I’m Back

Gorse flowering on Lynchmere Common

SO it’s not that easy to get rid of me after all?  Last time I looked it was the depths of Winter and now Spring has been rushing past in it’s usual way with a frantic list of things to do.

Tidying up  after the winter work, plenty of maintenance and then straight into the summer season of events, courses, bracken management and charcoal making to name but a few.

Writing up blog articles never seems to come close to the top. We had the pleasure of a brief visit from Sean Hellman and Lucy this week. Sean’s inspired me to make a start on the mound of pictures and ideas I have to catch upon.

With the sudden improvement in the weather charcoal is in demand again. So I have to stop this post and go deliver a few bags to our local hardware shop – Liphook Hardware.

Back soon!

Read Full Post »

Season’s Greetings

Frost on the Landrover window this morning.

Season’s Greetings! Last time I looked it was summer. 2016 has certainly been busy with plenty to post about but despite my good intentions it hasn’t happened. Where does the time go? No rest for even the slightly naughty around here?

Silver Birch in Midwinter Sun on Lynchmere Common

With the busy summer season of craft demonstrations, shows and teaching over its back to the woods cutting trees, scrub and clearing up. It’s just as hard to keep up as there are a lot less hours in the day. It’s dark by 4pm in midwinter but the light from the low sun angle is glorious and helps to make up for the frozen fingers and toes a little.

Where ever you are I hope you have a good break (if you get one) and best wishes for the New Year. See you there! Meanwhilst put another log on the fire and enjoy the fruits of all that labour.

Read Full Post »

Aren’t the Bluebells lovely?

I had the pleasure of looking around a small woodland up on the South Downs today under the guise of giving some advice.  I haven’t got out much recently and it’s always nice to visit other woodlands. A bonus when it turned out to be a traditional Hazel coppice with Oak Standards and the most amazing Bluebell woods. So I can’t resist posting some photos.

An intense riot of colour and smell on the woodland floor, the flowers damp with last nights rain and warming in the dappled sunlight coming through the thin canopy with the oaks just starting to come into leaf.

The wood has been neglected for years so the new owner has plenty of work to be getting on with. Oak standards have fallen over during the wet winter and the coppice is overstood and neglected. But the display of  bluebells shows that gentle neglect is not always the worst of management techniques, all it needs now is a little TLC and some hard graft.

 

 

Read Full Post »

….Been Beachcombing

My annual ‘blow away the cobwebs’ retreat takes me to the Gower Peninsula in South Wales for a couple of days. A chance to walk the cliffs and waters edge and see what the the winter has thrown onto the shore.

Not just about the coastline, though you are never far from it, Gower is criss-crossed by old ways running between little fields, ruined castles and standing stones on open moorland. As the sun rises higher through March it starts to creep into sunken paths it’s not seen since last Autumn. The wild garlic starts to grow, soon you’ll smell it.

I like to be there before it becomes crowded as it will be in the height of the summer. In March I have the beaches almost to myself – except for Oystercatchers, Gulls and the odd Shag in the water. ( In case you are not familiar with UK coastline I’d better point out that a Shag is a seabird very similar to a Cormorant. )

Then there are the cliffs. Scenery for which Gower is rightly famous. The stretch from Port Eynon to Rhossili is my favourite walk,  littered by headlands, narrow ledges, rocky inlets and caves – like  Goat’s Hole at Paviland – where the skeleton of the ‘Red Lady’ was discovered in the 19th century. Subsequently discovered to have been neither a lady nor red and 33,000 years old, you can easily leave the 21st Century behind as you walk towards the dragon like shape of the Worm’s Head at Rhossili.

 That’s helped by all the signs left from human habitation over centuries – drystone walls and limekilns lie mixed with the curved earth banks and ditches of prehistoric forts.

The mark of the 20th Century is not quite so well suited to the landscape. Unlike the drystone walls, limekilns, earth banks and ‘red ladies’  the mountains of plastic on the shore are not made from local materials and don’t blend into the landscape over the decades. Bio-degrading is a misnomer – they simply breakup into millions of small bits and pieces which are even harder to clean up and once small enough can enter the food chain. Somebody got here before me!  What used to be beachcombing has become beach-cleaning and every spring teams of volunteers work hard to remove as much as possible – good work! But it would be so much easier if we didn’t make and throw away so much unnecessary plastic in the first place.

Amonths of endless gales I managed to catch a couple of calmer spring days and as I write this blog I can hear the birds singing outside. Amazing how quickly you start to forget the wind, rain and floods once the sun comes out. The stonechat likes to sit right on top of the gorse scrub and ‘chat’ as I walk along – a very welcome reminder that Spring is on the way.

Read Full Post »

Courses & Events Page Updated

Bitterly cold again outside. Which makes me think of warmer times and so I’ve spent some time updating the Courses & Events page on the website this morning whilst I huddle next to the woodburner and try to mentally prepare myself for going out and getting cold again.

On the rare occasion that the sun does pierce the snowladen grey clouds I have been treated to some very season displays of colour –  as here when I was preparing pea sticks from the cut stems on Lynchmere Common when the low angle of the sun lit the bronzed bracken against the Silver Birch stems and the grey skies behind.

Read Full Post »

Where am I now?

 

Yes I know, my blog posts are starting to get like London Buses….. no posts for ages and then three come along together!

It’s an old joke and a poor excuse to post a picture of a great sunset. I’ve been in Wales for a few days with virtually no internet connection (so you can expect some more photos of Gower beaches soon) and on the way down I spent a day in Somerset with my Dad who is going on 92 and unfortunately suffers from Alzheimers. This sunset photo was taken from just in front of the window that used to be my bedroom thirty odd years ago. Just in case you don’t recognise the iconic shape it’s Glastonbury Tor.

Back to the woodwork soon enough with tales of the Weald Woodfair and the World Log to leg championships at the APF show amongst others still to come.

 

Read Full Post »

On Retreat

I’ve been away on my annual beachcombing retreat on the Gower Peninsula. Not much in the way of internet connection, which may be a good thing, but it’s one excuse for not being able to post recently. Another is that at this time of year many of the tasks are not terribly photogenic – there are only so many photos of firewood, logs and birch trees that I can post. As soon as I am back and sorted out I will start to catch up on some posts that I really should have written before now. Yes, that’s a threat and not a promise!

Read Full Post »

January means beanpoles and peasticks

I’ve been a little distracted of late and you will have noticed I’ve not been posting as much. Sadly my mother died suddenly just before Christmas and I’ve not had much time for posting on the blog as a result. Normal service will be resumed eventually and I will shortly post something appropriate, as if you ever received one of her hand crafted cards, you will know she was quite a talented caligrapher. Meanwhilst the seasons don’t wait and if I don’t get the birch cut soon it will be too late, particularly with the warm weather we’ve had.

On sunday we had a good sized group of Volunteers working on the commons and managed to clear through a patch of birch which yielded plenty of peasticks and few good beanpoles. I even managed to persuade our more enthusiastic burners not to burn them all.

We joined up with some of the Allotmenteers from the nearby Shottermill Ponds allotments so plenty of beanpoles and pea-sticks were taken away but there were still some left for me as well.

I particularly like this way of working on the heathland as it is a living landscape and this is the way it was created and has been managed as commonland for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Completely sustainable, it provides exercise and a sense of connection and continuity with the environment – and it might just have avoided the import of the odd bundle of bamboo or even worse, plastic poles. Not saved a shipload, or even a container load yet – but every little counts as they say!

Read Full Post »

Looking back with Twelve at Eleven

I’ve been a little distracted whilst trying to put together this view of the year just past, but it’s better late than never I hope. It’s always hard trying to select just twelve photos which together capture something of the year and it’s not a short process always taking me a lot more time than I imagined it would do. I think I’ve managed it in a small way for me, you will have to make your own minds up!

January means low sun angles through the leafless skeletons of the birch trees on the commons, never rising high, always a cold light and quick to fall below the hillside opposite whilst I am still cutting the young birch for poles, flower stakes, peasticks and besom brooms before the buds swell.

But February chills to the bone, and it was a bitter freezing winter which seemed it would surely go on for ever, perhaps we’d never even make it to the Spring. You need a fire (with baked potatoes) just to make it through the end of each day as the cold seems to seep up through my feet and into my bones.

But just when it seemed least likely Spring did arrive, and in the Gower on my annual beachcombing holiday it was scented with Coconut from the gorse flowers.

Working outside in April is rarely that much of a pleasure but as Spring got a grip, the days lengthened and the evenings spread themselves we had some wonderful sunsets – and not a drop of rain.

From a late start Spring was indeed Sprung rushing headlong into an early Summer with endless blue skies and talk of drought – yes this is still England I am talking about. By May and the Beltain celebration at Butser Ancient Farm, you could have been forgiven for thinking it had been warm and sunny all year. But Winters over the summer show season starts here.

Sadly the sunny weather was interrupted by the usual annual rainfall for the 21st  Bodgers ball (held at lower Brockhampton, Herefordshire) and again at the West Country (underwater) scythe festival at Muchelney, but the heat returned late in June, if only for the Wimpole Hall, Scything and Smallholders weekend near Cambridge. Andy Coleman is leading Ded on the brushcutter on a blazing hot afternoon on the lawns in front of Wimpole. The less said about my own shambolic performance the better!

Something of a building theme emerging in these photos and closer to home things have been afoot all year at Swan Barn Farm the base for the the National Trust team in Haslemere. A new cruck framed timber building emerges next to the barn. Built almost entirely with materials from the farm itself or a within a few miles it’s the vision of Dave Elliott the head warden and his team and the first cruck is raised guided by Ben Law.

By August the charcoal burning season is at it’s peak, the logs are good and dry (we hope) and the burns go fast and well, but in the back of my mind I know that time is passing and that this is the time to be starting to try and get ahead with both the charcoal and firewood before it’s too late.

The summer season has been busy with woodfairs, shows, work in the woods and scything reaching a climax in September as the end of term party season gets into full swing – plenty of work to do as well on polelathe and shavehorse – but a definite sense of the seasons shifting, heavy dews in the mornings and a chill in the evenings.

Which brings us inexorably to October and the apple harvest. Not mine this one sadly, these Kingston Blacks are waiting to go into the mill at the New Forest Cider Farm, Burley, though I did manage to press about a third of a tonne of apples myself this year.  Autumn is my favourite season with all the colours changing and all the senses of colour, smell, feel and texture all heightened by the inevitable end coming. A bitter sweet time of year, sweet with the harvest but bitter with chill of approaching winter.

Of course it wouldn’t be a true reflection upon the year without at least one landrover making it into the list and this year it’s got to be Puff (the magic landrover) who passed his MOT in April after a fairly extensive restoration. But with plenty of blue smoke billowing from the exhaust something had to be done and in November I finally managed to complete an engine rebuild thanks to Garry and Richard with plenty of boring, honing, torquing and bedding in to get him on the road in time for winter. Now got 100 miles on the clock, so running in should only last about another year!

We’re back in December with the sun lower in the sky catching on one of the leaded glass windows at the Weald & Downland Museum. I spent a lot of time with friends at the museum this year, demonstrating, teaching (drinking the cider – thanks Julian!) and helping out – it’s something of a spiritual home for me. I’m looking forward to spending more time there in the coming year and the reflection of the sun in the glass brings me back around the cycle to looking forwards towards the coming season. I wish you all the very best for 2o12.

Read Full Post »

Finding Fungi on a Walk in the Woods

I am certainly not a fungi expert but I can’t resist taking a good look and at this time of year there are loads of fungi to choose from. So if anyone has any identifications to offer please feel free to comment.  But yes,  you are right this is just an excuse to post some colourful pictures of the Lynchmere Commons.

Here a Fly Agaric has just appeared from it’s bed of moss. At least I think it’s a Fly Agaric as they are common in the birch woods, but there is no sign of a veil on this one, so I may be leading you astray already. Just shows how difficult it is to follow the identification books.

Very few of the woodland fungi are edible and you really do need to know what you are doing to pick them as a mistake can be highly dangerous. The Fly Agaric is well known for it’s toxic and hallucinogenic properties. It’s one of the Amanita family which include our most toxic fungi so one to beware of.

With a heavy dew the cobwebs glisten in the low angle sun light which seems to give everything deeper colour at this time of year.

These fungi were nestled on the old stump of a birch tree. They look quite similar to Honey Fungus, but then again…maybe not quite.

This one is suspiciously white and clean. I have to say that I don’t know what it is, but as the most toxic fungi in the UK, the Destroying Angel, is also white and clean I tend to leave anything similar well alone even though it’s very likely an innocent pretender (it’s deadly cousin the Death Cap is also similar in appearance though with a greenish tinge to the cap).

The Birch trees are now in their winter plummage and it’s already time to be thinking about harvesting the next crop of bean poles, pea sticks and broom heads.

No idea what these are and even after a quick look through a book I am non the wiser.

Likewise these very small, almost blue ones were just by a beech tree. Even though I couldn’t identify them I did find a Bay Boletus which we took home for tea, but forgot to photograph! Very similar to the Cep or Penny Bun which are also in the Boletus family the Bay Boletus has yellow pores instead of gills which stain blue when touched

Must be about time for a gratuitous Landrover photograph. Surely that’s far too shiny to be one of my Landrovers? Yes we took Puff out for a leisurely Sunday afternoon run as a part of the running in the new engine. The aim is to treat the engine very gently until all of the moving parts have had time to wear in.

Read Full Post »