Nature Notes

Harvest, home.

Patchy holiday weather, patchy harvest weather. The two go hand in hand of course – harvest and a holiday from school – a relic from when everyone was needed in the fields. We rush out to pull the washing in as the combine roars into the field as if it were on fire.

We are enveloped in a gold-grey dust-cloud.  Straw lines the gutters all the way to Hungerford, through it and beyond, festooning hedges all the way: the shining gold days of June and July stored in each fluttering yellow ribbon. At night, we go gleaning straw from windrows lying thick as gold plaits across the stubble. The uniform straws rudely spurt accumulated dew up the insides of our bare legs. John Barleycorn has the last word.

There are grain spills on the bends of the lanes, for the last of the farmland birds. Modern farming has become ‘an ecological holocaust’ (according to John Lewis-Stempel in The Running Hare) and harvest for me is a bitter-sweet romantic time when the recent rural past is perhaps at its most tangible. On this farm, the wild bird cover, nectar strips, beetle banks, grassy headlands, widening field margins and chalk grassland break up the chemical aggregation of the arable: rich seams of life and colour, joy and hope holding the patchwork together.

The secret combe radiates the sun’s heat. The soil over chalk in this deep hidden valley is thin and dry and the plants are specialists; low growing, mat forming: even the thistles don’t bother with stems. Lie down in this fragrant, wild kitchen garden and your clothes keep the scent for days. Wild basil, calamint, cucumbery salad burnet, thyme on the raised castle mounds of anthills and wild marjoram all tremble with the life on them. Embroidered through are trefoils and bedstraws, a heather-haze of red bartsia, blue-violet self-heal, and eyebright: pansyish, purple veined, white with a splash of egg yolk. Scabious and harebells are sky-coloured. There are waves of butterflies, moths and bees with every jubilant step. The silhouettes of buzzards and kites rotate over it all with the shadowy arms of a windmill.

We count the days down now and on a hot day, bookended by rainy ones, make a mad day-trip to beloved Bude. A bank of slate-grey cloud is mistaken prematurely for the sea and a hedgerow cloud of blue sloes for a patch of summer sky. The treat of a pretty beach hut with a yellow door helps us pack a week at the beach into one day. We swim in the sea-pool until the tide overwhelms it.

Then one morning, the air is fresher with the tang of the sea in it, though we are miles from it – and the light has a softer, nostalgic quality. As my hand reaches for its practised turn on the smooth-worn handle of the kissing-gate, it is chill and damp on my palm; the gate wrapped and spun shut with spider silk that crackles when I open it.  The August-absence of birdsong slips into September and a robin sings its autumn lament. It makes such a catch in my heart and falters my steps.

Nature Notes

Love Letter to North Devon.

Fifteen years ago, shortly before I fell pregnant with the first of our three children, my parents moved from the west of West Berks to North Devon. It was a wrench – but no more so than now, when they are moving again. We fell in love with a place I ended up calling ‘home’ for the longest time.

‘Tansy’ is a remnant farm of the dairy vales, between the moors and sea, with a little wood, and stream that feeds a lake my father dug. There have been fifteen years of extended family life here, and cows, sheep, lambs, chickens and ducks, foxes, fox cubs, and wild red deer. Above the roof of the pole barn, the highest field (and its ‘tea shed’) has panoramic views to Crackington Haven, Bodmin and Dartmoor – I’ve written many ‘Nature Notes’ here over the last fifteen years as well as one and a half books.

Devon has given me a borrowed sense of belonging somewhere else in the world. I am neither native, nor tourist (neither moor nor sea) but something inbetween; an ‘inner émigré’ to this other border country. I know its flowers (now, meadowsweet, betony, montbretia and purple loosestrife) its birds (oystercatchers on the cricket pitch, siskins, ravens, have seen great, shifting smoke-clouds of winter starlings and greeted the first swallows in off the Atlantic). I know the Culm grasslands, Tarka’s rivers, heavy lichen on stunted oaks in faery forests of ferns in the coast woods or on Dartmoor; whole stoat-haunted Devon banks of navelwort, campion, grass snakes and sunning lizards. We have known snow, high summer and apocalyptic floods and people; the lovely accent, the struggling farms, agricultural shows and auctions.

But my heart breaks for Cornish Bude; its vintage beauty, colours and light, its mantle of downs and cliffs, the more secret ‘local’s beaches of Northcott Mouth and Pierce’s Cove. And the astonishing loveliness of the 1930’s tidal pool under bookshelf-cliffs. I love Crooklets beach café lit by fairy lights at Christmas, the Atlantic Diner in a storm, Spencer Thorn Bookshop and the exhilaration of the wrecking rocks and pools refilling at high tide.

The weather this last week has been patchy. We camped out in the woods, we swam. On ‘changeover day’, when the summer people are coming or going, it becomes ours again, for the last time. The sea pool is inundated with a crashing swell under an iron sky, but when we scramble, breathlessly, out, the sun warms the cliffs to amber and out to sea, beyond Barrel Rock, sets a silver bar on the horizon. The girls’ hair tangles and falls in salty ringlets and my son’s face is lit with a sandy glow. They belong.

I try to be brave. I have to turn away from the light sparking off the ocean. The salt taste on my lips has not come from the sea.

Nature Notes

Sea Pinks and Coconut Ice-Cream

We are at my parents in North Devon for half-term – perhaps for the last time. After fifteen years of living here, the house is up for sale.  We determine to make the most of the week, whatever the weather.

The South West Coastal Path is a riot of wild, ramping, vintage colour that, today, is set against a turquoise sea. There are mounds of sea pinks, pillows of wild thyme, and cushions of white sea campion; the felted yellow-and-red flowers of kidney vetch merge with dwarf gorse (with its scent of coconut ice-cream) and there are pockets of smaller blooms: the tiny pink flowers and sedum-like stems of English stonecrop, delicate milkwort and the trembling blue stars of spring squill. But best of all, the burnet rose is blooming. The low, woven nature of this rambling rose sprinkles flowers amongst everything else. This most thorniest of our native roses is by far the most romantic. The creamy white flowers are soft as the best lawn linen.

Above Longbeak headlands we search for the shadows of basking sharks, noting the new cliff edge and the old fenceposts that are now half-buried below. There are stonechats on the walls of the 18^th century Salting House.

Holidays here are all the children have ever known, no matter what the season. We’ve carried each of them along here – and now, here they all are, racing swallows along the clifftops of Efford Down’s gentle slopes.

We reach the octagonal storm tower at Compass Point.  Bude comes into view, then, perhaps for the last time. Spray is flying over the Barrel Rock, its eponymous barrel raised on a salt-rusted pole on top of the breakwater. The current pole was the propeller shaft of the Portuguese steamer wrecked around the corner in 1917. The beach is squeezed full of people at just past high-tide and the disconnected sound of a fairground reaches us. We cross the sea loch onto Summerleaze beach, and walk around the walls of our beloved Sea Pool (today, a fitting, 1930’s pistachio green) to Crooklets beach.

Amongst the crowds, a linnet comes to drink from the stream that runs through the shingle of the upper beach. We head over Maer Down and scramble down the rocks to all but empty Pearces Cove.  Over the glittering sea, Lundy Island is lucidly visible. We always meant to go. The clarity in the weather means there’ll be hell to pay tomorrow; even now, a mackerel sky is building.

From the beach, the slumped cliffs are like collapsed bookshelves of stacked and toppling volumes of geography. At intervals there are sand martin colonies and kittiwake nests and, running out by the rocks, an otter’s footprints, heading for the café.