Tor Falcon: Diary of a Wild Place

November, Fleabane.

Repellent, not only to fleas but to cows as well, fleabane stands alone at the edge of the bog. Overlooked in the floral orgy of summer, only it marks the boundary between wet and damp now. Smoky blue has given way to dark chocolate and dirty chalk. Yellow on yellow has become ochre on black. The low sun turns thousands of fuzzy seed heads into angelic halos. The only witnesses to the muddy probings of a wisp of stripy snipe.

November, Chalara Fraxinea

There’s a foresters war cabinet in my kitchen. The dress code is green and the mood is sombre, disinfectant (on your boots) is obligatory. There’s a large map of East Anglia open on the table and red circles are being drawn round an alarming number of woods. They’ve come from far and wide to see for themselves the first confirmed case of chalara fraxinea in the indigenous ash population in the UK. In trees here, just outside my studio. They will then go on to other suspect sites. They are trying to gage the extent of the problem.

The government foresters know they have big decisions to make and will have to choose their words wisely when reporting to their flighty political masters, the timber merchants brains are ticking with calculations, the plant health guys are trying to contain their excitement and I’m stirring sugar into cups of tea and thinking about these dear dying ash trees.

The one by the sluice, that I’ve drawn so many times, admiring it’s smooth pink trunk and the sweep of it’s lowest branch that frames the lake beyond. The many, beside the stream, whose branches shine as bright as egg yolk on wet February days, (it’s something to do with the orange lichen on the white lichen that coats the branches). The sapling that catches the light in the afternoon when everything around it has sunk into inky gloom. I think about the old ash pollard in the ruin in Cumbria, huge and hollow, you can fit ten people comfortably inside. And of her children and grandchildren that snake along the nearby stone walls. And I wonder, will they all die before me? I thought I had my life time to draw them. A life time of looking at and loving ash trees, safe in the knowledge that they would outlive me.

I leave the woodland generals to their theories and their plans and I return to my studio. Ironically to a painting of an ash tree that was begun three weeks ago. In a time that now seems poignantly bathed in the blissful sunshine of ignorance.

October, Leaves.

I don’t need to be the Queen of England. I don’t need sycophantic courtiers throwing their cloaks at my feet. I can walk under trees. Trees shedding leaves afresh each day. Creating intricate patterns in audacious colours that surprise me every year. Surely blessing anyone who cares to look where they’re putting their feet.

October, The World Wide Web!

A low autumn sun on a cold morning reveals a usually hidden world both beautiful and macabre. Briefly, the sinister spinnings of millions of spiders are made visible through the happy marriage of early morning sun light and cold water clinging to silk. A spot light is thrown on the breath taking ingenuity and industry of spiders. A Taj Mahal glistens between dock seed head spikes. A ghostly pyramid is wrapped around knapweed. The dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, slightly toppily, between ragwort stems. Tightropes of unnerving length. Classic cobwebs and chaotic muddles. Every single thing here has been used for spinning. The huge gorse bush has been shrink wrapped in silk, every spike covered. Stand still for long enough and you too will be incorporated into the web. As my dull brain begins to wonder at the number and variety of spiders, the slow rising of the sun begins to wipe any trace of this arachnid civilisation from view.

As I return home my thoughts are all with the fly.

October, The Autumn Hawthorn

If you can, this October, turn your astonished gaze away from the ravaged thorn hedge. Don’t look at her poor chewed bones. Leave her quietly to her shame and her humiliation, all life striped from her. Try not to notice the shreds of her bright, early autumn clothes lying in tatters around her ankles.

Instead look for her sister. Safe, curled round an electric pillion, beyond the jurisdiction of the flail. Laying out her deep red wares, in readiness for winter visitors she never sees.

September, Slugs.

The new puppy, Slinky and I have made quite a substantial path round the field since the end of July. We walk it twice, sometimes three times a day. We always walk it in the same direction but we vary the time taken. We sometimes stop and lie on it. I stick to it, the dogs use it as a rough guide only. My footsteps have squashed the grass into a pale trail, a lightly snaking contour. It has edges, I can walk it in the dark without loosing it. Milky with dew in the morning, it dries more quickly than the surrounding grass and rabbits and pheasants have begun to use lengths of it. Slugs cavort on it in the evenings, wrapped round each other in slimy love, they produce big bubbles of pale blue…… what?… eggs?….. ecstasy? Whatever it is, it’s vanished by morning and the slugs are single again.

Our path passes young scots pine, glowing ochre with old needles. It loops round oak trees, blotched and brittle with mildew. It crosses the scared site of a bonfire. Twenty years ago three articulated lorry loads of tyres were burned here, black smoke and flame could be seen fifteen miles away. The poison in the soil is visible as finer grasses, and small contorted trees with gnarled leaves. There’s a pause in the path by a large patch of brambles. All three of us stop to gorge on blackberries, cool and cobwebby in the morning, warm and sweet by mid day. And then we arrive back where we started.

We haven’t made an epic journey. Our adventures are small but the pleasures of being together, all set on the same course are great. It’s a tour of the recent past. It’s a good place to keep your feet dry. It’s an opportunity for snacking, a slug pick up joint and of course it’s the whole world to my puppy for whom each step is a joyous beginning.

August, A Rowan Tree.

The rowan is a tree of the mountains. It’s the brave clinger on of steep gullies. Sown wherever a bird can perch, it’s a speck of colour against black rock. It can even grow in the cleft of another tree.

They’re magical trees too. In Scotland rowan boughs were placed over the door to keep witches out. Hung over the barn door, it stopped those witches stealing milk from your cow. The merest glimpse of one can transport my father back to his childhood in the Scottish highlands.

There’s one here, outside my studio, in soft, lowland Norfolk. It’s roots spread unhindered, there are no rocks to squeeze between. Sheltered by large oaks, it can grow tall, not crippled by cruel, sculpting winds. And this summer it is positively dripping with bunches of orangey crimson fruit. The first harbinger of autumn, this young tree is alive with birds. Blackbirds quietly gorging themselves. Black silhouettes briefly and then gone Two mistle thrushes, pale and clacking loudly at each other, such bounty is worth fighting for. And pigeons, clumsy, bending branches.

The rowan takes its place, now, in the succession of fruit borne on trees and shrubs. It comes after the cherry, at the same time as the blackberry and before the spindle and hoar. The beautiful little rowan steps into the lime light, and it’s berries quickly vanish down the throats of hungry thrushes.

August, New Walking Boots

The rugged looking sales man promised me my one hundred pounds would be money well spent. The walking boots were completely waterproof, as light as feathers and, he turned them over with a flourish, “look at that aggressive tread.” I tried not to visibly wince at the thought of all those slow growing, delicate mountain plants being pulverised under my feet, but I bought them anyway. I didn’t have much choice, I’d left home for two weeks in Cumbria with only the flimsy sandals I stood up in.

And so to test these once in a life time walking boots I persuaded the children to walk to the top of Black Crag with me. I reached the top with dry comfortable feet for the first time in my life. It really was money well spent.

Coming back down a different way and lagging behind the others, I suddenly became acutely aware of my surroundings. I was walking along the top of a wavy edge of gigantic regular folds of earth. They were like the ridges left in sand left by an out going tide, but on a mammoth scale and only clothed in the thinnest veil of wispy grass. Gashed in places, revealing dull red sores. I felt as if I was looking at them moments after their creation. Suddenly there was no distance between me and the last ice age.

With no signs of humanity and hardly any plant life there was nothing to anchor me to my accustomed place in time. No sign of all those generations of people who have left their mark on this landscape with buildings, fields and walls. No trees, to mark time through their size, and through the seasons. Nothing but giant folds of earth. It was as if the protective skin of time hardly existed here. It was transparently thin. Then ,now, tomorrow, it didn’t matter, it was all the same.

It was a feeling like vertigo. A glimpse into the unimaginable vastness of the universe. It was exhilarating and terrifying……. and then I remembered the aggressive tread on my boots, and froze. I was one false step away from piercing time!

So I descended more carefully, slowly reacclimatizing myself to the certainties of a time scale I understood. Past old stone walls, patched and furred with moss and lichen. Past the farm, dogs barking. Past huge sycamores, sprouting ferns along their branches. Across the main tourist path, busy with intrepid walkers, maps round their necks, poles in each hand and rucksacks containing, goodness knows what, on their backs. And finally, to the lake where I found my children shrieking with delight (or was it agony?) in the icy water.

July, A Manifesto (for modern farming)

To the toads spawning in a muddy ditch; you’re beneath contempt.

To the dragonfly larva nearing the completion of your modest three year life cycle; you’re invisible.

To the oak sapling, whose parent remembers time before the industrial revolution; you’re in the way.

To the six hundred year old oak trees; you’re not cherished.

To the boggy meadow; you’re a disgrace.

To the stream; you’re a drain, a receptacle of hundreds of tonnes of mud.

To the bullhead the loach and the dace; you will be entombed alive in your hiding places.

To crows, magpies, buzzards and hawks; you will be exterminated.

To hedgehogs and stoats; see above.

To the broom and the gorse; you cannot be tolerated.

To the butterfly and the bee; you won’t find any nectar here.

To the thick hedge; you will be flailed into orderly submission.

To the lie of the land; you will be de-constructed and then reconstructed.

To the rain; you will not lie in puddles.

To the poor gravely soil; you will be forced to bare fruit.

To the ancient, burred field maples; you’re just wood.

To the thickets of sallow and thorn; you’re bonfire fodder.

To the whispering aspen; you’re easily silenced.

To the slug and the snail; be gone.

To bird song; stop!

To the owl and the swallow; you’ll have to work harder to feed your young.

To the ragged robin, the vetch, mallow and thistle; goodbye.

You’re expendable,

You’re collateral damage.

A memory, lost in the wake of profit margins, sacrificed for one more acre of farm land.

June, Insects are for eating.

I was going to write about beetles. That every time I sit down to draw something, I’m visited by a parade of marvellous bugs. All friendly and all so splendid, they run across my paper, over my hand and down my leg. I swap one bit of paper for another and try and draw my beautiful visitors.

But last weekend my view of insects changed. I no longer see them as interesting curiosities, I see them as food. Not for me I hasten to add but for duckling, who was found lying in a bedraggled heap on my studio doorstep in a thunder storm. Just hatched and apparently lifeless, it was fully restored to health after just half an hour in someone’s breast pocket. Heat being the magic ingredient for life and three more days of dreadful weather mean I have now become it’s mother, with feelings of guilt about the life half lived in a sordid box with horrible grey chick crumbs to eat and a bowl of dirty water to wallow in. I think of the life it should have had, with other murmuring ducklings and a wary mother coaching her brood on the mysteries of being a wild mallard. Of the perils of deep water and open spaces, of the delights of mud and insect larvae, of the art of diving and eventually flying.

Unsure what to do, I’ve just taken it outside and watched it. A case of the blind leading the blind. But by watching I’ve discovered what it can do, what it likes to do, what it loves to do and also what frightens it. It’s sharp black eyes make it a formidable hunter already, small grasshoppers, mosquitoes, gnats and flies disappear down it’s gullet effortlessly. It doesn’t like ants. It loves dibbling in the mud and weeds at the edge of the stream and spends hours preening. I now look for insects with it, I’m proud when it makes a particularly good catch, sad if it misses. I try and think of good damp, dark and mosquito ridden places to take it to. I’m discovering times of day and weather conditions likely to produce more insects. I’m covered in mosquito bites! I’ve seen things I normally wouldn’t, like the dark hairy moths dancing up the middle of the stream at dusk, or the king fisher landing on a branch right in front of me. This tiny scrap of life, left for dead on my doorstep has given me a ducklings eye view of the world. One in which insects are for eating not admiring.