Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer
A clear day, hard frost
early twilight, geese finding quiet roosts
sculptural seed heads of hogweed (not the giant sort – the native, smaller one
all the leaves are down now
robins singing defiantly.
This last week has been a rush, but these are some of the best moments I’ve had lately.
This is an essay I wrote for Stravaig 2, back in 2013, introducing Richard of St Victor, who got a mention in the last post.
At sixty miles distance, this village where I have lived for thirty years is about as far from the coast as you can get in Britain. It wasn’t always so. About 10,000 years ago, when the last ice melted, there was a long sea loch here which stretched another twenty miles inland, and the fossilised remains of whales were found just up the road, near where the famous battle of Stirling Bridge took place. But since then the land has lifted and the water has drained away. It’s all about the earth round here now, farmland reclaimed from the mosses, coal and silver mined in the hills, gravel for roads and clay for making the tiles all the houses in the village had, before we became a conservation area and had to be gentrified to slate.
Gentrified doesn’t bother this house, though. Gentrified has been where it’s at from the start. Unlike my neighbour’s houses, which were built for miners and rope makers, this house was built as three holiday lets for the Glasgow Boys, who came to the village in great numbers at the turn of the twentieth century (drawn, it is said, by the lure of the modern girls, art students at Denovan’s school of animal drawing a mile up the road). This is why our house, despite its small rooms, has unusually high ceilings, some original cornicing, and, under the seventies woodchip in our guest room, the very latest in Edwardian interior design chic – plastered walls painted in a kind of mustard/old-gold colour, with a fine line of dark green along the skirting board. We put the wood chip back. I like to know the original work is still there, but I’m not inflicting it on any of my guests! We’ll come back to the Glasgow Boys later. They are only one set of the ‘wandering Scots’ who have flowed through this strange inland peninsula, which turns out to be much less of a backwater than you might think.
Although we are now so far from the sea, we aren’t entirely landlocked. The Forth is still tidal here, and when there is a high tide and an easterly wind you occasionally get the tang of salt in the air. There’s even a bore sometimes at the spring equinox, but I’ve never seen it. I do sometimes see seals rolling lazily upriver after the salmon, and in winter sea-birds come this far upstream looking for shelter, guillemots one year, young loons two years running, identifiable only by their eerie unmistakeable call, goldeneye, goosander and the sinister black cormorant every year from August to April. There was a thriving harbour just a little downstream until the thirties, exporting hides and cloth, and importing timber and wool from northern parts and wine from the south. Road traffic came this way too; it was the first place you could cross the Forth until they built the bridges at Queensferry. But the deep meanders of the river cut us off from the urban sprawl of Stirling, making this place feel a little apart and secluded, a little bit special.
That has been an attraction for ages. A recent archaeological dig found a fortified ditch from Pictish times encircling the vulnerable north side of the village, and effectively closing off the river. Local tradition has it that the Arrouaisian monks who settled here in the twelfth century built on the site of a church founded by an Irish monk from Derry – St Kenneth, a friend and follower of St Columba. Kenneth was the son of a poet and a scholar, who travelled widely in Ireland and Scotland, even going as far as Rome, and united in his teaching the traditions of Celtic and Roman learning.
The Arrouaisians themselves were a cutting edge blend of the oldest and most radical in monastic thinking – the canons Regular of the Augustinian order, and the Cistercians. Augustinian Canons had been around for centuries, often in large urban centres, at Cathedrals, specialising in services to travellers (not only hospitality, but in the building and maintenance of roads and bridges), liturgy and learning. They developed skills in medicine and diplomacy and often found themselves caught up in affairs of state. But at the time of the first Arrouaisian, Abbot Gervaise, they had begun to long for a little more solitude, more peace, and the perspective you get from being more grounded. They came under the influence of the new kids on the block, the Cistercians, who were keen to get out of the courts and the cities – they’d have understood Kenneth White’s motorway of culture – and get some real work done. Cistercians chose waste places and learned to farm them (becoming ironically, very wealthy and powerful in the process) and expressed their love for the places they settled in the monastery names – so many bright valleys, beautiful valleys, clear springs, monasteries of the forests, snows or gardens. So the Arrouaisians got out from under the shadow of the castle across the river, settled here, and made orchards which outlasted them by some four hundred years.
Travellers, scholars, earth-conscious – they already sound quite interesting, but what really concerns us as geo-poeticians is their connection with things that were happening in Europe. They came back fairly quickly into the Augustinian order and made contact with the highly influential School of St Victor in Paris – a forerunner of what would eventually become the Sorbonne. Kenneth White talks a lot about the ‘scoti vagantes’ – wandering Scots of the Middle Ages, but he doesn’t mention my favourite, Richard of St Victor.
All that is known of Richard is that he was Scottish, and I can’t even find out what grounds there are for thinking so, but he was Abbot of St Victor from 1162-70. It’s not surprising that Kenneth White doesn’t have too much time for him. His writings are mystical, theological and burdened with some very cumbersome allegorical interpretations of Biblical figures. But in an age which could veer wildly between contempt for any learning that wasn’t directly theological and contempt for any intellectual activity at all, the Victorines were inspired by their first Abbot, Hugh of St Victor, who produced an encyclopaedia of all the branches of knowledge including philosophy, carpentry and agriculture, and who famously said “Learn everything, and you will find out later that nothing is useless.” Richard of St Victor produced a study of the mind which held a balance between intellect and emotion, and between science and imagination which I don’t think has ever been bettered. It sits nicely in my head alongside White’s talk of erotic logic, body-mind and sensuous abstraction.
Of course, being so close to the Castle they couldn’t entirely keep out of public life. They were all over the political scene during the Wars of Independence, and under James IV, who was a leading patron of the arts, and they benefited from the royal court’s openness to the Renaissance in Europe.
After the last Abbot left to become the head of the First Court of Justice in Edinburgh, the Abbey became a place for wanderers who couldn’t afford to be seen drinking in Stirling to hide out. Cromwell fought over it, and Jacobites – they are still discovering cannon balls and musket shot from minor skirmishes, alongside lead from more modern wild-fowlers. The orchards lasted, and the village grew up, served first by a ferry and then by a footbridge. But towards the end of the nineteenth century, Joseph Denovan Adam set up his art school a mile away across the fields. Soon the Glasgow Boys followed, and several, including William Kennedy, James Guthrie, Crawford Shaw, George Henry and A.E. Hornel spent their summers in Stirling and Cambuskenneth. Some of their paintings – for example Harvest Moon by William Kennedy show the village pretty much as you can see it today.
The Glasgow boys were in reaction from the Edinburgh-based Scottish Academy, and believed in getting outside, away from the Romanticism and desire for sentimental prettiness, to paint real people in real places. They were influenced by Japonisme, in contact with the Impressionists in France, and travelled widely in Europe and the Middle East. Once again, this little enclosed pocket of ground became a crucible for artistic developments from elsewhere.
In between times, things sometimes settle and stagnate. Mists sometimes gather here because we are low-lying, trapped between the Ochils, the Trossachs and the Campsies, and so do stories of ghosts, of monks, orphaned children screaming, and grey ladies. The older generation of miners who used to travel through the village to the pit at Polmaise didn’t like walking through the village after dark. It’s easy to understand when your view is cut off by the trees, the familiar hills, the village boundaries, but in thirty years I’ve never met anything worse than myself. And it’s autumn, now. When the leaves have fallen I’ll be able to see out to the north as far as Ben Ledi on the skyline. The pink footed geese and the greylags are coming up from the coast in their thousands ahead of winter’s gales, filling the air with their clamour, with rumours of Norway and Iceland, and the occasional tang of salt.
We have got to the time of year when the mornings are dewy and the last flowers are making a brave show amid the wreckage of summer. This seems to have happened very fast. Last week, there was a magnificent array of marigolds and the first sprays of montbretia around the pond. This week there is a scattered few, and I am saving seed for next year.
I have teasel seed, too, and pods of evening primrose
You can see the split in the pod where the seed is ready to fall out. I will have to be careful where I use these seeds – they are prolific, and long-lasting, and will come up everywhere.
The birds are still getting used to the change in the weather. I am aware of robins’ winter song in the hedges and apple trees, and of the daring of one who turns over anywhere I have been digging or clearing, looking for disturbed insects. Starlings arrived, and moved on south, and swallows still appear, the last stragglers from northerly parts, moving ahead of the blustery weather. Geese are here, but in transit, and as I was gardening on Sunday, seven whooper swans flew over the village following the river down towards the Gartmorn dam and Cambus ponds, where there are reserves which will offer them shelter, and where I hope we’ll see them over the winter. The first apples are being harvested.
The birds are coming back into the garden now the fields are being ploughed, little ninja blue tits and great tits emerging from the rowan leaves, the first sparrows doing the bird equivalent of leaving towels on the loungers in the thick privet hedges that make secure hiding places from predators. Sparrowhawks and buzzards follow them back into the village, and you can sometimes spot them, the buzzard circling high over the riverbank, the sparrowhawk cruising the lines of the hedges. Sometime they get ambitious and go for the pigeons that raid the bird feeders, and we find neat circles of grey feathers on the grass.
There are still butterflies, but numbers are thinning, and the wasps and spiders are making themselves evident. The darker evenings make it possible to see bats earlier – they move too fast for me to identify them, but local naturalists have recorded pipistrelles, so I imagine that’s what they are. The deer will be moving into the fields and the reedbeds, moving closer to the village every year, and at the highest tides around the equinox, we’ll be looking for otters, seals coming up following the fish, and even occasionally a porpoise.
Bust as the winter comes closer, poetry gets more lively. Two poets I’ve edited will have pamphlets launched during the next month, and I’ll be reading at LoveCrumbs in the West Port in Edinburgh tomorrow, and at St Ninians’s Library as part of an event celebrating National Poetry Day. There will be an event post about this soon, but the others are up already, along with a workshop I’ll be leading as part of the WriteAngle’s One Weekened in Stirling.
One of those events listed happened yesterday, a fundraiser for Hugh MacDiarmid’s Brownsbank Cottage, which has fallen into disrepair. It was an excellent night, with readings from Richie McCaffery, ( apoet in residence in 2011) Gerry Cambridge, (a Brownsbank Fellow) and Colin Will, and a fascinating and generous introduction and poems from Alan Riach. There was a raffle with irresistible prizes to a MacDiarmid enthusiast, donated by Richie McCaffery. We made a good start on the fund-raising, but there is a long way to go, so please visit the website, and if you can, make a donation.
When you start to see this, you know that summer is almost over. The crocosmia – which comes back no matter how hard you try to thin it out – justifies its presence in the garden when the garden takes a deep breath after the summer pause, and begins to think about autumn. The weather has changed too – less hot, less showery, but most important of all, there is wind. So often the first half of August is marked with heavy humid stillness, and then, towards the end of the second week – you can almost set the calendar by it, the a wind blows up, and the air is fresher, and I begin to breathe easier again, and to want to be in the garden.
The garden is very quiet now, because the sparrows ands starlings have gone to investigate the stubble in the barley after harvest, and the blue tits and great tits are quieter, almost hidden in the leaves of the rowan tree. The rowan is heavy with berries this year,
but so far we have not had many takers. With luck they will hang on until the fieldfares and redwings come. The winter migration has already started. The first geese – not northern migrants, but resident flocks looking out for the best winter homes – have appeared, and the swifts have gone. The very last, a straggler heading south by himself, crossed the river last Sunday, and although the house martins are still here, and it looks as if there is a second brood in the nests, I haven’t seen any swallows lately. The black-headed gulls have their winter heads on, and the big black-backed gulls, which spent the last fortnight screaming from the chimney-tops, have gathered their forces and gone back to the coast.
Poetry is starting up now, as the schools go back. I will have news of a reading, a fundraiser, hosted by Red Squirrel Press for restoration work on Hugh MacDiarmid’s home, Brownsbank, and a workshop as part of The Write Angle‘s One Weekend in Stirling event on my events page. I hope to see a lot of friends there!
It is a mixed summer – the swifts were late, but arrived in numbers, and they’ll be gone again by next week. There were lots of butterflies in April, then none, and now lots of small tortoiseshells and whites. The weather was very dry, then wet, then hot and thundery. The lime blossom is over but the buddleia is out, and the first rownas are turning red. The garden is at its peak of production just now, and all the weak points are showing up – the places where mildew has hit, the fruit bushes under attack from sawfly, the places where some things have grown too big, and other things come to nothing. On the whole, I’m quite pleased – the lavender is finally doing what I wanted it to do
I got a good haul of redcurrants and gooseberries, most of the seeds I planted have germinated, the pond is full of invertebrates and amphibians, and there’s plenty of colour and butterfly, bird and bee action.
But now is the time when you start to reckon up, and think about the next year. As I go through the harvest, drying herbs, freezing tomato sauce, and trying new dye plants, I’m beginning to think – but what next? is this doing what I expected? what will the garden need from me next year?
So too with this blog. There will be a short hiatus while I have a holiday, and deal with all the garden things, and set up next winter’s writing and editing projects. But also I’ll be thinking what to do with this blog. It seems to have hit the doldrums, between one book and the next, and one family or political drama after another, and I need to whistle up a wind to take me to the next phase.
The newsletters will continue steadily – it will be marigold next time, and looking at form – and I certainly won’t stop posting. But I have had a couple of projects brewing behind the scenes coming out of the research I’ve been doing for the next collection, and if I can get them properly evolved, it might be interesting to share them here. There are a few people who follow the blog who are less interested in poetry, and more interested in herbs (and well-being generally), or in the environment, and what responses we might make to all the stuff that goes on, or the society we will need to build to deal with it. Well, I’m quite interested in those things myself (it’s where the poetry comes from), and though my research is a bit random, there’s a lot of it, and a lot of hard thinking I don’t want going to waste. I just have to work out what might be interesting to other people, and find a good way to present it.
If you’ve been reading this blog a while, you might have an opinion on this – please comment if so – either here or on my Facebook page.
There are about five bees here, all enjoying yesterdays sunshine. There are three carder bees and two white-tailed bumble bees.
I’m think this is a hairy-footed flower bee.
I suspect there may be miner bees here too. We used to have them in our walls a few years ago, and they were quite disconcerting as they headed for the cracks round the windows. They were surprisingly noisy too. They aren’t nesting there now, but we have plenty of other places for them to hide.
We have done very well for bees for the last few years, and exceptionally well this year. I was telling myself that thirty-seven years of organic gardening had paid off, but I caught a glimpse of a deer on the river bank and an awful thought occurred to me. The deer are coming closer because they are running out of wilder places to be. What if the bees are here, not because our garden is quite friendly, but because everywhere else is so barren?
I’m not giving in to this thought, however. Plenty of people in the village and more across the river, are planting bee friendly plants (there’s a new wildflower meadow germinating in one previously well-manicured lawn) and feeding birds. There’s someone nearby who rears thousands of peacock butterflies and releases them each year. The farmer has planted trees along the edges of the road, and the council are much less fanatical about mowing the verges, so we have had a lot of cow parsley this year.
The biggest change is the birds. Twenty years ago you could walk along the road into the village past the fields and hear nothing but the occasional jackdaw, or sometimes skylarks. Then you would come into the village and it was like turning the radio on, as birds were in every garden. Now we have plenty of skylarks – I’m promising myself to go out and record their songs one evening when the rain stops – more swallows than ever zipping across the road in front of you, and a lot of these:
They are everywhere. It’s not all good news. We don’t see half the curlews flying over that we used to, and there are no lapwings at all. But good things are happening – not enough, I admit, and there are many setbacks – but there is enough good to encourage us, enough of a nucleus to build on. The sound of bees in my garden is like a spring of hope.
We have had erratic weather, sometimes very warm, sometimes cold and windy, a lot of sunshine, a bit of cloud, but on the whole, not enough rain. The garden is unusually dry, and what is particularly annoying, it has done nothing to discourage those well-known wet-lovers, slugs and horsetails, which are flourishing mightily.
Fortunately, so is almost everything. There is a good set of fruit on the gooseberries and redcurrant, and a massive crop of rhubarb. The tulips are over, except for the fabulous black parrot ones, but the aquilegias and peonies are looking wonderful, and the first rose – a pink zephirine drouhin, is out.
It has been a wonderful year for bees and butterflies. I have just seen an orange tip male knock a small white – that was about twice its own size – off a rocket flower it fancied. Orange tips seem to have the same feisty reckless spirit as Jack Russell terriers. There were so many bees on the rowan blossom that for two days the whole tree was humming, and they are making the most of the thyme flowers.
The birds are loving the new bird feeder, and several broods have fledged – sparrows (of course – the hedge is a yelling tenement of lust and gossip, and they are on their second brood already), starlings and goldfinches. There are blue tits and great tits too, but they are shyer, and only seen in glimpses among the leaves, and chaffinches and at least one robin nest somewhere, but they are slower off the mark.
Further afield, I’ve seen goldfinches even on the most silent stretch of the road out of the village, and whatever the long-term situation of the planet (it’s not looking good, whichever way you look at it), it does seem that last year’s good summer and the mild winter and sunny spring, have really strengthened the wildlife of this patch.
We always try to go to Inchmahome in spring to see the bluebells. They can be up to three weeks behind us here at a much lower level, so it’s a guess when the best time is, but this year, I think we hit peak bluebell.
They are everywhere under the trees
I took the camera and tried a few experiments. It was a beautiful day, and we saw peacock and orange tip butterflies, swans and mallards, a great crested grebe (the first time for here), and best of all, the osprey.
There were wrens, robins and a thrush singing, and we saw the first swallows as we came home. If you were to celebrate Beltane, that would have been the day to do it!
This is the new camera. I’m calling it the beast because it is so much bigger than I thought it would be. And, beside it, its little sister, the compact. One unexpected spin off from getting the beast is that the manuals tell me so much about getting the best out of little sister, and as she is much more manoeuverable, she will be going with me most places.
There are things that the beast can do better, however. Yesterday we went on a walk along the road out of the village to take advantage of the mist and snow on the hills, and to try out the paces of the zoom lens. Some of the pictures were quite interesting:
We haven’t had a bad winter so far. There were some frosts but a lot of mild and overcast weather. We haven’t seen so many birds at the feeder because there was enough food available elsewhere, and even the ducks on the river have been few in number, though I have seen goosander, goldeneye and an occasional teal now and then. On the plus side, though, I’ve heard more owls this winter than I remember before. As the temperatures climbed a little and the days lengthened after Christmas, birdsong and territorial behaviour kicked up a notch, especially among the sparrows and starlings. Growth started in the garden, with early flowers and hazel catkins, and buds visibly swelling on many of the perennials, and I thought of clearing away the dead leaves from around the emerging plants.
I’m so glad I didn’t now. All that has come to a halt, with this beautiful cold snap, bringing the first real snow of the winter. It was down to -6 last night and it hasn’t reached zero yet, in spite of blazing sun. Coal tits, blue tits and great tits have joined the sparrows and pigeons at the feeder, though so far none of the riverbank species have joined them. And out in the fields, winter visitors are becoming slightly less shy.
I reckon these are roe deer, because you can see conspicuous white rumps. Red deer have paler patches, but they are not so obvious. They are in a field close to the road, apparently quite unafraid, though they seemed to be aware of us. In winter they come much closer to the village than in summer when they can almost disappear into the trees and reeds where the river winds away from the built up areas along the Hillfoots.
Although I have poetry to write and a new collection to edit from an author I have admired for many years, I’m a little distracted this week. I’m very excited about the potential of this camera. And as you can see, the #derangedpoetess thing is still going.
These are my local hills, the Ochils, stretching out as far as Perth, marking the boundary with Fife. They have been on the edge of my horizon for thirty-six years, and though I am not a hill-walker, they have fed my imagination all that time. Stories of historic battles, witches, artists, farmers, and silver miners, abbeys, whisky bonds and woollen mills fascinated me, but I have concentrated so far on the western edge, between Stirling and Bridge of Allan.
This weekend I went to the annual conference of the Forth Naturalist and Historian, which focussed this year on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Friends of the Ochils and what a rich experience it was. There were talks about the birds and plants of the glens, about tree-planting and flood management, about ancient forts and victorian woollen mills, and about the work that is going on to improve bio-diversity and to manage leisure use so that the hills can be protected.
This, partly, is what I have been looking for. I am not academic or skilled enough to find this kind of information myself, and enormous resources of knowledge have opened up. But two other things came up. One is the appeal for poets to write about the Ochils. There was a sense that the hills needed to be celebrated and poetry was important to the vision. Let’s just say I’m on it.
The other is the myth of the ‘lost connection’ to nature and landscape. This is nothing new. Stories about evacuees in the last war often mentioned the ignorance of town children, and how appalling this was. City children of the working classes have not had much access to the country since the industrial revolution, and it has always been one of the markers that the middle classes have used to convey how inadequately educated working class people are. But also, it is true that cities were very much more polluted, and the environment more degraded in my childhood than they are now. Before I was ten I knew sparrows, blackbirds and pigeons, dandelions, buttercups and daisies, and buzzards or wild roses might as well have been unicorns for all the chance I had of seeing them. Even yet, when I see old man’s beard in the southern counties of England, there is a little part of me that reacts as if I’d actually met Father Christmas.
Now the old slag heaps are green, and are considered desirable habitats for plants which need poor soils, the flashes in mining areas are often bird reserves, and I can see forty species of birds within half a mile from my house. There are salmon in the Thames and the Mersey, and initiatives in almost every part of the country to protect and reintroduce more species. I don’t want to sound ridiculously optimistic; wildlife habitats are still critically endangered and under attack. But a ‘lost connection’ is not one of the causes.
Naked greed of the capitalist is of course a main cause. But this patronising attitude of the ‘educated’ towards those whom they feel are less qualified to have an opinion is their weapon. If they can convince themselves that the ‘ordinary working people’ don’t know how to look after the land, or, better, doesn’t really care what happens to it so long as they have nice houses and steady jobs, then they can have a free run at spaces working people thought were theirs. It isn’t always builders and industrialists either. Often conservationists take the same attitude, fencing off areas to protect habitats that locals have been looking after for years. And then they spend a lot of time feeling that they have to ‘raise awareness’ or ‘build connections’ while all the time letting the punters know that they don’t know how to look after this, that they really ought to leave nature safe in the hands of their betters.
John Lister-Kaye wound up an otherwise excellent talk recently by saying that ‘the public are apathetic’, and complained that their enthusiasm for nature went no further than watching tv and putting up bird feeders. It is my contention that they are not apathetic, but sidelined.
There is a local organisation near me which has fought for the last twenty years to keep their local area safe from quarrying. During that time they have campaigned, raised money and protested. They have recorded the wonderful variety of wildlife – pine martins, red squirrels, birds of prey, the plants the trees, they have discovered the archaeology and celebrated significant historical events. the community has been brought together, and they know the good bakers fro coffee mornings, the musicians to play at fundraisers, the venues who will be helpful. And the reward for all this effort is that they are now fighting off two applications for quarries.
There is another group who have looked after their local pond for many years, not only protecting it but also teaching the local primary schools about wetlands. A well-funded environemnetal organisation recently approached them and told them they would have no chance with their next funding application unless they allowed the ‘experts’ to take over.
And the Friends of the Ochils who have campaigned for twenty-five years under the aegis of several government funded bodies are now being told that the money is running out, they are no longer a priority, and will have to manage with volunteers. The man who said this looked suitably chastened by the outraged response, but it is not, in fact his fault. There is a shortage of money. There will always be bigger projects and more urgent needs. Volunteers will have to do it as they always have. It would be nice, though, if the paid employees actually gave the impression that the volunteers were up to the job.
The moral of this rant – don’t assume that people don’t care, or that nothing is being done. There’s a lot going on if you can find it, a buzz, a vibe that could put heart into the most discouraged of us. To use the metaphor I may have over-worked, there’s a wren singing.
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