Category: The Natural World
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Joy of an autumn walk
As we ambled along homewards through the lush vegetation, my beloved exclaimed, ‘Oh I do love these woods!’ I felt so guilty that for so many long years we’ve been stuck high on the remote and moor-ish fellside where a deciduous woodland walk has not been feasible unless you get in the car and drive…
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The fruiting body of the Fly Agaric
I stepped out this morning, getting ready for the dash back to Northumberland, and discovered a swarm of fruiting bodies of this poisonous mushroom under the trees across the way to the bottle bank. This one caught my eye, so fresh after the heavy rain yesterday, so vigorously pushed up through the topsoil. These crimson…
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Golden dawn . . .
Dawn is something that I rarely experienced in my youth, but as winter draws near it’s an increasingly frequent delight. This morning’s golden hues evoke a sense of optimism that is frankly at odds with the prevailing climate, economic and political situation here. Often, when showing visitors around the place, I point over to the…
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There’s nothing like a nice fire to warm us up . . .
Doubtless it’s primeval, going back to the ancient legends of fire and its control. Otherwise, we might venture into Greek mythology and thank Prometheus for bringing fire back to earth, for the comfort of us mortals. Certainly in Allendale, home of the annual Tar Bar’l parade and New Year’s Eve bonfire, fire has played an…
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The season’s change brings joy
Finally, as the end of September clambers into reach, it feels like autumn here high up in these North Pennines. The sun still shines with warmth, and the sky is still blue, even though the winds have started up again after the prolonged respite during the hot summer. It’s the beginning of the end for…
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The gleaming in the gloaming
My beloved tells me that ‘gloaming’ is dusk, to those of a Scottish persuasion, but the Oxford English dictionary suggests that twilight is also gloaming, and astronomical twilight is either just before dawn or just after sundown. So I hope today’s joyful title makes reasonable etymological sense, anyway. There are so many metaphors for that…
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Family stories . . .
Images can capture a lifetime of memories in s single frame. My mother loved her family’s ‘sugar bush’ and she conveyed, onto a canvas, her childhood experience of maple sap collection and its semi-magical rendering into syrup. I think she used a postcard of a late winter scene from a farm near Toronto as her…
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Blackberry season
With any luck, if the sun shines this afternoon, after we’re diligent with a bit of house cleaning chores, and locally-contributive with a visit to a Producers’ Market, we’ll take a little amble into the New Galloway edge of the Ken-Dee Marshes on a blackberry forage. We’ve been promising ourselves, for some time, that we’d…
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Tranquility
Twice we heard a splash in the still water; whether a rising fish or a diving frog we couldn’t say. We’d walked through the wood and onward, specifically to find this little loch. Fortunately, though we’d had ample directions earlier, we met, twice, a kind friend who pointed out the correct path. When we arrived…
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A little hopping joy
We used to see so many frogs hopping around the place, when I was growing up. Indeed, drying stream beds and helpless, wriggling tadpoles were a feature of note. How many survived into adulthood and how many dessicated we children never knew, or cared, for that matter. There were always plenty of croakers about. As…
Roads to Joy 