In the Midst of Life …

Snowdrops come up in the darkest days

It’s been a sad few days for us as a family, with my brother-in-law taken from us far too young by galloping cancer. He was a lovely man and a committed environmentalist, dedicating his life to keeping his small organic farm in France going and preserving the wildlife and habitat it harboured.

It’s times like these, I find gardening can be the best solace. My continuing dodgy shoulder is preventing me from doing what I should be doing (heaving bags of horse manure onto my raised beds) but I did manage to cut the ground (literally) on another project that seemed a fitting way to mark Adrian’s passing.

Sadly our own farming neighbour doesn’t share his commitment to wildlife and agriculture and the field on two sides of our garden is a classic green desert – sprayed and cut and slurried to the max. Much as we enjoy our friendly coo neighbours for the two months they are with us, it has been eye opening just how intensive a dairy farm needs to be, having only had beef cows for neighbours up to now. The garden fence keeps the cows out but that’s all it does – unlike a hedgerow it doesn’t shelter us from the wind (or whatever is drifting in on that wind from the field) and nor does it shelter any wildlife. But establishing a hedge in the face of Moo I 5 will be an uphill task, if the fate of the ash tree is anything to go by.

We spotted this impressive woven willow hedge at Paxton House last weekend

Enter, hopefully, the fedge – a fence woven out of willow that will take root and sprout into a hedge. We have plenty of willow growing in the garden (some of it where it shouldn’t) and it seems that the main drawback to a willow fedge is all the pruning it requires. The hope is that our neighbours will see to the pruning while the willow will be vigorous enough to survive their attentions or at least numerous enough that some of it will survive. We’ll get a bit of a screen from the worst of the slurry drift, and the birds and the hares and other creatures will have somewhere to hide, while the cows will have something to chew on that isn’t grass, which seems to be their aim in life.

 

So this afternoon, I started peeling back the turf along the bottom fence, and filling the gap with some of the pile of woodchips from when the willow was pollarded. And – because it appears that there’s an iron law that if you reduce any of the various piles of stuff in our garden you have to replace that with another one of a similar size – creating another pile of the resulting turf.* Theoretically, once covered over, this will turn into beautiful crumbly loam in a year or so. At least, that’s what happens in normal gardens. Given that all ours wants to do is grow grass, I expect I’m just creating a three dimensional lawn, but I live in hope.

An hour or two’s work was enough to prepare a decent length of ground, and the next step will be to plant the willow and weave it into shape once spring looks a bit closer at hand. And if it goes even a small way towards making our garden a better sanctuary for wildlife, then it will be a fitting tribute to my brother-in-law’s too-short life.

* Please can some well-known garden designer create a show garden at Chelsea this year that consists of random piles of stones, landscape fabric, bricks, old railway sleepers and lawn clippings?

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Drive, Interrupted

As part of my bid to get more walking done without doing too much in the way of additional driving, a visit to Duns presented an opportunity to try a walk we’ve long talked about doing, but never left enough time to actually do: the walk up past the Grey Mare’s Tail waterfall to Loch Skeen.

Today, we finally got ourselves organised and packed some sandwiches and left a couple of hours early to give ourselves time to explore. It’s a steep climb at the start but with a well-made path; I’ve done enough conservation volunteering in the past to appreciate the effort that goes into these trails. It was especially appreciated when there are precipitous drops – this isn’t maybe a walk for those prone to vertigo.

For everyone else, although it’s pretty strenuous to start with, the views are worth it.

It levels off once past the main waterfall and soon we were walking along a pretty burn that tumbles down cascades and into rocky pools. We spotted some of the wild goats that roam the area, and the sheep that were busy keeping everything close cropped. After our visit to Carrifran, I couldn’t help wondering what the valley might be like if the sheep and goats were vanished and the trees and scrub allowed to return. It might help a bit with the erosion, too (that said, our sandwiches had lamb in them, so I confess we’re part of the problem).

On the whole, it’s better not to think about this giant landslip until you’re back at the car park… (the path is the line above it)

All good walks need a great endpoint (apart from the part where you finally get to sit down and take off your boots). It was only recently that I realised this walk took you up to a loch hidden up in the hills – and even though I knew it was there, it was still very striking to turn a corner and find Loch Skeen filling the whole bowl of the valley.

It was also rather nippy, so we didn’t linger over our sandwiches.

And then it was just a matter of walking down again…

Much as I love the whole active travel thing, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t grateful for our car’s comfy seats and internal combustion engine, wafting our tired legs onwards to Duns in time for tea. But all in all, it was a good way to break up the drive, get in some hill walking and explore another corner of our world that we’ve been passing by for so long.

Headwinds I Lose

Ever since we moved to a house that was not only up a Category 3 hill, but also, crucially, into the prevailing wind on my way home, I’ve been trying to develop a love – or at least a vaguely positive feeling about – a headwind. After all, if cyclists can learn to love hills, and supposedly enjoy suffering, surely we can relish the prospect of battering into a block headwind?

Typically, the photos don’t show the headwind …

Today and yesterday have been good opportunities to put it to the test. Yesterday was one of those days when I realised on the way into town that I had a stonking tailwind of the push-you-up-the-hill variety which is never as much fun as you might think when you get it on the outward leg of a journey (even worse is the undetected tailwind which only manifests itself when you turn around and realise that, no, you weren’t just super fit and awesome on the way out). Today was, if anything, worse – I set off on a bright, sunny, chilly but calm day, the sort of day that makes you glad to be alive and on a bike and faintly and smugly sorry for all the poor people stuck in their cars – only for the wind to get up just as I was setting off for home, and strengthen as I turned to tackle the final climb.

One thing about headwinds is they give you plenty of time to think. Indeed, I swear that time slows down when you’re going into one (this may be why Einstein* allegedly thought up the theory of relativity while riding his bike) – yes, you’re a bit slower going into the wind, but that doesn’t explain how you feel as if you’ve been battling it for eternity. So I’ve had time to consider some of the positives of headwinds and I’ve come up with a short list:

1. Unlike a crosswind, a gusty headwind won’t send you right across the road and into oncoming traffic.
2. er, that’s it.

Surely there must be some others? Because it’s going to be easier to learn to love the damn things than it is to move house, or change the rotation of the earth so our prevailing winds run from the east.

* “Never believe anything I’m supposed to have said if you read it on the Internet” – A. Einstein.

Right to Roam

After last weekend’s adventure, I’ve been wondering about finding some hill-climbing walks closer to home. Then the other day we were chatting with our octogenarian neighbour and she told us that they used to climb up to the nearby trig point on New Year’s Day. Today, with sunshine forecast, seemed the perfect opportunity to give that a go.

A less than appealing road for walking on (cycling on it is bad enough)

According to the neighbour there is a track part of the way up from the road, but the problem was getting to the start of the track, as the road is fast and narrow and we didn’t really fancy walking along it on what was a fairly winding stretch. The alternative was across the fields from our house which we have, as a commenter on last weekend’s blog pointed out, a perfect right to do:

You do realise you’re free to walk across *any* fields in Scotland, including those with animals or crops in them, and even ones that have barbed wire fences enclosing them? No permission necessary!

This is, undeniably, true but in practice – just as cyclists have the right to ride on (almost) any road – there’s a difference between being free to do something and it actually being a practical and enjoyable proposition, especially if you’re not a badger and can go under barbed wire fences instead of over them. So there were a few ‘interesting’ bits as we squeezed through gaps and over walls and sent flocks of sheep scattering over the horizon.

Once we’d found the track it was easier going, apart from the whole slogging uphill part – you can cycle up as many hills as you like on a bike and it doesn’t seem to make walking up them any easier. On the other hand, you can spot more interesting wildlife when you’re on foot

Tremella mesenteric (yellow brain or witches’ butter) (You realise, I don’t know any of this stuff, I just ask people on social media)

The highlight was an interesting shaped pond in front of an old ruined cottage – I couldn’t decide whether it was art or accident.

In fact, the only real fly in the ointment was the lack of the promised sunshine – the views from the top were less than spectacular on a murky sort of a day.

All in all, a less photogenic walk than last weekend’s, but at least it was on our doorstep and a bit of an adventure. Time to get the Ordnance Survey out and see if we can scope out a few more …

Emerging …

It’s probably way too early to get excited about this – what with the bulk of the winter still to go – but it turns out that if you want to murder rhubarb, dismembering it with a mattock and burying it alive in horseshit is not particularly effective.

We won’t be able to harvest it until next year, but as I suspect 2019 will be one of those ‘take your good news where you can find it’ years (see also, 2016, 2017, 2018) I’m posting this now before it has a chance to go pearshaped.

Asparagus next …

New Year, New You

Some mornings, heading out on the bike to lead the Bigtown Cycle Campaign winter rides can be a bit of a chore.

This was not one of those mornings.

Amazingly, it turns out 20 other people thought that a bike ride in the winter sunshine was an excellent way to start the year. As I mentioned on the ride back, it’s days like these that get us through the winter.

I hope your 2019 had as promising a start.