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