Rain Man

Posts (as you may have noticed if you’re still hanging in there) have been less frequent around these parts for some time. There are two principal reasons, the first is that I’m trying to find a balance between work, play, chores and blogging etc., and the second is that I simply haven’t been out as much. This year I haven’t been commuting on the train, as I did for a while last year, so don’t get a morning and evening stroll then. I’d like to use the train, but I’m too often required as a family taxi service immediately after work for that to be very practical. Another reason is that S is beyond the nap in a pushchair stage so I don’t have that excuse to get out. Also, although he still wakes early it’s no longer possible to bundle him up and take him out in the rucksack for a pre-breakfast leg-stretcher. (He would protest – he likes breakfast early and he doesn’t often like to be carried.) Meanwhile TBH has taken to setting off for early morning runs. Naturally, I’m jealous – I used to be the runner in the family.

On Saturday morning I decided to take a leaf out of her book and get out early once S had woken up. As you can see above, at 6.30am it was still fairly dark, but getting lighter, and the eastern sky was promisingly blue. Naively perhaps I half expected to hear a rousing dawn chorus as I did on an early outing some time ago, but aside from the spluttering calls (not songs) of a few blackbirds it was fairly quiet. From the direction of Hagg Wood I did hear an owl calling though.

I followed the path up the side of Potter’s Field and was surprised in the wood that although it was light enough to see, it seemed to be a little misty. Perhaps an illusion caused by the low light I wondered? A Gamelan orchestra of secondary rain drops splashing from leaf to leaf provided the music which I had hoped the birds would supply. But…..was it secondary rain drops or had it started to rain? Under the trees it was very difficult to tell, but I began to suspect the latter . As I reached the edge of a clearing close to Castlebarrow summit, the hiss of a really fearsome downpour striking the canopy of trees overhead confirmed the worst. I hunched under the the low branches of a yew, which gave reasonable protection. Standing waiting and hoping that the deluge would subside soon, it was interesting to hear not just the percussion of water on leaves but also the gurgle of running water, although I’m not aware of any streams in Eaves Wood at all.

When the rain did ease a little, I continued to the Pepper Pot.

From Castlebarrow the lights of Silverdale, and Morecambe in the distance.

I had envisaged finding a sheltered spot to sit down and watching a spectacular sunrise from the hilltop, but that seemed like an unlikely hope and a daft idea all round now. I could still see one bright spot to the east and….perhaps, just maybe, a patch of blue out over the Bay. Maybe it would head this way. I set-off towards home, just in case things weren’t going to brighten up.

But, it stopped raining, and so I took a right turn towards Cove Road and the Cove.

Looking out over the Bay and…that patch of blue!

There were lots of crows…or perhaps rooks out on the mud. Black-headed gulls paddled in the channel, where the water was not even knee-deep on the gulls. A curlew picked at the mud and loosed the occasional burbling cry. A cormorant winging low over the Bay was perfectly reflected in the wet mud.

As I crossed the Lots, causing a large flock of black-headed gulls to lift and wheel away, I noticed that some of the clouds were tinged with pink, and that the sun was probably still to rise. In fact when I rounded the final corner on to the lane past our house, a view opened up to the east and I could see that the sun was just above the horizon. If I’d stayed out a little longer perhaps I could have enjoyed some sunshine…

But, that would have meant a very late breakfast, and we had things to do….

It was sunny for a while, but it was a very changeable day, with the showers getting longer and heavier as the day wore on. Later we even had hail for a while.

Our bird-bath during the hail shower.

I was back in Eaves Wood last night, in even less light and even more rain, and back at the Cove enjoying some sunshine today, but more of that another time.

Puddle Plodging

Last Sunday. After some unseasonably mild weather, Friday night had brought payback: torrential rain, proper stair-rods; roads running with streams, huge new puddles in the drive. The weekend brought further heavy showers accompanied by strong winds.

A brief bright spell on Sunday afternoon saw S and I out enjoying the after effects of the storms.

 

We weren’t out for long – once we were out of the shelter of enclosing walls and hedges S found the wind was pushing him into a jog. ‘Too windy Dad’ so we had to beat a hasty retreat.

But he did love those puddles.

Especially running through them kicking up a good splash in the process.

Donna Nook

 

Whilst visiting my parents in Lincolnshire, we took a trip out to the coast, to a reserve (and bizarrely bombing range) where Grey Seals pup and then mate. This photo (heavily cropped) shows the only pup born so far this year (on the right). Last year around 1200 were born there. In around a month there will be thousands of seals on the beach at Donna Nook, but it’s early in the season – I counted 37 at present. The females come onto the beach to give birth and then to feed the pups until they are ready to take to the water. The males come to mate with the females once they have given birth – they take no part in raising the pup. The really striking thing about the seals was how big they are – and how quickly they could move about the beach. I’m guessing that the seal in the middle here is a male and the one on the left is the pups mother, but I could be wrong.

If you are in the Cleethorpes area in the near future I would recommend a visit, but – the car park is very small, the roads are very minor single track lanes and the reserve is quite a draw – if you can go midweek I suspect your visit will be a lot less stressful.

Autumnal Images

The rowan in our garden has no leaves left at all and yet I find that I haven’t posted any autumn leaf pictures. The following pictures then are gleaned from two walks in Eaves Wood earlier in the week. The first quite a long one with A, B and my friend Uncle Fester…

B is grasping the Pepperpot geocache in his mitt and is about to initiate Uncle Fester into the joys of caching. Uncle Fester was on the first of two flying visits to see bands – Nine Below Zero and Show of Hands again. This was the second time that we’ve seen Nine Below Zero at the Kendal Brewery Arts Centre and it confirmed our suspicion that Nine Below Zero fans – at least in the Kendal area – are very tall. How odd.

 

Different leaves decay in quite different ways, for instance the black spots peculiar to sycamore. Oak on the other hand turn brown around the margins, and yellow within that brown border, leaving a green area within the yellow. Once they’re completely browned and fallen they seem to have a waterproof property – on a wet day when other leaves are glossy with damp and are sticking together in great papery lumps, oak leaves still retain their individual status, their shape and the seemingly unique property of collecting water droplets…

Sometimes it’s the colour of a single leaf which stands out…

Or it’s shape, size or situation.

Sometimes it’s the general colour all around..

Of course, there’s more than leaves to look at. There’s been a lot of fungi in the wood this autumn – mostly I haven’t photographed it or remarked upon it here, but here’s one odd looking one which I did take a picture of…

This one has to go in (despite the poor focus) because it comes as close as I’ve managed to come in my search for heart-shapes in nature.

And there, for now, I shall leave it, except to append this quote from G.K.Chesterton, encountered, like E.V.Lucas, in the pages of ‘Modern Prose’, from an essay ‘A Defence of Nonsense’ which begins by favourably comparing Edward Lear with Lewis Carroll, but then, as so often (or always?) with Chesterton, moves on to matters spiritual.

Religion has for centuries been trying to make men exult in the “wonders” of creation, but it has forgotten that a thing cannot be completely wonderful so long as it remains sensible. So long as we regard a tree as an obvious thing, naturally and reasonably created for a giraffe to eat, we cannot properly wonder at it. It is when we consider it as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up to the skies for no reason in particular that we take off our hats, to the astonishment of the park-keeper.

It was the idea of a tree ‘as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up to the skies’ which first stuck in my memory, but on reflection there’s lots here to admire – the choice of the not at all reasonable giraffe as an example, and the image of pompous, mustachioed Edwardian gents doffing their hats to city park trees. The sentiment’s an interesting one too, whether you agree or not.

This simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality…

On Finding Things

…finding things is one of the purest of earthly joys.

E. V. Lucas from the essay On Finding Things

I found this gem on Saturday, in a very short essay. The essay is in a book, Modern Prose whose title has rather overtaken it since it was first published in 1922. My copy is the fourth edition from 1926 and it cost me a pound at a local second-hand bookshop. It’s small and rode snugly in my back-pocket when I took the kids and their friend S to the village playground on Saturday morning. It was a beautiful warm sunny morning – perfect for sitting in the park reading a book, or so I thought – but the kids wanted help with the zip wire, and then S’s Dad joined us and filled me in on the local geo-caching scene. So I had to come back to E. V. Lucas on Saturday night. I enjoyed reading the essay – even though, or perhaps because, I felt like taking issue with much of what it had to say. After a promising start it strikes a rather less positive note:

I have, in a lifetime that now and then appals me by its length, found almost nothing.

Lucas enumerates his lifetime’s finds: a couple of brooches, a carriage key, sixpence, some pennies, ‘a safety-pin, a pencil, some other trifle’. By coincidence, when we were out on the fell last weekend my friend GP found a tenner lying on the hill-side. Apparently, this was not the first such find he has made and there was some jealous comments about his good fortune. I couldn’t recall ever finding anything of pecuniary value whilst out walking although, on reflection, I did once find a perfectly good Silva compass sticking out of the peat on Black Hill in the Peak District. When I pulled it out of the bog, I half expected to find a sunken hand grasping it. I used it for years, but then lost it myself – perhaps somebody else found it and then used it in turn?

The disappointing ‘half-century’ of paltry finds which Lucas describes is surely a result of his narrow focus on what kinds of things he hopes to discover. Actually, there’s a hint in the essay that his attitude may have been quite different to what he implies, when he refers to a ‘a great moment, once, in the island of Coll, when after two hours of systematic searching I found the plover’s nest’. So – who was E. V. Lucas? A little bit of lazy internet research throws up thousands of links, all of which (well – the first couple anyway) lead to different pages containing the same article. Poor E. V.  suffers the indignity of having his writing described as ‘insipid’, but my sympathies are enlisted when I read that he wrote a column for the Sunday Times called ‘A Wanderer’s notebook’, and that one of his books was an anthology of poetry called ‘The Open Road’. Perhaps I’ll unearth one of his books some day when I’m browsing the dustier shelves of a second-hand bookshop somewhere.

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Our weekend had got off to a fantastic start when we ‘found’ a band which we had never seen before and which we very much enjoyed. We went to the Brewery Arts Centre at Kendal with our friends T&A to see the African Jazz All-stars. We didn’t really know what to expect – I wanted to go in case they turned out to be like the African Jazz Pioneers – whom I’ve loved for years after GP (yes him again) played one of their albums repeatedly on a long drive down to the Alps one summer. All we had to go on was this one clip I found on Youtube:

Happily, the gig was tremendous. TBH has been playing my meager collection of African jazz CDs around the house ever since (although I’m not sure that I’ve convinced her of the merits of Fela Kuti. Yet). The only disappointment was that the Malt Room at the Brewery had been set out with tables and chairs making it very hard to dance.

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On Sunday the pleasant sunshine had evaporated to be replaced with more familiar cold wet cloudy autumnal weather. Naturally I took the boys for a walk in the woods. We were joined by CW and a gaggle of kids – some of them hers, some borrowed. The kids mostly coped exceedingly well with the inclement weather. They expected to find a bear in the woods and when none appeared took it in turns to roar and play the part.

Of course kids love finding things – and when they’re little it can be almost anything – sticks, stones, leaves, fungi. At the Ring of Beeches they played hide and seek, finding each other, until they found this low branch which turned out to be perfect to sit on and bounce:

We’ve often noticed how much more our kids enjoy a walk when they have some friends for company, and this was no exception. Even soaking wet through on the exposed top of Castlebarrow most of them managed to raise a smile:

Swinside Weekend II

That’s the Swinside Hotel there – in the centre of the picture. With Swinside Farm B&B just across the road where we were staying. Latrigg is prominent in the background, dwarfing the town of Keswick, with the bulk of Blencathra and Skiddaw capped by cloud behind.

Sunday started much less promisingly, with heavy rain and strong winds. It had begun to brighten as we set off though and waterproofs were only donned in one of those farcical routines in which the rain stops at the exact moment when you’re kitted up and ready to start walking again. The climb up Rolling End was steep and I soon had my waterproofs stashed back in my bag. Just short of the top we stopped for tea. By now the sun was shining and we had found a sheltered spot in which to enjoy the improving views. (Well, to be fair…I didn’t find the sheltered spot, I staggered up to find everybody else enjoying the sheltered spot. Perhaps some recompense for the day before when I staggered up to the top of Dale Head to find everybody else sitting in the mist shivering?)

Our sunny perch. Swinside Hill centre, Skiddaw and Blencathra behind, now almost clear of cloud.

Skelgill bank and Cat Bells.

The Newlands Valley and yesterday’s route – Maiden Moor and High Spy on the left, Dale Head centre, Hindscarth and the long descent ridge on the right.

Our rest/stop was further enlivened by this Fox Moth caterpillar:

Which was feeding on the heather…

…or perhaps just enjoying the view like we were…

Our onward route took us over Causey Pike and then Scar Crags.

The ridge over Scar Crags was very exposed to the wind and the weather had deteriorated a little – whilst it looked fine back over Causey Pike…

 

It was a little more ominous ahead…

From the col before Sail, with some of the party facing very long drives home and some feeling the effects of yesterday’s walk (well I was anyway) we decided to turn back towards the pub and our cars.

An excellent weekend all round – fine company, fine food, fine weather, great walks. When will we be doing it again?

 

Addendum – Bagging stats.

Twelve Birketts over the weekend, eight of them also Wainwrights. That brings the Birkett tally for the year to 37 – more than twice my arbitrary target of 17. Can I grab 14 more before year’s end to top triple the target? The tension is palpable. (I wouldn’t hold your breath!)

Swinside Weekend I

Swinside Hill with Bassenthwaite behind.

Had a fabulous weekend with a bunch of old friends staying at the Swinside Inn and Swinside Farm B&B in the Newlands Valley. We’d all left our kids with grandparents and hastened from all points to a late Friday night muster in the bar at the Swinside. A forecast for a bit of everything weatherwise on Saturday – some showers, some cloud, some bright spells – seemed to be belied by cloudless clear blue skies on Saturday morning, but the clouds had left their kids with grandparents and converged on the lakes with much the same singularity of purpose as our own speeding motorway journeys the night before. We got the drizzle as we climbed above Derwentwater on the prow of Cat Bells. (Yes there really is a hill in the Lake District called Cat Bells and all because of the tragic story of Keswick Ginger and the ghostly tinkling that can occasionally be heard on the fell….or perhaps because the name is a corruption of Cat Bield and the area was once the haunt of Wild Cats.)

Inexplicably I’m not the last to the top….”somebody tied my boot laces together” fumes the Shandy Sherpa

As we reached the top of Cat Bells, our second Birkett for the day – Skelgill Bank having passed by unrecognised as such – the sky was clearing and we had fine views of Causey Pike (of which more in another post).

Just beyond the busy summit we sat down (some might say slumped in my case) to drink in the views and the tea from our flasks (and lungfuls of air in my case).

The first of many lunch stops. Notice the Adopted Yorkshireman (centre) modelling ‘the grunge look’ circa 1990 on behalf of the Victoria and Albert Museum costume collection.

We ambled on (well…I ambled on – the others waited patiently every so often) over Maiden Moor…

Looking back to Cat Bells. Skiddaw and Blencathra almost clear behind.

…where naturally we felt compelled to sit down for a while. Then diverted slightly to the cairn on Blea Crag (to my surprise not a Birkett despite having a name, a prominent cairn and very nearly a contour line of its very own) for…well – a sit down.

Looking to Maiden Moor from the cairn on Blea Crag – Skiddaw and Blencathra playing hard to get again.

More sitting down followed on High Spy (probably) and at Dale Head tarn (definitely). A long steep climb (that’s how my legs remember it anyway) took us into the mist and up to our highest point of the day on Dale Head. We stayed in the cloud round Hindscarth Edge to Hindscarth…

The magnificent seven.

… and for much of the long ridge we descended back to the Newlands valley. A quick visit to the tiny Newlands Church (too dark now for photos I’m afraid) and a very, very long road walk (that’s how my legs remember it anyway), brought us back to the pub, a hot shower, foaming mugs of ale, steaming mounds of food, the Jacuzzi, a team of Swedish masseuses…..

Well…some of the above.

The Language of Leaves

Leaves are of more various forms than the alphabets of all languages put together

Henry David Thoreau A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Another bright sunny afternoon in the woods. S and I are out on a spree. Actually, we are only in the woods briefly due to our very slow pace. Our stats are:

Distance: Less than a mile

Time: An hour and a half, including stops.

(There walk stats = a proper walking blog. Just need to review a few stoves now!)

Although, our pace is so slow that sometimes I’m not sure whether we have stopped or not. We do sit down at one point for a drink and a snack. S is very excited about a very voluble Robin’s song. Also, he has a stick of course.

Meanwhile, I’m entranced by the leaves, and the dappled light, and the way the leaves fill with light and glow.

Be they dried husks on the floor, or green thoughts in a green shade…

 

Isn’t that green tree-mendous? (Sorry)

Now that I know where to look for it, I can usually find thin curls of papery bark catching the sun on days like this too…

In all, a wonderful rest cure from Doctor Sun. And the best part is – it wasn’t even my idea to head this way – S was insistent.

 

Silvery Y

…which sounds like the title of a notional Sonic Youth tune, maybe an out-take from Daydream Nation, but which is in fact a moth…

This one was trapped in S’s bedroom for a while and became “my moth”.

It transpires that there are several British species of moth named for a y on their wings. I wonder if they all have those odd protuberances too.

Here’s a bit of Sonic Youth (from Daydream Nation)…just in case you’re curious. Give it a minute and a half – then it kicks off…

The original youtube page is here.

Belladonna

A lovely weekend with a house full of guests. A house so full in fact that some were sleeping in the drive in their Dormobile. On Saturday we climbed to the Pepper Pot via the favourite yew and the fallen beeches. On the beech roots the mass of Inkcaps had all but disappeared, but these Earthballs were thrusting up through the leaf-litter nearby. It was a dull day with occasional short-lived showers. We walked through Eaves Wood to Water Slack then round Haweswater and back via Bank Well and Lambert’s Meadow. Oddly, there are goldfish in Bank Well. Baby S will probably remember it best for the large cold drops of rain which began to fall at a most inopportune moment whilst I was changing his nappy – apparently the rain was cold.

Saturday was grand despite the weather, but Sunday was fantastic with clear skies and bright sunshine as well as the fabulous company. We were back in Eaves Wood but this time heading for Far Arnside and a coastal route to Arnside. In the woods there were lots of Speckled Wood butterflies about again. Near Far Arnside this Red Admiral was basking on a wall…

Ivy growing on the wall here was loud with bees, many of them clearly already heavily laden with pollen…

We stopped by the shore while baby S had a nap. The adults enjoyed the sunshine the kids dashed about on the rocks and collected tiny crabs. The tide was right in, scuppering our envisaged play on the beach, but it didn’t seem to matter. The walk around the cliff path to White Creek was unusually busy. With the tide in we took the most direct route to New Barns and stopped again for a late lunch in Grubbins Wood…

The small meadow in the wood was well stocked with late summer flowers, the names of which elude me at present…

S decided to walk from this point which slowed our already very moderate pace to a crawl. Particularly when he and his brother decided to try to climb into some rabbit holes…

 

In the shingle of the river’s edge nearby some large herbaceous shrubs…

 

…covered in berries with an attractive purple ruff..

These berries are apparently sweet, or so I read, which is unfortunate since they are Deadly Nightshade, or Belladonna, ‘the most poisonous plant in the Western Hemisphere’. I’ve seen them flowering near here before, but not the berries. Apparently a single leave or about 20 berries can be fatal to an adult, and the roots are more toxic still.

We opted for ice creams in Arnside instead to round off an excellent day.