BurnedThumb

For the last few days, the nights have been cold and frosty, and the days bright, clear and warm. The work on the roof has gone without a hitch, and it should be finished today. It’s been lovely. The flowers are doing their final fling.

The leaves are turning. We haven’t had too many blueberries, and what there was, the blackbirds will surely steal, but what we get is this fantastic colour.

I’m really thrilled with this, however. The wet summer has provided me with the ideal conditions for this cranberry – well, bog, to be honest!

And this is what I got this morning! Not much, I admit, but maybe next year—

This is not a re-run of Hurricane Bawbag. After thirty years, the slates are breaking up, every wind lifts a few more, and rain and condensation is getting into the upstairs rooms, so we are having the front of our house re-roofed. There is noise and dust everywhere and I’m camping out in the kitchen (nice and warm, though but) writing reviews and correcting the proofs for the new print run of Wherever We Live Now.

The picture, however, is not of our house but of the dig at the Abbey. This wall, they think, is what is left of the old watergate. There isn’t too much to see, because a lot of the good stone was robbed out to make fancy buildings up beside the Castle. But there’s enough to encourage the archaeologists to come back in the spring, and when they do, I hope I’ll have the first draft of a bunch of poems about it.

On the Great Road of the Four Abbots
two monks come ghost-walking
from St Ninians to Cambuskenneth.

This is a reference to some friends of mine, American Benedictines, who came to visit the Abbey and pray there,so that there would be monks there again. And after that there was a story going round the village about ghosts haunting the place!

The thing that intrigues me most is the continuity. People have been here since Pictish times. The first Abbot may not have been the Augustinian Canon whoename is in the histories, but Cainneach, a friend of Columba, whose family, like mine, came from Waterford. And the last, one Alexander Mylne, renewed the connection between our abbey and the Abbey of St Victor, which later became the sorbonne. This is a connection for me too, as the author of The Cloud of Unknowing which is one of the key texts in my life, was heavily influenced by Richard of St Victor – who turns out to have been Scottish.

I missed the trip to Flanders Moss which opened the Callander Weekend this year, so on the first day of the Glasgow Weekend, the Senior Partner and I went out there, taking advantage of what was possibly the best day of the lot.

Other creatures seemed to think so too. The raised edges of the walways had a great many of these beautiful newts basking on them,

and there seemed to have been a mass hatching, or fledging of these –

which I believe are black darters. We had hoped to see geese coming in, as we are beginning to hear them in greater numbers flying overhead, but we were too early, and we had to beat a hasty retreat as a sudden shower blew in on us from the shoulders of Ben Ledi.

The wind is here in earnest now; the day-time temperature has dropped significantly, and the rain is starting. Life is beginning to settle more indoors, and I am writing a couple of reviews – one of the new Dark Mountain anthology, and one very exciting one, which I’ll talk about later, for the Scottish Review of Books. I’m hoping to get a fair amount of reading done during the winter quiet, and to move into a new kind of writing. We’ll see.

The barley and wheat were harvested last week, and the garden went quiet as all the seed-eaters disappeared into the fields for spilt grain. Now the straw has been baled and the calves are browsing in the stubble. The first greylag and pink-footed geese have begun to fly in, the winter starlings are mustering in the orchard, the cormorant has taken up residence in the river, and yesterday nine goldeneye came up with the tide. The swallows were still here yesterday, but gone this morning, and I’m looking for my gloves.

This is cheery, though. A stray violet, growing just beneath the frame of the greenhouse has come into flower. Apparently this happens often, and they set seed more readily now than in spring too, but I don’t remember ever seeing one here before.

I spent Saturday tidying up. I ripped out the spent beans – a very disappointing harvest this year – and weeded and mulched with the contents of the growbags for tomatoes – also disappointing. I’ll never try to grow Marmande again, though the few fruits I got cook really beautifully. so now, all I have to do is to keep the slugs and the pigeons off the cabbages!

I did a bit more clearing, too, to make storage space for all the canes and posts I won’t be using for a few months, and came across this fungus growing on the log-pile. I’m hoping that this will be a good overwintering place for invertebrates and small mammals, so I haven’t tidied here too much.

Looking forward to next year, I have created a small patch for my grand-daughter to have a garden of her own. It is going to be filled with ‘fairy’ flowers – candytuft (fairy series) lupin ‘the fairy’ and ‘thumbelina’ zinnias – plus the fairy rose in a pot. It’s going to be very pink and frilly, but as the Flower Fairy books were my original inspiration to garden I don’t reckon it will do her any harm. And, finally, I found that the honeysuckles I raised from cuttings last year have borne their first flower.

Guard Archaeology, from Glasgow University, are digging in the field next to Cambuskenneth Abbey, and they very kindly allowed me to go in and talk to them. They are looking for traces of the Battle of Bannockburn, which isn’t too far away. It is said that survivors fled to the Abbey, so there might well be something to find. They are also looking for buildings surrounding the Abbey, including a medieval settlement nearby.

So far they have discovered some pottery, both medieval and modern, the sole of a shoe, and the end of a wall, which they believe to be the old gate.

They have been very kind and friendly, explaining everything that is going on, but there will be an official open day tomorrow (Saturday 8th September) from 10-4, when there will be metal detectorists on site, and they confidently expect to have finds to share, so if you are in the area, why not visit?

That is, unless you are going to the Callander Poetry Weekend. I’ll be there, taking part in the FilmPoem event on Saturday afternoon, and reading on Saturday evening. I’ve posted about this event in previous years, and this year looks set to be just as exciting!

It’s been a quiet week here, as I get used to the routine of taking my grand-daughter to and from school, but there have been a few highlights! You can tell it’s autumn now the anemones are in flower.

When I first saw this from the bedroom window on Saturday morning, I wondered who had been throwing rubbish away! I couldn’t work out what had happened. These look like gull feathers, but for a hawk to have caught it just there would have been a very tricky stoop, even if the gull could have been enticed into the confined space of our garden. However, The Collins Guide to Animal Tracks and Signs (which looks like an ex-library copy and is dated 1974), indicates that an owl may have been using our fence as a plucking post. the more ghoulish might be able to spot that there are bits of shredded gull there too!

But the big thing was the blue moon. It fell officially on Friday, but that night was cloudy and wet. Fortunately the senior partner had persuaded me to go for a walk on Thursday, which was rather wonderful – if cold. First, looking west, over the barley field>

Then eastwards. You’d never think Grangemouth and Longannet were over that way, would you?

This one, looking through the grass stems at the roadside, was a bit tricky!

We went away in summer, and it feels almost as if we have come back to autumn. It is mostly the illusion caused by the week’s gap, but not all. The rowans are red, the elderflower is over (it seemed to go on and on this year, and in England it is flowering yet), and all the birds have fledged, even the big black-backed gull chicks who were trampolining about on their warehouse roof, while the older birds all trash-talked them into finally making the jump. The swifts have gone, and I’ve seen the first geese and heard curlews heading coastwards.

Ther vegetable patch is coming good. We’ve started eating courgettes, and the first beans will be later this week. There are tomatoes ripening – not many, pollination has been poor, and now the bean plants aren’t so tall the pigeons can’t find the cabbages so easily.And my companion planting of borage and marigold looks fabulous, even if it doesn’t seem to achieve much!

This photo was meant to be a spider’s web, coloured rusty with the spores of the fern it stretches over, but I’m not sure whether you can make it out.I’ve sown some of it, according to the instructions on Sunday’s Gardener’s Question Time, just for curiosity. Fernseed is curious stuff. Apart from the fact it isn’t actually seed at all, it was popularly supposed to be magical – if you mixed it with oil it could make a potion enabling you to see fairies. I think I’ll settle for some more fernlets to plant in the shady places!

I do love lavender; there are so many varieties, and the scent is so powerful – and not at all oldlady-ish – and the bees and butterflies were everywhere. It was developed on the site of a run-down pig farm, and as well as the commercial side of things, it tries to be as sustainable as possible. The distillation process is fuelled by their own wood, and the ground surrounding the display and production areas has been landscaped to encourage wildlife.

I came home with five new varieties of lavender for my garden, some tips on growing them well, and a lot of inspiration. Now I am picking up the threads of my poetry life and my garden, and looking forward to being involved in an archaeological project in our local Abbey. I’m not sure yet just what this will entail, but it sounds very promising. Watch this space as the project unfolds!

Yesterday was the first good opportunity to get into the garden, and I spent a fair bit of time doing what my father would have called “letting the dog see the rabbit”. Everything was lush and wet and overgrown, and there is some serious mildew and rust because of all the damp. I cut back all the spent flowers – much more than I expected, as it turned out. Last year the rocket went on producing new blooms right into October, but this year we got one glorious swathe of flower, and then it all went over at once, which means that I could cut it right down, let some air and sunlight into the borders, and hopefully, prevent it self-seeding all over the place like it did last year.

Most of the vegetables seemed to like the rain. We had three good pickings off the peas, and the sun has come at the right time for the beans.

I’ve been growing potatoes in sacks for the last year or two, as Bob Flowerdew recommends. Last year wasn’t so hot, and I really resented the amount of potting compost it took. This year I did something different. When we returfed the lawn, I saved the old stuff to make a loam stack, and the first lot seemed to be ready. It wasn’t quite, and ground elder had rampaged through the whole stack, so I had to seive it all to get rid of the roots, but with a little 6x to beef it up it did pretty well, and I was quite impressed with the haul.

I’m really pleased with the garlic, too. It went in last November, after Monty Don told everyone to put it in. I went to the Garden Centre and asked for it and the assistant said “You’ve been watching THAT PROGRAMME!” so I guess half of Stirling had been in on the same errand.

It wasn’t all about the food, though. The robins are back and the great tits. I’ve noticed them checking out the new nest-box, so I hope it will get used next year. There are young greenfinches and chaffinches trying out their wings, a second brood of sparrows, and wrens and dunnocks seem to be singing as much as in May. I should have known they’d be back – our village is notorious for infestations of harvest mites – known as berry bugs here – and they are biting ferociously just now! The flowers are much less in evidence, as the roses took a battering, but this pot of french lavender is at its best.