Tor Falcon: Diary of a Wild Place

April, In Praise of Ditches.

The gods of the weather and the months of the year have conspired to make this week perfect for sitting in ditches. It’s been warm and dry, there’s not too much vegetation and importantly there are no mosquitos yet. It’s easy to find yourself a comfortable spot and steal a glance at these private places before nettles grow to terrifying proportions and bar you for the next six months.

You need to pick your ditch though. Not all ditches are equal. From the deep, steep v’s that drain farmland, wheat right up to the edge, to the hedged and even the tree lined. Some have deep water in them all year, some dry up. Some stink. Some are roomy, some aren’t.

This one however, is a Queen among ditches. Once a stream, it still bears some reminders of it’s noble past. Old alders and warty oaks remember it before it’s demotion eighty years ago when the lakes were dug and the water stolen. Unbothered it trickles through a no-mans-land of lakes and more ditches. It is home to the shy and the retiring and it hides an invisible network of paths. It is as wide and as lovely a ditch as you are likely to find.  

And yesterday a blackcap sang in it.  A woodpecker emerged from a hole above my head. The hazel linked arms with the oak. The ivy and the moss waltzed over the water and made edible reflections. Dogs mercury was dressed in pure gold. A guelder-rose swam naked with a shoal of tadpoles and twenty pregnant hinds tap-danced over a honeysuckle bridge. The sun couldn’t stop shining and I watched through a brief window as this enchanted place danced before my eyes. 

April, Violets are drowning in cold air this year.

Violets are drowning in cold air this year. Their sweet stand for spring is no match against the ceaseless north east wind. The primrose on a south facing bank is vibrating, a glazed look in it’s eye. Pussy willow split it’s winter coat a month ago but has still not cast it off. Blackthorn buds are fossilised. Snowdrops long to die and even the brashest daffodils dare not open. Pink Siberian clouds rush through a bright blue sky over our cold heads. And we all wait and wonder if this will ever end.

April Cold.

I’m frozen to the middle of my bones. I’m speechless with cold. My thoughts are entombed in ice. 

March, The Tree of Life.

The ash tree and the pollarded willow between the lake and the stream are preparing for a season of high rise maternity care. Wrapped in ivy and out of otter’s reach, they offer scenic views, privacy and good local amenities to prospective egg layers. 

Already two mallard have moved in. Craning their necks and poking their heads out of the ivy they quack crossly at each other and at their mates below. A moorhen becomes a bad tight rope walker as she  wobbles along a branch to her chosen spot. Last year a grey wagtail, two blackbirds and a tawny owl also took up residence. And although there was alarm and angry shouting every time the owl returned to feed her brood, I don’t think she actually ate any of her neighbours.

This year, I’m not only watching the birds nesting in these trees, worrying about them, willing them success. I’m also going to be watching the ash tree. Looking for signs of ash dieback. Wondering what the fatal chalara fraxinea fungus means to this landscape and to all of us who live here. Not only wondering what the future holds for each clutch of eggs but also worrying for the tree of life itself. 

March, Melbreak.

In amongst the complicated folds and ridges of the Cumbrian Fells sits Melbreak. Separate and dark. An armoured insect, legs pulled up under it. It’s flimsy carapace of peat drips into a lake on it’s eastern side while to the west it trails orchids in the summer.

To Chris, it’s grazing. His livelihood. He was born with it in his blood. To the never ending tourists who cut deep gashes down to it’s bones, it’s a day out. A conquest. To my eighty four year old father-in-law it was an unexpected triumph. To the falcons who nest in it’s needles, it’s the perfect place for a high speed ambush. To the ewe with the herbage map of generations in her blank head, it’s everything. To me, today, it’s a set of shapes within a set of shapes. It’s dark against light, solid in air. I’m trying to condense one hundred million years of geology through my eyes and into the fat chalk in my hand making marks on a small bit of paper in front of me

March, Longing for Spring.

I was young at the beginning of winter. Easily sustained by a lichen on a trunk or an icy turquoise sky. But now, it’s March and I’m ninety nine years older, each miracle is less nutritious. I’m impatient with the slow    drip      drip    of spring. Cold, creeping light, is too cold, too reluctant. Only snowdrops, for weeks. Then aconites, in mud. Bird song, on deaf old ears. Catkins, just hang. I can see the magic weakly but I’m thirsty for more. 

I know these precious drops will become a steady trickle until by June I am soaked to the skin in a torrent of blossom and a rainbow of greens.

It’s just that as it starts to snow again, I wonder if I’ve got the strength to wait.

March, A Cold Morning With Pigeons

A shower of fine hail has muffled the early morning. The field is cross hatched in white. The small oaks stand out in relief along the edge of the wood and pigeons have decoratively arranged themselves in all the tall trees. The only movement is the gentle fall of snow. I watch for a minute or two, noticing how the pigeons have spaced themselves out. There seems to be some ideal distance they like to keep between each other. It’s an orderly scene, identical silhouettes an identical distance apart, tracing the shapes of tall trees.

But I can’t stay and the snow melts. The gas cannons ranged along each side of this valley start up and are joined by the usual din of the day.

Later as I stare out of my studio window I watch the same pigeons   flying in a no-formation formation from left to right…boom… and then back again. Their random flapping reminds me more of butterflies than birds. I look at the shapes of sky between their wings in the hope of finding a pattern. But I can’t find any rhythm in this chaotic pigeon cloud. Just a dash to the rape tops, before…. boom…. and a mad flutter away. Flutter…. boom, flutter….. boom, the daily life of a flock of pigeons in winter. 

February Bracken

Is it the ceaseless nagging of the wind, the rip and tear of an icy squall? Is it the weight of snow? Is it ice exploding through living call walls? The regular coating of rime or the deep luxury of darkness and the long cold stare of winter stars?

Whatever the reason, bracken is at it’s loveliest now. Bleached and broken, poignantly reduced to pink, it still gives the warmest colour along the edge of the wood. It’s thugishly perfect green days are a distant memory. The outrageous glow of autumn orange has given way to a delicate old age. Brittle and curled the few remaining upright stems catch homeless oak leaves like a sea anemone catches food particles. A swirl of wind and the oak leaves break free like a flock of little birds. Weightless, aimless they glint in the sun and subside back into the bracken’s boney old arms.

February, A plea for Scrub.

Farmers, single issue conservationists, neat and tidy minded people all agree that scrub is the enemy. It’s a loss of control, an invasion of space, a living metaphor for moral decline. Farmers are paid to “reclaim” scrubland or warn of low lamb prices and the disastrous consequences that will surely follow - less sheep, more scrub. Conservationists blame scrub for the loss of a particular leaf which rare butterfly caterpillars eat. Everyone knows that scrub encourages fly tipping, drug taking and murder! Culturally we seem to have a loathing for our most common and freely given plants.

The black thorn and the hawthorn, bramble, gorse and broom, the humble rush among others, are the bottom of a beautifully complex food chain. They are necessary in abundance to sustain the insects, birds and animals we all love. They grow enthusiastically and freely where ever they find half a chance.The first inhabitants of this country after the last ice age, they are more English than fish and chips. More English than the English. They are unpaid nurse maids to slower growing trees, no need for plastic tubes when a young oak is protected by a blackthorn. It’s no surprise that such a wealth of life has evolved  in association with them. Free, with scrub comes colour, movement, scent, song, birth, death and everything in between. 

I understand that the farmer has scrub clearance in his DNA. Even now, with his machinery and his deadly chemicals he can’t let go of the eternal enmity. His modern computerised efficiency leaves no corner unkempt. I understand the rare butterfly lover, I really do. I’m as saddened by the loss of unique habitats as anyone. But it seems to me, here in East Anglia, that the rate with which we are destroying everything natural is only getting faster and I wonder if perhaps we should look at what we do still have and make an effort to cherish that, before we get to the point when we are trying to recreate what was once most common.

The field, that has held my attention for twenty years, that surprises and enchants me every day, that I can draw and paint and write about endlessly is only scrubland. There are ‘common’ plants growing here that I don’t see anywhere else. There are more insects in this small island of wildness than in the thousands of acres of arable land around. It’s hard to believe in the received wisdom that scrub is worthless when all I see is so obviously worthwhile.

Shouldn’t we be giving thanks for prickly places? Rejoicing in a self sown riot of life? Counting our blessings for all that is local and overlooked, for the miracle of being able to take things for granted? As a society I wish we would realise that here are all the riches of the earth, right under our noses if only we could open our eyes and see them.

February, A Week Spent Quietly Among Friends.

It felt like I was last here in another life. These old friends I hadn’t given a thought to for a couple of months, I saw afresh in their mid-winter nakedness. Wide, wind blown, mossy and knobbled, these woody giants of the Cumbrian fells astound me every time I see them. And yet there is nothing particularly remarkable about them. They are just big trees. They are trees which have been, if not cherished, then at least left alone for centuries. Growing by becks, along walls or giving shelter to houses, no one has had any reason to remove them. 

To have come straight from a landscape devoted to the worship of intensive agricultural production and the chasing of short term grants, where hedges come and hedges go and where trees mostly go, to this place where trees grow unmolested for hundreds of years, is profoundly moving.

And so, I spent last week visiting my favourite Cumbrian trees. I sat snugly between the roots of the enormous High Cross oak, completely sheltered from the insistent north wind while I quickly drew Black Crag and High Nook farm. It’s bare oaks are as bright as emeralds and heavy with ferns. I walked through woods of soaring beech, into old oak coppice getting smaller and more tortured until the prevailing wind puts a stop to it. Down to the exposed bay at the end of the lake where twisted thorns have braved that violent wind for years. And into woods of huge Norway spruce and European larch. I marvel at the multitudes of warts on the holly growing out of a wall, I reverently walk between ancient ash coppice hedges. And finally I shelter under a wide sycamore branch as it begins to snow.

Silently, I begin to walk home in the freezing half light, when four luminously dressed mountain bikers flash past me. I hear their yells as they hit the bog below, eight wheels cutting through years of slow grown vegetation sink into wet mud. And then they are gone.

Deep silence accompanies me as far as the Scots pine behind the house, where the soft hissing of wind through needles tells me that I’m home.