Turbines, nightjars and forty per cent of the time

[Photo: View of the shingle bank along Mill Drift. Credit: Merlin Turville-Petre]

One night, nearly fifteen years ago, when G had become really sick, I was sitting by her bed upstairs in the cottage at Salthouse. She had already retreated into a sensory world, and she was stroking a stone with her thumbs and staring unseeing at something brilliant and noisy on the telly to do with the Olympics.

The cottage is on the coast road, and on that moonlit night I could see straight out across the saltmarsh to the shingle bank that has been there – in some form or other – since it was thrown up by the last retreating glacier. The shingle bank meant that from the cottage you couldn’t see the sea.

While G loved this coast, for some people it was too quiet. Land meeting sea meeting sky with a murmur, not a bang. ‘Sounds easy, looks simple, only consisting/of stones, water and air – three horizontal/bands of pale element, and just the gentle/wash of the North Sea in the English morning’ (from Salthouse Beach, a poem by Sebastian Eden).

Now though, looking north, the view is interrupted. G didn’t stick around to see the Sheringham Shoal Offshore Wind Farm, eleven miles out to sea. I wonder what she’d have thought of it. Eighty-eight wind turbines that play tricks with your mind. Under brooding cloud, a menacing Wellsian army; on a clear sunny day, pin-sharp and jaunty, just another of the anodyne beach hut-wind break-sailboat complex of holiday home screen prints; on a misty evening, vague and dreamy, beautiful even; at night, a horizontal band of red lights, blinking a code that I can’t fathom.

The Sheringham Shoal website says that ‘the turbines are visible from the shore approximately 60% of the time, depending on the weather.’ I can’t fathom this either. Is that sixty percent of daylight hours? Sixty percent of twenty-four hours? Is that averaged out over a week, a month, a year? As the seas rise due to climate heating will we see the wind farm more or less? As the weather gets wilder, will we see more clearly more often? Maybe. Metaphorically, at least.

One day in May this year I was on the shingle bank again. Fishermen had pitched small tents at regular intervals along the beach, their bright colours smeared pastel by the sea spray. I was remembering G, soothed by the stone, sea, sky combo and the rhythm of the waves.  It was forty per cent time, the turbines obscured by haze, so I didn’t have to deal with the visceral reaction the windfarm always gives me. Didn’t have to think about what it means, whether it’s good or bad, whether I’m doing enough or not doing enough, whether technology can keep the sea at bay, whether – as a grandmother now and aware of the human catastrophe ahead – I even dare imagine that the floods might serve the planet well, just like in the Noah legend, kick us all out, now and forever, amen.

We wandered back under the big sky along the old track, reed-filled ditches either side of us trickling with warblers’ song, waders in the salt lagoons, bubbling calls of oystercatchers, the shadow of the marsh harrier on the hunt. The village sprawled ahead along the coast road, Salthouse Heath up on the ridge, St Nicholas’ church on the hill between them.

View towards Salthouse Heath across the saltmarsh

St Nicholas’ is late perpendicular, built by 15^th century merchant wealth when Salthouse was part of a great port, reached by a creek that led from the harbour at Blakeney. The creek silted up and the trade went and the people with it, but the church remains, austere, serene, full of natural light. That evening there was a concert, three of Bach’s six cello suites, the music spinning order out of chaos, a refuge from apocalyptic thoughts. The cellist was still playing when the sun set at two minutes to nine, just as it was supposed to, and from the dim nave the huge east window was still bright and we watched the shadow play of swifts, rushing and screaming against the sky.

After the concert we went at a good clip up to the heath, trying to outrun the dusk that would fall at twenty to ten. I was thinking about the swifts, thinking whatever heights human creativity can reach – the church, the score, the performance – the natural world effortlessly reaches higher. There’s beauty and then there’s the sublime. We got both.

Salthouse Heath is a mosaic of acid grassland and dry heath, with scrub of gorse and sycamore, bounded by blackthorn. It has meant a lot for a long time – more than forty Bronze Age burial mounds are scattered across it. The air was warm and still, and there were other people up there, talking in hushed tones, stopping and listening in the silky twilight, waiting for the nightjars.

 The birds return annually to breed before leaving for their wintering grounds in southern Africa. They’re here from late April until August, forty per cent of the year. The low electric churring of the males started in one place and then another and another, their song shifting from light to dark and back again, each individual with a unique pulsing pattern that can carry for half a mile. There’s no sound like it, not crickets, not frogs, and it drills into you, insistent, disorientating, transporting. God, I was on tiptoes I was so excited. We started to see them on the wing, their flight calls – blunt whistles – helping us locate them between the trees as they hunted for insects, their hawk-like silhouettes tracing arcs against the soft sky in another thrilling shadow-play. And sometimes there was the strange territorial clapping of wings, like paper bags being snapped open.

Eventually we let go, bouncing along the ridge, exhilarated by what we’d shared, and turned towards the village and the sea. Nine thousand years ago you’d have had to travel many miles further to get to the shoreline, which was more than fifty metres lower than it is now.  You’d have made your way over steppe, expansive grassland with a scattering of trees, cut through by lakes and rivers. Rich hunting grounds. By six thousand years ago, swollen by the melting glaciers, the sea had drowned Doggerland.

And it keeps on coming. The shingle bank is advancing towards the village by three quarters of a metre each year and the sea-level will rise by as much as half a metre by 2050. Fifteen years ago, the government had already changed policy, transitioning from the Knut-like fight against the tide to ‘supporting communities on the coastline to adapt to and manage the risks of climate change’, as Defra delicately puts it.  

As we skipped down the hill, a line of red lights blinked along the horizon. Sixty per cent of the time, you have to bottle up your joy and face facts.

When I was sitting there with G in her bedroom, staring out over the saltmarsh, a sudden movement caught my eye. The flood warden had been along earlier, but it still took a while to make sense of what I was seeing. Caught in the act by the moonlight, the sea coming quietly, purposefully over the shingle bank.

In hopeful moments, I can imagine a good future. The grazed marsh reverting to a teeming tidal saltmarsh, more carbon sequestered, a greater buffer zone against the flood, the nightjars and nightingales returning in hordes, spilling out beyond the heath down towards the village.

Forty per cent of the time, you’ll find me chasing beauty and wildness and glimpses of the sublime.

First published on Caught by the River, as part of Shadows and Reflections 2022-23

• Seb Eden’s poem is published in Salthouse: The Story of a Norfolk Village, FN Stagg, Val Fiddian.
• For Steve Harris’s fascinating account of Salthouse, visit http://www.salthousehistory.co.uk
• Orlando Jopling’s cello pilgrimage http://www.cellopilgrimage.blogspot.com

Short fiction: Me and Heston walk all night

“tensely constructed and authentically rendered”
Carly Holmes, Editor TLR Issue 12

The Lampeter Review Issue 12 September 2015, editor Carly Holmes

One harsh winter I worked at night and weekends as a volunteer in cold weather shelters, set up by St James’ Piccadilly and St Martin-in-the-Fields to try to support the hundreds of people sleeping rough in Central London, in places like the notorious cardboard city on the South Bank. Most of the people I met were from the UK – mostly male ranging upwards in age from late teens. It was difficult to tell how old the older people were – living on the street and the things that go with it accelerate ageing processes and a recent study by Crisis showed that people who live on the streets die an average of 30 years before the general population.

The Lampeter Review published my short story, ‘Me and Heston walk all night,’ in Issue 12, September 2015. It’s based on what I learned in the shelters.

*****************************************************************************

Me and Heston walk all night

As soon as I turned the corner, I knew something wasn’t right. The people bunched together at the hostel entrance looked weird, jumpy under the orange street lamp. Not what Morris would’ve called ‘the usual argie bargie’, if he’d sodding well been there. But silent. Cigarette smoke and clouds of stinking breath and stinking heat hung around their heads. I couldn’t figure it out. Was it the cold?

And then I saw them. Slosh and Taffy, in the middle of it all, heads down, trying not to draw attention. They’ve been banned from every hostel in central London but it never stopped them trying. On a night like this the management might just let them in. Might have to.

We’d gone over to Camden for a bed. The Professor had been by, said it was going to be the coldest night so far, that we’d be – get this – ‘well advised to seek alternative arrangements’.  The Professor cracks me up, what he comes out with. Calls me ‘old bean’. Little bloke, sharp as anything in his sandy coat and his hat. You’d never have him down as one of us unless you got close enough to catch a nose full of him.  Clever too. He’ll tell anyone who’ll listen about the papers in his briefcase.  His seventy-nine-stage plan for a new economic order. (I said, why seventy-nine and not eighty? Might as well round it up mate. But he stuck to his guns. And what do I know? Not even old enough to vote). The Professor had a job for years, had a house and everything. He could have had a wife, for all I know.  Some things you don’t ask. First rule of the streets: don’t ask. Second rule: it’s hard, because it’s hard. Third rule. Third? You’re joking, aren’t you?

So we left the tunnel and went over to Camden for a bed.  When I first got to London the tunnels weren’t so bad. In the autumn, the concrete sucks in the day’s heat and lets it out slowly over night. Warm concrete against your back. It’s nice in the evening, when you’ve been about all day. Nicer at four in the morning when the hot day rolls over and the cold butts in.

The storage heaters in the Home, they were the same, same principle. Morris explained it to me, one of the nights when he was trying to bring me down – one of those long nights. The bricks get heated up and then let go of it, convection or thermal radiation or, I don’t know, can’t remember. Morris was good at that stuff. If I’d had him for school as well, like a teacher, not just a care worker, I might have done okay. But it was a job for him at the end of the day, just a job.  That’s what the counsellor said, after the inquest.

So me and Heston went on over to Camden.  Last time, one of the helpers took Heston for the night, so the management could let me in. I thought I could maybe pull it off for him again, five star accommodation in a stranger’s porch, leftovers, maybe his very own tin of dog food. He seemed to know it too, had a bit of a spring in his step, almost convinced me he wasn’t interested in the bins, wasn’t straining for every single bin we passed. I’ll forgive him the minor detour round the back of Cally Road Tesco.  He’s not called Heston for nothing.  After that baldy tv chef who cooks like a scientist. Morris and me never missed a show. Anyhow, this Heston also has a scientific approach to food. He can find nutrition in a fag packet. Being a dog, he can’t use a blow torch, but he’ll wolf down a combination of past-their-sell-by ready meals you’d never dream of. And never bring them up again.  Gutting, seeing as how I can’t keep anything down.

Round the back of St Pancras, Mad Mary came at us like a bat out of the dark, skin and bones and those see-through blue eyes drinkers get. Before I could whistle, she had me in a headlock, nails in my scalp and she was on at me, ‘oh my own, my baby, come back to me, cruel, cruel, your own mother.’ And Heston was barking, doing his manic pogo stick act around us and people were looking. So I started back, ‘you gave me away, how could you, how could you, my own mother’. And it worked again. She let me go, stood there like she’d been hit over the head and let us get on. Team Heston three, Mad Mary zero.

We got off the High Street, zig-zagging through Miller Street, Arlington Road, Delancey Street and I could almost taste the soup, had the heat and salt already on my tongue, could almost feel the hot water and soap on my hands, round my poor arse. And there they were. Slosh and Taffy.

What a bastard choice. That’s what Morris would say if he was there. But he wasn’t.

A night on the streets, long cold hell.  Or a night in the hostel, hot food, hot water and knowing that those psychos are coming for you.

I don’t know why they’ve got it in for me. They were the first ones I met.  So green, I didn’t spot they were junkies.  All right, so their teeth were falling out and they were a bit wired, but they seemed ok, gave me a bottle of orange squash they’d just jacked from some French school kids. But after a bit, you get it.  The only thing that keeps them going is the next hit. They’d sell their mothers for gear.

The main problem is Heston.  That old boy at Norwich Bus Station, he was bang on. His advice for anyone going up to London? Get a dog. Company, warmth and coinage.  The punters can’t resist a mutt. So a good one’s worth a lot. I got Heston as soon as I got off the bus at Victoria.  This bloke, John I think, took my sleeping bag in exchange. Poor sod, didn’t know what day it was, cried when he said goodbye.

Slosh and Taffy wanted Heston, soon as they set eyes on him. They knew they wouldn’t get him off me. But they never let up, offering me money, gear, food, even sex. Then, one day, me and Taffy had pulled a mattress out of a skip and dragged it into our favourite spot for a doze, and Heston was jerkily asleep, chasing rabbits.  Before I knew it Slosh was there, a knife at my neck. He was shaking and the spit was bubbling at the corner of his yellow mouth and his pupils were massive in his big bony head on his sticky little body. He was going to kill me to get Heston. I could see the knife out of the corner of my eye and I was thinking, Morris, why did you leave me? And then I was thinking, at last, it’s over. And then, no. No, what about Heston? And then a bunch of lads came pushing and shoving into the alley for a piss and Slosh and Taffy scarpered. Me and Heston ran too, the other way.

And here we are again, running the other way, running away from the soup and water and bed and the steamy comfort of dirty, damp bodies drying out.  London’s big, bigger than you could ever imagine. But it’s hard to hide. Me and Heston have got good at it, these weeks.  Always take the long way round. Steer clear of the shelters and the soup kitchens. Talk to no-one. Slosh and Taffy work the trains out of Waterloo, so we stay up east. Just our luck we chose the same hostel.  By the time we get to any of the others, they’ll be full.

But this night I’m scared. The cold is like an iron clamp. My coat never dried out from the rain and my joints feel massive, knobbly, my shoulder blades cold and sharp, like they’re going to sprout wings.  That would be something, wouldn’t it Heston? Flying? Because we’ve got to keep moving all night, never stop, if you stop, you die. First you hurt all over and then you get sleepy and then you die.

So we walk. It follows a pattern, I’ve noticed. I start off trying to map it out in my head, make a kind of plan of where we’ll go. Let’s go to Paddington, say, then Edgware Road, follow the Westway out to the Grove, work along the restaurants – they like a dog there – swing back down through Marylebone to Soho.  I map it out, for the hell of it. Then I try being Heston for a bit. In my mind he’s a cross between a geezer and a copper. He says things like ‘Orl righty then, what have we here?’ and ‘phwoar, lamppost, Iet me atcha, let me Hoover you up wiv me nose’, and ‘dum dee dum, just trotting over to the skip why don’t I?’ It can go on for hours.

And later, when I can’t hold him off any longer, I think about Morris.  Why did he do it? Why’d he top himself? The counsellor said it was nothing to do with me, like there was nothing I could have done to stop him. But I think back, over and over. All the grief I gave him, all the shouting, all the shitty things I said to him. The punches. How he sucked it all up.  Took it away from me. Tried to explain everything. That can’t be good for you, can it? Taking it all on yourself. Taking on a fuck-up like me. He always said, no problem, mate. He always said, no problem, one day at a time, mate. Did I make him do it? Did he kill himself because?

And on and on, going on and on. Was it when I said? Was it when I did? And my head gets jammed and I can’t think and I can’t think and I can’t think and then it’s just me and Heston, walking, and heat from the ducts and the cold wind through the alleys and the light, dark, light, dark from the shops and the caffs and the wheeze of the buses and the growl of the taxis, walking and walking and the cold is killing my bones.

***

Can’t believe it’s morning. Fuck right off, day, back to where you came from. Someone’s gone and shoved grit in my eyes and then stitched my eyelids together with binder twine and a three-inch needle.  And while they were at it they slammed my joints with polystyrene, banged tar into my blood, changed my bones for twigs, my muscles for cat gut. Through these slits-for-eyes I can see it.  That sick yellow death light bending round the edges of the cardboard, bulging through the holes in the blanket over my head.  It’s a half-light, won’t get any brighter than this down here.

I’d burrow deeper under the blankets, under the cardboard, excepting that I’m frozen stiff. Can’t bend, can’t flex. On the upside, can’t smell either, can’t smell these shitty rags. Heston pushes his nose into my balls.  Thank god for you Heston, my private central heating system.

My tongue’s swollen and coated with slime, my nose is crusty and I’m so thirsty. You get so thirsty when you know there’s nothing clean to drink. Psychosomatic. There, see, I do remember something. Morris reckoned the rashes and the panic attacks were psychosomatic.  Didn’t mean they weren’t real, just that pills weren’t going to sort them out.  One day at a time, he said. I’ve been okay, in the main, since I’ve been down here. Not even the backs of my ears and behind my knees are bleeding now.

If I get my hands out my armpits and get a good hold of Heston, I stand a chance of coming back to life. Cold doesn’t touch him. Heston, you beast, how long’s it been?  February now so it’s five months. Company, warmth and coinage.  The punters can’t resist a mutt.

What’s that for? Don’t you growl at me, you. Come here, you know it’s not about the money. What’s up fella? Oh, what is up? Someone coming? Not again, please let them leave me alone, let them leave me. Push my face into Heston’s side, vibrating with his growl, stop breathing, play dead. A dead lump of nothing under a pile of rags and cardboard. Pass by, whoever you are, just pass by.

And they do.  Nothing happens. Footsteps get louder, crack just by my temple, and then go off, away to the left. Really? Yes, really. Breathe. Things are looking up. Heston, you ugly bag of bones, today could be better.

Creative common: wandering on Hounslow Heath

Written after a year of the Covid-19 pandemic.

It has always appealed to me, the idea of staying put, really getting to know the detail of my immediate surroundings. So when the pandemic came, and lockdown, and I had to ditch the two hour daily commute, and work (oh god, how I worked) in my garden shed, suddenly it seemed possible. I got Steven Falk’s extraordinary Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland, downloaded the iRecord Butterflies app, let my three square yards of grass grow long, and waited for the plantings of the previous autumn to flower.

And the insects came. I observed and recorded, puzzled and googled. Hairy-footed flower bees on the lungwort, ashy mining bee on the smoke tree, brimstone and holly blue and speckled wood flitting through.  

But who was I kidding? After a few weeks I had cabin fever.  All this detail was entrancing and fascinating, glimpses of the fleeting lives of insects, their paths crossing as the season unfolded, but my brain needed a bit of space.

I got out the Ordnance Survey map and spread it on the table. Though you might think there wouldn’t be much call for a map in the relentless suburbia of south-west London, I often pour over the patterns (I like the 1930s developments, with their cul-de-sacs and crescents) and the intersections of roads, and the great Thames serpent, and the pretty graphic rendering of the royal parks.

A map makes sense of the world. Order, control, reassurance.

But in the face of this ghastly grinding multi-vehicle pile-up of politics, pandemic and environmental apocalypse, I needed an escape from the information overload. I was drawn back again and again to the blank space between the roads, a place that the Ordnance Survey map hadn’t coloured in.

Hounslow Heath, inscrutable.

The walk there takes me along a stretch of the River Crane that, by contrast, wears its history on its sleeve. From the thirteenth century for six hundred years, these few miles of river were altered to power a series of industrial mills, making dye and calico, snuff and gunpowder and swords. Now, the valley holds big horse chestnuts, mighty (still healthy) ashes, willows draping their limbs casually into the water like Impressionist ladies in punts, white poplar with their cheesegrater bark and a scrappy understorey of wild cherry and elder. The muddy paths crisscross the steep earthworks of the old industrial complexes and the woodpeckers drum away in the crowns. In spite of all the people (and the dogs, so many dogs!) you can still spot the kestrel and the nuthatch, the kingfisher like a lit fuse shooting over the water or the corvids massing for the return to their roost.

Further upstream, the paths get vaguer, and the crowds thin. The hogging and stacks of concrete sleepers and colonies of buddleia hint at the huge marshalling yards, built after the Great War, where freight wagons were sorted and sent on the next stage of their journey. The long unlit tunnel that you have to pass through to get under the Waterloo-Reading line is disturbing in its darkness and dereliction, and the steel fencing along the embankment is vicious.  Then you’re out in the open again, following a stretch of shallow, fast flowing river, where there are roach and stickleback and even pike, and vibrant green tresses of water crowfoot billowing in the current.

Cross the river here and you leave the lush riparian woodland behind you as you reach the Heath. This is disorientating in itself, climbing up out of the river valley onto two hundred acres of scrubby flatness. Inscrutable on the map, indecipherable when you get there. It’s easy to get lost. Except for a couple of tower blocks on the southern perimeter, the Heath has no prospects. You can’t see to the end of it.

In fact it’s now around sixty feet above sea level, an ancient terrace of the Thames made from a bed of Taplow Gravel on a slab of London clay. Removal of trees on the ‘Warren of Staines’ over the centuries created the heathland habitat. Forest clearance destabilized the topsoil, which slid away along the river or blew east. This steady impoverishment led to a jumbled landscape of stunted oak and hawthorn, gorse and heather, grasslands, wet meadows and reed beds.

Disruption brought diversity. There are four different reptile species here, adder, grass snake, slowworm, common lizard. There are three types of heather, ling, bell heather and cross-leaved heath. Skylarks and meadow pipits stay all year round, stonechats overwinter and reed warblers breed in summer. The reed beds support thirteen species of Wainscot moth. Red kite have arrived.  These rare habitats are maintained and restored through intriguing low-key interventions. A long trench where the huge colony of ivy bees seethes in September, a square plot where the vegetation has been scraped off and the gravel layer exposed and the heather is bouncing back.

The Heath holds its historical cards close to its chest and you have to search to find the stories. Devil’s Highway, the Roman road that ran out of Londinium along Oxford Street, crossing the Thames at Staines and on to Silchester, traverses the heath east-west (in capital letters ROMAN ROAD on the map) over the Crane at Baber (a sign that beavers used to be about) Bridge. The Romans mustered their army here, as did Cromwell and James II. Military manoeuvres didn’t deter the footpads and highwaymen. Stalking passing travellers under the cover of the dense scrub, robbing them at point blank range, the network of paths providing plenty of escape routes. They didn’t always get away with it, and chained corpses of the convicted swung from the gibbets that dotted the heath, like crows on barbed wire.

It’s still an edgy place, with a vibe of neglect. In 1830, William Cobbett described it as ‘a sample of all that is bad in soil and villainous in look’. I get it. We’ve all been conditioned to mistake the enclosed fields of hedge and brilliant green pasture, the artful Capability Brown landscape, the overgrazed uplands, as natural and beautiful. But our brains need a reset. Disorder is what makes Hounslow Heath special.

Maybe that’s why it’s never busy. There are occasional dog walkers and cyclists. In summer, lovers lie down together in the long grass. There are solitary guitar players, friends getting wasted, there’s even a longer term tent-dweller. Later in the year, people beat paths through the bramble thickets to harvest the gnarly apple and pear trees that line the derelict fairways of the abandoned golf course.

We hear a lot these days about how being outdoors helps our heads. In this muted place I seem able to quell that urge to analyse and categorise. There are no signs telling me where I am or explaining what I’m seeing. I can just have a wander, physically and mentally. Let the vapours rise through the gravel, of the people who made the bronze figurine of a boar or weapons that are now in the British Museum, or Mary Frith, aka Moll Cutpurse, who wore men’s clothing, rode out to the Heath to rob the gentry, and bribed her way out of Fleet Prison. Or just allow myself to watch without thinking, be in the moment, look at the shapes in the clouds.

Was this about lockdown? If so, my lockdown has been going on for years, marching to the order of railway schedules, office hours, daylight saving time, the demands of family, job, misplaced ambition.

On the Heath, none of it matters. In its quiet, understated abandon, it lets you go.

Old fairway on the abandoned golf course

Early spring flowers of the Lesser Caucasus (including Georgia’s Javakheti Plateau)

A version of this article was published in the Alpine Gardener, the journal of the Alpine Garden Society, in June 2021. I was travelling with Andreas Groeger*, who provided all the scientific detail. 

Unless you’re visiting the Republic of Georgia in March to see the snowdrops in the west of the country, plant enthusiasts tend to visit the country in late May and June, travelling north to Kazbegi in the Greater Caucasus to the magnificent alpine meadows.

But as we were there relatively early, in mid-late April, we took the opportunity to go hunting for snowmelt geophytes on the high altitude Javakheti plateau.

We took a circular route from T’bilisi, tracking the Mtkvari (or Kura) river upstream in a 270 km arc to Akhaltsikhe the Lesser Caucasus, taking in the famous twelfth century cave monastery of Vardzia, before returning via Ninots’minda and Lake Paravani over the plateau.

Here I’ll try to describe the landscapes and their plants. Even if you’re not a great botanist, the gorgeous landscapes and rich history of this route offer a fantastic few days of exploring.

Dry scrubby hills

First stop, the hinterland of Mtskheta, the old capital of Georgia, where the low, deeply riven hills are still covered with dry oak-juniper forest, which has been lost in many parts of the country.

Tulipa undulatifolia var undulatifolia (syn T eichleri)

Astragalus glaucophylloides on a steep south-facing slope

Scrambling up through stony gulleys, we were rewarded by Tulipa undulatifolia var. undulatifolia (syn T. eichleri), sparsely scattered on the ridges. Its solitary wide bell-shaped scarlet flowers have a dark basal blotch with yellow margins. It has spreading, deeply wavy, glaucous leaves that looked especially striking because of the shadows they threw in the bright spring sunshine.  Given how particular it seemed to be about its location and lack of competition, it has a surprisingly broad range, from the south Balkan Peninsula (see Northumberland Diary, April 2019) to west and central Turkey, and the eastern Caucasus.

Just below the ridges, the gentle grassy slopes were starry with Ornithogalum woronowii, the Caucasian version of the widespread O. orthophyllum. The pedicels of the lower flowers are much longer than the upper ones, resulting in an umbel-like appearance of the racemose inflorescence. Growing alongside it relatively frequently was a Bellavalia sp. that we couldn’t identify.

On a steep south-facing slope created by a landslide we found one of Georgia’s most exquisite astragalus species, Astragalus glaucophylloides, with its arcuate leaves composed of 10-12 pairs of rounded, glaucous leaflets. It needs a full sun and sharp drainage and its range is restricted to the southern Transcaucasus and bordering Turkey.

Rocks above the river

We continued along the main highway that links Tbilisi with the Black Sea coast, and then turned south with the Mtkvari river towards Borjomi, famous for its mineral springs.  On the roadside rocks we found colonies of white and blue Muscari armeniacum, and sprawling mats of the Veronica liwanensis. The preferred habitat of this striking speedwell are sunny, rocky slopes and screes, from the lowlands up to 2400 m. It grows from a woody base, and has oval, slightly glaucous leaves and intensely blue flowers. In recent years, nurseries have begun to offer this robust species for rock gardens and as ground cover.

Veronica liwanensis

Sapara monastery

At Akhaltsike a 10km detour took us to the Sapara monastery, cupped in a sheltered cleft in the steep hills at 1,300m asl, surrounded by mixed woodland.  Dating from the ninth century, the beautiful complex has tenth and thirteenth century churches, and well-preserved fourteenth century frescoes. A grassy roadside slope on a woodland margin was full oxslips and the pretty, white Corydalis angustifolia (its flowers are like little albino orcas), which ranges from the Crimea and north-east Turkey, through the Caucasus to northern Iran. In the sparse woodland we saw more Muscari armeniacum, and white and blue forms of Pulsatilla albana. On bare rock above the site were several Astragalus humifusus, a relatively small, prostrate milkvetch that occurs on rocky cliffs in the forest belt of the Caucasus region and northern Turkey.  In the flora of Georgia it is described with four different species names!

Pulsatilla albana

Corydalis angustifolia flowers like little albino orcas

Back on the road again, we travelled south-east to the impressive fourteenth century Khertvisi fortress (built on the site of a much more ancient citadel) perched high above the confluence of the Mtkvari and Paravani rivers. Then we turned south again, following the Mtkvari up the long, gently climbing, steep-sided valley, with signs of abandoned terraces here and there.

The cave monasteries at Vardzia and Vanis Kvabebi

At Vardzia, at 1,300m, the valley widens. Willow and Prunus trees (perhaps peaches?) were just coming into flower and the valley was full of the lovely muted colours of early spring. We met a bee-keeper with perhaps 50 hives, who overwintered there and got his first honey harvest from willow, before taking his bees up to the high meadows in summer.

Cave city of Vardzia above the Mtsketa river

There are two breathtaking and extensive cave monasteries on opposite sides of the valley, east facing Vardzia and west facing Vanis Kvabebi.  At Vanis Kvabebi, a flamboyant Solanaceae was growing strongly on a high terrace in the rain shadow of an overhanging cliff. Physochlaina is an Asian genus of the nightshade family (Solanaceae), comprising 8-11 species (6 species in the Flora of China), related to the henbane (Hyoscyamus, both genera have 2-locular capsules). Physochlaina orientalis is the westernmost representative of the genus (distribution range northwest Iran to northeast Turkey, 1400 – 1500 m). Described by the great Ukrainian botanist Alexander Alfonsovich Grossheim, the location of the type specimen was the entrance to a cave, and this appears to be its favourite habitat, where the thick rhizomes secure the plant in shallow, well-drained, gravelly soil. It has been cultivated successfully at Munich Botanic Gardens, growing to about 40cm tall.

In meadows in the narrow valleys leading away from the main river valley we found Fritillaria caucasica. Though not as showy as other fritillaries, it is very elegant, growing to 20cm tall. In Georgia it is the fritillary of lower altitudes, and is also found in steppe vegetation around Tblisi. The rounded flower has a plum-like colour, and a comparatively long style. The distribution of F. caucasica extends into Armenia and Northeastern Turkey, where it shows transitions to other species, like F. armena and F. pinardii.

Fritillaria caucasica

Iris pumila, yellow form

Physochlaina orientalis

The yellow form of Iris pumila was growing among shrubs in a roadside meadow. The solitary flowers are borne on a short stem (less than 10 cm), on a very short pedicel with a long, slender perianth tube sheathed by two narrow bracts. The basal leaves elongate after flowering. The type form is purple, but there is a lot of colour variation. It has a wide native range, from Austria to the Caucasus and the Ural Mountains, where it grows in dryish, grassy habitats. 

Javakheti plateau

Our journey back to Tbilisi took us via Akhalk’alaki and Ninots’minda, where the storks were already building enormous nests on every telegraph pole. On the vast open plain we passed a large railway depot on the recently constructed railway from Azerbajan’s capital Baku on the Caspian sea to Kars in north eastern Turkey, part of the huge Chinese infrastructure belt and road project, the new Silk Road. Large developments are nothing new, as the megalithic monuments and fortresses attest. One of the main routes to Byzantium ran through this region and it has been subject to waves of settlers over the centuries.

Stork nesting on a main road in Ninots’minda

The Javakheti plateau is a volcanic plateau mostly above 2000m, now a treeless alpine steppe, although natural subalpine forest occurs around Lake Kartsakhi on the Georgia-Turkey border. Its wetlands and shallow lakes make it a place of international importance for birds. The plain is crossed from north to south by a series of extinct volcanoes, and and intensively grazed, making a truly dramatic, bleak landscape.

We were lucky with the cool, cloudy, dry weather. The snow still lay thick on the ground on northern slopes when we stopped above frozen Lake Paravani, the largest lake in Georgia at 37.5 sq km, with an average depth of 2.2 metres.

Frozen Lake Paravani, and beyond it a chain of extinct volcanoes

Here, in meadows at 2,100m, which must have been snow covered only days before, among chunks of obsidian glass, were hundreds of thousands of pale pink Colchichum raddeanum and purple Crocus adamii, with occasional tiny Gentiana aquatica.

Colchicum raddeanum

Crocus adamii, hundreds of thousands of them!

Brian Mathew’s 1982 monograph treated Crocus adamii as a subspecies of C. biflorus, while Janis Rukšans (2016) reinstated it at the species level. Its distribution is restricted to central Transcaucasia. For identification, you have to look closely at the stamens. The anthers are yellow with a pale connective, and only 2-4 mm long. The flattened filaments are 2-3 times shorter than the anthers. There was terrific variation in the colour density and striation of the petals.

Pale pink Colchicum raddeanum (syn. Merendera raddeana) is still under discussion. Some authors sink it into C. trigynum, while others keep them as separate species. It differs by generally having only two leaves and broader perianth segments. The differences are gradual and there are transitional forms. C. raddeanum typically has two leaves, a more globular flower with distinct venation, and dark yellow to greyish anthers. C. trigynum tends to have three leaves, one to three flowers per plant and dark grey to olive-brown anthers. The plants of the Javakheti plateau seem to be intermediate, with overlapping characters.

Gagea taurica, flowering en masse on higher, slightly flatter meadows

Obsidian glass, scattered across the plateau

Gagea taurica was flowering en masse on slightly higher, flatter meadows. It belongs to a group of very similar species around Gagea reticulata, and occurs from Crimea to Armenia.  The flora of Georgia comprises seventeen Gagea species, which need proper revision.

Return to Tbilisi

Easter is the high point of the orthodox calendar, and a fine time to be in T’bilisi, with warm sunshine (once the rain has passed), bearded iris in the streets, huge displays of wisteria everywhere and a fruit tree full of blossom in every suburban yard. Georgian cuisine is rightly renowned, and among other fine discoveries were Staphylea buds and Smilax, both pickled. On the roadsides, alongside big bunches of fresh herbs Azeri women were selling bundles of madder root, Rubia tinctorum, for dying eggs red, and plates of sprouted wheat on which to display them. These eggs are taken to the cemeteries, and laid on the graves of relatives, along with single stems of iris and tulips. I’ll save all that for another less botanical post.

*Andreas Groeger is co-author of Illustrated Field Guide to the Flora of Georgia (South Caucasus) and scientific curator of Munich Botanic Gardens.

Hopefully you can trace our journey on the map below. Follow the Mtkvari river from T’bilisi west and then south west via Borjomi to Akhaltsikhe. Turn south east down to Ninots’minda and then north east past Lake Paravani and back to T’bilisi.

Martins and the Miocene: time warp in a Bavarian quarry

A short version of this piece was published on Caught by the River as part of their Shadows and Reflections 2020

Bavaria, 1 August 2020. 8 am. It was Saturday, so the quarry was deserted. It was already fiercely hot, one of those days when you feel winded before it even starts. The forecast was for thirty-four degrees and the sky was relentless blue and the main pit was as smooth and sterile as a slab of halva.

On weekends and public holidays, when the big yellow machines fall silent, amateur paleontologists come to these places to dig for fossils. That’s why we were there, on the hunt.  Andreas was planning an exhibition about the prehistoric landscape of Bavaria and we were looking for exhibits. But from the get-go I was watching the clock. By eleven, I thought, the heat would be unbearable.

Leaving our bikes on a gravel bank, we climbed a steep crumbling slope, riven with run-off channels from summer downpours, dotted with dusty weeds. On the edge of a higher terrace, in the shade of a cliff, the fifteen million-year-old molasse layer was obvious, a grey-blue seam about forty inches deep.

The 15 million year old fossil layer

We chose our spot, set out our tools, put on our gloves and got to work, using a spade to dig out blocks of clay, maybe a foot square and six inches deep. Two hours, I figured, before the sun reached us.

It’s hard to get your head around geological time. If the world is roughly 4.5 billion years old, then this ribbon of clay is young, formed in the middle of the Miocene, a geological epoch that stretched from around 23 to 5 million years ago. Sifting through my brain to try to get some context, that’s way after the mass extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and a bit before the Ice Age, which began 2.6 million years ago.

I was weighing the lump in my hands, heavy and cool to the touch, and that’s when I heard the martins. It often happens when you’re out in an unfamiliar place – you sense things for quite a while before you make sense of them. I’d been aware of something happening over my shoulder, out of focus, and a vague but constant sound. I put down the clay, and went to investigate.

Beyond a protruding stack of sandstone, a sand martin colony in a concave cliff, not yet in the sun. The grating staccato chatter never stopped as the tiny brown and white birds flew in a revolving swarm, so fleet and acrobatic, it was hard to keep track of an individual. Out and back, out and back, plucking insects from the air to feed what by then must have been their second brood of the year. Here in front of me, descendants of those dinosaurs that survived that mass extinction.

Sand martin colony

I didn’t watch for long, though. Time was ticking, so I went back to the seam.

If you’re lucky, Andreas said, the mudstone splits along its thin laminae. Following his lead, I pushed the broad blade into the block (molasse means soft), held my breath and applied gentle pressure.

The sun got higher and sweat pricked at my hairline and the martins flew out and back, out and back. We glugged our water and ate pistachios. The spoil heap grew with breakage and blocks that yielded nothing. We kept it tidy to avoid contaminating the pit below, its sand destined for construction, for concrete, mortar, render, cement, and scree.

Matter displaced and dispersed. Disruption like quarrying can work for nature. This quarry – a gash in the land – has created breeding sites for martins and bee-eaters, habitat for pioneer plants and voles, hunting ground for an eagle owl. Natural processes do it too. A beaver dam makes a whole new world. A landslide. An earthquake.

Oh, when splitting the clay goes right. Like cracking open a mold to reveal the casting. Our haul of beautiful fossils grew too. A serrated leaf, ochre mottled purple, its veins chestnut brown, perfectly delineated. What looked like the split case of a nut, burnt sienna. Three creamy yellow strips of grass. A rich rust rectangle of wood.  A smooth oval leaf, cardinal purple. Like petroglyphs, or the frescoes of Pompeii, each a perfect work of art.

Leaf fossil

Lately, researchers have calculated that solid stuff made by humans now weighs more than all the living biomass on Earth. I know this supports the idea of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene but, apart from that, I don’t know what to make of it.  I thought of my grandmother’s small wicker chair with the mother of pearl inlay. And the shards of pottery that show up in my garden, unearthed by unseen creatures in the soil. Do they count towards that total? Would our newly dug exhibits?

Hunched over our best finds to shield them from the pounding rays, we carved away the superfluous clay and then wrapped them in protective layers of newspaper. Dry them out too fast and they crack and crumble, too slow and they get moldy and the beautiful pigments are destroyed.

When these leaves and fruit fell into the water and sank into the mud, when branches or whole trees toppled into the sediment, hominids were just a twinkle in the planet’s eye, not emerging until the end of the Miocene. I still struggle to conceptualise. John McPhee, in his 1981 book Basin and Range, used the English imperial measure of the yard as a metaphor for deep time. Taking ‘the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.’ A second stroke takes us back to our leaves, which fell in an era of mountain building. Talk about disruption! To the north of the rising Alps, a depression formed where the European plate was submerging under the African plate. Over time, this basin filled with debris brought down by the rivers, and plants colonized the resulting land.  If you were suddenly transported back, you’d recognize, more or less, a lot of the animals. Sabre-toothed tigers, pig-like omnivores, primates, the forebears of elephants, hoofed grazers, early rodents, living in the forests and expanding grasslands.

Here, in our actual hands, were actual elements of that middle Miocene landscape, ‘riparian’ plants, so-called because they grew along river margins and banks. Ancestors of plane trees, poplars and willow relatives, ginkgo and swamp cypress, exposed to the air for the first time in fifteen million years.

And there, in the sky behind us, were birds very like the birds that flew in that same landscape. The sand martin’s scientific name is Riparia riparia (‘of the river bank, of the river bank’, like a song).

This planet has been in flux since year dot. Our short lives mean we don’t see the changes, are under the illusion that our environment is stable, static. The scientists gives us glimpses of what’s really going on, and what we see is frightening. We can accept the destruction of whole mountains of Carrara marble, sandstone from India lining the pavements of London, aggregates from around the world damming the Nile or the Yangtze or the Indus, because we are the agents of change. But natural processes? Resisted, repressed, canalized, controlled, denied.

In the quarry that day, there was something magical about the layering of time, the incessant rhythm of those small winged creatures, the daily arc of the sun, the annual cycle of birds’ migration across continents, the deep time of their evolution and the suspension-in-time of the plants.

Through millions of years of churn and cataclysm, there is continuity too.

As we worked, the clock that had been ticking down in my head fell silent. And, in this weirdest of weird years, when time has alternately staggered along like a zombie and run like sand through a timer, those few hours have stayed with me, extending through the days and months, shimmering like a heat haze.

With thanks to UCL’s Dr Ruth Siddall for making sure I had my geological ducks in a row. Visit Orpiment, Ruth’s fascinating blog about urban geology, artists’ pigments, mineralogy and geoarchaeology.

Canute or the collective? Stemming the tide in our age of unreason

First published on the wonderful Caught by the River, as part of their 2018 Shadows and Reflections series.

My 2018 starts in Cornwall. Out past the surfers hanging about for the right wave, the resident pod of dolphins leap across St Ives Bay. At Carrick Du the gannets plunge into the wild sea and the wind is so strong you can almost lie down and it keeps you standing. I’m thinking, all’s well with the world.

In spring, a huge flock of lapwings mass and billow over the meadow by the River Severn at Slimbridge and a jack snipe shapeshifts in the reeds below, and I’m thinking, yes, all’s well with the world.

Then in early summer, in Berchtesgaden National Park in south eastern Germany, I climb for four hours to pay homage to the Blau Eis, the most northerly glacier in the alps. It is shrunken and feeble and will disappear soon. The perfect little alpine scree plant, Thlaspi rotundifolium, that I photograph below the glacier’s senile snout may not survive the competition of the lower altitude plants that will soon invade this lunar landscape.  I’m thinking, the world is sick.

I didn’t watch Blue Planet. I don’t watch telly anyway, mainly because technology has advanced so fast I can’t work out how to, and also I find nature documentaries too painful to bear (even with the mute button on). But Blue Planet made waves. The Daily Mail runs headlines I agree with. I’m thinking, the world is truly turning upside down.

High summer brings Tete a Tete‘s annual festival of contemporary opera. At a pond on Hampstead Heath I meet composer Catherine Kontz and librettist Sarah Grange. They have made Fleet Footings, a sonic treasure hunt following one of London’s lost rivers, the Fleet, from where it rises on the Heath to where it meets the Thames at Blackfriars. Drought means the first stages of the river are dry, but it is still traceable through ‘the curves of streets, the names of roads and – if you listen hard enough – the sound of it still flowing beneath your feet…’ and at 17 points along its ghostly six mile path, we stop and listen to their work through headphones (you can download the album and the map catherinekontz.com/fleet-footing).  Even in the 13th century the monks were writing to the king, complaining about how the Fleet stank. 250 years ago, for reasons of health and safety, the open sewer was bricked up and hidden. I’m thinking, we’ve been fucking up the world for a long time.

Late summer to Salthouse, north Norfolk, to remember Geraldine, ten years on from her death. A walk across the salt marsh to the shingle bank and a wicked playful wind makes throwing her ashes into the sea quite tricky. The shingle bank was constructed after the 1953 flood, to protect the coast.   But a clearer understanding of the shift and flux of our shores, combined with climate change modelling, means the authorities have changed their ideas. The shingle bank is being left to time and tide and weather. It is shrinking too, like the Blau Eis, breaking up, dispersing. Geraldine’s favourite poem was Snow, by Louis MacNiece.

World is suddener than we fancy it/World is crazier and more of it than we think/Incorrigibly plural.

I’m thinking, the world will sort itself out; this is a comfort.

On a bitter autumn day to the Lenbachhaus in Munich to see Alfred Kubin’s dark apocalyptic drawings, far from the dazzling colour and space of the others Blue Riders like Kandinsky and Marc and Munter. Apart from his 1907 picture War (Der Kreig), the one that stood out for me was Noah’s Ark: Landing (1911), a detailed pen and ink imagining of the disembarkation, the living cargo returning to the earth, observed by birds on a blasted tree, the landscape thick with the drowned corpses of wild animals.  The flood myth is not the gentle tale of children’s storybooks. I’m thinking, the world will wipe us off its face and it will be a terrible slow death.

December, to the Thames again, near old Billingsgate. The sun is sinking over Westminster and the sky is salmon and baby blue and Canaletto clouds billow over Tower Bridge to the east. The river is muscular, calm, and the low tide has exposed a spatter of shingle at the bottom of the wide stone steps and the flint and glass and gravel shift under foot. Water laps in a frothing head of twisted metal, plastic, twigs and seeds.  A condom. Splintered wood. A moorhen. The broken stem of a clay pipe, an inch long, white like a finger bone, hollow, the central tube smokey black. I scoop it up.  There’s another. And another. Tens, no, hundreds. They clink against each other as I gather them in my cupped palms, chink chalkily together. One of London’s early throwaway products, manufactured in bulk from the late sixteenth century for three hundred and fifty years, to shift to the masses tobacco from the New World. Had they belonged to the Billingsgate fishmongers, clamped between their chapped lips as they gutted and sluiced the day’s haul. Had the washerwomen bitten down on them with their rotten teeth and plague-riddled children sucked on them as a cure and chucked them in the water when they were done?  Lighter than the stones, rolled and sorted, rolled and sorted on the river bed over hundreds of years until they surface on this intertidal lick of land. The bleached fragments summon bones from the catacombs, from the relic caskets in the crypt of Bermondsey Abbey, from the plague pits, from the caves of the interglacial times when the sabre toothed tigers stalked the herds of antelope over the London plain.

There I am on that fault line between the city and the natural world, between the past and the present. There I am, a twenty-first century Canute: vegetarian, no milk products, trying to be plastic free, no car, train not plane, lobbying my MP, writing letters, signing petitions, putting up nest boxes.   Twelve years until the damage we’ve done to the earth is irreversible, the scientists tell us. What can one person do? I’m thinking, it’s useless.

But then every one of these experiences I have shared with other people – ecology students at the glacier, family, friends at the sea and by the rivers, strangers on the search for the Fleet – and where we do things together there’s hope and a kind of power.

It comes on the shingle bank as we remember Geraldine. Among us is artist Charlie Holmes. He gives us each a white postcard with a small hole punched in the centre and instructions printed on it:

Stand on the edge/select a piece of sea/take it away with you/remember where it used to be

And, on the reverse:

Stand on the edge/select a piece of sky/take it away with you/remember where it used to be

We all do it. Hold up our cards and select sky and sea.

We all do it together.

We all have different memories of Geraldine but they are all of her.

We each select a different bit of what we see through our tiny viewfinders but they all add up to the same sea and sky.

 

Think of a heron, always alone

Grey heron by the river Thames at Richmond, south-west London

Published on the wonderful Caught by the River

Think of a heron. Hunter of the shallows. Hunched, static, by the waterway. Stalking the gravelly banks of the Thames. On the gable end of the house next door, sizing up my newt-filled pond with a gimlet eye. Flying ponderously, a stop-frame animation, legs trailing like a ballerina’s. Always alone.

I thought, if you want to see birds in groups, take a kit of pigeons, circling the weather vane on the school, a murmuration of starlings, billowing like smoke over the hill, a mutation of field fares, filling the beech hangar with their noise, a charm of goldfinches, like a shoal of fish above the estuary, a clamour of rooks and jackdaws, commuting to their roost.

There is a collective noun for herons, a sedge or siege. But grey herons en masse? No, they don’t like company. Breeding season is the only time you see more than one at the same time, when they nest at close quarters in trees.

Or that’s what I thought. But I have seen it happen, more than once, a beautiful and mysterious congregation in a field by the Thames. Always in late autumn and early winter, just after dusk.

The embankment carrying four lanes of traffic above the Old Deer Park

A main arterial route out of London, the A316, passes through Richmond-upon-Thames. Travelling south west, the last half mile of road before the River Thames rises on a massive embankment to join the elegant span of Twickenham bridge, opened in 1933.

North of the embankment is the Old Deer Park, a great expanse of grass that once belonged to the Royal estates at Kew. It is municipal land now and there are sports pitches and, near the river, the flood waters can engulf acres for days at a time.

One soggy evening in late autumn, I was cycling home after work along the embankment. It must have been getting on for 5pm. The traffic was heavy both ways under the orange street lamps. I looked out towards the meadow, into the darkness and, what I saw made me laugh aloud in surprise.

Slender figures, like anorexic ghosts, their breasts pale in the gloom beyond the cast sulphurous light. Three of them. No, five. Hah! Ten. No, twenty. Spread out, like socially inept guests at a cocktail party, perhaps five yards separating each from the other.

That was the first time. I saw them many times after. If I cycled steadily past, I got a good view of them – the most I counted was 36 – between the leafless cherry trees on the embankment. If I stopped, they spooked.

What were they doing there? It had to involve food. The rough bank and the mown grass at its base would be teeming with slugs and snails, amphibians and even small rodents. Maybe the street lighting helped them to hunt.

I got in touch with Richard Bullock, Biodiversity Officer of WWT London Wetland Centre at Barnes, to see what he made of it. He said they often migrate at night, so their night vision is likely to be good, but that the artificial light would have helped them out. Grey heron are wide-ranging, opportunistic eaters and invertebrate food can make up a quarter of their diet. He had seen three or four together hunting at night on the playing fields at Barn Elms and so many herons in one place on the Old Deer Park suggested a rich source of food. Mild weather means that invertebrates become more available during the evenings, especially after rain, when earthworms, beetles and other invertebrates come to the surface. The waiting birds (my birds, I thought, stupidly) would be there waiting.

A siege of herons. It did look a bit like a siege, this wan legion standing in formation beyond the walls. I could imagine it taken up in folklore about strange goings on beside the Thames. Not herons, but spirits of the dead, in silent protest against the interminable ravages of the internal combustion engine. Or ghosts of fallen soldiers rising from the scene of a long-forgotten battle. Or witches morphing for an arcane seasonal ritual.

The reality was far more straightforward and more wonderful. Abundant food. Intelligent life. Using a man-made, artificially-lit hill to nab some easy prey. These big, handsome birds, determinedly wild, are somehow making the best of the city – they even breed in colonies in the trees of Regent’s Park, right in the heart of London.

They don’t need us, far from it, but they walk among us, and sometimes, if we’re lucky, we catch them from the corner of our distracted eye.

View along the embankment that carries the A316 across Twickenham bridge

What we talk about when we talk about pigeons

Richmond Park, mid September. The wood pigeons scuffle through the crisp detritus under the beech trees looking for beech nuts.  Their smoky blue bodies are plump and perfect. So many of them. I have played a small part in shoring up this overblown population. By one. One extra pigeon in 2017. I’m not ashamed. In fact I’m pleased as anything.

This is how it happened. I was working at the table by the window. Risky, with all that outside business going on – insect, plant, bird, light etc. But we were past the spring frenzy and coasting into early summer, so it was cool and placid and I figured I’d get stuff done.

An odd movement kept catching my eye though. I’d look up but I couldn’t place it. And then I saw the neighbour’s cat, hunkered down, tail twitching. Sodding cats. I opened the door and it scarpered – our relationship is one of mutual loathing – and I went out to see what it had been up to.

Under the holly tree I found the source of movement. Caught in the thorns of the berberis, such an unearthly thing, at first I couldn’t make sense of it. A still lump of yellowing goose-bumped flesh the size of my palm. And then it spasmed.

It was a bird, not old enough to have feathers. A chick then, but big. I lifted the limp body off the thorns. Its skin was cold and clammy but the puncture wounds on its back were slight. Minimal blood. I stuck it in my armpit to try to warm it up.

I couldn’t type with the chick under my arm so I put it in a nest of tissue paper in a plastic lunchbox, on top of a hot water bottle and waited for it to keel over. Its ridiculous dinosaur head with its big knobbly beak and holes for ears and the sparse proto feathers on its crown like too much brylcream. Wood pigeon. One ugly bird. Doomed.

After half an hour, it opened its eyes. Not dead then.  I gave it some water, pinching its soft beak so that it opened. And then some watery yoghurt. Actually quite perky.  Come on little fella. You can make it.

But hell, now what? All that feeding. All that fledging.  Do I never learn? Thinking of all the times I’ve done this, all the hopeless times I’ve picked up young birds and tried to keep them alive. The rook, the redwing, the house martin, the pheasants. And so on. All the wasps I ‘rescued’ from jam traps. The bee I ‘saved’ from Lake Achensee, swimming with one hand out of the water to the shore while it sorted itself out. Pity, then empathy. Impulse, then bonding. Hope, then loss. Fool.

This unviable creature had caught me up.  But it was still doomed. Maybe I’d just put it in the bin and forget about it. But then again, maybe I’d give it a name. Pidge. And a gender. Her.

A mature wood pigeon sat in in the big tree of heaven a couple of doors down. Was it the mother bird, waiting for the all clear to go back to the nest? Would it know that one of its babies had gone? How would it feel?

Pull yourself together. It’s a pigeon. It doesn’t have a stream of consciousness. Those elephants, they don’t know they’re the last. Those pandas, they’re not popping corks because they’ve moved from ‘critically endangered’ to ‘vulnerable’ in the red list. Those polar bears, they’re not weeping about their grandchildren’s future as the ice melts under their feet. Conservation shouldn’t be driven by the pathetic fallacy. We shouldn’t have to blooming well adopt lion cubs or orangutans to make the connections. But maybe that’s the only hope.

The cat was back. It had crept off the fence into the lower branches of the holly tree. I chased it away again and looked up.  Wood pigeon nest six foot above. About the most casual nest construction there is. These birds are real slackers when it comes to nests. A bunch of twigs like spillikins caught between two branches. But it was occupied. There was another chick there, stock still. No wonder the cat was so intent. 

Still, I had an idea. Maybe I could put Pidge back in the nest with its sibling. Then I’d have tried my best. If the mother bird never comes back, if both of them die, if the cat gets them? Just nature taking its course.

I borrowed a ladder. I gave Pidge a final dribble of watery yoghurt, stuck her in my pocket and climbed up into the holly. The other chick sat rigid on the flimsy stack even as Pidge tipped in. Somehow the platform held. Two ugly birds. Doomed.

The cat was watching. It would be after them as soon as I was out of the way. I borrowed a saw and took out the lower branches of the holly. If this didn’t shake the babies from their nest, if this didn’t stop the mother bird returning, nothing would.

I took the ladder and the saw and went inside. Dispassionate intellectual, that’s me.

Minutes passed. The cat did a couple of reccies along the fence and gave up. The holly had resumed its glossy spiky deep green inscrutability. I looked away, on the basis that a watched pot never boils.

Hours passed and guess what? The next time I went out and looked up into the tree, the mother was back. She did that rigid deadpan ‘I’m not here so I don’t know what you’re looking at’ thing. God, I loved her.

The days passed and no bloody corpses appeared under the holly. The parent pigeons came and went, clumsy and noisy.  I opened a few conversations with them, standing under the holly tree. They were a bit one way.  Soon the chicks were so big you could see their silly heads from the ground, doing the ‘I’m not here so I don’t know who you think you’re talking to’ thing, just like their mother. And one day they were gone.

Pigeons waddling under the bird feeder. Pigeon eyes popping as they scoff the big cherries on the tree. Pigeons flapping away like paper bags when the cat comes back. Of course, I recognise the one I rescued. Of course she recognises me.

‘Alright Pidge? How’s it going?’

Diagnosis? Chronic anthropomorphism. Treatment? None.

The causeway and the wedding: ritual and hope on midsummer’s eve

First published in Earthlines magazine. Buy a subscription to support their wonderful work! 

Steventon, Oxfordshire, June 2015. We would have been straight through and out the other side, were it not for the wedding we were going to in the next village.

‘Steventon? Which one was that again?’

Just a conduit, a linear development along the road to Oxford, ten miles north. A clutter of pubs, street lights, a shop, red brick Victorian houses under slate roofs, front gardens scrubbed out for parking, blank picture windows of 1970s bungalows, squat community hall on the corner of the green. Nothing special.

But hiding in plain sight is a twelfth century earthwork that is marvellous for being there at all.

We might have missed it entirely. The bypass is the A34, the post Roman trunk road between the great port of Southampton and Manchester, via Oxford and the Potteries. Until 1998, it passed through Steventon (it was turnpiked in 1755). Its relocation, splicing the water meadows between Steventon and Milton, was less contested than further south at Newbury, where construction of the bypass  twenty years ago spawned a new kind of protestor, who took to the trees and tunnelled under ground in a bid to protect ancient woodland. On this mizzly day in the village you could barely hear the dual carriageway. The main road through Steventon has been reclassified – or detrunked – as the B4017, obscuring the passing past.

Great Western Railway with Didcot chimney in the distance

We could have skimmed the village’s straggling southern edge at even higher speed. The Great Western Railway reached the village in 1840 and this stretch is dead straight, an iron causeway through the Vale, at right angles to the A34. How satisfying it must have been for those new Victorians to impress their technology so emphatically on the landscape. On this low land they could raise their eyes to the horizon and pinpoint their destination. ‘There!’ As the crow flies. Simple, efficient, fast. No regard to the old lanes, the watercourses, the minor inclines, the manor boundaries.

Travelling at speed, vistas open on hills and valleys in quick succession. As we left the bypass and drove down Steventon Hill in fine midsummer rain, the cooling towers of Didcot’s power station loomed out of the flood plain, their grey bulk flattened and smudged by low cloud. Around them the vale banked in tiers of hedge, field, copse as far as the eye could see.

In getting the overview we lose the detail. Steventon lies in the Vale of the White Horse, just north of a line of chalk downs that keeps the Thames running eastwards. At speed, the eye doesn’t see the prehistoric ridgeway, the Roman road, the medieval drovers’ track to the south. It doesn’t see the ruins of Wilts and Berkshire canal that scythes through the parish between the Thames at Abingdon and its junction with the Kennet and Avon at Melksham sixty miles away.

The Bronze age traveller would have looked out from the ridgeway across a dense patchwork of forest and marsh, would have found something sacred in the complex of brooks and rivers fed by the clear streams springing from the chalk. The village evolved to the standard Anglo Saxon formula and even now its rural past echoes in Stocks Lane, Mill Street, Sheepwash Lane, Kennel Lane.

But what’s this? The Causeway.

The Causeway, flanked by more recent paths

It’s a raised path born of a lost landscape. It runs for a mile across meadows that would have been flooded often. It starts out from the higher ground that bears the church of St Michael and All Angels, built in the 14th century. This elevated site must have been significant for far longer – a church at Steventon was recorded in the Domesday Book and by then the yew tree was already more than two hundred years old. After another nine hundred years, its torso is a mass of ruddy cylinders, like a vast rustic pipe organ, tinder dry under its dense canopy.

Ancient yew at St Michael’s

The Causeway runs north east from the church, tracking the Ginge brook as it curves towards the common, dark fists at the heart of the shimmering willows recalling decades of pollarding. The Causeway is twelve foot wide and raises the traveller three feet above the surrounding land. In places it is cobbled with small, dark setts, but long stretches are paved with irregular slabs of stone. On top of its steep grassy banks are hornbeam and cherry, horse chestnut and hawthorn, though it was probably an avenue of elms at the time of enclosure. It runs through the heart of the village, past the pub on the corner, past the playground and the tidy allotments, ending at the far eastern reach of the green, where a paved path at ground level continues across fields of ripening corn to Milton, the next village.

Today the Causeway is interrupted many times: by the level crossing and the grey hogging embankment of the Great Western Railway, by the tarmac of Stocks Lane, by the High Street (the detrunked A34), by the unnamed road that cuts through the allotments. Swallows slip from the gables of the many mellow timber-framed buildings that look out over it. They were constructed on lower ground and must have been built sometime after it, when the land became less prone to floods either through drainage or climate change.

Timber-framed houses below the Causeway

So if it was obsolete within a few generations, how has it held sway over the residents of Steventon, who have maintained it – for better, for worse – for more than eight hundred years?

A tablet in the church from around 1620 says that ‘Two sisters by ancient report gave a yard of land, one acre of Meadow, four Swathes, one Taylors yeard, one close, and a Coops to ye Maintenance of ye Cawseway of Steventon.’ Even now a group of parishioners is appointed as ‘Causewaymen’ to ensure that the path is kept up. Why?

Was it commerce? Steventon Priory lay near the church and it’s thought the Causeway was constructed for the Prior. It would have brought passing merchants straight to his door. Was it industry? One theory is that it carried an aqueduct delivering water to the cloth makers. Was it ritual? As a raised path to the church, it might have played a leading role in the marking of birth, marriage and death. Was it about Michaelmass? Feast day of the patron saint of the church, festival of harvest time, pivot of the husbandman’s year. Could it have been superstition? In times of pestilence, at the heart of rites that sought to protect the people from the horror.

We walked to the wedding. The rain had stopped and we walked east on the Causeway in sun and dappled shade and sun again. Then at the end of the green we took the paved path along the meandering Ginge, lit with yellow flags in full flower and sun on water. We walked in the heat of midsummer’s eve, crossed the thundering A34 on a metal footbridge, and the path led us to the church of St Blaise, patron saint of wool combers, another 14th century church on a Saxon site.

How many people have walked this way? Was it flight or dalliance or plain old commerce that drove them? How many weddings did they walk to? And christenings and funerals and harvest festivals and blessings of the sick. Our walk became part of the ritual, tied in to the landscape, as its people were tied until very recently.

Two strange survivors. The Causeway and the wedding. Proof of the power we invest in landscape and ceremony. We cling to the idea of permanence, kicking against change, but in spite of the delusion this is about hope. The Causeway is something that the people of Steventon have held on to. Something that for whatever long forgotten reason they have not ceased to value down the generations. There are plenty of obsolete and ancient customs that should be done away with, but the Causeway shows we can preserve things if we want to, can collectively nurture and care for and hand on.

How do we tell stories about our countryside that resonate with enough people to give us reason to preserve it?  Just as the people of Steventon have preserved the Causeway. Stories that show how intertwined our lives are with countryside and nature, what’s left of it, even now that Michaelmass is meaningless to most of us.

Oak leaf carving on stone capital in St Michael’s

 

 

The bee and the damson tree: everything is connected

Published on the excellent Caught by the River.

It’ll be hard to say when spring is really here this year. So many signs, those precious iterations, and so topsy turvy these last few weeks. By contrast there’s a place I know where spring arrives definitively on one particular day. One day it’s winter. The next it’s spring.

This place is a second storey balcony in the German city of Munich. A white rendered apartment block from the 1920s in a grid of similar blocks where street trees are rare. The balcony on the western elevation is a bare exposed platform two metres square, ten metres above the street, entirely isolated from the rest of the world. But what happens when spring arrives on the balcony is a bewitching reminder of interconnectedness of things.

Landlocked Munich – about as far from the temperate influence of the sea as you can be in Western Europe – hangs on to winter until the last minute. There are still signs, a kind of easing. The acid yellow furze of cornelian cherry flowers. The pounding turquoise waters of the River Isar, milky with sediment from the snow melting through the alpine screes sixty miles to the south. Lords and ladies foliage shiny and dark as spinach unfurling in the leaf litter under the trees of the Englischer Garten. And above all, the song and argie-bargie of the birds. Humans feel the changes too. We are part of the natural world, however much we try to shake it off. On the first mild day of the year the base of the southern wall of the Residenz – the palace in the centre of the city – and the ranks of south facing chairs outside the chic cafes are rammed with people wearing shades, basking like seals, lifting their faces towards the sun.

On the balcony though, it’s still winter. In a matter of weeks, when summer comes with its sledgehammer heat and electric storms, the grapefruit tree, the agave, the hibiscus will be moved outside in their heavy terracotta pots. The spiky velvet-coated tillandsias go out too, hung from the white painted metal railings to catch the sun and the rain and the air. The houseleeks will swell and flush green, the little irises from the near east will put up their complex purple flowers on stubby stems. The swifts will scream as they wheel like cut throat razors along the ersatz gorge of the street in the sultry evenings. There’s just enough room for a table and two chairs and on sweltering nights the balcony becomes a cool crows’ nest for watching the stars, constellations sliding across the long rectangle of sky between the buildings.

But for now, it’s winter on the balcony. Not even moss or algae find purchase on the surfaces that are swept clean by the bitter desiccating winds. There’s a stack of plastic flower pots on one side of the French Windows and on the other, several bundles of foot long elder twigs tied together with string and laid horizontally in a pile.

Ten metres below, the land between the apartment blocks lies sealed and thwarted under paving and tarmac, all but a strip of vegetation at the base of the building, a gritty patch of moss, chickweed, grasses, daisy and hawkweed rosettes, bound by a dark barberry hedge to waist height. About twenty metres from the balcony, growing on the scruffy grass in a container made of ugly composite slabs of grey pebbles, is a small damson tree.

In the time I’ve known this tree – eight years now – its blooming time has fluctuated with the harshness of the season. Sometimes the end of February, sometimes weeks later. It never fails to flower, though, and it does it magnificently. Billowing drifts of white blossom coat its angled limbs and shade the rings on its pewter trunk. Even against the gloopy white render of the wall behind it, in the banal monotony of the car lined street, it is spectacular.

Osmia cornuta shortly after emerging from their cells in a bundle of elder twigs. Photo: Andreas Groeger

But here’s the thing. The very day the flowers open on the damson tree below, something changes on the balcony. Suddenly there is life, movement, sound, a whole different texture to the atmosphere. The bees have broken out of their cells.

These are mason bees – and on this particular balcony they are horned mason bees, Osmia cornuta, that aren’t seen in the UK, though other mason bee species are. Mason bees are solitary bees. They don’t do honey or beeswax. The first to hatch from their cocoons in the dry hollow core of the elder twigs are the males. They hang around the bundles until the females emerge, then they mate and die.

But for the females, this is just the start. They fly from the balcony straight into the clouds of blossom on the damson tree. They gather pollen and nectar to create food stores in the nests they make in the same hollow twigs that they emerged from for the first time in their lives just a few hours before. Collecting enough food to support a single offspring takes many trips to the damson tree. When the sticky ball of pollen and nectar is large enough, the bee backs into the hole and lays an egg on top of it. Then she builds a partition, creating a new cell. She repeats the process, flying back and forth, back and forth to the damson tree, until she has filled the hollow tube with a series of eggs, each with its own carefully weighed food supply, finally plugging the opening with a mud like seal.

The lifecycle of these mason bees is fascinating and amazing and there are plenty of people who know much more than me. And anyway, that’s not my story. I could tell you that they are far more efficient pollinators of fruit trees than honey bees, that the farmers are eyeing them up as future collaborators but that’s not my point.

There is something deeply touching about their utter disregard for the human dimension, these small creatures going about their lives as if a bleak extrusion high up on a concrete slab in a major city were the most natural place in the world.

But the thing most wonderful to me is the exquisite correlation of the bee and the damson tree.

One day it’s winter and the next it’s spring.