White Magic

I went out for a stroll in my local woodland this morning. I took a few pictures of the Blackthorn blossom which is just appearing. Out of the corner of my eye I spied a flash of white moving along the tiny river. I crept over and it flapped languidly up on to a low branch. A Little Egret. And there it sat allowing me to take as many pictures as I wanted - the blossom in the breeze was actually moving more than the bird! 

And that - apart from a long conversation with a man mending a fence after the recent storms - was my entertainment for this morning.

Take care.

King Willow

The willow tree has always had a special place in my heart. It may not be as imposing as a mighty oak, or even the ash tree that stood at the top of my childhood garden, but you have to admire the willow's sheer will to survive.

The trees I'm about to show you stand beside a small meadow, just a short bicycle ride from my present home. But there were willows throughout my life: some strange-looking trees grew outside a house called "The Willows" when I was a child. They had broad, stumpy trunks and a crown of thin, radiating branches, like the one on the right of the above photo. Every few years the branches were lopped off, then allowed to grow again; a practice I now know is called "pollarding".

And these trees are also frequently split open by strong winds as they get older and the inside gets hollowed out. This also happened to the trees on Grantchester Meadows where I often wandered in my teenage years.

At first sight the tree above looks like a natural and graceful addition to the scene. But on closer inspection you can see that the trunk is at the back, way over to the right, while 75% of the growth is from a huge branch that has succumbed to gravity and is now resting its elbow on the ground. But despite all this it still bursts into leaf every spring!

This is the tortured tangle of timber that you see close up. Like an elephant....or an octopus....or those writhing, anthropomorphic creations of the illustrator Arthur Rackham?

What I think must have happened here is that the trees were once pollarded, but when the branches began to shot up they were then left untrimmed - for centuries perhaps. Their weight was too great for the tree to bear and they gradually descended to the ground. But, as they are willows, they just kept on living as if nothing untoward had occurred.

Some trees are split asunder by the forces involved but, although the heartwood has completely rotted, both halves of the tree continue to produce new foliage each spring, while the disintegrating centre provides a sheltered habitat for all kinds of other life.

Small people, and perhaps elves and fairies too, can climb right inside.

There seems to be no indignity that a willow tree can not survive. You can cut off a pole, stick it in the ground, even stick it in upside down if you like, and, if there's enough moisture, it'll grow into a new tree. If you think these trees' days are numbered then all I can tell you is that I thought that when I first saw these trees forty-odd years ago.

And if looking at all these twisted and shattered trees is giving you a headache, then all you need to do is chew on a piece of willow bark and it's said to provide a cure.

This is nothing to do with willows at all, but a blackthorn hedge which has suddenly come into flower in the same little meadow. Well worth a short bike ride.

*******

And we'll finish of with a little music....

As you might have already gathered from his appearance - long, grey dreadlocks and stockinged feet - Steve Cooney is an interesting character. Born in Melbourne, Australia, he left home and went to live in an Aboriginal village to learn didgeridoo. He then decided to explore his own roots by moving to Ireland and played in rock bands, eventually ending up in the folk-rock group, Stockton's Wing. Nowadays he mostly accompanies Irish fiddlers, singers and accordion players on acoustic guitar. The fiddler Martin Hayes challenged him to make a solo album of Irish airs originally composed for the harp. That's just two of the beautiful tunes you're listening to.

You can only hear and buy the album here - Steve Cooney - harp tunes CD (stevecooneymusic.com) - as far as I know. A copy of the CD is on its way to me from Ireland right now.

Take care.

Wetness And Greenness

Some days I wake up and feel I've just got to get outside for a walk. It's a bit cloudy out there and it might rain later, but I'm not going to let that stop me. Lets see if we can find something to photograph along the well-trodden paths around home. 

When I'm on familiar territory I have to take a quick snap to get me going, otherwise I just trudge along and get bored. So here's a little portrait of a pioneering little sprig that is making its way through the bars of its prison. That's what you've got to do: just poke your head outside and see what's there. 

And just a little way along the road there's a show of flowers in the border, looking fine despite three days of heavy rain.

Lets celebrate the overnight rain! It will return the green to the English countryside, though there'll be many farmers worrying over such crops that yet remain unharvested.

The familiar little footbridge, just behind the church, is in danger of being swamped by vegetation. Water is still dripping from the leaves as I cross. 

Here's an adolescent tree trying to fight its way upwards into the light among the ivy-clad grown-ups. I fear that its bold efforts may be brought to an end the next time this path needs clearing, but maybe it'll be spared. 

Down on Shepreth Moor there's a log-pile that seems to have built itself a little nest among the dry grasses. These little piles have been left all over as potential homes for insect life.

In the hedgerow I find a familiar dead tree is slowly sinking earthwards, having been felled by the winds of last winter. 

It almost looks like November, but you can just glimpse the big, square straw bales in the far distance. And actually it's really quite warm this morning - it's not so much misty as steamy!

There seems to be a "tree" theme emerging from my photographs this morning and here's a Scots pine raising its noble head above the more familiar native trees of the little woodland.

A fallen branch inverts the usual pattern of tree-growth and adds a little hint of Autumn to the general greenery.

But mostly there's unstoppable growth sprouting up everywhere, like green fountains. So that's what my walk has revealed on this murky and humid morning. Now I'd better head for home before the next thunderstorm arrives. And this is August 2020.

Take care.

In Praise Of Old Wood

The snow and frost departed this morning, leaving in their wake muddy paths, wet grass and puddles. As I slithered along the forgotten lane I spied an old friend still lying on the field-edge. This old tree has been here for several years and is slowly returning to the earth from whence it came. At some time men came with saws and removed some of the branches, but they abandoned the task and left the bulky trunk behind. Now it's home for beetles and spiders. Various fungi have moved in and increasingly plants are growing from the decaying wood.

I made some photos of its contorted, rotting form some years ago and couldn't resist having another go today. Here are a few photos - intimate portraits or small landscapes - of old wood.

As you can see from some photos someone has tried to set fire to part of the old tree at some time but they've scarcely made any impression other than blackening some of it. If I remember I'll try to come back in Summer to see just what plants have managed to colonise the old wood.

Take care.

Churchyards - Matters Of Death And Immortality

We often visit old churches as we trundle about the English countryside on this blog. But, other than the odd picture of a particularly grand or unusual gravestone, I don't seem to have mentioned much about the churchyards in which they stand. So here goes.....

Although almost all our villages date back to way before the Domesday Book, archaeological evidence has shown that many settlements have moved around over the years, so that the modern village may not always be in exactly the same place as its Medieval or Saxon equivalent, and it's quite possible that there'll be a Roman or even prehistoric settlement discovered somewhere else in the neighbouring fields. A village might first form around a spring, but later a road might be built nearby and gradually more and more houses are built near the road to take advantage of passing trade till the original settlement becomes deserted. But it probably still has the same name - and it probably still has the same church. Which is why some churches now stand out in the fields, away from the houses.

Some of the churches we've seen date back 1,000 years, but before that there was probably an earlier church on the same site, and before that quite possibly a pre-Christian gathering place and maybe even some sort of burial mound. In fact we may have been burying our dead in the same plot for well over two millennia. When, as in the two churches I've shown you above, the village is small and the churchyard is large there's been no real problem. But sometimes things get mighty crowded....

Lets think about this: if there are, say, 200 people in the village and if, as throughout most of history, they live on average to the age of about 50......errrrr.....then there'll be about 4 burials every year......errmm....that's about 400 new graves every century....er....4,000 every thousand years. You begin to get the picture.

So it's not at all unusual to find headstones stacked against the churchyard wall where old graves have been dug up to allow a new burial.

I suppose I could tell you that the graveyard in Grantchester, which is pictured above, has become crowded because everyone in the village has exceedingly long legs, but actually those are normal people walking on ground that has built up over the centuries because of the interment of so many corpses and coffins. (Don't tell them; it'll ruin their afternoon - the strolling couple I mean, not the corpses!). Maintaining that retaining wall costs the village a small fortune.

Around the church you can see where the original foundations of the church were at a lower level.

And as you go inside you'll find a series of steps which lead you down to the level of the church floor. You probably wouldn't notice unless, like I was recently, you were pushing someone in a wheelchair when they becomes a formidable obstacle - though there are some ramps stowed to the left of the door.

In urban areas the overcrowding of graveyards became a real problem as the towns grew in size. Bones were often unearthed by the gravediggers and were stored in boneyards. In Paris whole graveyards were excavated and the bones removed to catacombs because the stench, the pollution of the water supply and resultant health hazard had become intolerable. Many towns created new cemeteries outside the built up areas, though frequently the town spread out and soon enclosed them.

In fact the smell from graveyards was always a problem even in rural locations and is probably why we started to put flowers on graves. A good big stone slab was also a good investment if you didn't want the corpse to be dug up by dogs or foxes. The wealthy paid extra for their loved ones to be buried inside the church and, when that was stopped because of the stink inside the building, they invested in mausoleums in the churchyards.

Enough of death and decay! Lets talk about something as near to immortal as is possible in this world. 

Just about every churchyard you explore has at least one yew tree. Some of these are very old indeed and just a few are reckoned to have been here longer than Christianity. One in St Cynog’s churchyard at Defynnog, near Sennybridge in Wales, has been dated at 5,000 years old! Plenty of people will tell you that the yew is grown in churchyards as a symbol of immortality, either Christian or pagan. And there may be some truth in what they say but.... 

There's another reason why every village had to have a supply of yew wood and that was nothing less than the defence of the nation. For yew was the wood of choice for making longbows. The sapwood springs back from having been stretched, ideal for the outside of the curve of the bow, while the heartwood springs back from being compressed, ideal for the inside of the bow's curve. Bow-makers have known this for a long time and remains of bows from the neolithic show that they were made in this way too.

But why in the churchyard? Well, because yew is also poisonous, so was grown in the only place where farm animals could not browse upon them. 

Probably.

Take care.