A forage in the Iron Age

I’m at the Scottish Crannog Centre this season, guiding and demonstrating Iron Age crafts, and it’s been a great learning experience about how people lived in the Highlands 2500 years ago. The Crannog is a reconstruction of an underwater structure in Loch Tay that has been excavated over the last thirty years or so. It dates from about 500 BC, so it’s prehistoric but the preservation of stuff in the cold waters of Loch Tay has been so perfect that it’s been possible to find hazel wattle walls, wood floors, supporting piles made from alder, turf from the roof and all the accumulated rubbish that fell through the floor, especially bracken, which was used on the roof and the floor and as cavity wall insulation, bits of chaff from wheat, barley and other crops, seeds from wild fruits like blackberry, raspberry and cloudberry and even sheep droppings from animals kept in the house over the water. It was a home that was made entirely of plants by people who knew their local environment intimately.

There was a food festival at the Crannog on Sunday, with food cooked by methods and with ingredients available in the Iron Age. We did a bit of foraging to gather spring greens from the wild, which I think must have been particularly valued at this time of year as a kind of spring tonic, full of flavour and freshness, after a winter of grains and dried meat. It was a bit of a challenge to find much this year after such a slow, cold spring but the ransoms are here in abundance, very garlicky after hanging around for such a long time before the slightly warmer weather got them growing, though most of them still aren’t in flower yet. We’ve had a some fine days, which have brought on a few more things recently and we did manage to find some early hedge garlic, lady’s smock (very fiery but good flavour, if you like hot mustard), hairy bittercress, which tastes like watercress, nettles, coltsfoot, rosebay (it has a strong flavour, I suspect it needs cooking), opposite-leaved golden saxifrage, which looks pretty in a salad but doesn’t taste of much, gosegrass (my dog’s favourite green nibble) and lots of ransoms.

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…..