Tag Archives: new year

Digging ponds and singing songs

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2013 is here… So a very Happy New Year to you all. May this year be a good one: peace, health, prosperity, happiness, the whole shebang.

The festive season was certainly a good one for me. I got to catch up with more or less all of my family, including sundry nephews and one of my great-nieces (who is, of course, a total cutie). My mum came through a complicated spinal operation successfully and is recovering well, for which I am hugely thankful. And despite the generally discouraging weather (day after day of grey cloud and rain) I did get out into the wild winter countryside on occasion, as well.

One of many highlights was going to stay with my oldest brother in Norwich for a few days over new year. Not only is he a host par excellence (and a very good cook, to boot) but like me he enjoys rambling along by the sea. We made a trip up to Hunstanton (where the photo at the top of this blog was taken), which is right up on the north-west edge of the sticky-outy bit of Norfolk. I’d never been there before; it’s a funky old Victorian seaside town with the most amazing pink and white cliffs, kind of like coconut ice. (Anyone else remember making that when they were a kid?)

Both the white and red upper rocks are types of limestone, the reddish colour caused by staining with iron. There is also a brownish-red sandstone known as carrstone, similarly iron-stained. The limestone strata are full of fossils – a condition which my brother took full advantage of by spending a couple of busy hours working with his rock hammer to extract several really nice brachiopod fossils.

Being in a more beachcombing mood myself, I strolled for a while along Hunstanton beach, which is littered with curious rounded boulders somewhat reminiscent of stromatolites. Crouching down to eye-level with these boulders put me into what felt like a strange mythical landscape, with rounded hills rolling away to the horizon of the sea.

There’s even a genuine shipwreck on Hunstanton beach: the remains of the 1907 steam trawler Sheraton, mostly buried in the beach. This former fishing boat did duty in both World Wars, ending up rather ignominiously as a target ship for artillery practice. She drifted from her morrings in 1947 and was washed up on the coast, to be nibbled away at by salvagers until all that remains is the bottom section of her hull.

After my Christmas and New Year familial wanderings it was back to work in early January. I had been due to help a team of people build a pond before Christmas, but freezing weather and then flooding had forced us to postpone. In the first week of January however it finally stopped raining so we were able to get to work. You may ask, “How does it take whole a team of people to build one pond?” Well, this wasn’t your average garden goldfish pond. No… This was more on the scale of being a minor civil engineering project. For all those who’d like to try this at home, here’s your step-by-step guide to building a very large wildlife pond:

Step 1, get a nice shiny mechanical digger to dig out a hole the size of, oh say an Olympic swimming pool.

 

Step 2: ensure pond hole conforms to the exacting design of top ecologist and pond-builder supremo Rod d’Ayala.

Step 3: assemble a team of highly-skilled, energetic and fetchingly-attired pond construction staff (aka ‘The Hired Muscle’).

Step 4: pick out stones by hand from pond hole and cover any loose earth with puddled chalky clay (N.B. getting muddy is a vital part of this process).

Step 5: line the entire pond (sides and bottom) with two layers of tough underlay material, to protect pond liner. Note that boots must be removed first, so enabling all those involved to spend the entire day padding about in the pond hole with soggy socks.

Step 6: lift roll of waterproof rubber pond liner (weighing over 600 kg) to edge of pond using digger, then pause to make sure you’ve got it lined up exactly the right way round because if you haven’t it’s going to be rather difficult lifting it out again.

Step 7: let the liner unroll!

Step 8: use your highly-skilled team to unfold the liner and get it tucked beautifully into position. (A great team-building exercise, this.)

Step 9: cover the whole thing with another two layers of underlay material, then cover that with a six-inch layer of topsoil lifted in by digger and spread by hand with shovels. Create marshy and shallow areas within pond by heaping up soil, following Rod’s cunning and intricate pond design.

Step 10: go home to a hot bath and generally ache a lot for a few days afterwards.

Actually, Step 10 should probably be wait for pond to fill with water… So I will re-visit the site over the next couple of months and see how it’s getting on. Watch this space. The pond has been built mainly to encourage toads, so it’s hoped that it will be full enough with water for them to find it attractive as they emerge from hibernation and start to do their courtship and spawn-laying in February. Fingers crossed.

Aching muscles or not, pond building was certainly a great way to start the new year. Being out in the fresh air and helping to create a valuable habitat for declining British wildlife, plus all the Eccles cakes I could eat… Life could be a lot worse!

January continued to be inspiring, with an opportunity for me to attend the Natural Voice Practitioners’ Network annual gathering, which was held at Wortley Hall near Sheffield. As a co-leader of Newbury-based community choir Sing The World I’ve been a member of NVPN for a couple of years now, but this was my first gathering – and what an amazing weekend it was. About a hundred incredibly creative and talented singing teachers and voice workers, gathered together to share ideas and teach songs to each other, in a lovely old country house set in beautiful Yorkshire landscapes.

Wortley Hall itself is an amazing place: a former private residence, it was bought by an independent co-operative organisation known as Wortley Hall (Labour’s Home), with the intention that it would be used by the working class as an education and holiday centre. Today it is still run on co-operative principles, and hosts all kinds of gatherings and events ranging from socialist celebrations and conferences to weddings and parties. My paternal grandfather was a strong socialist, so it felt wonderfully familiar to be roaming around a building whose rooms and wings are named after the likes of Keir Hardie, Robert Owen and Sylvia Pankhurst. In the current political climate it was heartening to be somewhere which celebrated a long tradition of radicalism and social justice. A whole bunch of us even sang The Internationale on the hall staircase – in four-part harmony, of course!

Not only was the hall itself a beautiful and peaceful place, but the staff there were friendly and the the food excellent. All of us at the NVPN gathering were working hard over weekend, so it was great to have such a lovely venue. Being singers, of course we kept the bar filled with song every evening… Until 2am, on one occasion! It was impossible to go to bed when there were always so many wonderful voices joining together in harmonies, wherever you went. Music was everywhere: in the bar; over breakfast, lunch and supper; during workshops; even on a 2-hour singing walk around the surrounding countryside (much to the amusement of a Ramblers group we met along the way). I feel very fortunate to have enjoyed such a great weekend, both from a professional development viewpoint but also because I made so many friends.

So all in all, it’s been rather a good start to 2013. Hopefully this is a good omen of things to come… I certainly plan to be getting out and about a lot this year, working and visiting friends and discovering all kinds of new and wonderful places. I’ll leave you with the wish that your own year ahead may be filled with good things too. Have fun, stay healthy, play in the snow and sing whenever possible. Or dance, if that’s your thing. Or do both! Looking forward to the adventures the coming year will bring…

 

 

Striding into the New Year…

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After a suitably festive Yuletide (spent largely with family and friends) which featured a lot of winter feasting, what better way to welcome in the new year than with a long walk across the countryside… So on a rather grey and rainy January 1st, two friends and I set out on a yomp around the vicinity of West Kennet and Avebury.

 

2011’s warm early spring weather resulted in phenomenal crops of wild fruits of all sorts.  Whilst red (and hence most attractive to birds) fruits such as holly berries and rose hips are now scarce, crab apples still decorate hedgerows, whilst sloes and ivy berries cover twigs so thickly that branches were drooping downwards under the weight.  We kept ears and eyes alert for winter thrushes such as fieldfare and redwing, but to no avail.  Plenty of blackbirds, robins, finches and other smaller birds, though.  And the scent of foxes and badgers was heavy along the hedgebanks as we walked along.  We half expected to see rabbits foraging but maybe the rainy weather was keeping them below ground.  Such a contrast with the heavy snows and prolonged freezes of the preceding two years.

 

I’m wondering if we’ll get severe winter weather in January or February?  Some of my friends further north have had snow on the hills, but apart from a few hard frosts it’s stayed mild in southern England.  We noticed on our walk that fungi is still much in evidence, including the Jelly Ear Fungus Auricalaria auricula-judae, whose scientific name reveals an older common name supposedly derived from the belief that Judas Iscariot hanged himself from an Elder tree, on which this fungus commonly grows.  While some reckon it to be a wild food worth trying (both Richard Mabey’s Food For Free and Roger Phillips’ Wild Food give recipes), its texture isn’t hugely appealing and it needs long or imaginative cooking to render it palatable.  As you often find the Chinese equivalent (aka ‘Wood Ears’) in spring rolls and stir fries, maybe do as they do: slice very thinly and cook well until tender.  And try not to keep in mind that you are eating something that essentially resembles a severed human ear.  Yum.

 

Halfway along our walk with the rain now taking on that familiarly British quality of penetrative persistence, we took temporary shelter in West Kennet longbarrow.  In fact when we first arrived it was standing room only inside, so we drank coffee leaning against the sarsen stones and watched the clouds scouring across the Wiltshire countryside with somewhat gloomy drama.  Once the throngs had thinned somewhat we spent a few minutes in meditative silence in the damp darkness inside the chamber, atmospherically lit by a couple of candles left by previous visitors.  (And also lit through the slightly less-atmospheric glass tiles cemented into the ceiling.)  At around 5,600 years old this tomb predates Stonehenge by nearly half a century. Without wanting to succumb to an attack of yoghurt weaving, you can feel the weight of millennia when you stand quietly in there.  When Neolithic folk were building this, wheels were the latest thing and the plough had yet to be invented.  Archaeological work has showed that the barrow was used for burials and ritual for 1,000 years… So hardly surprising that there is still a presence of some sort to be felt there now.

 

The rain and ourselves continuing, our walk took us over the A4 and past Silbury Hill, following the route of the beginnings of the River Kennet (or “the baby River Kennet” as our route guidebook would have it).  Unsurprisingly after a year of scant precipitation, the “baby River Kennet” was not in evidence, consisting of a ditch with a few watercress plants and little else.  With April 2011 having been the driest in the UK since reliable records began in 1910, chalk streams like the Kennet are suffering from low flows of record proportions.  In November 2011, fish started dying in their thousands as stretches of the river near Marlborough dried up, and Thames Water have launched Care For The Kennet, the UK’s first awareness campaign aimed at reducing water usage to protect water supplies and the local environment.  Perhaps hard to keep drought in mind on a rainy New Year’s Day… Yet water has become another resource in high demand and suffering from subsequent supply issues.

 

Taking shelter at the National Trust’s barn museum in Avebury village (blessed be the young man at the museum desk who allowed us to picnic on the benches along the inside of the barn without demanding the £4.90 admission normally charged to visitors) gave us a chance to dry out our layers, resulting in a lively comparison of our assorted weather gear.  I was smug in a new waterproof jacket, after months of cursing my old one which was no longer so much deflecting rain as absorbing it.  The various merits of waxed cotton, wool and the wicking effects of overlong top halves settled to everyone’s satisfaction, we refuelled on Christmas cake for dessert and then set out on the last leg of our new year’s journey.

We circled an arc of the ponderous sarsen stones that ring the village, patchworked with lichens that almost seem to glow in the damp weather against the grey sandstone.  Each of these massive naturally-carved blocks has a unique character.
I was reminded irresistibly of Terry Pratchett’s troll characters: I’m pretty sure that I know which one is Detritus.

 

The last port of call before heading away from Avebury back to the Ridgeway was the serpentine roots of the beech trees that grow just east of the circle’s outer ring.  A thick carpet of beech leaves had blown into rich brown drifts at the foot of the slope below the trees, but the roots themselves were exposed.

Here and there on the trees’ twigs people have knotted ribbons and scraps of cloth, some carrying wishes whilst others are simple offerings.  Whilst being cheered that people still have a relationship of sorts with natural magic, there is a big part of me that hopes that in future folks will tie on something that will decay and disintegrate, e.g. woven grass or leaves, rather than the random oddments of cloth and plastic that seemed to be most people’s choice.  Thus the trees’ branches will be free to grow unfettered.  Like leaving burning candles in ancient stone shrines (a practice which is known to be damaging to the stone), leaving offerings of any sort at natural places could be done with sensitivity and environmental mindfulness.  Groups such as SOSS (Save Our Sacred Sites) and ASLaN (Ancient Sacred Landscape Network) as well as individuals have been working quietly to ensure that less ritual ‘litter’ is left at sites such as Avebury and West Kennet.  It is wonderful to be able to visit such places and experience them in a way which is meaningful to me: hopefully increasing numbers of visitors will consider the cumulative impact of their footfall and leavings, treating these sites with the respect they deserve.

 

Darkness came on as we gained the Ridgeway, heralded by the cawing of hundreds of rooks gathering in pre-roost flocks in the damp Wiltshire fields.  Cold rain set in again as our boots trod over the chalk soil, much as travellers 5,000 years ago along this same track may have turned their footsteps towards shelter and warmth as winter dark descended.  We were wet, muddy and cold… but energised by our new year sojourn.  The January wind had blown all of the last year’s cobwebs away and we feel ready to encounter what 2012 will bring.

Out with the old and on with the new!