Waders, ducks and other birds.

6th April, Mrs Turnstone and I were in Woodbridge, Suffolk, for a change of air and scene. A walk across a little level crossing brought us out of town to a bench with an untidy patch of willow scrub behind us and the estuary before us; that was where we were looking, with shelduck, gulls, crows and many different waders. I used to be more confident in identifying these when I could count on using my beach-side lunch breaks from work; however today there were knots, redshanks, oystercatchers, curlews and a whimbrel, as well as oystercatchers, an egret and a few crows.

I would have left the bench happy to have seen these, but there was something else behind us. Not the goldfinches that were highlighted by the pollen-laden pussy willow, but a real singer, a nightingale, happy to have arrived here safely.

Will he and his mate spend the summer in this – to many human eyes – scruffy eyesore? It would be good to think many people will hear him. Mrs T and I are glad to have heard him, newly arrived from the South, just as many of the birds on the mud were preparing to fly to their Northern summer homes.

Flying flowers.

I have typed up many a post for Will’s Turned Stones these last months but all in my imagination. Let’s reclaim one of them this evening!

A week or so ago I was sitting in the L’Arche garden at Saint Mildred’s, staring at this forsythia, golden in the sun. I had just given a rooted, flowering cutting to one of the houses but still had this one to enjoy.

Of a sudden, a bunch of the flowers took off and flew along the hedgerow. It was a brimstone butterfly, one of the first heralds of spring in the insect world. This one at rest looks like a beech leaf, but in flight is bright yellow, like the forsythia, even more so when the sun is shining through its wings.

A special moment to be grateful for.

Image by Holger Krisp on wikicommons

Mrs Turnstone’s good news for Valentine’s.

Well, we’ve always thought of Valentine’s Day as the birds’ wedding day, but this year the bouquet goes to the garden frogs. Mrs Turnstone ran indoors to grab her phone and record the event. We shall have to watch the weather and protect the eggs from frost, if we get any. It is unusually warm. But we have had lying snow in February, half a lifetime ago.

At least we can do a bit for the climate by helping the frogs who choose our pool. That may include covering it to prevent the blackbirds from fishing.

A New Year’s Promise

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The hazel we planted a few years ago on a scrap of waste land was not in flower on New Year’s Day, but yesterday it had shaken out the first lambs’ tails. Can Spring be far behind?

A peaceful and prosperous New Year to each and every reader! God bless,

Will.

A Christmas Rose

Mrs Turnstone’s delight in the flowering of her white hellebore (or Christmas rose) is worth sharing.

Boxing day is not too late to wish you a very happy Christmas and a peaceful and prosperous New Year.

Will Turnstone.

Winter’s Gold

Mrs Turnstone and I were in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, where we went to see the Mediaeval carved leaves in the Cathedral. The garden of the ruined Palace of the Archbishops of York has been planted to accompany the stone leaves, but this post is about a tree that does not appear inside: the Larch. It appears here as a flame, as its needles turn from green to gold.

The needles close-up. It won’t be long before they fall to the ground; this is the only deciduous conifer in Europe. It is equally beautiful when the new needles appear in spring.

Sunbathing in Wintertime

pigeons sunbathing 23 November

About 10.00 this morning these pigeons had fluffed up their feathers and were clearly enjoying a safe sunbathe.

Gathered together on a Winter’s morning.

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Walking to work yesterday – we were rained off before we began – I heard a chattering and a chittering from this squadron of starlings, planning their day’s foraging.

The spider finds a home

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The wall is not going to win prizes for its brickwork, but the cracks and crevices provide shelter for many creatures including a trapdoor spider. It’s probably hibernating a few centimetres back from the doorway.

Autumn Rains

The autumn rains swelled the river which runs left to right behind the iron fence in this picture. The water wasn’t deep enough to close the park but there were near-perfect reflections of the bench and bushes on this windless morning, earlier this week.

On velvet paws

Your kit sits quietly on your knee
While you brush and groom her silken fur,
Accepts a ribbon around her neck,
Subsides into a contented purr:

 A perfect house cat. Yet I saw her
Yesterday, creeping over the verge,
Belly to earth, lifting paw by silent paw,
Living her own life,gripped by the urge,

The killing urge,to do as cats must do.
No prey I saw - no bird, vole or mouse -
But she sprang, clapped paws twice,leapt,and slew
A cricket! Oh, velvet killer of your house!

Aglais Io

Opened
it lay before me on the path:
earth’s lightest book —
it has but two pages.
Filled with wonder I read its magic signs.
Then it ascended into the air.
No apocalypse.
Only a couple of words from summer’s
secret revelation:
Aglais io, peacock butterfly.

Christine Busta (1915–1987)

 Photograph: Didier Descouens – Own work; copied from wikipedia.

Thank you to Bishop Erik Varden for sharing this poem on his Coram Fratribus blog.

On the Hill-side

By Radcliffe Hall:

A Memory

You lay so still in the sunshine,
So still in that hot sweet hour—
That the timid things of the forest land
Came close; a butterfly lit on your hand,
Mistaking it for a flower.

You scarcely breathed in your slumber,
So dreamless it was, so deep—
While the warm air stirred in my veins like wine,
The air that had blown through a jasmine vine,
But you slept—and I let you sleep.

It quite possibly was a gate-keeper butterfly that landed on the hand of the poet’s companion, a creature of the forest edge, as the name suggests. A sung version of this played on the radio this morning: ‘You lay so still in the sunshine’ by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

The hawks’ return

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It was i July last year that I met this sparrowhawk on our city street. I guess it was a young bird, as the intruding magpie seemed to flummox him until I came on the scene. Hawk and prey into the brambles, magpie off to scavenge elsewhere. And I into town.

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In the year since then, disaster befell the hawk. About 30 metres from this picture, taken by the back gate of a plumber’s merchant’s warehouse, the hawk was found dead by the showroom door, its breast ripped apart by another predator.

We thought it most likely he had swooped down on another little bird and hit the plate glass window at speed, breaking his neck. A handful of neighbours at least mourned his passing.

Two days ago a partly dismembered collared dove lay on the pavement not far from the original encounter. As long as a certain neighbour continues to feed the birds so generously, I think we can say we have our sparrowhawk back!

What Dorothy can do

I stopped at the corner of Watling Street and the Whitefriars shopping centre to adjust my shopping, and looked up. There was Dorothy, more properly Rosa Dorothy Perkins, climbing up to the sun through a foxglove tree, Paulownia Tomentosa.

Summer is here!

Watling Street runs from Dover to Holyhead in North Wales under different names in places, but it’s an old Roman Road. There was a Carmelite monastery where Whitefriars now stands. St John Stone was a friar here.

Saint John’s Wort on Saint John’s Day

Yesterday Mrs Turnstone and I sought the cooling breeze on the top of Wye Downs and were not disappointed. Since it was St John the Baptist’s Birthday, there was a little extra satisfaction in seeing his plant, Saint John’s Wort. You can buy expensive pills made from it that are said to enhance the mood. Perhaps a walk in a National Nature Reserve would be as effective, at least in Midsummer!

The gate at Snailham Level Crossing

Not any old gate

We came across this gate while walking in Sussex. When we got home I saw that there were a few stories to be heard – or seen – here.

This is where a track crosses the railway, or better, the other way about, because the track was there well before the railway was built. There was a station here, though few passengers. The station had a wooden platform, wooden shelter and no lighting, oil, gas or electric. Not surprisingly. there is little to be seen of the station, nor of the crossing keeper’s cottage.

The footpath is on the Brede Level marshland. It must get very muddy, so someone has added cobbles to make the foot crossing dry. The crossing keeper would surely have kept the gates open to trains, closed to road vehicles, so the position was something of a sinecure, or a job for an elderly worker still strong enough to manage the heavy gates. There were fewer road vehicles than trains. A lightweight farm gate either side of the track is all that’s needed.

The old pedestrian gate is a picture; I guess it’s XIX Century. Its new galvanised post suggests that a surveyor did not want to scrap this unique specimen – the one on the opposite side is quite different, but both were clearly handmade by carpenter and blacksmith, probably in the South Eastern Railway works at Ashford. No question of an off-the-peg gate here. Note the decorative work on the top hinge, and the swivelling pulley cover to keep fingers safe; its makers took pride in their work. The gate frame will have been made of hardwood, possibly English oak, and when the upright palings had perished a sheet of marine plywood was substituted. Railwaymen seem to have had a soft spot for this gate over the last 150 years or so.

Modern technology is represented by the telephone: drivers of slow moving vehicles are warned to call the signaller for the all clear before crossing the railway. We arrived here by foot downhill from Udimore where King Edward III once stayed. He was supervising defensive fortifications at nearby Winchelsea in 1350 when the Spanish fleet came into sight and gave battle, ending in an English victory, witnessed by Queen Phillipa from the top of the track we are following.

Since then a naval safe haven has become a saltmarsh, supporting sheep beside the river; and the sea is now some distance away.

In the distance across the marsh is a hill with a village and pub, a destination for our walk. A shared walk, a shared meal; reminders of why we chose to share all things, for better or worse, forty-three years ago.

2 Beauties

These two were in the leaf litter under the sage bush clinging onto that big leaf. No blackbird or thrush around to gobble them up and no crops for them to devour. A few sage leaves went into the evening risotto, and rosemary, but no parsley or thyme!

15 March: Hiking into Silence

willturnstone Silence can be a moment of revelation, writes Eddie Gilmore of the London Irish chaplaincy. Here’s a paragraph from his reflection, where a hike across Wales opened that possibility to him. As ever, the whole article is worth reflecting upon, but here’s that taster. When I was fourteen I was on a school trip to North Wales and we were hiking one day across the high and remote moorland when the guide asked us to stop dead still and to listen. Having grown up in a city, and in a house where my sister liked to have Radio 1 playing all the time, and where the TV was usually on non-stop, it was probably the first time I had heard that sound of silence. And what an amazing sound it was. It lasted just a few seconds before some of the others started giggling but it was a little moment of revelation for me. What revelation could we receive if we stopped the noise for a few minutes? That said, I used to find silence following a noisy lawnmower around some extensive grounds, part of my mind concentrating on the machine and the grass, the rest, eventually turning to silence.There are many entries to the bliss of solitude.

Twice a garden in London.

I continue to estimate my own-roof comforts highly. How could I remain all my life a lodger! My garden thrives (I am told) tho’ I have yet reaped nothing but some tiny sallad, and withered carrots. But a garden’s a garden anywhere, and twice a garden in London.

The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Vol 6 Letters 1821-1842.

Charles and Mary Lamb have moved out of their rented flat in Covent Garden to the outer suburb of Islington, where he has bought a house of his own. He is writing to Bernard Barton, the Quaker Poet on September 17, 1823. Lamb was then 48 years old, and took to gardening, as well as home-owning, with enthusiasm. This not-so-tiny salad was growing in a tiny patch of soil in Canterbury, and grew to edible size. Let’s look forward to growing and eating our own salads this coming summer!

25 January: Winter’s charms.

Willow wands growing through the snow. Calm after the storm.

Epistle to William Simpson Of Ochiltree

Ev'n winter bleak has charms to me, 
When winds rave thro' the naked tree; 
Or frosts on hills of Ochiltree 
Are hoary gray; 
Or blinding drifts wild-furious flee, 
Dark'ning the day! 

O Nature! a' thy shews an' forms 
To feeling, pensive hearts hae charms! 
Whether the summer kindly warms, 
Wi' life an' light; 
Or winter howls, in gusty storms, 
The lang, dark night! 
The Muse, nae poet ever fand her, 
Till by himsel he learn'd to wander, 
Adown some trottin burn's meander, 
An' no think lang: 
O, sweet to stray, an' pensive ponder 
A heart-felt sang.  

Three wintry verses from Burns to mark his day. The Sots dialect is not too difficult here, but just a couple of translations from our third verse. Fand: found. Burn: brook; it crops up in English place-names, Saltburn, Blackburn,  etc..

Behold the sea itself!

Here is the beach at Pett Level, Sussex, a few miles west of Brighton. Today we have a Londoner’s reflections on the seaside and walking around Sussex, up to 15 miles a day. Mary Lamb was in Brighton with her brother Charles and a friend. She is writing to Dorothy Wordsworth up in the Lake District. Seaside holidays 200 years ago! A little taste of her summer in our winter.

I resolved to learn to look out of the window, a habit I never could attain in my life, and I have given it up as a thing quite impracticable—yet when I was at Brighton last summer, the first week I never took my eyes off from the sea, not even to look in a book. I had not seen the sea for sixteen years.

Mrs. Morgan, who was with us, kept her liking, and continued her seat in the window till the very last, while Charles and I played truant and wandered among the hills, which we magnified into little mountains and almost as good as Westmoreland scenery. Certainly we made discoveries of many pleasant walks which few of the Brighton visitors have ever dreamed of—for like as is the case in the neighbourhood of London, after the first two or three miles we were sure to find ourselves in a perfect solitude.

I hope we shall meet before the walking faculties of either of us fail. You say you can walk fifteen miles with ease,—that is exactly my stint, and more fatigues me; four or five miles every third or fourth day, keeping very quiet between, was all Mrs. Morgan could accomplish.

God bless you and yours. Love to all and each one.

I am ever yours most affectionately M. LAMB.

From The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, 1796-1820, Edited by E. V. Lucas

Harvest to be anticipated.

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I expect some of the Fordwich allotment gardeners put their own produce on the table over Christmas and New Year, but there was no-one around when we peered through the hazel hedge on 8 January – except for the dancing scarecrow at the back. And there’s a good patch of brassicas to the left, I’m not sure whether it’s kale or cauliflower. Note the leaf broken over the head of the plant; gardeners do this to keep the florets white and deter pigeons.

I hope my chard recovers from the December frosts! Nothing to see there for the pigeons right now.

Sol Invictus by Frog

My friend Frog shared these wintry photos, I found them so calming that I’m passing them on to any reader feeling festivally frazzled!

Sol invictus (2)

12.12.22: Winter companionship

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We have a neighbour who feeds the pigeons (and indirectly the sparrowhawk). This morning the pigeons were not ranging the snow-covered fields, but gathered in the lime tree, keeping company, conserving energy, and waiting for the grain to be scattered in our neighbour’s garden.

13 November: Autumnal Beech beside the canal

We had gone up North, despite the railway strikes, for an important family funeral. But thanks to the railway strikes, we travelled early and had time for a few reflective walks. The restored Huddersfield Narrow Canal is easy, dry-shod walking; we found warm accommodation in Greenfield village. On a day of showers and sunshine we turned a corner to witness this autumn scene: a watery sun shining through the golden leaves of the beech, the hedge behind it still hardly changed. Can spring be far behind?

Out on the marshes

This world belongs to the gulls, waders, ducks and herons, and perhaps to the birdwatchers and the wader-shod man who disappeared into the wreck with his spaniel.

Watch for the birds

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For a few weeks the birds in evidence in town have been jackdaws and other crows, gulls, including one that could not find its way out of St Thomas’ church, and members of the pigeon family. They do things their own way: last week I saw a half eggshell of a wood pigeon, but a town pigeon landed just in front of my bike to retrieve a lost stick needed for nest building on the old post office.

Precious little sight or sound of the song birds until this week. We were sitting under the trees at the Glebe when two robins began to sing quietly to each other just above our heads. Surely a couple. Then a happy surprise when our 4 year old blackbird reappeared. You may just distinguish his identifying white spots.

Happy Autumn!

Respecting the neighbours

Mrs T eventually got to trimming the ivy hedge that grows over our garden wall and helps keeps intruders out. It will never be a masterpiece of topiary, but it is held in check with annual or biannual trimmings.

The main reason for delaying the trim is shown below: the birds nest in it. This blackbird’s nest does not have its lining of mud. Was it abandoned unfinished for some reason, or was it impossible to find the right sort of mud in this driest of summers? For sure the blackbirds raised two broods in the hedge this year.

Here is a fledgling from a few years ago, quite convinced he is invisible.

We recommend respecting the neighbours, they will repay you with interest — plenty of interest as you watch them go about their business.

Let the hedge grow till August, when the last chicks are fledged. Make sure they can get to water for drinking and bathing; ours like the tiny pond opposite the hedge. It gets plenty of shade and is full of oxygenating plants, mostly self-invited. We wish we had more frogs, but our last cock blackbird had been watching the kingfishers, I think, because he had learnt to catch tadpoles to feed his offspring. This year it seemed as though more survived to grow legs and make for dry land. Let’s hope so.

A trout from Canterbury by Izaac Walton

A gallant trout

Izaak Walton wrote a charming little book on Angling, ranging through many topics, including the trout in all its varieties. We often see them in Canterbury, indeed I was once presented with an excellent trout, caught by one of my pupils, whose mother would not let it into the house, but he did not want to waste it. It was not as big as a salmon, but plenty of ‘rare meat’ for two. That fish had an empty belly, in November, but was caught on a grain of sweetcorn.

There is also in Kent, near to Canterbury, a Trout (called there a Fordig Trout) a Trout (that bears the name of the Town [Fordwich] where ’tis usually caught) that is accounted rare meat, many of them near the bigness of a Salmon, but known by their different colour, and in their best season cut very white; and none have been known to be caught with an Angle, unless it were one that was caught by honest Sir George Hastings, an excellent Angler (and now with God) and he has told me, he thought that Trout bit not for hunger, but wantonness; and ’tis the rather to be believed, because both he then, and many others before him have been curious to search into their bellies what the food was by which they lived; and have found out nothing by which they might satisfy their curiosity.

Izaak Walton, The Complete Angler, 1653.

Start reading it for free: https://amzn.eu/3T59M

Pushing the boundaries

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While Mrs T took our grandson to the swimming pool in Faversham, I wandered the streets. Along the iron fence between the churchyard graves and the path were clumps of hollyhocks, some well over 2 metres tall. Lovely in the group, lovely each individual bloom, and nature’s way of pushing the boundaries between tame and wild.

The Last Straw.

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It’s been a long time since I allowed myself a rant about litter in the neighbourhood, so please indulge an old man’s moan.

The daily accumulation of drinks cans, fast food containers, surgical masks and cigarette ends does not lessen, though the place looks better for a few days when a litter picker has been round. Now, though, we have the departing students’ summer spectacular of fly-tipping. The city council have removed a stack of black bags dumped opposite our house, but three times I have filled our bins – glass recycling and general waste – with rubbish dumped outside our home. Food waste attracts those sharp-billed chancers, the herring gulls, who spread pizza crusts and more across the street for the foxes and rats to enjoy. I would rather clear up before that happens, but I’d rather not have to clear it up at all.

Back to the regular round. Good to see one student landlord has tidied the pavement outside one of his houses. The rubbish in my bag accumulates fast, until it gets too heavy for the catch on the carrying ring and drops out. Time for me to stop, straighten my back, and come home and complain.

Love where you live!

On looking out of the window.

By © Francis C. Franklin /Attribution: © Francis C. Franklin / CC-BY-SA-3.0

We were taking a break from work at the Glebe garden, indoors because the weather was unseasonably cold. My friend looked out to see two blue tits on the bird feeder. Suddenly there was a flurry of activity between the feeder and the nearby elder, now in full leaf and bloom. There was a family of blue tits! Were they from the nesting box in our garden, or maybe from Peter’s box on the balcony across the river?

No chance of any sort of a photo from that distance, but here is a glorious image from Francis C. Franklin, via Wikipedia. Let’s hope the fledglings soon learn about the predatory cat that has begun to frequent the garden. Maybe the cold morning kept it indoors, or the noise of power tools and hammers from next door.

Thanks to my sharp-eyed friend for a special moment!

Kitchen sink drama

It sounded like a wasp, battering its brains out on the skylight above the kitchen sink. As I turned to grab a chair and release her, the buzzing of her wings changed, higher pitched, then cut out. A meal for one of our housemates!

28 April: The Shower.

Waters above! eternal springs! 
The dew that silvers the Dove's wings! 
O welcome, welcome to the sad! 
Give dry dust drink; drink that makes glad! 
Many fair ev'nings, many flow'rs 
Sweeten'd with rich and gentle showers, 
Have I enjoy'd, and down have run 
Many a fine and shining sun; 
But never, till this happy hour, 
Was blest with such an evening-shower! 

                                                  From "Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II.

This was not an April shower, but a March one; a morning but not an evening shower yet I'm sure Henry Vaughan would have appreciated it, as I did, seeing the raindrops on the willows shining on the osiers. Laudato Si'!

John Downie’s spring moment

When Mrs T had decided the old lilac tree had to go, it went to keep us warm, thanks to the woodburner. In to replace it came a crab apple called John Downie. A welcome addition to the garden and much friendlier to its neighbours than the lilac, which hogged all the surface water and the light. Maybe we can, at last, grow hellebores here. Whether or not that happens, this is John Downie’s Spring moment!

Come the Autumn and those little branches will be full of deep red apples which make a well-coloured jelly.

Wind Flowers

It has been windy but bright these last few days, just the weather for windflowers, wood anemones. Mrs Turnstone’s walk took us up to the University woods to greet them. Here they are are very pale, even white. Across town in Larkey Valley woods there are patches of such a dark pink as to merit being called purple. I had a photo of them, somewhere …

Croaking into Spring

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Mrs T had been subdued, hardly mentioning the lack of frogspawn in our garden pond. It’s an annual worry: will they lay this year? Last summer neighbours cleared a neglected garden and disturbed many frogs in the ivy that was undermining the garden wall.

I said nothing; till today. As I let myself through the back gate I heard a croak, a full-throated, joyous croak. At least one frog was alive! Naturally I peered into the pond and there I saw two mounds of frogs’ eggs. Had a certain friend brought some from her garden which always has a surplus?

Not at all, these had been laid overnight. Coming later in the season they are less likely to be killed by frost, though we’ll have to be on hand to cover the pond overnight with bubble wrap. Let’s live in hope, and continue to provide places of refuge amid ground cover plants such as ivy, periwinkle or these violets.

Fleecy tenants

fleecy tenants

… The sheepfold here
  Pours out its fleecy tenants o’er the glebe.
  At first, progressive as a stream they seek
  The middle field: but, scatter’d by degrees,
  Each to his choice, soon whiten all the land.
  

(from William Cowper’s The Task

When Cowper wrote this in the 18th Century he was living in Bedfordshire, almost as flat as the Sussex salt marshes, where the picture was taken. And he would have seen the occasional stage coach pass by, not hourly trains, as seen in the background here.

A delightful word picture, an illumination like those little sketches in mediaeval manuscripts.

A therapeutic exercise for January

My friend Thomas sent an email to say, ‘We are not failures’ if our New Year Resolutions have not borne the fruit we’d hoped for. So be good to yourself: ‘if only for a moment, let yourself be at home with yourself’.’

One place I am at home with myself is the kitchen. The school Thomas and I attended expected us to master basic cooking, but many of the lads can do better than basic. My January therapeutic special activity is making marmalade. Not much foraging to this one but come Autumn we can make October marmalade using citrus peel, sugar and windfall or crab apples, which supply the pectin that helps the preserve to set.

January the set depends on long boiling and added pectin, using most of the stored jars from under the stairs. That’s our label up above. Friends and relations look out!

A Misty, moisty Boxing Day.

If Christmas day does not allow a walk in the countryside or by the sea, the 26th will have to see us on our feet. That is how we were in 2021, despite the mud underfoot, the puddles almost big enough to count as floods and a sky 20cm above our heads. A short walk to Harbledown and Golden Hill, which did not live up to its name today.

On Golden Hill

Jewelled raindrops on the Hawthorn.

Looking North across the mist from Golden Hill, and below, looking East, a white house just visible through the mist.

Let’s hope the rain allows another walk before the holiday is over. No white Christmas here!

Samuel Johnson in Winter

A festive fire at the Turnstones’ a few years ago.

Festive fires are few and far between these days, but ‘Rouse, rouse the fire, and pile it high, Light up a constellation here’, as Samuel Johnson says. It will soon be Christmas. We have our constellation of fairy lights, now what would he have made of that?

Well, we no more than Johnson, should not submit to a dreary winter’s tale: it will soon be Christmas! Let’s use each transient hour to restore the spring in our own – or other people’s hearts. It is the time of Joy.

But many are in danger of death in regions where conflict has led to famine, cold, sickness and separation from family and friends. Not to mention Covid in all its variants. Let us not bar the door of our hearts to our sisters and brothers!

Winter

Haste, close the window, bar the doors,
  Fate leaves me Stella, and a friend.

In nature’s aid, let art supply
  With light and heat my little sphere;
Rouse, rouse the fire, and pile it high,
  Light up a constellation here.

Let musick sound the voice of joy,
  Or mirth repeat the jocund tale;
Let love his wanton wiles employ,
  And o’er the season wine prevail.

Yet time life’s dreary winter brings,
  When mirth’s gay tale shall please no more
Nor musick charm—though Stella sings;
  Nor love, nor wine, the spring restore.

Catch, then, Oh! catch the transient hour,
  Improve each moment as it flies;
Life’s a short summer—man a flow’r:
  He dies—alas! how soon he dies!”

(from The Works of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., in Nine Volumes.

Victory!

The ancient Blean Wood is behind the young growth and scrub here.

Barriers and ‘Road Closed’ signs gloated across the big roundabout, cutting us off from our intended walk. ‘We could go to Victory Wood’, suggested Mrs Turnstone, so we did.

Trees growing where once was farmland – but before that, for thousands of years, there were trees.

The Woodland Trust began planting Victory Wood in 2005 before many of us had realised how urgently we need to increase our forest cover in England. 2005 is 200 years since the battle of Trafalgar, when Admiral Nelson, on board HMS Victory, defeated the French and Spanish navies. Victory, like all ships of the line in those days, was constructed chiefly from English, even Kentish Oak. There was good money for timber, and landowners did not always replace felled trees.

The sea, in the background here, transported thousands of oaks to Chatham Naval Yards from this site.

Much of the land we walked today had been cleared for agriculture post 1945, but 60 years later it was being returned to its natural state, a process that continues as staff and volunteers monitor the growth of different species.

A ladybird was basking in the November sunshine.

And a pretty crab apple caught the eye.

Winter comes on Autumn’s Heels

Bitter For Sweet

Summer is gone with all its roses,
  Its sun and perfumes and sweet flowers,
  Its warm air and refreshing showers:
    And even Autumn closes.

 Yea, Autumn's chilly self is going,
  And winter comes which is yet colder;
  Each day the hoar-frost waxes bolder,
    And the last buds cease blowing.

From Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress, and Other Poems by Christina Rossetti.

There were more frosts and more intense cold in Christina Rossetti’s time. Nevertheless, we have had the first hoar frost of this winter, those last dahlia buds look unlikely to flower; the tents along Canterbury High Street we hope are keeping people safe, and warmer than otherwise they would be, until the shelter opens next month.

26 October: Dig the whole day through.

Mrs T and I went to Richborough Roman Fort this morning, a few miles from Canterbury. There are high walls still above ground but much more remains underground. We had booked a tour to the excavations, along with several other adults and children. It’s one of those places where the sea has retreated. In Roman times it was an island, linked by a causeway to the mainland, famous for oysters. The former sea is now farmland, the sea a good 2 miles away. All change!

The tour was most interesting, led by people who knew their subject and could speak to the non-expert. At various times between 43 AD and the great Roman retreat, the place was a garrison and a trading port and there is a sizable town under the earth. The bit that was being excavated had been identified as an amphitheatre in Tudor times, but this was the first modern dig after a local surveyor had a peek in 1850 or so. His plan did not fit the one the technology found from drone flights, till the scientists allowed for the shift in magnetic North, which aligned the two plans exactly.

What we could see was of course trenches cut through the soil, but one of them included a section of the wall of the bullring, which was painted: only 17 others have been identified throughout the Empire. Experts are coming down to have a close look and try to interpret the painting, meanwhile the young archaeologists, and a couple of elderly ones, were still digging and cleaning the painting with smokers’ stiff toothbrushes. A nail brush would be too hard.

There was also a wall of what had been thought to be an entrance to the building but turned out to be the holding area for the beasts. Grooves for the hurdles to keep them apart. A few yards away, a complete cat’s skeleton was found, bagged up for analysis, and nicknamed Bagpuss. Coins, pottery, jewellery; there are many finds to be examined and recorded.

And now the archaeologists have to hurry as the farmer wants his land back in the middle of next month. The walls will be covered up again, but carefully, to ensure the safety of the relics for possibly a few hundred more years and to leave the surface safe and sound for cattle to graze over.

It was a privilege to see this amphitheatre; no photographs allowed at the dig, so no photographs in the blog either. The view above shows part of the remaining Roman fort.

2 October: A mythical creature

I think it’s a centaur, stepping out from the trees beside Morcambe Bay. Thank goodness no-one has seen fit to remove it as a public safety measure.

Autumnal birds

We are moving slowly, gently, through Autumn into winter again. I passed this spot the other evening: it’s no longer a car park, but has been adopted by skate-boarders and roller skaters for practising their skills. The trees and bushes behind the railway fence are as inaccessible to humans as ever so provide safe roosting for little birds through the dark nights. Even our messiest corners can be used creatively by other creatures.

Last year we had the sparrows in residence, last week it was the starlings, chuckling away in chorus as I walked by. They were close at hand but out of sight in the gloaming, so here they are getting together one afternoon before flying off to gather in greater numbers on their way to the roost.

Follow this link for a previous reflection from this car park.

Where did that come from?

Yesterday, as you can see, it was raining when I got to the Garden, and it stayed that way all the time I was there. That’s not the reason for the post, though, but the plant the pictures show.

You’ll notice that it has no hint of green about it; this is because it is a parasite and cannot make its own chlorophyll. It derives this vital fluid from tapping into the roots of its host plant, which is ivy. It’s name is Orobanche hederae, or ivy broomrape.

When I was identifying this at the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland there were few records mapped in Kent, the nearest being at Eastry village 14 miles away. That of course does not mean there are none nearer than that, they may even be relatively common since ivy, the host plant, grows almost everywhere. I don’t think anyone has introduced it here on purpose, especially to the awkward corner it occupies, so the guess has to be that a highly favoured seed – they are like specks of dust – blew here from wherever the parent plant was growing. The third picture shows that there are more shoots to come, so it’s well established with us. Let’s hope we can keep it thriving.

Give me your answer true!

The champion weeder was due back at the garden today after absence due to the corona virus. Maybe that’s why I noticed the daisies, turning their golden eyes to the sun. In the event, he found plenty to do in another corner, so they live to smile another day!

From a Sunday walk in May

Our Sunday walk took us through King’s Wood near Chilham. A graceful beech sapling, and bluebells, the more fragrant after a night’s rain.

A tall tree in Canterbury.

smart

This winter our walk in and out of town has often featured, at ground level, a young heron, who seemed to be making a living in the shallows of the River Stour. A few yards upstream the water is much deeper, due to the sluices from the former mill site. This provides deep water and a living for a couple of cormorants who dry themselves on the roof of the sheltered housing block, or else the trees across the road from there.

November Lambs to Covent Garden

We are in London, 21 November 1817, two years after Waterloo, and Charles and Mary Lamb have just moved from the relative quiet of the inns of court to ‘a place all alive with noise and bustle’, and she is loving it, as she tells Dorothy Wordsworth. The linkboys, who carried burning torches to guide the theatre-goers home, would soon be put out of business by gas lighting. Some gas lamps still illuminate parts of Covent Garden. A gas lamp, a linkboy and a candle in this illustration from the Pickwick Papers, and still people are in the dark!

At last we mustered up resolution enough to leave the good old place that so long had sheltered us—and here we are, living at a Brazier’s shop, No. 20, in Russell Street, Covent Garden, a place all alive with noise and bustle, Drury Lane Theatre in sight from our front and Covent Garden from our back windows. The hubbub of the carriages returning from the play does not annoy me in the least—strange that it does not, for it is quite tremendous.

I quite enjoy looking out of the window and listening to the calling up of the carriages and the squabbles of the coachmen and linkboys. It is the oddest scene to look down upon, I am sure you would be amused with it. It is well I am in a chearful place.

From The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, 1796-1820 , edited by E. V. Lucas.

Now, of course, it’s black cabs and Uber! Enjoy the Gas lights of an evening visit to Covent Garden.