Looking at flies

I’ve been thinking about my blog title, taking a closer look, and why I’m writing it.  On a practical level it’s helped me take more note of what I’m doing.  By writing about it and recording it in a semi-public way I’ve made myself a record, which is becoming useful for the projects I’ve been writing about. 

And taking a close look at the natural world is something that is always worthwhile, which takes me to my nasty fly photo.  I took this picture in the summer, having found these dead flies and thinking there was something odd about them but not sure what.   Then I bought Peter Marren’s new book, Mushrooms, published by the wonderful British Wildlife Publishing (who take looking at the natural world as seriously as it deserves).  Flicking through and looking at the photos I found one like mine of a dead fly.  The text told me it was infected by a fungus, Entomophora muscae¸ which invades the fly’s system and affects its behaviour so its dying act is to climb to the top of long grass, where the fungus bursts out of the fly and throws its spores into the wind so it can infect some other unlucky insect.  Not a pretty way to live, but effective and, to my mind anyway, wonderful.  But to discover wonders like fly killing fungus you need to look.  I can’t congratulate myself on knowing what it was when I first saw it, but I can credit myself for seeing it and recognising it as something out of the ordinary.  That’s what looking is all about.

Ash

I was in Treswell yesterday, on a golden autumn day with the Notts Wildlife Trust volunteers, who were coppicing hazel. I left them at it and went for a walk around the wood and had a good look at the trees.  Treswell is typical in many ways of woods in this part of England because it is dominated by ash.  When NWT bought it forty years ago it wasn’t so long since the war and the mass felling that had gone on then to support the war effort.  A huge number of woods were clear-felled, including Treswell, and left to do their own thing in the years afterwards.  Traditional woodland management was dead then, certainly in Nottinghamshire, and it wasn’t going to revive at all until the 1990s, and even then only in a few lucky woods like Treswell.  So all those abandoned woods, that were probably fairly diverse with oak, field maple and other broadleaves, as well as ash, became almost entirely ash because ash can set lots of seed and establish very quickly on disturbed sites and nothing was done to thin them out.  If you wanted to set the scene for a disaster to attack those woodlands then you couldn’t do much better than that.  All that was needed to finish it off was a disease that kills ash.  And what do we have to do the job?  Chalara fraxinea.  It could have been avoided, or come slow enough to allow time to get those devastated woods back into good heart, if we didn’t have this insane system of transporting live plants around the globe and if we really valued and understood our natural resources.  But cash is king, if we knew then we ignored and Chalara is here to do what it will do. 

But Treswell Wood is in good heart, thanks largely to the revival of coppice management over the last twenty years.  Thanks also to good luck.  It belongs to the Wildlife Trust who have allowed it to be managed sensitively using old, tested ways, it’s fairly big and there are other trees than ash here.  In fact it has a very diverse range of trees and shrubs including oak, elm (they didn’t all die in that other much-cited tree disaster), field maple, wild cherry, apple, dogwood, midland hawthorn and lots and lots of hazel.  It’s probably the hazel that has rescued Treswell.  It’s a valuable and entirely renewable resource.  And many of those masses of ash trees have been thinned out over the years for firewood and timber.  Now there’s space and light for all those other species to flourish and keep the wood alive, whatever our mad society throws at it.  I hope.

I’m writing more about this in my forthcoming book, Treswell, a working wood.  I’m not sure when it’ll come out but ash dieback is concentrating my mind.

Patchwork tales at Moulin Hall

Claire Hewitt and I were at Moulin Hall on Friday with the patchwork quilt for Tell a Story Day and for an event that was part of the Luminate Creative Ageing festival.  Children from four of Highland Perthshire schools came early to hear and rehearse ‘The Spider that Spun the Golden Web’, a wonder tale created on Claire’s Travelling Tales cycling project in May.  The children worked hard to learn the story.  There was no reading and no props. They just had their memories and voices to tell the story.  And they did, wonderfully well, to an audience in the afternoon of older people who had come to listen and to tell their stories about the patchwork quilt.

Some of those quilt stories were remarkable.  Angus Macmaster and his brother Archie came along and told us about their three aunts, Gracie, Katie and Bella Macmaster.  The three girls lived at Saunich, four miles over the hill from Kinloch Rannoch and they walked to and from school every day.  They were known as the ‘wild deer of Rannoch’. Even for the time that was a tough walk.  They all emigrated to Canada about a hundred years ago.  Perhapsthat wasn’t such a daunting journey for young women who’d walked the hills since they were five years old. Mabel Macaulay came from Kyle to talk about her grandmother, who was the assistant teacher in Lochmaddy when she signed her name on the quilt. Mabel had a school tale too. She lived on Kirkibost, a tidal island off North Uist, and went by boat or horse and cart, depending on the tide.

We are hoping to have more gatherings to hear stories from those patchwork names and, eventually, I will write them.  The patchwork names represent girls from three Highland and Island communities and their lives in those landscapes one hundred and odd years ago.  It’ll take some time to piece their stories and how they fit in their communities and landscapes, so it will be a while.  And hopefully we can get some funding.  In the meantime the stories on Friday were wonderful to hear, and thank you to all who came to listen and tell. It was a very special day.

Pop Up Prints

Buoyed up by another successful outing at Fortingall Art the Splinter Group is branching out again. We are going to be in a ‘pop-up shop’ in Dunkeld for three weeks between the 10th and 27th October.

We will be in Zigzag, next to Palmerstons Café. Zigzag was a lovely little shop where Dave Amos sold mostly locally produced handmade goods. He used to sell some of my stuff too, mostly beads and felt from my early craft selling days. Dave has gone on to other things but for three weeks only we'll be stepping in to fill the shop before the new tenants come in.  We’ll be mostly selling prints in our three week stint, though Penny Kennedy has her new home-ware and wrapping papers for sale under her new ‘Homebird’ brand. Linda Farquharson has lots of her exquisite lino prints, and I’ve put in a few too. And of course there’s the range of Splinter output, especially the Animal Alphabet and this year’s Calendar project. There’s also some Philip Wood pots, handmade notebooks and wood carvings.

I went along at the weekend to help Penny and Linda set up and was impressed how good it looked even before we’d got it fully setup.

Patchwork Stories, Patchwork Names

To mark National Tell a Story Day, Claire Hewitt and I will spend the afternoon at Moulin Hall, Pitlochry on Friday 26^th October with the patchwork and some of its stories.  Local schoolchildren will also tell their new wonder tale ‘The Spider that Spun the Golden Web’ created on Claire’s ‘Story Cycle’ this summer. 

We hope a few people with connections to the girls on the patchwork will come along and tell their stories over a cuppa and cake. 





The event is part of The Luminate Festival and The Scottish International Storytelling Festival.

Names on the quilt

The dates when Isabella Christie taught at each school and the relevant names are listed below.  The information comes from the census: 1881 for Heisker, 1891 for Lochmaddy and 1891 and 1901 for Kinloch Rannoch.  Sisters are together under one surname, names in full are for girls from different households.  Clearly there aren’t that many surnames (or first names for that matter), especially in Heisker and Lochmaddy. A few girls signed just with initials and, because I think they will be almost impossible to trace, I've missed them out.

Heisker, 1882 to 1887: Chrissie and Annie Macaulay, Maggie Macaulay, Effie Macaulay, Jessie and  Annie (Jannet) McCuish, Alexandrina Macdonald, Chrissie and Lizzie Macdonald, Maggie Macdonald, Maggie and Marian Morrison, Marion Morrison.

There is a second Chrissie Macaulay who I think was from Heisker, but I can’t be sure.  Katie Morrison, is listed in the relevant census for Heisker and Lochmaddy in two different families, so I don’t know which she belongs to.

Lochmaddy, 1887 to 1894: Bella Dingwall, Anna and Effie Dingwall, Maggie and Bessie Grant, Katie McDiarmid, Jeanie Macdonald, Bella Macdonald,  Shenac (Jean) Macdonald, Effie Macdonald, Mary Macdougald, Bessie McFarlane, Rachel Macgilp, Rachel and Marian Mcinnes, Lizzie Mackay, Flora and  Isabel Maclean, Maggie and Annie Macorquodale, Chrissie Morrison, Chrissie Kate Stewart.

Kinloch Rannoch, 1895 to 1897: Catherine Anderson, Euphemia Cameron McGregor, Jessie Campbell, Lizzie Dewar, Maggie Farquharson, Tina Forbes, Annie Fraser Stewart, Christina McEwen, Jeannie MacMartin, Katie, Bella and Gracie MacMaster, Maria Macpherson, Flora and Maggie MacSwan, Mary Munro,  Maggie Richardson, Bessie Robertson, Marie, Katie and Jessie Scott, Annie Sinclair, Mary Templeton, Maggie Thomson, Jessie Urquhart.

The following names weren’t located, though, given that the census for Heisker and Lochmaddy are a good match and most of them have surnames that were not found in the islands (apart from McCuish, Macdonald and possibly Macdougald), it’s likely they’re mostly from Kinloch Rannoch.

Maggie Clark Macdonald, Maggie Cooper, Katie Cramb, Mary Cramb, Isa Dott, Bessie Ferguson, Chrissie Macdougald, Bella McCuish, Annie McIntosh, Ethel Mackenzie, Madge Mackenzie, Barbara McColl McInnes, Jessie Maconie McInnes, Jeannie McPherson (twice), Katie McPherson, Elsie Stuart, Williamina Sutherland, Gracie Thomson, Maggie Todd Robertson, Tina Bell Turner Campbell.

The spelling of surnames is more or less standardised but the first names are as they appear on the quilt.  There’s a bit of guessing about which first name matches with the census records. Where there are different first names but it seems a plausible match the census recorded name is given in brackets.

Taking a closer look at two master wood engravers

 

The Splinter Group had an outing on Friday, to see the exhibition of wood engravings by Eric Ravilious at Aberdeen Art Gallery.   We also were shown their collection of work by Claire Leighton, another consummate wood engraver who worked in the 1930s. 

Ravilious’ work was typical Ravilious, decorative, full of mark making, playful.  There was a strong sense of him testing out his tools to see what marks they could make, and the way he played with perspective gave his work a naïve feeling which I guess is reflected in the work of many designers and illustrators today.  Leighton on the other hand was more about the subject.  The Gallery’s collection was mostly from a series she did based on workmen in the US.  To me, the most successful were of men in snow, shovelling in the streets of New York or a wagon hauling through the backwoods.  The snow helped lighten the blacks, which dominated her images. Her work was all about outline and shape, beautifully athletic men and machinery in rugged landscapes.  Tone was minimal and just a few strokes of her spitsticker were all she used to relieve the black.  There’s a hint of that socialist worker stuff that was fashionable then in art but certainly not now.  Unlike Ravilious, whose decorative, not-quite-but-almost quaint, certainly charming, Englishness is still popular. Robert MacFarlane devotes a chapter to him in The Old Ways, so he must be in.

Not all Claire Leighton’s work was so dark, she wrote and illustrated a lovely book about her garden, Four Hedges, which was reissued in 1970 so not outrageously expensive on Abebooks.

Plenty of inspiration for the next Splinter project…..

Reconnections

Borenich is a tiny graveyard perched on a knoll and with views to Schiehallion a few miles west and Loch Tummel, just to the north.  There are only two gravestones and a little iron cross, though there are some recumbent stones. I couldn’t get the gate open so I didn’t go in, but I could read the gravestones, both with Stewart names engraved on them.  I went to visit after meeting Cathy Laing, who was born a Stewart, told me about the place on North Uist at the patchwork quilt meeting at Taigh Chearsabhaigh. Chrissie Kate Stewart, Cathy’s grandmother, signed her name on the quilt and her family, who were travellers, had strong connections with Borenich.  Isabella Christie taught down the road in Kinloch Rannoch and in Lochmaddy, at first sight completely unlinked places but it seems not.  There is a website about Borenich with lots of information about the people who lived there in the nineteenth century, when it was a reasonable sized village (www.borenich.co.uk).  Now there’s one farm, many piles of stones in the surrounding fields, a graveyard with a visitors’ book and the feeling that this place was connected in ways now long forgotten. 

Mistle thrushes were feeding on the anthills in the dry grassland where these harebells were still in flower, just. 

A homecoming for the patchwork quilt

I went to North Uist at the weekend with Claire Hewitt taking the school patchwork back to one of its original locations in Lochmaddy.  The local heritage society had helped gather interested people to come to Taigh Chearsabhaigh, an arts and heritage centre, and see the quilt, hear some of what we already knew about it and to see the names.  Powerful things those names, they recorded grannies and great aunts for a surprising number of the people in the room.  Just about everyone was related to someone on the quilt, including children from Lochmaddy primary school. It was very moving to hear about the lives of those women and even to see photographs of some of them. We heard about a lost way of life too from Angus 'Moy' MacDonald, who had lived on Heisker until 1942, sixty years after Isabella Christie taught there and started making her quilt.  Those islands are uninhabited now.  The quilt holds many stories of loss and abandonment, but the people in that room also showed how it records continuity too.  It was an inspiring day.  We are hoping that the heritage society, and others, will help us gather memories and memorabilia together for an exhibition sometime with the quilt at its centre.

We camped at Balranald while we were on North Uist and I took the chance to explore the machair and take a closer look at the wildlife.  The flowers were past their best but there were still plenty around for insects, including some wind-tattered butterflies.  This bumblebee was a bit more robust and not quite so battered looking.  It's a Great Yellow, Bombus distinguendus, a species like the corncrake that has found a refuge on the Outer Isles from the intensive agriculture in the rest of the country that has driven it extinct elsewhere. It's not just people who keep their roots in these islands, the wildlife does too.



Chasing butterflies

I was at Treswell last week and spent a couple of mornings chasing butterflies, trying to take photographs.  It's a bit of a zen pursuit.  I know I will get one eventually but it can take some time.  It's very meditative in its way.  This small skipper was relatively easy to catch compared to the gatekeepers and meadow brown that were also feeding on the knapweed amongst the long grass of the field that edges the wood.  The field is like a chunk bitten out of the wood (an asart I think, taken from the wood in medieval times, at least). It has a great view of the nearby Cottam power station, belching CO2 into the morning sky.  Notts Wildlife Trust are hoping to buy it and incorporate the field into the nature reserve. Judging from the butterflies it's already a valuable habitat.  Grassland that hasn't been fertilised, cut and reseeded into relatively sterile uniformity is increasingly rare, so I hope the Trust do manage to get it.

A full calendar

Fortingall Art finished yesterday, and I took my first opportunity to see it, having decided on a last minute holiday before it was all printed and hung. Unfortunately for my viewing experience but not for our sales, the whole calendar print with all twelve blocks had been sold and picked up.  This was great news for the Splinter Group and I did get to see, and photograph, an unframed print.  It's an impressive piece of work, rich in detail and some well considered design, well done us.  We're moving on with our wood engraving and it shows how the technique brings its own character to our diverse styles of mark making.  We're planning a trip to Aberdeen Art Gallery for our next meeting to take a look at their wood engraving collection and to see the Ravilious exhibition there. They also have lots of Clare Leighton, who did many richly textured engravings for her own books on the living world, so it should be an inspiring visit.

Fortingall Art... again

High summer and the Splinter wood engraving group is back in the beautiful Arts and Crafts, James Maclaren designed Molteno Hall as part of the annual Fortingall Art exhibition.  After last year's animal alphabet we were slightly less ambitious with our calendar, 12 images instead of 26.  But we've gone a little bigger to 7 x 7 cm for each month.  It might not sound big but with such concentrated mark making each block feels like a substantial piece of work.  We're still to print all the blocks, there's some last minute scratching to do, but it should be a great showpiece for the six entirely different styles of the six of us in the Splinter group.  My months were June and December, inspired by a Picasso lino of Bacchanalian revels and a Ravilious wood engraving of Saturnalia. I have naked ladies for June, dancing with midsummer madness and, more decorously, men in a midwinter Saturnalian scene for December, no Christmas in sight.

We have an entry on the website:
http://www.fortingallart.co.uk/artists_m_z.html
And the exhibition runs from Saturday 28th July to Sunday 5th August 2012. 

Fire and Juniper

I spent a chilly weekend in the woods last week, warmed by fire-making, a good tweed skirt and lots of stories. I was on a bushcraft weekend with Willow Lohr, an inspiring woman who was teaching us to make amidu, the tinder carried by Otsie the iceman, lighting it with flints and steel, making feather sticks and lots of other incendiary tricks. So if I’m in a survival situation I now appreciate the preciousness of a box of matches.   Claire Hewitt was telling stories too, which blended beautifully into a weekend spent sitting around fire.   Our fire circle was under the cover of an old parachute strung under a majestic old pine and we scavenged for dead juniper twigs to make wonderfully fragrant, almost smoke free fire (which is why juniper was so liked by illegal distillers in the days of whisky stills up in the hills).  It was a beautiful piece of woodland at Crathie, near Balmoral and with the biggest goat willow tree I think I’ve ever seen amongst all the old pines, birches and juniper. And it was almost too cold for midges, so an added treat for an already great weekend.

Lost and found

The patchwork quilt has been found! I wrote about it in January on this blog, with a very grainy photograph reproduced from a newspaper, and now I’ve got the real thing.  My storyteller friend Claire Hewitt, who was with me when I first saw it at Kinloch Rannoch primary school prompted its rediscovery when she was on a journey around Highland Perthshire, doing the eighty odd miles of the Etape in eight days and collecting stories on the way.  She found a good few stories, and she found the quilt.  The Etape is a timed cycle race on closed roads that the keen cyclists put their heads down and do in a few hours, but Claire decided keep her head up and take her time, and I’m very glad she did.  She went into Kinloch Rannoch school and had them telling stories, then took out some red and white squares for the kids to sign in homage to the quilt we thought was lost.  But thankfully it was still in the school and Claire and I have now got it.  We’re looking for a good home but it needs somewhere that can show it and help gather and tell its many stories.  

Bamff beavers

Beavers are back on the Tay after a gap of a few hundred years and very welcome they are too as far as I’m concerned.  Although I’ve heard lots about them being around Aberfeldy I’ve yet to see any sign of them so I was glad to have the chance to go to Bamff estate near Alyth where there are beavers aplenty.  Paul and Louise Ramsay brought European beavers onto the estate about ten years ago and have let them do their thing ever since.  They now have two families of beavers thriving in two separate areas on the estate.  We didn’t see beavers, they’re nocturnal and we were there in the middle of a very bright sunny day, but there was plenty of evidence that they were around.  They’re impressively ambitious, gnawing at a huge old beech tree and making a dam 100 metres long and digging canals to swim down from the further reaches of their territory.  All their activity has transformed a rather dull bit of woodland (part of which I helped plant 20 years ago) into an intricate, thriving wetland, a rare thing in our increasingly drained and tidied countryside. There’s been a fair bit of controversy about these beavers.  The Tay beavers are not officially sanctioned, despite the official beaver reintroduction project currently running in Argyll.   These easterners are all escapees, not from Bamff Paul and Louise were very quick to point out, despite much speculation to the contrary.  I suspect most of the objection to them is that they’re rather untidy by our increasingly obsessive tidy standards and they did it in their own way with a bit of help from knowledgeable enthusiasts without the involvement of officialdom.  Good luck to them I say.

Arabian toads and flower photos

I’m back in Scotland from Oman now, and still enjoying the soft light and lushness of spring green, though a bit more warmth would be lovely.  We had more rain in Oman after our first deluge, including a massive electrical storm, which was spectacular and frightening, especially since we were planning to camp right in the middle of it. We decamped instead and drove back from Sur to Muscat through the rain and lightning.  The road was a brand new motorway, mostly empty, and crawling with toads that must have felt the rain and a rare chance to move out in the open.  I hate seeing frogs and toads on the road here and there it was particularly sad. It must be tough being a toad in Arabia and being squashed on the road seems a squalid end. 

We spent a lot of time taking photos of plants in Oman. I’ve never engaged with photography much. I tended to look at it as just another way to spend money on expensive electronic tat, but since I didn’t buy the camera and I had time to use it properly, and we were surrounded by so much materialism in Muscat, I put my reservations to one side and enjoyed it. Sadly the plants weren’t desperately photogenic, though this Echinops was a good show-off. 

And the advantage of the cold weather is spring in Scotland is slow. The wood anemones were still out before I left and it’s good to see them still here and almost fresh after all this rain.

Plant hunting in Oman, roads and rain

I’m in Oman, plant hunting with a small team from the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. RBGE has strong links with Oman, Tony Miller has been working in Arabia for getting on for 35 years and he and our team have been asked by the Omani government to explore some of the more isolated mountains, where botanists have not been before. This trip is a recce to see what we can find on some of the less isolated, but still precipitous mountains. The Hajar mountains are a dramatic range parallel to the coast east and west of Muscat. They are intimidatingly dramatic and, without a continuous plant cover, they’re exposed to weather in a big way. Great chunks of rock look like they slid down the mountain yesterday and loose, slippy stuff is everywhere. There are plateaus though, with a cooler and damper climate and villages are scattered across the more accessible places, especially on the Sayq plateau in the Western Hajar.

We went to visit Wukan, a village perched on a cliff on the north side of Sayq plateau a couple of days ago. It was a long drive through a wadi on gravel roads. We got into Wadi Mistall through a narrow gorge where, like just about everywhere in Oman, there was massive road construction. Once through the gorge the wadi opened out into a huge bowl, circled by the cliffs of Jabal al Akhdar and Jabal Nakhl (one of our mountains, with no apparent way up it). Wukan was right at the head of the bowl up a steep dirt track. It was a small place but busy with children who’d all just come back from school. We climbed up through the terraces, following a falaj that irrigated the fruit trees, pomegranates, almonds, apricots and dates. Higher up there was water in a tank, the first fresh water I'd seen on this very dry trip. I got quite excited about it until we reached the top of the village and looked up to see dark clouds gathering and thunder in the distance. We made a swift descent and got back to the car just as the first drops fell. Rain is a scary prospect on these loose dirt roads and we were glad to get down the steepest slopes before it really started hammering it down. The road turned to a mini wadi and waterfalls ran down the mountains where only an hour before running water was inconceivable. It transformed the landscape, especially the colours that suddenly became rich and clean.

Summer sonnet

I collected my Dun Coillich summer sonnet print from the Quarto Press last week, ready for sale at the Highland Perthshire Communities Partnership AGM in Kinloch Rannoch last Saturday, and for this unexpectedly summery weather. I’m donating a proportion of the sale price to HPCLT who are on a fundraising and awareness raising mission at the moment. A large part of the ground was planted up with trees a few years ago in an attempt to create native woodland on the hill but the deer have been getting in through a leaky fence and nibbling the trees so at the moment there’s not much sign of anything above the heather. I’ve just been elected as a trustee so I’m trying to do my bit to help, at the moment mostly through selling the print to help raise funds for tree planting and fencing and, hopefully, footpath work. Trish Waite, another trustee, has been putting in lots of effort and energy and has organised a Celebration of Trees for Saturday afternoon on the 31st March in the Lesser Hall, Aberfeldy. It should be a good afternoon celebrating as many tree things as possible: wine, wood engraving and wood cut (my bit), charcoal drawing, stories, baskets, etc. etc. It would be good to blog after the event with pictures but I’m off to Oman early on Sunday morning so I’m pre-empting. Oman may well be the next entry.

Birds, horses and frogs

I spent Saturday in Treswell Village Hall at a meeting arranged by TWIG, the bird monitoring group for the wood. It was a remarkable day, 50 people gathered to hear about and discuss the work that’s been going on there for nearly 40 years. Treswell is one of the best studied sites for birds in the country now, a fact acknowledged by Andy Clements, director of the British Trust for Ornithology. It's the BTO's mission to get the sort of data they've been gathering for years at Treswell. There’s such a mass of it, and it’s been so carefully collected, that academics are starting to publish papers without having to do any more fieldwork. A couple of them presented published work on how the changing climate is affecting tit species and how coppicing can benefit a range of woodland birds. It was good stuff to hear. The bird monitoring will be an important part of the book so it was good to have the opportunity to catch up with all the people who’ve been involved and to see how it is beginning to be appreciated in the world outside of Treswell Wood.
Early the next morning the ringers were back in the wood and I went along to catch up with them, at the nets catching and recording the local birds, like this treecreeper.

And on Wednesday the volunteers and woodmen were back in the wood. There were horses too, brought in for a course on horse logging, extracting timber without machines. The horses were magnificent Shires, Alison and Emily, and they were very patient being driven by, mostly mildly terrified, novices and picking their way through thickets of rose and bramble. Spring was in the air and a mass of frogs were spawning in a small pond by the track, intent on their own business, despite all the horsey activity.

A crowd in the woods

I had another day in a quiet place yesterday with lots of people. It wasn’t really a crowd, though it felt busy. I went to Treswell Wood nature reserve with Rob and his volunteers to work for the day, mostly burning brash from trees that have been felled this winter. There were seven of us plus three other veteran volunteers who like to go at their own pace. Then there was a little posse who came up from the Notts Wildlife Trust head offices in Nottingham to have a look around, a couple of professional woodmen who were working in the coppice and at least a couple of dog walkers, including one old man who had known the wood for at least seventy years. I’d travelled down from Scotland on the train a couple of days before and I saw no-one in the countryside, apart from the occasional dog walker. There’s not much to attract people into the arable lands of Eastern England but there’s plenty to bring them into a wood like Treswell. And some of them are making a living by being there. Yesterday was a good example to me of how a well-managed wood can be much more socially, economically and environmentally valuable (in its way) than an intensively farmed field.

Books, collies and a Marilyn

Saturday felt like spring, just as well for an outdoor book launch. My friend Linda Cracknell has just published a wee book, ‘Following our Fathers’, featuring two essays about her journeys following fathers. One was her friend’s Ule Somme, whose father Sven Somme was a Norwegian hero of the resistance during World War II and made an epic trek across Norway to escape from the Nazis. The other father was Linda’s, who died when she was small, but climbed in the Alps on a momentous expedition as a student. Linda followed in the footsteps of both of them, across Norway and up the mountain and wrote about them, beautifully.

The book launch was at a shed on a piece of community owned land called Dun Coillich. Linda is a trustee of the charity that owns it, Highland Perthshire Communities Land Trust, and I was involved when it started ten years ago and will be coming back as a trustee next month. Dun Coillich is a hill (a Marilyn, the definition of which I do not know, but it’s smaller than a Corbett, if that means anything) that sits above the confluence of two burns and guards the top of the pass that connects straths Tay and Tummel.

Linda read from her book, and distracted us with pass the parcel, and then led us all up the hill. It was great to be there with so many people, I’m used to be on the hill by myself, and having collies look after us was particularly poignant, since my hill collie died a couple of years ago and I’d forgotten the reassurance they can bring on rough ground, constantly on the watch to make sure we’re all together.

Taking responsibility for land is not easy and all of us at HPCLT are learning, but it is still a special place, if you can get there. It’s not the easiest place to get around either, hopefully something will be done about that, but it’s worth exploring. Whatever a Marilyn is (well-rounded I guess), it’s a good height to view the landscape, without the slog of trekking up a Munro.

Patchwork lives

A few years ago I visited a local primary school in Kinloch Rannoch and the head teacher at the time showed us an old quilt that had recently donated to the school. It wasn’t very beautiful, crude red and white squares patched into a checkerboard. But each square had a girl’s name embroidered on it and there was a central medallion with the initials IFC. The teacher, Simon Calvin, had done some research and found that IFC was Isabella Christie who had taught at Kinloch Rannoch in the 1890s after starting her career in the Western Isles. She left her home near Elgin at the age of nineteen to teach on Heisker (aka the Monach Isles), a windy bit of Hebridean machair marooned off the west coast of North Uist. Heisker is deserted now but then there were over a hundred people living there and they needed a teacher. Isabella Christie had got the girls there and in her next two schools to sign their own square. The quilt was a record of her teaching.

Three of the girls’ names were Macmasters, Katie, Gracie and Bella. I knew Angus Macmaster, who lives in Aberfeldy, and he told me that they were his aunts. Gracie, the youngest of seventeen, emigrated with her mother and two of her sisters in 1908, abandoning the family home at Saunich over the hill from Rannoch in lonely Glen Errochty and moving to Saskatchewan, Canada. So the quilt held stories of people who were the last to live in some of the remotest parts of the Highlands and Islands. These were stories of lives shaped by the landscapes in which they lived and recorded in a quilt. As someone who looks at landscape as a storybook that can be read if you look closely enough, and as an occasional quilter, I couldn’t help being fascinated by it.

Sadly the quilt has disappeared and I didn’t manage to take a picture of it before it vanished. The picture here is taken from an article that appeared in the Perth Courier in 2007. But I’ve been able to do more research and I’m planning to produce a wee book, sometime soon I hope. Watch this space.

Being Rook

A soundtrack of cawing and mewing crows, rooks and jackdaws accompany winter dawn and dusk in Aberfeldy. I often see a trail of crows, which can take half an hour to pass, flying to roost in a wee plantation just over the river. It’s not just a few birds passing at a time either, there are clouds of them. They mess about as they go, especially the jackdaws who seem to do their best to stir things up amongst the other crows. They don’t seem to be in a hurry to go to bed, perhaps because the nights are so long at this time of year. When they get to the roost there are often crowds of birds birling around in tight formations before they settle on the spruce branches. I hear them at night, bickering quietly, but by then the roost is calm and only a few birds are active. They all seem to get up at once in the morning. Just the right amount of light and they’re off to their daily business.

There was a piece in this Saturday’s Guardian Review by John Burnside, who has just won the TS Eliot prize and the Forward prize for his latest poetry collection, and who was my tutor for a short while, until he took a sabbatical to finish his prize winning collection and a novel, which was short-listed for the Costa. As well as all that he managed to find time to write about creatureliness, i.e. imagining being another creature, in his case a hyena. It was a strange piece, especially in such literary pages, but it got me thinking. Rooks are the animals I think about most in creaturely terms. They seem to enjoy themselves in a stately sort of way, strutting about on fields, poking about for worms. It’s not too much like hard work and they have a good social life. They think too, if birds can be said to think. They’re certainly intelligent and can live a long time, if the gamekeepers don’t get them. You could do worse than be a rook. I did the lino cut after watching a rook annoyed by blowing leaves.

Falling Trees

Gales have been a feature of this winter. There was one this weekend, although it was fairly calm compared to the one in mid December, which caused havoc in out local forests. I went to the Hermitage near Dunkeld to see its impact. Walking in from the car park to Ossian’s Hall there is a huge shard of wood standing out of the shattered stump of a Douglas fir and many trees in the grove below Ossian’s Hall are lying flat, roots in the air. The tallest tree in Britain (is it still?) is still there though. The effect of the wind seems random, one tree is felled its neighbour is still standing. Conifers are particularly prone to wind. The beech trees on The Gallops near Kenmore are mostly still standing after the gales, even though they are elderly now. Their sinewy looks reflect a stronger woody musculature than the conifers. A couple of beeches had been caught, but it was easy to see why they went, they were full of rot and hollow at the base. But the conifers toppled or broke without any obvious weakness. Some fell right over with their root plates pulled clean out of the ground, others snapped or twisted to leave a mangled stump.

The path to Pinecone Point, a great viewpoint over the Tay valley, was closed because so many trees were down. In places it looked like forestry machines had been out, laying the trees in neat ranks and leaving few survivors. The wind must have blasted from the west, down Strathbraan and swirled around the base of Craigvinean crag, felling the trees as it went.

It’s exciting to see the results of powerful weather but it would have been terrifying to have been there. It brought to mind the old philosophical conundrum: if a tree falls in the forest with no-one to hear does it make a sound? I’d rather not find out but it didn’t stop John Muir. He described in his book The Mountains of California how he climbed a Douglas fir during a storm in the Sierra to listen to the music of the gale and see the trees dancing in the wind. It seems insane now but it shows what a remarkable naturalist Muir was that he could judge a safe tree and have the confidence to climb it and stay there for hours so that he could not just observe, but also feel part of, the natural world.

New Blog

I’ve set up a separate blog (Thought Fox) to write about my explorations in printmaking, illustration, letterpress and poetry, starting with a little plug for my bookbinder friend Heather Dewick. Taking A Closer Look will be more about my interests in landscape and ecology, but I’m sure there’ll be overlap so I hope you will take a look at both.

Bogs and Puritans

I’ve started to investigate the Humberhead Levels, the flat lands that stretch north from Retford most of the way to York. It’s an area I’d never explored before, despite growing up on its borders. If I’d thought about it, it was to think there was nothing there. It’s not exactly a remote location and is criss-crossed by motorways and railways but it still feels like the middle of nowhere. It’s not pretty either. There are no contours on the OS maps except where island villages rise slightly above the flats. Perhaps that I am starting to appreciate flat lands is a sign I’m getting older.
I first heard the name Humberhead Levels in Catherine Caufield’s little book Thorne Moors, beautifully and starkly illustrated with photos by Fay Godwin, about the battle to save Thorne and Hatfield Moors in the 1980s and early 1990s when they were being destroyed by peat extraction on an industrial scale. They are raised bogs, great lenses of water held above the surrounding land in peat formed from millenia’s worth of bog mosses and cotton sedge. Bog in lowland England is a rare habitat, especially species-rich raised bogs like these. There's lots more about it at http://www.thmcf.org/. Thorne and Hatfield Moors became part of the Humberhead Peatlands National Nature Reserve in 1995 but, incredibly, peat extraction didn’t stop until 2002. Now it has, English Nature and its partners are trying to get them back as healthy raised bogs. They’re getting there but there’s a long way to go. It was a shock to see bare peat stretching to the horizon.
The Humberhead Levels were splashy, isolated and independent until the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden started his massive drainage works in the seventeenth century. The locals rioted frequently after the drainage started, not surprising since it led to villages flooding, and the farming of land they’d previously hunted and fished was an imposition by foreigners and big landowners. It was also a place of religious independence. Charles and John Wesley, founders of Methodism, came from the island village of Epworth and several of the Pilgrim Fathers came from villages to the north of Retford. And Robin Hood was said to hunt on Hatfield Chase: an odd sort of place that gave birth to outlaws and Puritans. We ended our day at Crowle, where we passed the time of day with a man pushing an old bike and balancing a bag of wood gathered from the moors. It was a perfect conversation of its sort. He thought through every word he said, and every one was a gem. Maybe there was something about the place that gave time and space for thinking for yourself.

Treswell Wood

I’ve been working with my brother, Rob, to produce a book about Treswell wood just a few miles from where we grew up in Retford, North Nottinghamshire. Rob works for the Notts Wildlife Trust, who own the wood, and he manages it on their behalf. At first sight it doesn’t seem all that special. Although it’s an ancient wood there aren’t many old trees since it was felled in the war and then sold on to a forestry company who wanted to plant it with conifers. It was rescued from that fate by the Wildlife Trust nearly 40 years ago and they tried to get some coppice going again but it didn’t have much long term impact. In those days nature conservation was about preservation and change was suspect. Ideas in the field have moved on and it’s started to be recognised that nature is remarkably dynamic and resilient, if it’s allowed to be.

In the mid 1990s the pace of change at Treswell stepped up when a Rob and a group of like-minded people started to try and make a living from coppicing. Coppicing is all about change, taking out canopy trees for timber and to let in light, cutting hazel shrubs regularly to get a range of useful habitats and lots of lovely sticks. It can look like tidying up, housekeeping transferred to the woods, but the tidiness doesn’t last and wildness quickly returns. Generally a tidy countryside is bad for wildlife but coppicing is unusual in that it creates a range of habitats that can be used by all sorts of plants and creatures. A well coppiced wood should be a healthy wood.

Treswell has been quite intensively managed for getting on for twenty years now by a small army of professional woodsmen and volunteers who are helping turn it back to healthy coppice that provides a range of valuable products and habitats. It’s the people that make Treswell unique. Although the wood is owned by a conservation organisation whose priority is its wildlife, it is treasured by many people who value it in many different ways. The book will focus on those people and hopefully will provide inspiration and ideas for anyone who is interested in ecologically and economically healthy woodland.

And as Christmas present for Rob I had my first go at woodcut printing. This is the result, inspired by Treswell. I’ll write more on woodcuts another time.

Deep in the dark of Adana

I’ve just made my first attempt at letterpress printing. I wanted to make a Christmas card that combined words and wood engraving so I wrote a short poem, engraved a block to illustrate it and then wondered how I was going to print it. I thought, briefly, about using a computer, scanning the image and placing the text around it but I was dubious how the wood engraving might scan, my printer is unpredictable and I struggled to use a page setup programme that would place the text exactly where I wanted it. So I decided to send a winter card instead and waited until after Christmas when I could visit a friend who has an Adana press and lots of type and had a go at printing it by hand.

The Adana press is a small, portable press that could quickly and relatively easily be used to print flyers and cards. I like to imagine it was a gift to radical groups in the 1960s and 1970s who wanted a cheap way of printing revolutionary text without having to go to professional printers, though it was probably used more by the professionals for printing business cards for the bourgeoisie. Sadly it’s no longer in production, though there’s a good market for them on eBay and you can buy them reconditioned (www.caslon.co.uk).

It was a fiddly, time consuming, but deeply satisfying in-

a-way-computers-never-can

-be, process to print. I suspect it was a bit ambitious to make a first attempt combining letters with a wood block, especially since it was quite a big block, but I was reasonably happy with the result. We tried printing just the block first and managed to get a print that showed all the detail of the engraving but when I added the type the first print was just text and no image. That was because the wood block was lower than the type and it took several hours of absorbing work to get the type and the block to the same height and absolutely level. I didn’t get it perfect but it was good enough. I ended up with too much ink so the fine detail of the wood engraving got lost and the letters were a bit blurry, but not bad for a first attempt.

The words on the print came from the first line of my winter poem:

Deep in the dark of the wood

When ice crystals starred the night

A spruce in her skirts stood

Tall as if reaching full height

And way in the north Aurora

Soared to the zenith above

And a fox and a hare

Caught the light as if it were love.

Happy New Year