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.