virtual demonstration purposes only, and in any case when I copied and then laminated the map (we are on the edge so I needed two) before carefully drawing on my dotted line square mile, Bookhound spotted instantly that I had actually gone a mile in each direction when I should only have gone half a mile. 

Then I have hardly had a minute to think about it until now.

Anyway, some latitude to my boundaries may be permitted to extend across the Parish a little further because I was delighted that my erroneous lines incorporated the Tamar, and Georgina Duchess of Bedford's carriage drive, and the Duke's stew ponds for his trout, and a bit of Endsleigh, and mines and quarries and woods and churchyards. Suddenly that A Level Geography is coming in handy... remember the exams, and the unseen bit of an Ordnance Survey map from which you had to extrapolate what the local population had eaten for breakfast (or similar) well now I am properly interested in the map and the green dotted lines and the contours and everything else.

I have a facsimile of the original Ordnance survey map too, a thing of beauty in its own way....

Beating the Bounds, as I have titled this close-to-home project, a Parish activity more traditionally reserved for Rogationtide, the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday immediately preceding Ascension Day, the fortieth day after Easter Sunday (thank you Steve Roud and The English Year) a time for the faithful to process around and give thanks for and to bless the crops, the fields and the animals.

Well I do that all the time really, so I will be beating my bounds and heading for the library to do some ferreting out of information too. Already I discover, apropos of Jude's comment on Monday about the Cornish miners heading to Australia in the 19th century, that from the bedroom window (and within my coat hanger square) we look across the fields to the location of the Devon Kapunda, a copper mine opened in 1852 and named after a much more famous one in South Australia. 

But I wonder too about your doorsteps...

Something interesting very nearby??

 

 

 

Standing and staring...

Nowhere to go, nowhere I'd rather be
than here fulfilling my daily rituals.
                                        Why would one want
to absent oneself, when one's commute

is a lonely hillside by-way, high
above the river?

From 'Doing Away' by Kathleen Jamie (The Overhaul)

There are several paths that wind around 'our' Beechwood, mostly made by us I suspect, and one leads to a small clearing on the southern edge of the wood, a natural proscenium arch framed by branches rather than curtains and raised about four feet from the field below. It always feels as if I am standing on the edge of a stage looking out and should perhaps rattle off a soliloquy, but instead of an audience, there it is, just masses of endless open space echoing back at me.

I'm hoping you will all share some 'stand and stare' moments from recent weeks too... this was most definitely one of mine.

 

Mending and making...

Well, goodness me... I needed that week.

I have revelled in going nowhere and having to do precisely not a lot, though by the miracle that is Skype and an iPad I was able to take part in the first of the Fiction Uncovered judges meetings in London. All from the comfort of my kitchen table and without the early start, the hundred mile round trip to the station (twice for Bookhound), three hours on the train, the dash across London, three hours home on the train. Sensible and easy and it worked, I may never go to London for a meeting unless I absolutely have to ever again.

In fact it had snowed too, a soft light eiderdown amount rather than a blanket, but we were iced in so I would not have got far anyway. This was our view earlier this week...

...and this year our ever present winter parliament/ murder/ congress/ conspiracy of crows, rooks, ravens, jackdaws... who knows. They are all big and black and they all seem to make the same noise.
 
Thank you once more from the bottom of my heart for all your wonderful comments, advice, suggestions, encouragement and e mails etc. I am feeling SO much better than I was a week ago. Allelulia for drugs, how on earth did people manage episodes like this before they existed...  though how anyone manages to ride a bike and win a race on steroids is a mystery to me. I could just about make it up four fields to the woods with the dog before staggering back home again to the sofa.

I will be writing much more about the woods through the year but they were looking perfectly shaped, exquisite and throughly majestic as we walked up there on Sunday afternoon... praise be whoever had the foresight to plant it however many years ago.

With so much to look forward to, and so many exciting things happening, and now with the added gift of more time in which to enjoy it all, I am genuinely and very positively over the whole work thing. I have just enjoyed my first Sunday evening without what I have always called the 'Songs of Praise Cloud'. You know, the moment that you hear the theme music and remember that it is Monday and work the next day.

All of a sudden I don't want to watch Call the Midwife either.

I was ready to stop. Someone, albeit unexpectedly stopped me, and surprisingly I don't sense a big work-shaped gap in my life. No ambitions at this stage to 'do' or take on anything new, or interesting, or worthy, or join something... we just want to welcome the Tinker to Tinker's Cott and enjoy our time with him here with us, share our lovely home and our garden and our view together.

...and I shall carry on writing dovegreyreader scribbles of course.

I must sing the praises of Bookhound this week too, and chocolate and hot water bottles, and a pile of good books... and the Hudson Bay blanket, and the right week to remember the pair of long thermal socks I had for Christmas, and to sleep (at all the wrong times, my circadian rhythms are in complete disharmony, but it matters not if I don't have to work) and to sit by a woodburning stove.

As if by magic a Retirement Kit arrived from the Knit Angel last Monday morning and it included this...

A tiny little hot water bottle in a doodle-scrumble crochet cover. Now I knitted a few of these for Christmas gifts but nothing quite to this standard, and this one cleverly lined with thermal wadding so it retains the heat for hours. It has proved endlessly fascinating, almost in a Mandala-type way... encouraging my fingers to follow the patterns and the ridges and it has been clutched to my person day and night for a week.

I have put prize-judging reading on hold for a few weeks in order to read what I want, not what I must (though I am enjoying some of the submissions very much) because reading for pleasure always has to take priority at times like this.

I have almost finished Emma and will have plenty to say about my revitalised Jane Austen encounter.

And as if by more magic a proof copy of The Last Runaway also arrived in timely fashion. This is Tracy Chevalier's new novel that she talked about at Port Eliot festival. Treats in store with this when it is published in March, I am loving it.

Oh and I almost forgot. I did do one thing... I made a cake, blame Mary and Paul and the Bake Off. Just a bog standard all-in-one Victoria sponge, left the food mixer going while I went to sort out the washing machine and forgot about it for a while. Slopped it into the tins, threw it in the fan oven (Aga hopeless for sponge in my limited experience) and out popped one of the very best cakes I have ever mustered... has to have been the steroids.

Ambrosia, food of the Gods on a cold January day and, blessed with the nectar of a forgotten jar of spiced bramble jelly found on the top shelf of the larder, it was soon disappearing...

So there we are, that's caught us up, almost back on schedule... please consider the new 'normal' service is now resumed, and how very lovely it is to be back and talking to you all again.

Are you still there??

What have I missed??

Cake...snow...hot water bottles where you are??

Or is it so hot you don't know where to put yourself??

Joys and pleasings ??

You know I can't bear to miss a thing...

 

 

 

 

 

The Wild Places ~ Robert Macfarlane

In an e mail correspondence with Robert Macfarlane last year (and how thrilled I am that he is to chair the Man Booker Prize) we joked about the fact that you might all be saying 'Oh not him again,' each time I posted about The Old Ways. I did warn Robert that there was to be more of the same now that I have finished The Wild Places, so I hope you can cope. It was one of my highlights of 2012 to meet and talk with Robert at Port Eliot Festival , a memorable conversation that I will always treasure, as I hope will those who were there to hear it on that hot summer's day in the dovegreyreader tent...

and by his own admission Robert doesn't expect to be yarn-bombed again any time soon.

But nor did I expect a book or its author to transform and re-enthuse my walking quite so radically. I have now read The Old Ways twice, and alongside it, and since that spirit-enhancing holiday in Orkney, I have
been meandering my way through The Wild Places... probably years after you have all read it, but all coinciding with a decision to do some proper job walking again through last year and into this one.

On reflection I can see that Bookhound and I had perhaps let our serious walking dwindle once the children had grown and flown, and once our dear old border collie had trotted off to round up heavenly sheep...in fact I think we missed them all. Years ago we would tramp for miles up on Dartmoor together and come home muddy and tired but happy, or we would drag thechildren off to Switzerland for summer walking holidays (sorry kids) ...

None of which seemed to put them off, perhaps the opposite because they all took to the Great Outdoors in their own ways, it becoming for each of them an intrinsic part of their lives, and we would now be hard-pushed to keep up with their pace. Gradually, and without those companions, Bookhound and I chose to do different things together leaving it all to be rediscovered again now, but in a new and different way.

Divided into chapter headings that equate to place...Beechwood, Island, Valley, Moor, Forest, River Mouth, Cape, Summit, Grave, Ridge, Holloway, Storm Beach, Saltmarsh, Tor and returning in conclusion to its starting point Beechwood, I can now see The Wild Places as a circular route that mirrors so many of the different places that many of us have probably known and walked.

To start and come back to that place we know with a different understanding has been one of the many experiences for me of reading the book, and for that place to be a Beechwood has special resonance. This is the Green Lane or Holloway, a few yards from our front door, that we scuffle up with the dogs most days to get to 'our' Beechwood. It is not exactly 'our' Beechwood, but if loving and visiting a place day in day out counts, then it is certainly 'ours' in spirit, a Wild Place we know well and through every season and I will be taking you up there every so often through this year.

But The Wild Places is also a book to take the mind back to pre-infinity and establish a sense of the vastness of time that has sculpted what I am seeing...

'Wildness... is an expression of independence from human direction, and wild land can be said to be self-willed land. Land that proceeds according to its own laws and principles, land whose habits - the growth of its trees, the movements of its creatures, the free descent of its streams through its rocks - are of its own devising and own execution.'

'Like our garden then' I now see I have cheekily scribbled in the margin.

If I could see the American hardwood forest I think I would be completely overawed at the idea that it has waited seventy million years for people to come and live in it.

I will never look at an ancient oak in the same way again knowing that they take 300 years to grow, 300 to live and another 300 to die. Nor to take lightly the scourge of the plague which decimated 30 million elm trees back in the 1960s, and the new one that may do likewsie with our ash trees right now. Robert Macfarlane gave currency, context and perspective to what I was seeing as I travelled through this book, and doubtless will see as I walk, with care and attention, my own versions of his chapter headings which will start with our Beechwood.

Robert notes a quote from a source he has long forgotten which echoes in my mind still...

'Landscape was here long before we were even dreamed. It watched us arrive.'

And I guess, being realistic without being maudlin, it will watch us depart eventually.

Off the beaten track up on Dartmoor and we come across stone circles...

and standing stones...
and you cannot fail to get that sense of a rooted and solid, yet largely unknown past.

Robert draws his own map of his Wild Places, a 'prose map' he calls it, and every reader could likewise draw their own. It is one of the merits of a book like this, a book that fires the imagination of the reader to explore their own territory with the compass set in the direction of mindful-ness (well, best use a proper one and a map too maybe)  It is the close observation and that joined-up thinking that I love, those random echoes, the memories and associations that place can ignite.

Books like The Wild Places are not for reading in a weekend and blogging about on the Monday for the sake of having something to say... not that I ever do. I have been reading it for six months, my thoughts on it are so elongated and stretched out that it is hard to rein them all back in under the banner of a single post, and I am not sure a single post does books like this any justice whatsoever.

So please accept this as an introduction to a book of permanence around here, and one I will be writing about heading by heading as I explore and consider my own Wild Places. through next year.

I am sure you all have Wild Places too...

 

 

Make your own M-Aga-lade..

Since several of you asked here it is and even if you don't have an Aga, I can't see why this wouldn't work with some amendments.

The ingredients we use are..

4lb Seville Oranges
Juice of two lemons (thank you Tinker)
8lb sugar
5 pints water

First things first, the sugar stands on the back of the Aga to warm.

The oranges and lemon juice go in a pan, cover them with the water, bring to the boil making sure the oranges are under the water (we weighted them with a plate). At this point we covered the pan and stashed it in the simmering (bottom) oven of the Aga for two hours as instructed, and took the dogs for walk.

This dog-walking isn't essential to the final outcome but it seemed like a nice thing to do on a Sunday afternoon. I think you could equally put the oranges in an ordinary oven on a low heat, or perhaps gently simmer the on a very very low heat and get the same effect. The main thing is you don't want to lose the liquid which is the prectin-rich base for your M-Aga-lade along with hot, soft squidgy oranges that are then incredibly easy to scoop out.

Extract the oranges from the liquid and then do the scooping. Put all the pith, pips etc back into the liquid leaving you with the skins.

Bring the liquid to the boil for 6 minutes or so (no, I don't why 6 exactly either) with the lid off, then strain this liquid through a sieve, mashing the pulp through with a wooden spoon until you can mash it through no more.

Then pour HALF this liquid into the preserving pan.

You will have a debate about this...

'Why bother to do this in two halves when...look... it will all fit in there easily..'.

'But we haven't added sugar yet...'

'Nah...it'll be fine..'

'No let us proceed as per Mary Berry's instructions....remember the strawberry jam/ Quick Jel debacle...'

Who could forget that. The gallons of non-setting strawberry jam at 11pm on a sweltering hot evening and the emergency addition of the Quick Jel rather than stand there stirring until the morning. And what a good thing we did listen to Mary...always listen to Mary people.

Meanwhile chop the skins into fine shreds or chunky shreds...whatever you want.

We had two large pans of equal quantity of liquid on the go and added half the shreds to each, with half the sugar to each.Bookhound took his out to the gas hob and I coaxed mine on the Aga and the race was on for the first rolling boil, the first puckering of the sample on the saucer, and the mad rush to find more jars in the shed because it made far more (14 jars) than we thought it would and very quickly too... setting in about 20 minutes. I was hovering with the pectin(oh me of little faith) which I keep in the larder all the time after the liquid strawberry fiasco.

Let the M-Aga-lade stand for ten minutes or so before pouring so that the shreds don't float to the top, and then hey presto, jar up and be very pleased with yourself for bothering.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

M-Aga-lade

O.M.D....

O-H ...

M-Y.. 

D-O-G...

Just this week I had unwisely said to a friend that at last I could knit again because Nell now ignores it. Well yes, when I am in progress, but clearly not when I leave the bag of temptation on the floor. My fault... and Someone Else's for falling asleep on watch when I was out of the room.

There was a bit of a meltdown, I was everso nice and understanding about it.

And it could have been worse, imagine a lovely set of Lantern Moon needles...

However I was on my beam ends with the wool as it was (thank you for it Cheryl, your guilt and donation of the stash is finally assuaged) and the downside is that the clever little critter had chomped up the edges too, so a lot of unravelling of short bits of wool later and it is clear that though I should have enough to finish this final sleeve of the cardigan (Noro Designer Mini Knits Pattern 1 with a bit of length added)  there will probably not be enough for the button bands and the neck. A scouring of the internet reveals not an ounce of Noro Kochoran Shade 55 to be had in the UK, so I am now looking at equivalents that might do the trick as a plain contrast. The wool needs to knit to approximately 12sts x 15rows on 6mm needles, and the nearest I can find is Rowan Cocoon, which does 14 x 16 on 7mm, in shade 813 that might just work, what do you think ...all suggestions welcome. 

And of course it may all have been revenge...

for this...

Bring me Sunshine...

The Tinker started it with the arrival of the free gift of a lemon tree last year with something or other he had ordered, and we all stared at it (including him) and said 'Yeah right,' when the leaflet promised a good crop.

So we have all watched this thing sitting on the table in his bay window and ...well I'll go to the foot of our stairs if it didn't start to grow things that looked like...limes.

And slowly (v-e-r-y slowly) the 'limes' have ripened into lemons.

This feels like no mean achievement in Devon, and we can only ascribe it to the fact that the Tinker's little apartment has a micro-climate akin to the lemon groves of California (or wherever lemons grow best) and this would have died within a week chez dovegrey.

What's the saying about when life gives you lemons make lemonade...

Well we didn't need any of that, but I nipped in to see the Tinker after Christmas and he produced two jars of homemade lemon curd from the fridge.

'I haven't tried it yet,' he said.

So we grabbed a spoon each and soon put that right, and so delicious was it I immediately plucked my three lemons and set off home to make my own. I have to say it comes to something when your soon-to-be 88 year old Dad beats you to the preserves...

'Do you want the recipe?' he asked...

I found one of my own in Mary Berry's  Aga cookbook...

4ozs of butter, 8ozs of caster sugar combined in a bowl over a pan of simmering water. Add in 3 beaten eggs (the Tinker used egg whites only, Mary uses whole eggs...my loyalties were torn and in the end it was only the absence of an egg separator that decided it) and the juice and zest of the lemons...

...and stir intermittently for about 20-30 minutes until thickened.

And hey presto, potted sunshine in January...

Oh so simple and I can't think why I have never made lemon curd before. This jar didn't stay pristine for very long, the crumpets were out of the freezer and in the oven in a flash.

I can't think of anything better to make on a dull January afternoon...except marmalade that is...will you give me a shout when the Seville oranges appear. 

 

Killerton patterns...

A tenuous connection to the Acland family of Killerton and ours did emerge in the end, and thanks to the Tinker for remembering that, many years ago (1940s) when my mum had worked for the Commercial Union Insurance Company in Exeter, she had looked after all the Acland family insurances... there I told you it was tenuous, but I feel we have done our bit to help look after this lovely house.

And as always, when I walk around places like this I keep an eye out for patterns, Killerton had plenty...

and did I mention this amazing organ in the drawing room, really every home should have one, and even a little note on it saying that if you wanted to play it just ask. 

...and then there was the secret cupboard in the library..

and the private chapel in the grounds, built in 1841 and wonderfully gothic...

and ghostly..

So much to see, even on a dark winter's evening, and all hail to Killerton for opening in the run-up to Christmas, making this all feel like a very different National Trust property as a result, and one that we felt part of. Well worth a visit if you are heading west, hit Exeter and feel like a break, just minutes off the M5 and we will certainly be going back in the summer when we can explore the grounds in daylight.

Thank you Killerton for a magical evening.

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More Christmas at Killerton...

More Christmas at Killerton...

Wandering around Killerton as darkness fell outside, and with a pianist reaching the end of a long day's playing in the drawing room to add to that magical atmosphere,

we moved through the hallway...
...past another of the many Christmas trees that graced every room, and then walked up the main staircase...

I don't always know what Bookhound thinks about when he wanders around places like this... probably worries about the number of chimneys to be swept, or how to clean the guttering, whilst me...well I just pretend I live there, and these are my stairs and someone else has to sweep them. 

Delightful things to look at upstairs, because as well as the costume displays...and this fabric was embroidered..

..we came across this wonderful doll's house peopled (mousled) with little mice, and I hope if you click on these pictures they should enlarge a little...

and with the magic of Picasa and the collage feature I think I have almost managed to recreate it. The detail was perfect... you can even see Carson in the hallway and Mrs Patmore and Daisy (Downton Mice) down in the kitchens.
Here's a close-up of that laundry, 

and of course as we wandered around the grounds searching out those Twelve Days of Christmas, we had to stop and admire the two turtle doves.

 

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Literary Christmases...

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Killerton Christmas

I'd like to be able to say 'Just look at our dining room !' but I'd be fibbing.

We had the loveliest afternoon out at Killerton House near Exeter last week. Tea in the old stables when we arrived at about 3pm, and sitting next to this we decided we could have sat there all day...

but the second-hand bookshop beckoned before we 'did' the house...

The house and grounds decked overall for the festive season and late night opening on Wednesday.

Killerton a lovely Georgian house with a lived-in feel, and built as a temporary residence in 1775 pending the construction of a grand mansion which never happened. But with spectacular grounds extending to ten square miles, and all once owned by the Acland family for generations before being given to the National Trust in 1942, it wasn't hard to imagine the house in its heyday in the 1800s. The 10th Baronet, his wife and ten children would have had an idyllic life here, the loudest noise probably the horses and carriage wheels trundling along the driveway, long before the arrival of the nearby M5 and the drone of traffic in the background now.

It also occurred to us how rarely you get to see a National Trust property at dusk on a winter's afternoon, and the atmosphere around the house and peeking in the windows was a delight, we loved it. The staff couldn't have been more welcoming, were very happy for me to take pictures, and unlike so many properties with those well-placed teazels on the chairs, there were signs around saying things like 'Feet tired? Please do take a seat here.'

Fascinating costume exhibitions upstairs and one that included a Victorian Crazy Quilt on the bed that caught my eye.

That little red dress incidentally called a Transition Dress, which I assume may have meant for a young girl entering adolescence. I can get really carried away looking at clothes and just imagining who may have worn them.

As as we wandered around the torchlit grounds at dusk seeking out the Twelve Days of Christmas, the visit all felt like a lovely quiet beginning to our very quiet mid-winter break.

Happy Boxing Day

Touching base with anyone who is reading, and greetings from the far side of the turkey, the trimmings, the pudding, the homemade crackers, Christmas cake, The Snowman and the Snowdog,(adorable) Downton (gasp) and now deeply into Boxing Day which we LOVE.

Cold cuts for lunch, tea, supper...

Fires lit...

Weather blowing a hoolie up from Cornwall...

Warnings about landslides here in Devon...

It transpires that Father Christmas does read blogs because amongst other lovely surprises I unwrapped the three books I wanted very much...

200 Fair Isle Designs by Mary Jane Muckleston

Ted and I - A Brother's Memoir (of Ted Hughes) by Gerald Hughes

At the Source by Gillian Clarke

All of which I am curled up with today.

The television has waned a little for now, just Miranda and Mrs Brown's Boys for us this evening, but there are some great programmes coming up including a two-part dramatisation of Restless by William Boyd... anything else anyone recommends to save me poring over the Radio Times??

And sadly my trip to London this Saturday, to see the matinee performance of The Dark Earth and the Light Sky at the Almeida, now abandoned due to the absence of train track and trains and flooding. So if anyone is in London, and at a loss for something brilliant to go and see at 2.30pm please do contact me, (dovegreyreader at gmail dot com) you would be very welcome to my ticket.

So how about you... any good reads in amongst the other lovely things??

The Mud Walk

Like many of you here in the UK, and probably elsewhere too, in between frosts we have been doing a very nice line in mud at the moment, and this post will be very exciting for not one...not two...but three pictures of my glovely (fit like gloves) Scarpa boots.

I don't even really feel like singing the Glorious Mud song either because it is everywhere and it's glutinous, treacly horrible stuff... muddy cat paw prints in the oddest places indoors that we didn't even know a cat could reach. So it was with a sense of some resignation that I set off with my sparkly clean walking boots, having hosed them off after the last mud-walk.

At this point I really would like to thank the woman (surely it was a woman) who invented Gore-Tex, thanks to which I can traverse just about any wet obstacle and keep my feet dry, and even hose these off and still keep my feet dry.

Anyway I set off for a tramp without Little Nell. Possibly my first walk-alone since we have had her, and it is occasionally nice to be able to look and think without worrying I hear a car and need to go through the getting-back-on-the-lead palava. I had only planned to walk to the Meths (Methodist Chapel) and back but, carried on and had a wander around the village church that we can see from our kitchen window, before finding the footpath up across more fields.

I'm happy with sheep in fields, they safely graze and usually ignore. These looked a bit Wensleydale-ish to me, but surely not in Devon...any sheep experts out there??

Anyway sheep take no notice unlike bullocks ...who do..

and don't worry I was the right side of the gate for this lot. 

It was only as I stopped in the field of sheep to take a picture of an interesting 'thing' growing on a stick...

and one of you will know what it is I feel sure...

But I suddenly sense the proximity of animals and there were the sheep racing across for a look too.

I think they might have thought I was the bearer of food so we soon sorted that out, just one Bonio in my pocket, but my only exit was possibly the muddiest gate to date...

By which time all was lost with the clean boots...

I headed up towards my favourite cattle trough and thought about it...

But decided I was more likely to lose my balance and fall in so squelched home and did the hose thing....God how I love these boots.

Interestingly the very next morning, well who would have thought it...

A deep frost, all that mud frozen solid and the most beautiful sunrise, the grey and lowering sky of the previous day consigned to a distant memory...


and suddenly I forget all about the mud and realise all over again just why we live here, and why we are so very lucky to do so as I look back down Rocky's Field to home

And yes, if you look very carefully, on that right boot...you will see where You-Know-Who (not Bookhound) has chewed my new laces.

 

 

More Nature Table reading...

As in my recent six month sojourn with The Wild Places, I realise that these books just can't be rushed.

I am currently and variously on a slow read of Wildwood by Roger Deakin, A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit and Deep Country - Five Years in the Welsh Hills by Neil Ansell...which reminds me of that poem by Christopher Logue 

To a Friend in Search of Rural Seclusion
                When all else fails,
                    Try Wales. 

So with my thoughts on The Wild Places pending, and those on the other books unlikely to appear any time soon, and with another little queue of similar-themed books in the wings, I thought I would just share the next batch with you in advance. Text is taken from blurbs and websites with some additions of my own, and yet again, you'd be delighted to find any of these under the tree in ....eeeeek... twelve days time.

A Year in the Woods ~ Colin Alford (Penguin) 

My thanks to Carol for this book which I have been saving to start reading at the beginning of a year, and to then follow it month by month through that year. Somehow I missed 2012 so 2013 it will be.

"Colin Alford spends his days lone but for the deer, the squirrels, the rabbots, the birds and the many other creatures inhabiting the woods.

From the crisp cold of January, through the promise of spring and the heat of summer, and then into the damp autumn, we accompany the forest ranger as he goes about his work - stalking in the early morning darkness, putting an injured fallow buck out of its misery, watching stoats kill a hare, observing owls, and simply being part of the outdoors."

This is the Gamekeeper's life too...the life that, as Kathleen Jamie suggests, is not all 'otters and primroses'. If he takes me out for a drive around the estate he works on I get a real feel for those realities and the hardships too. It is no easy life working with the light, from sunrise until sunset and through every conceivable weather, much of it alone... and I still marvel that from a 50% genetic inheritance that loves her bed, there comes a son who jumps out of his crib every morning as dawn breaks and without fail, and who won't return to it until he is sure all is well with his bit of the outdoors.

Wild Hares and Hummingbirds - The Natural History of an English Village ~ Stephen Moss (Vintage)

"Naturalist and author Stephen Moss lives in one of the longest villages in England - Mark, on the Somerset Levels. This watery wonderland is steeped in history: it is the land of King Arthur, where King Alfred burnt the cakes and where the last battle was fought on English soil.

This ancient country parish, dating from before the Domesday Book, has been reclaimed from the sea over many centuries. Today the landscape bears witness to its eventful past, and is criss-crossed with watery ditches and broad droves, down which livestock was once taken to market. These are now home to a rich selection of resident and visiting wildlife: rooks and roe deer; sparrows and snowdrops; buzzards, badgers and butterflies. Amongst these natural wonders are the 'wild hares and hummingbirds' of the book's title: one of our most iconic mammals, the brown hare; and a scarce and spectacular visitor, the hummingbird hawk-moth.

As the year unfolds, Stephen Moss creates an intimate account of the natural history of his parish. He witnesses the landscape as it passes from deep snow to spring blossom, through the heat haze of summer to the chill winds of autumn; from the first hazel catkins to the swallows returning from Africa; the sounds of the dawn chorus to the nocturnal mysteries of moths.

But this is not simply the story of one small corner of the West Country; it also serves as a microcosm of Britain's wider countryside. At a time of uncertainty - as our landscape and wildlife face some of the greatest changes in recorded history - it reveals the plants and animals that will adapt and thrive, and those that may struggle, and even disappear from our lives.

This is a very personal celebration of why the natural world matters to all of us, wherever we live. Wild Hares and Hummingbirds is nature-writing at its finest, expressed through the natural history of one very special place." 

Well this should be our life too. We have lived on the very edge of the Parish, three miles from the village, for eighteeen years now, but I am interested to see whether there are parallels in my perceptions of life here to that as seen be Stephen Moss.

Beechcombings - The Narrative of Trees ~ Richard Mabey (Vintage)

In 1987, the greatest English storm for three centuries laid flat fifteen million trees across southern England and devastated a nation of tree-lovers. The storm marked a turning point in our perception of trees and a dawning realisation that they have lives of their own, beyond the roles and images we press on them.

In Beechcombings Richard Mabey traces the long history of the beech tree throughout Europe, writing about the bluebells, orchids, fungi, deer and badgers associated with them, the narratives we tell about trees and the images we make of them. It is an engrossing, exciting, poetical and profound book that will stimulate debate about man's relationship with nature and enchant the reader.

With my focus on 'our' Beechwood and the walking of my own Wild Places I am hoping this will be the perfect book to graft onto (sorry couldn't resist) my reading of Roger Deakin's Wildwood.

Walking Home - Travels With a Troubadour on the Pennine Way ~ Simon Armitage.(Faber)

'In summer 2010 Simon Armitage decided to walk the Pennine Way. The challenging 256-mile route is usually approached from south to north, from Edale in the Peak District to Kirk Yetholm, the other side of the Scottish border. He resolved to tackle it the other way round: through beautiful and bleak terrain, across lonely fells and into the howling wind, he would be walking home, towards theYorkshire village where he was born.

Travelling as a 'modern troubadour' without a penny in his pocket, he stopped along the way to give poetry readings in village halls, churches, pubs and living rooms. His audiences varied from the passionate to the indifferent, and his readings were accompanied by the clacking of pool balls, the drumming of rain and the bleating of sheep.

Walking Home describes this extraordinary, yet ordinary, journey. It's a story about Britain's remote and overlooked interior - the wildness of its landscape and the generosity of the locals who sustained him on his journey. It's about facing emotional and physical challenges, and sometimes overcoming them. It's nature writing, but with people at its heart. Contemplative, moving and droll, it is a unique narrative from one of our most beloved writers.'

I am intrigued to see how a poet imparts his skills to the land of psycho-geography especially in the light of this from Simon Armitage which I chanced upon as I browsed the book...

'...when I swapped social work for poetry, part of the idea was to get out of the office and into the wider world again, to rejoin the adventure. But the sediment has built up. The stodginess of routine has set in. So even if I'm writing about the Sahara or the Antarctic I'm usually doing it in a chair, behind double glazing. The Pennine Way is about getting OUT THERE again. Its about taking the air and clearing my head.'

Winter - Five Windows on the Season ~ Adam Gopnik (Quercus)

'Winter takes us on an intimate tour of the artists, poets, composers, writers, explorers, scientists and thinkers who helped shape a new and modern idea of winter. We learn how literature heralds the arrival of the middle class; how snow science leads to existential questions of God and our place in the world; how the race to the poles marks the human drive to imprint meaning on a blank space. Offering a kaleidoscopic take on the season, Winter is a homage to an idea of a season and a journey through the modern imagination.'

I like the premise for this one, a series of lectures given by Adam Gopnik, thus pieces that retain the spontaineity of the spoken word, that are 'meant to sound vocal.' and having already made my bookmark selection as this card for its plenteous snow..

I was then really intrigued to see there is a big chunk on the art of Caspar David Friedrich in this book. It was ages before I had spotted the detail beyond the snow, I had missed the crutches, the man presumably beseeching the shrine... that gothic castle, so I clearly have much to find out. 

And if you have any more reading suggestions around similar themes please do add them in comments and perhaps we'll have ourselves another list.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lan-Downton-hydrock

Having equipped myself adequately for dog-walking in torrential downpours it's not often that I feel a bit trapped indoors by the weather, but this last week had been a bit extreme and cabin fever was setting in.

So wet that I will confess to occasionally opening the back door and hoping Nell will go out, perform and return of her own accord. Nell, in return, knows that if she just ventures around the corner of the house, out of sight, I will panic and think "Supposing she goes out onto the lane...and the one of three cars a day that go past happens to come along this minute," and end up getting togged up and doing a proper walk.

Anyway it was heaven to get out to meet a friend, who comments here as PineHillNotes. PHN lives down in Cornwall so we met halfway at Lanhydrock House, the National Trust property at Bodmin. The theme to Downton Abbey was playing on the car radio as I drove through the gates, and the news was reporting an upsurge in the number of UK trained butlers now being sought in China and Russia (and earning £150k...I may send Bookhound for a stint) which all felt spot on for this beautifully preserved Victorian pile, now very much an Edwardian preserve. The house is closed for the winter but the grounds, cafe and shop are open. 

We immediately did coffee/hot chocolate and cake, and exchanged books for wool. PineHillNotes has recently completed the Betty Mouat Cowl designed by Kate Davies and there was wool to spare, enough for another for which I paid in books...

Fans of Kate Davies will be up at dawn on Monday to order a copy of her new book of patterns, Colours of Shetland. Kate has been dripping tantalising previews of the patterns onto Twitter this week, (you can find her on Twitter here,) and I will be as interested in the essays that accompany the designs as the tempting knits. 

I have never really explored the estate at Lanhydrock so a walk round (well, hobble for me with a sprained ankle sustained in time-honoured fashion slipping off a pavement) and an inspection was in order...

Predictably stunning on a sunny Cornish day...

On the way round we stumbled upon a gem of pottery, as you do, I'll show you around there soon because it all segues well with my current read of The Potter's Hand by A.N.Wilson, a novel about the life and times of Josiah Wedgwood which I am really enjoying.

Recent storm damage much in evidence as we made our way back...

...by which time we have missed lunch and it is time for tea and crumpets. So back into the cafe which is located in the old stables, so you sit in nice little individual equine quarters and, rather than hay, make difficult decisions about whether you want jam or lemon curd to accompany.

As PineHillNotes drove west into a glorious setting sun, and I drove east with the sun gleaming in my mirror, the miles flew by as I pondered the intricacies of knitting the cowl with a puppy and a kitten in attendance, but also the blessings that are good days in the company of friends.

And apropos of no connection beyond the setting sun, we have had some corkers this week as the winter sun makes its way (left) across to its Shortest Day setting point, which will be exactly behind that woodland on December 21st, before setting back across the valley again.  
Good for the soul, sights like that. 

 

Rain - Drench for the Duchy

And so it rained and rained and rained and rained, and I'm not sure Ted Hughes would have wished to invoke this...

...having written Rain-Charm for the Duchy at the end of a long period of drought when the land was desperate for a drenching, but the Tamar is reverting to type today...

And the Tamar, roused and blinking under the fifty-mile drumming,
Declaming her legend - her rusty knights tumbling out of their
    clay vaults, her cantrevs assembling from shillets.

The Gamekeeper rang us early this morning to say the river had burst its banks and was now in full flood and we could hear that 'drumming' from home. Never a sight to miss and so we nipped down to that same spot from where I took yesterday's picture to be met by a sea where we usually expect fields...all this the land that the Gamekeeper works...

and a little tidal wave across the road from Horsebridge leading into Cornwall...

We have certainly seen the Tamar angrier than this, remembering some years ago that those railings disappeared entirely, swept away like matchsticks. A majestic sight if you can briefly seperate the vision from the reality, that for many people this may mean flooded homes and a miserable and displaced Christmas.

and the out-take...yes I did get wet...

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Noye's Fludde

I am completely convinced that we sang Noye's Fludde at school but I could be wrong, perhaps I dreamt it, however I do know for sure that we sang Captain Noah and His Floating Zoo because I have the LP to prove it...

and I am playing on it...

Actually nothing more exciting than the guitar and there is a terrible, terrible moment when I very loudly and obviously strum completely the wrong chord, and I remember doing it and cringing, so I am quite relieved in the absence of a turntable not to be able to listen to it.

Rummaging through the LP cupboard fatal. Half an hour of acute nostalging and I found Teaser and the Firecat by Cat Stevens which I suddenly and inexplicably really did want to listen to that minute...

To my surprise, (though why, given that this is me and I keep everything) when I took Captain Noah out of the cover there were the local newspaper reviews of the concert where we first performed it in amongst a varied programme that I see also included Mahler, Kodaly, Shostakovich and Haydn along with pupil compositions. We are described as 'a particularly musical institution' with the 'wheel of the girls' musical ability' spinning on 'the hub of genius of one or two individual names'...I'd go with that and I definitely wasn't one of them...

I can't somehow imagine this being written now though...

'There are not enough composing members of the fair sex. So what a nice surprise to know that three Nonsuch girls had each composed the music of  one or more of the pieces...'

The orchestra came in for a bit of flak though...

'...not all were up to scratch, the foundations were sound enough and quite enjoyable renderings were given... plenty of 'pep' but a little lacking in colour and contrast.'

Things were apparently 'pleasingly sung', and someone's solo voice was 'sweet', and there was some 'exceptionally attractive part singing by seven young ladies.'

1972 and there we were all on the brink of taking such...dare I say slightly patronising sexist praise out into the world and stirring things up a little perhaps. 

Anyway, talking of Noye's Fludde, which we may or may not have sung at some time, what reminded me was that we could have made good use of an ark this week, and I do hope all those here in the UK have remained damage and flood-free, especially on Thursday. The day was so dreadful that Nell and I wimped out and cancelled a much-anticipated meet-up and walk with a friend at Lanhydrock House down at Bodmin for fear of falling trees en route and floods. Bookhound went off to help the Gamekeeper with his shoot (which is never cancelled) and Nell and I hunkered down in the kitchen for the day.

Magnus, in contrast took himself off out for some of the action and reappeared a few hours later looking ...well, like a drowned cat, before drying out and taking up his station with Rocky.

Remember this tiny stray scrap found out on the lane just five months ago, a fur-covered ribcage with a pipe cleaner on each corner,  and we were not in the least bit certain he would make it??

Nell meanwhile is bursting out of the puppy-sized bed fondly known as Base Camp and which is actually one we use for cats out in the shed.
She wriggled and jiggled and just couldn't get comfortable, eventually falling asleep like this...

The weather raged on outside and the electricity flickered and then died, and she and I sat there like lemons in the gloaming for half an hour before thinking perhaps it was only us and our famously hyper-sensitive trip switch, which of course it was.

A day of respite on Friday, clear skies and a chance to assess the damage... just a roof panel off the kennel, bit of downpipe absent without leave, nothing major thank goodness. Further across the Shire things are much worse and the West Country currently cut off by train from Taunton down, with lines washed away. We nipped out to get some essentials before the next storm heads our way over the weekend, and stopped off at Pets-R-Us, or whatever it is called, for a bigger dog bed which we quietly substituted only to be faced with this perverse but demonstrative protest of an even smaller cat basket variety.

The cats are now sleeping in the dog bed which they think is lovely, the dog is happiest in the cat bed and it's a mess that they will have sort out between themselves 

The lane was awash...

and the Tamar was audible from home, and no surprise when we went to look...

As I walked out with Nell at dusk I could hear the river roaring in the near distance. The field felt saturated and boggy to its limits, soft and spongy underfoot, and even the rising moon looked wet... a pale, watery imitation of the bright clear moon we have become used to in recent weeks.

We brace for more this weekend, so how's the weather your way??

If someone could report on sun and warmth that would be nice... stay safe and dry everyone else.

 

Nell meets ...Dartmoor

Hard to believe that Little Nell once looked like this...

but now just four months on and a lot of hard work later looks like this...

Right, so this puppy thing is almost exactly like having a baby... bar the giving birth obviously.. and the choosing her from a litter in a garden shed... and putting her out in the kennel for an hour or so when we all need a rest (her as much as us) 

But the mess around the house, the bag of toys, the teething, the house-training, the disappearing 'spare time' and the 'having to think about something else' have all taken some getting used to given it is thirty five years since we have had a house puppy etc. 

However we are making grand progress with it all including now Dartmoor. just a few miles away from us here.

There is nothing better than Dartmoor with a dog.

Well, no actually Dartmoor with children is fun too, and ours were raised on it. Snowsuits and boots on at 6am if they were all awake and raring to start the day and Bookhound would take them up there with their breakfast for an 'adventure'  .. while I turned over and went back to sleep.

And a wonderful place to meet up with friends and children years ago and let them all run off steam. One memorable day up on Pewtor with a friend and her children who lived in a cottage just below. Their water supply came from the tor and we happily picnicked and let the chidren romp about in the leat while we chatted our way through a glorious summer's afternoon. When her water ran dry that night, and she walked back up to the top to investigate, there was a beautifully constructed but child-like dam.

For a start the views from Dartmoor are predictably stunning... this is a camera zoom towards Brentor from the top of White Tor (if you click on the picture it should also display as a larger size)

...and you generally have the place to yourself, vast acres of it, especially in November, this the view across to Roos and Staple Tor from White Tor on Remembrance Day last Sunday.

But Dartmoor with a dog can actually be very stressful.

All that wide open space and of course our first-born dog Ben, a handsome and very intelligent Border Collie, who we bought at six weeks old from a farm up on the moors, would spot a sheep ten miles away and be off across the horizon to round them up with us in mad pursuit. He had a wall-eye (one blue, one brown) which apparently makes for excellent sheep fixing, and frankly we should never have let him watch One Man and His Dog, because then you have to do all the 'getting cross' when you finally catch them for doing something that is instinctive, and seemed alright for Meg and Shep on the TV. You feel a bit bad trying to reverse their genes and hope no farmer has your precious puppy in his gun sights...well within his rights. Ben learned it all eventually but it took time.

Nell, a Sprocker (Cocker/Springer blend) has entirely different instincts and just likes to run with her nose along the ground and sniff things, and best of all to stay close. This all makes her a dream to take up on the moors and so we have started some serious Dartmoor walking again. Boots, rucksacks, waterproofs, map, compass, the lot. Nell is bagging Tors right left and centre (and we do have to go to one called Baggator) including Great Mis Tor which at 1765 feet is our highest so far. 

It was windy up top but seemed to display her ears to best effect..

Bookhound's years of experience in the Dartmoor Rescue Group are useful as well as comforting. He generally knows where we are, in which direction we are walking and what that Tor 'over there' is called, where the nearest pub lunch can be found, as well as what to do in an emergency.

So we are reacquainting ourselves with all our 'old ways' as well as discovering some new paths, and of course we will be taking you all along too.

Looking at that picture of Ben again I feel and remember all those seventeen years of faithful hound that we shared with him, but Nell is shaping up that way in our affections too, and I think you can see the ears are coming along very nicely.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Milton Abbot Village Play... No Sex Please We're British

Eye-wateringly hilarious every year, and 2012 will be no exception as the Milton Abbot Players players turn their talents to No Sex Please, We're British by Anthony Marriot and Alistair Foot. Yes, it's time for the annual village play.

First night tonight of the four night run, a play staged in the village hall every November since 1928. Traditionally staged in November so that the farmers would be finished with harvest and able to rehearse, and in the post war days the Players even used to tour their production around the local villages. Sets were packed onto the back of tractors and trailers and transported to various venues such as Launceston Town Hall, Tavistock, Lamerton, at Broadwoodwidger in a marquee, Chillaton Hall and Luckett.

I first saw No Sex Please We're British in London back in 1972, in the days when the London theatres would ring up the Nurses' Home and offer free tickets to any of us who wanted to turn up at the Box Office. We watched this one from the posh seats and I remember thoroughly enjoying a free night out, though not a lot about the plot...

Peter and Francis Hunter have a nice flat above Peter’s bank.
However due to an unfortunate mistake by Francis they find themselves inundated with pornographic materiel from the Scandinavian Import Company.  Hilarious problems ensue, brought to a head by the arrival of two girls from the company, to provide their own special services!

So last year Bookhound did the props with Jim the Postie and this year likewise, but Bookhound and I were also asked to take on the added and very responsible duty of Box Office. We have taken over from the couple who have been doing it since forever who decided it needed 'young' blood.

*Ahem*

Anyway we have taken phone bookings for over 400 tickets, allocating them to preferred seats on preferred night of four on big seating plans, tickets (except there aren't any 'actual' tickets) to be collected and paid for on the door each night ...I mean, what can possibly go wrong??

'Hello...is that the number for No Sex Please We're British??'

'Er... yes, yes it is, how may we help??'

'Well you know I rang two days ago and wanted four seats in Row D...well can I change that now for six seats a bit further back??'

Then a few days later...

'You know those six tickets I booked...well can I make it five now.'

And we take the eraser to the chart and update the list and have had lovely chats with everyone who has phoned, and while we've been on the phone Nell has taken full advantage and chewed something she shouldn't and I just hope I have remembered to turn the phone off before I yell at her, ask her nicely not to. I will probably have a torch and show people to their seats each evening, and rip the corner off the tickets and sell ice creams at half time and things like that.

The phone has (thankfully) been ringing non-stop and the four nights of the play are almost a sell-out,(though tonight you could pitch up at the door, there are tickets available...£5 each) but so funny how everyone knows the minute we sit down for supper, or lunch or Downton, or fall asleep on the sofa with the dog and then all jump up with a start.

Bookhound meanwhile has been tearing his hair out sourcing a small desk, a metal waste-bin, smoke that won't choke the audience and require emergency evacuation of the village hall, plus various other unmentionable sundries, and many thanks to Tavistock Area Support Services for the loan of four large boxes of sex manuals from their book sale stock... well actually hundreds of faux-leather-bound (very wrong words considering...) copies of the Reader's Digest, but hopefully everyone will be too busy laughing to notice that.

 

Buckfast Abbey

Towards the end of our day Barbara and I headed across from Dartington to nearby Buckfast Abbey. I have been there many times but have never visited the Abbey, or the chapel with its glorious stained glass, without hordes of people milling around and services and personal devotion in progress...it is what it is for after all, so to visit towards the end of a wet and drizzly day, as the place was about to close, proved to be a good move.

The Blessed Sacrament Chapel was empty so for the first time ever I felt able to take photographs..

Stunning isn't it, and even on a dull day, which this was, the light refracts through the glass beautifully, radiating a sense of well-deserved and very well-received glory. All made by the monks at Buckfast, and for the first time I was also able to see it in close up.

I was fascinated to read this about the construction of the windows...

In 1968 Dom Charles completed his most striking embellishment of the church ­ the huge east window in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel. This employs the technique known as dalles-de-verre in which ‘tiles’ of coloured glass are chipped into shape and laid, mosaic-fashion, in a matrix of resin. 

So, that is what I had always seen from a distance ...large chunky pieces of thick glass, chiselled and bevelled into shape, and then held together with resin rather than lead, creating a structure with the supporting strength of a wall.

It all reminded me of my dazzlingly bright Kaffe Fassett quilting project currently in progress at home.

Clearly the monks of Buckfast are the Kaffe Fassetts of the Benedictine world.

Day out at Dartington with Milady from her Boudoir

I had a wonderful day last week meeting up with friend Barbara during her annual trip to Devon. Barbara now blogs about her literary travels at Milady's Boudoir which all saves me the bother of leaving my armchair.

Once we had conversationally de-oxygenated all available air in the Cranks Restaurant in the Cider Press Centre at Dartington (coffee...lunch...about three hours-worth) we walked up to see the recently opened National Trust property on the Dartington Esate, High Cross House.

Designed by the architect William Lescaze in 1932, I now realise that all those Primary Care Trust meetings held in the Lescaze offices about a mile away in Dartington village actually saw me seated somewhere historic and apparently architecturally important. In fact we used to hate going there, the 1930s building seemed depressingly bleak and characterless.

High Cross House was commissioned by Leonard Elmhirst and built for the then headmaster at Dartington Hall School, William Curry. Modernist and minimalist would sum it up, and not entirely to my taste would sadly also be accurate.

But it was only when I thought about it, and as I looked at the building from the outside that I realised why.

It reminded me of school.

Not that I went to Dartington Hall School, but my primary school of the 1950s must have been built at around the same time and I couldn't get the feel of an institution out of my mind as we walked round...the metal window frames and the sense of space. I am clearly an architectural philistine and plenty of you will see much to admire here I feel sure, and the books on view will give you an indication of predominant themes and style at play here.

Spotting these chairs didn't help either..how many hours did we spend sitting on or stacking these back in the 1950s??

The other problem with modernist and minimalist is...well there isn't really much to look at is there, and whilst I know that is the whole point, and this is about looking differently and in a wholly undistracted way, and though there were some modern art displays around the house, it still felt sparse if not a little bleak.

I wonder what you all feel about places like this??

What am I missing here, what should I be admiring??

There were however a few glimmers which more than made up for the entrance charge, namely this chair which I want and why can't someone start making them like this again...

or like this...

and as we wandered around some beautiful piano music filtered into every round and square corner of the house...

From High Cross House we walked on through the grounds of Dartington Hall where the trees were putting on their best display of colour.

And more colour was what we needed as well as tea, so we headed off to see the stained glass and sample the delights at nearby Buckfast Abbey, more about that soon and you can read Barbara's much more informative account of our visit here.

 

The Puppy's Rules of Possession

Predictably for a Sprocker Little Nell has boundless energy and is now proving to be wonderful company on our walks around the fields and, off the lead for most of the time unless we are on the lane, she never strays far from our side. We had almost forgotten the joy of a puppy that is not being trained to work and though she is taking up hours and hours of time she is giving us a huge amount of pleasure, as well as limited wardrobe options...it is never worth wearing anything remotely smart at the moment.

These rules of possession are actually those of the toddler, and always cause much mirth and head nodding in the health visitor workplace, but it occurred to me that with a bit of tweaking they currently also apply to a five month-old puppy, probably a toddler already in dog years.

The toddler's puppy's rules of possession:

1. If I like it, it's mine.
2. If it's in my hand paw it's mine.
3. If I can take it from you, it's mine.
4. If I had it a little while ago, it's mine.
5. If it's mine, it must never appear to be yours in any way.
6. If I'm doing or building chewing something, all the pieces are mine.
7. If it looks just like mine, it is mine.
8. If I saw it first, it's mine.
9. If you are playing with something using something and you put it down, it automatically becomes mine.
10. If it's broken, it's yours.
11. If it's broken, but you are having fun playing with the pieces, it's mine again.
12. If there is ANY doubt, it's mine.

The one that we always add to the toddler list for added amusement is 

13. If it's broccoli it's yours.

I would change that very slightly because there is nothing this puppy won't eat so...

14. If it's dead it's mine....and just you try and get it off me.

Currently everything must still be chewed to within an inch of existence, and Nell's most favoured item??

The equivalant of the puppy's treasure basket... a pair of Bookhound's very old work trousers that she took a shine to whilst his legs were still in them. Eventually she had gnawed her way through and around half a leg so he surrendered them to their fate, and these are now known as the Teething Trews

Biscuits hidden inside the velcroed pockets, close them and fling the trousers her way.

Guaranteed hours of peace and quiet as she figures it out..

Barks at the trousers...

Chews the trousers...

Gets very cross with the trousers...

Chews the trousers...

Makes friends with the trousers again...

Chews the trousers...

Throws the trousers around the kitchen...

Watches the trousers carefully in case they move...

Kills the trousers... until eventually out pops a biscuit onto the floor and we all cheer.

And it starts all over again as she looks for the next one.

Pet shops should sell these....I really should take this to the Dragons Den