A real market, not a supermarket

Saturday was market day in Logierait, ten miles away from Aberfeldy but still our local market. It’s at the other end of Strath Tay from the ancient market site I visited about a month ago but it’s a living hint of what the old markets like that one at Inchadney were all about.

Logierait is a new market, started a few years ago by a local community group but now Pete and Fiona from Mill of Logierait farm run it and it’s a great place to go. There are plenty of stalls but there’s also live music, an outdoor cafe and even a wee train that can take you on a gentle chug around the farm for a couple of quid. It’s become a regular part of my life. I go to shop: there’s great bread on sale, superb chocolate, plenty of meat, including wild game, fish, veg, cakes, locally roasted coffee, plants, bric-a-brac and all sorts of crafty things. But I also go to meet up with people and do some small bits of business. So this month I was helping to publicise the new season of our local film society, sold some of the stuff I’ve been clearing out my house, did my weekly shop, met up with friends and made various social and work arrangements. Even Todd, my dog, had a good time and met up with plenty of doggy friends.

It seems like a simple thing, a few stalls in a field but it is makes a much pleasanter and more productive morning out than a trudge around a supermarket. It’s what markets should be about, local makers and producers selling direct, a local farm doing their best to diversify and a valuable gathering place for people from Aberfeldy, Dunkeld, Pitlochry, all the places between and a good few from further afield too. It’s made a real difference to Highland Perthshire where there is a real struggle to maintain a sense of community in an area with a small and dispersed population. It’s great to see a living version of the ancient markets that dotted the human landscape around here for so many centuries. Long may it prosper!

Weeds

I’ve been thinking about weeds a lot recently, probably because its summer and I’ve been doing a lot of gardening, and because I just read Richard Mabey’s book, Weeds. They even sprouted on Woman’s Hour on Radio 4 the other day. I work in a couple of gardens at the moment, one that is next to a field where the weeds constantly blow in, the other behind a stone wall where weeds have to compete with the ‘official’ plants and don’t always win. I take a fairly relaxed approach, I think dandelions can look a lot better than daffodils, especially when they’ve finished flowering when the daffs turn to mush and the dandelions to gossamer.
There is an ecological definition of a weed, which is a plant that can take off quickly in disturbed ground, flower, fruit, set seed and spread further into more disturbed ground. And gardening is all about disturbance, digging and spraying especially are a gift to weeds. Inevitably weeds are a gardener’s lot, but you can do a couple of things to reduce the stress of it, one is to not spend all your time disturbing things, the other is to learn which are a problem and which are actually quite attractive if you take the time to notice.
I find weeds a bit more worrying outside of the garden. There are the monster weeds, giant hogweed, Japanese knotweed and Himalayan balsam spring to mind, especially on rivers. There’s not much of the hogweed or japweed around here, on the upper reaches of the Tay, but there’s plenty of balsam, and it seems to be increasing pretty rapidly. This lot is on the Aberfeldy golf course. There was a lot less of it here until a few years ago when the groundsmen starting hacking the natural vegetation with a bit too much enthusiasm.
It helps if you know what a weed looks like too. Earlier this summer I saw a local farmer spraying herbicide along the river path. I think he was trying to kill off a patch of giant hogweed, but he managed to kill a good bit of sweet cicely and turned the butterbur in terrible contortions. It’s not surprising the biodiversity of this country is in such a terrible state (there's a thorough account in Silent Summer, ed. Norman Maclean, depressing stuff) when a farmer doesn’t know his sweet cicely from his giant hogweed, or doesn’t bother to know.

Splinter Group at Fortingall Art

Fortingall Art is well under way since the opening on Friday night. I was on duty yesterday afternoon and expected a quiet few hours with an occasional chat as people drifted steadily in. Instead at times it was a frenzy of wrapping, receipt writing and taking money. We had over a hundred visitors to the Molteno Hall, despite its location in a very quiet village some distance from anywhere much, and they were spending too. It was good to see, if a little bemusing, where do they all come from?

The Splinter Group wood engravings were a quiet contrast with the paintings in rest of the hall. The book was printed in time, just and alphabet was almost complete (apart from X, which is extinct). Our wee images take some looking at, but they make a satisfying and intriguing tile effect when they’re all together and the book is very beautiful and reflects not just the diversity of the Scottish fauna but also of the members of the Splinter Group. I suspect it needs to be handled to be fully appreciated, but there’s been lots of interest in the prints. Philippa Swann produced some lovely booklets explaining who the Splinter Group is and a little about the processes of wood engraving and printmaking. I think it’s quite difficult to convey how much work and skill is involved in traditional printmaking in these days of computers and laser jets so we need to put some effort into explanation. The exhibition finishes on Sunday, and then it’s onto the Splinter Group’s next project.