End of the day

You'll be glad to hear that reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated; it was another young man who died on the by-pass that day. A step in a wrong direction started from school days. Not as lucky as even the deer I have been watching.

But all in all it is a reminder that the city is not the soft life I imagined. I had chosen its margins as my camp after my ill-health last year. To get whole.

But without friends to feed me up with a big dinner and some warmth and talk now and then it is no home to me.

Still I am here; I have looked close at deer, fox and hedgehogs in the park and garden edges; found the by-pass lupins and the buzzard; stretched out undisturbed in the big cemetery by the main road.

But now it is time to get back to my wood. What has been happening there?

A whole season of changes to explore.

Deer path

I have been camping in some industrial land overgrown with dock, sorrel, bracken and gorse; it’s been left empty so long that its cleared spaces - once home to big worksheds of I hope not too chemical a nature - have become nature reserve. Bullrushes in machinery extraction pit, owls on the remaining gantry sentinel and deer on the line of brown young growth.

Each morning and evening I remind myself that they are not always there. And then there they are again.

The by-pass runs close and headlights keep me company in the late evening when it finally gets dark. In the morning it is speckled with wild lupins and a big red buzzard does its round or sits in a carved out shape on a fence post.

Then rush hour changes everything.

The deer tried to cross at this time and with inches to spare jumped and scrambled through the lupins to the otherside farmland.

The buzzard doesn't care. It is always there. Looking. Like me.

The hedgehog way

Part of my new urban home involves walking.

It is not usual for me to meet people on my treks in the forest. So here I keep my walks to dusk and dawn.

My circuits take me to the edge of neat estates. An alley or a wynd spits me past a new lawn and children's toys. It must be an old road. The remnants of a track where sheep were driven into the city and stopped to munch on hawthorn, dead nettle, bramble and sticky willie erupting from the ditch.

Sometimes I pass through an old industrial lot. Nothing fancy. The pre-fab office shards its papery walls. Odd objects - an iron, plastic flowers - sit on what might have been desks or workbenches. White collar? Blue collar? All the same.

If I need to walk in the day I have found a path between double hedges in an older part of the town. Shrubbed houses. Lilac. Laburnum. All the aliens the Victorians bought. This space between the hedges circuits a number of houses these days. Then I suppose it was one big garden it hid.

The grass is long like the grass will be under the pines. In my wood on the hill back home. Thick with incongruous rape seed escapees, patches of forget-me-not and the fleshy leaves of foxglove. The thin overgrown path is topped with intergrown twigs. But some hard-working gardener must have been cutting it until very recently - twenty years back? - for it not to be entirely lost.

The grass is snaked with tunnels. Hedgehog paths especially where bluebell leaves still show. Seeking slugs.

I follow their ways at dusk and dawn.

Thanks to bdk for this photo

Thick air

The temperature has been mild enough these past few days to sleep outside with no ill consequences. I am sick of being cooped up in the prefab. The rush at earliest light to get out before the builders arrive, the dust and stale air of it and to be honest the site and sight of the block going up. Flats. Inappropriate for the small plot that used to be home to warblers, weasel and flycatchers even though it was bang in the middle of Selkirk.

I am testing myself. After a spell unwell last year, walking any distance is like swimming. My body feels all wrong in the air. Small slopes I would have ignored last year seem to go on forever. Flies hatching early and giddy in the warm temperature have seemed an obstacle. I have often had to stop to let them pass.

However now I can see the buds forming on the trees. I have promise of work in a big wood planting. And thanks to my writing a commitment to my living in the bothy there, keeping an eye on things in every sense.

So I get to be official. And once I stagger over and up there, I should be able to bring you the spring.

Nests by the chestnuts

In the recent big wind, I took shelter in one of my favourite hedgerows.

Tempted to crawl right inside like a badger, I got on my hands and knees and started to brush softly at the dying back long grass and briars. Of course, I took a thorn. And my hand bled like black bramble juice.

The drops drew my eye to an interlaced layer of lichen caught up between the beaten grass and fireweed. I drew it out with my good hand. It was a nest. A nest like a whisper. Made of moss with a structure of the lichen that hangs in our trees here.

Once I could see them, the hedgerow berm of grass was studded with these dreams of home. Every two or three metres, another variation. And in some, the feathers from the small bird who had created this haven.

All blown out by the wind like dead leaves.

Web of paths

Somehow or other I find myself in October and still in the wood.

The night is already getting dark early.

There is one inhabited house in the centre of the wood. I am ashamed to say I walk past and round it each night. Those who live there don't know I am there. I don't think I have even disturbed the owl who uses their outhouse as a pre-prandial perch.

I don't spend time there. It is just always on the way. Whether I am going up to the pond by the fir trees, through to my own abandoned nook further up the valley slopes, or stopping by that tree to listen to the leaves and the wind and the rain.

This house is the centre of my map as the nights draw in as it never was in high summer. It is situated in a clearing made by its original forester's need for firewood. Two paddocks, a barn in a centre of a circle and around it paths spiral out through the plantation pines. Bracken. Long grass. At one stage, these paths would have had their own centrifugal pull. Now they are almost cosy in the light of a bit of moon.

A nettle patch suggesting the old midden and its nitrates has wilted in the cold of one or two nights although in general it has stayed warm. I see the old owners passing like I knew them.

These paths seems to hold me like a net. And then push me right out of the wood and back here.

I meet myself

There is someone else in the wood. Someone like me. Sleeping in a bag.

They have made a camp not far from mine. Bending leafy branches to hide it but I know that way too well. It had all the signs of a newly purchased house to me. Almost a car on the driveway thanks to the way they have driven their feet through the glass. They overlooked that.

I slipped into the bag under the leaves. It smellt of liquorice. That won't last long. I wanted to lie there a long time. It is so much dryer than mine. I could have slept there. I think I did. For a moment.

I woke in confusion to the smell of a child's sweets. And twigs cracking. Had they seen me there?

But a grown fawn from that summer stumbled away as I slithered out the way I came in.

Nobody was there.

That was a dream. Days later I found the bag sodden and the branches bowed with rain. It was a one night stand.

They never came back.

Watching the sparrowhawk

It was an evening before the rain came last week. In the wood I had been lying down watching a thyme bush and its visitors. Bumble bees mainly. The thick black flies were out in force but not unkind. No sting. It was the end of a long day. I had been at work and then retreated to my base here in the wood. And in the open. This was before the rain.

I had got so still and small that birds had started clamouring about in the edge of an old hedge that backed into the enclosure where I lay. Early blackbirds on the rowan territorial but no doubt in movement themselves as soon as the berries would be torn from the tree.

Then the sparrowhawk came.

Not for them mind you but the blackbirds left quickly. Its attention was focussed on the outgrown stump of hedge. Perhaps an old gate had once been here and the hedge, small trees by now, was growing out, where the tractor couldn't trim down for the pole.

The sparrowhawk missed that first time. But it sat on top of the lollipop shape of hawthorn. Its sinewy feet gripping the twisted much sheared branches of the hawthorn. It did that thing reaching down into the bush where several small birds were. The birds were out of reach. I breathed out. But those claw toes, long and seemingly to grow longer reached into the net of hawthorn where the birds were entrapped.

The sparrowhawk probed gently like a surgeon. It was not aware of me in my low greenery. Its glance was clear and straight. It reached into the cavity but this time found nothing.

The sparrowhawk changed the weather.

Scrambling down and around the face of the overgrown hawthorn head, not committing itself into the greenery because the birds it craved would fly but simply running and shaking its surface. The birds inside could be glimpsed tossed and turned by its agile runs and feints. A blue tit briefly visible, chaffinches mostly they rode out the storm.

The sparrowhawk sat. And levitated. A quick dart to where the birds were. Dark and canny, in their vessel of hawthorn they moved from side to side refusing to fly. Flight meant no escape. They knew.

The sparrowhawk sat. And I sat as trapped as the birds. How long could this go on? Before a bird broke for a brief freedom. The sparrowhawk appearing now like the ghost of itself at all sides of the bush at once, the thin talons wraiths and longer than ever reaching.

And then a dog barked from the farm a long way down the hill. The sparrowhawk flew. A short time later the small birds fed again.

Green woodpeckers

I have been over in a wood in the west of the Borders. It is private. A private space in an otherwise land of open walking. In Scotland, you have the right of way. Unless specifically told not to. Here you are told not to.

I have been living in the wood for the past few weeks. They know me in the pub even. It has been relatively easy to keep clean and tidy. I have surprised myself.

I have been waiting for green woodpeckers.

They are a large bird. And they live in this wood in numbers. You can hear their cry going from tree to tree. And in quite open places, you think you must see them. But I haven't.

Just the laughing cry that gives their old name of yaffle.

What makes the wood so attractive to them (and me) is the leas within it. Open clearings, mown flat, and surrounded by wild geranium, foxgloves still out in shady places, shot dog's mercury and russian grass and ragwort that has stolen in from the surrounding fields. The deer, whom I encounter often, keep the centre of the clearings green and short like a lawn. It is like a garden.

And I expect the woodpeckers. They like to ground feed I know.

I have met people on the road who have seen them close by. But whatever glade I choose, the ash tree, the newty pond, the balsam. The laughing cry comes from elsewhere.

I have become light and clean waiting for them. I have surprised myself.

Watching tadpoles

I've been living in the wood the past few days. Can't say exactly where for obvious reasons. Emerged slightly smelly, coat now lined with that fine dust you get off drying fir branches and cones; I'd employed them in my camp to beef up my bedding arrangement.

Close to my camp is a pond surrounded by larch. Oddly although the camp is high up, it is sheltered by this belt of trees and warm. And also I am unlikely to run into any of the other foresters. I know these guys and they might think it a bit surprising to see me there.

This pond has been a kind of consolation to me.

Firstly, it is full of life so I always have company.

Secondly, it is in an incline, a fairy dell very lush and easy for the deer to get into early morning. The bracken is beaten down and it has barely been boggy. This would be normal but the pond is on the top of a hill. One of those places that you cannot believe exist and then you hold your breath. How is the water held there? On another hill over the other side of the Tweed there are several of these pools high up on a walk to three cairns. The water stays right through the summer and is deep in places. Almost every pool holds newts, their orange speckles and crests like a small dragon under water, seemingly impervious to your presence but a hand inserted into water immediately disperses them.

Thirdly, the tadpoles. The pond by my camp holds frogspawn amongst its thick weed. And I have been watching it each day in the early afternoon at the end of my lunch break to see how they are progressing. The spawn is on one shallow end of the pool and it has been my pleasure to oversee it. But the recent warm weather has been upsetting. Temperatures so warm for April and absurd in my sheltered part of the hill. The shelf of spawn has heated up and in a day or two the tadpole’s food supply of albumen had broken into a rank bubbled jelly. The tadpoles themselves had developed with a Frankenstein-like speed. This is when the urge to play god irresistibly inserted itself. Here I was living gently in the landscape but I couldn't tame the urge to scoop a handful of the liquid mucus and relocate the tadpoles.

This is how my problems started. The tadpoles in their slippery web sank to the bottom of their new deeper home at the other end of the pond. With luck the spawn ball fell onto a clear rock and I was able to grab it. But the over-heated albumen had lost all its elasticity and strained through my fingers into soup. The tadpoles sank like pebbles onto the whitish cast.

Now gods don't feel guilty. But I did. The tadpoles didn't move. They looked like leaf debris on the stone. I watched them over three days and they lay in the deep cold water. I assumed breaking down and dead.

But somehow tadpoles have a past more complex than me. Today I stared into the pool and amongst what I had almost forgotten to be life, there was movement. Tails wriggling, bodies stretching. From a cold grave, dormant life returns.

Birling Wood

What with all the shenanigans with the woods and Forestry Commission sell off, my audio tree project has had to take a back seat for a bit. Good news is that the government forest give away sale has been called off (for the moment).

My project has evolved a bit in its scope: I am calling it Birling Wood. I have still yet to evolve a mic set up that doesn't require quite a bit of attendance. Also not sure if I can leave the equipment in the wood where I am working safely. It is quiet place apart from the section we are in the middle of felling. And my kit is not technically impressive stuff but that doesn't mean no one will be taking it.

However the act of checking has its own rewards, I almost ran into a fox the other day. A female it scarpered as soon as it saw me. We had been hidden from each other by a bend in the path. I had been looking at the start of the wild garlic cover. It already smells pungent. Then the cheerful face appeared. The same thing can happen with stoats. I once encountered a family of weasels crossing (probably their regular crossing, it is on my list to go and check this out by observation). Some big dogs had passed with their owner the other way and so my passage went unnoticed. Weasels are like a mini feather boa on a string; they move fast even on their own time. I had time to sense the younger ones playing.

So I need a mindset not dissimilar to Clym Yeobright to sit quietly and listen along with the mic, and I look forward to having it and to composing the words that will go along with the recorded sound. At the moment, I feel my lack of clothing, well the right clothing. It is hard to get things dry where I am living. My jacket has acquired that smell that rainproof material gets when it never drys out. But then you look at the leaf shards of green ramson and smell that oniony smell, the warm earth. It is not warm but something is moving in it.

It is all to look forward to.

Ruskin tweet poetry

poetandgeek poetandgeek.com 

the poppy is painted glass wherever it is seen against the light or with the light always it is a flame and warms the wind like a blown ruby

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From John Ruskin's Proserpina: Studies of Wayside Flowers while the Air was Yet Pure among the Alps and in the Scotland and England Which My Father Knew. (1886)