The Blackberry Hound

Bumbling across the fields and down the lane, basket in hand in the still warm afternoons of early October has been such a joy. I find myself mooching along with a smile on my face, utterly content.  I feel I would have been very happy to have been born a hunter-gatherer, I like gathering and I'm bizarrely accurate with a bow and arrow, which is odd because I've never had any archery lessons and can hardly throw a ball into a swimming pool I'm such a bad shot.  I digress.

The last of the blackberries have been collected.  We have made blackberry wine and bramble jelly, blackberry crumble, blackberry pie, blackberry vodka and my favourite Hedgerow Jelly. 

Blackberrying has always been one of those things that I do in a dream, not really paying attention necessarily to each and every blackberry, just happy in the hum of the hedgerow.  This year is has been different - firstly there has been competition from unexpected sources!

Daisy has always liked the odd blackberry, she used to wait for us to pick them for her and would delicately snuffle them from our proffered hands.  This year she has been too busy with her head in the hedge herself to worry about us picking them for her, although if there are a good crop but all high up then she will allow us to offer her some.  Mostly she clearly finds the service too slow!

It seems she has become something of a connoisseur, and it is this part of her blackberrying that has changed mine.  She bobs along the hedge, nose delicately sniffing at each blackberry, touching some like a little blessing and pulling others out with her teeth and eating them.  These one's were left - even though they were just the right height for her.  When I  picked them and (of course) tried one, they were bitter.  So I started wondering how she can tell.

The best pickings can be found where she stops to blackberry, and of course it's to do with what you can smell.  Ripe blackberries smell lusciously and richly of blackberry and unripe or over-ripe one's just don't!

 Druid was previously not bothered by fruit of any description but this year Daisy has been so enthusiastic that he's joined in too - just a little bit.

Thank you Blackberry Hound.

Migration

The year continues to turn - between the inhale and the exhale of the breath of life there is a moments stillness and in it today a winters-coming coldness in the air.  The birds have turned to look inwards to the ancient ancestral maps of interior stars that guide them on their migratory flights, they follow threads that are part of the warp and weft of their very being.  Most of them have gathered and gone on the long autumn flight that will take them far from here.

Having fattened their bellies and preened their feathers in readiness.

I love this time of year (I love every time of year - let's face it) and it seems I am not alone in this - almost everyone I know has proclaimed at some point in the last few weeks that this is their favourite time of year:  The soft September mornings,  half hidden and only half awake.

The seemingly endless bounty of the hedgerows,

Mushroom gathering in the fields and woodlands and the still blazing sun of short but perfect afternoons.

Chanterelles, - I've never been lucky enough to find these for myself.  These were a gift from a friend who guards the secret of their location so closely that apparently even his best friend will only be told of it upon the mushroom gatherer's death bed!

I have found lots of delicious Parasol Mushrooms and the usual Field and Horse Mushrooms.
We've even had our own figs - grown in a huge pot in the very sheltered yard behind our house.

I've come across some never-before-seen-by-my-eyes marvels in the fields just recently.  I had no idea that slugs mated in September!

Today is the Autumn Exquinox, the time of 'reckoning' they say. Time to tally the books, settle the accounts.  Time to feel the balance of the year; half way between the light and the dark, between life and death, between the tick and the tock of the planetary clock.

 Time also for our own migration, for turning inward. Time to stoke the fires, inner and outer, and to create:  Art, stories, songs, anything.  Time to count our blessings.

Dylan, Son Of The Sea

On Wednesday we went fishing.

Or rather more accurately, Fergus went fishing and I went along as the paparazzi.  Tootling about on the rocks pointing my camera at everything that would stay still long enough to be photographed and a few things that wouldn't.

I wasn't the only appreciative audience he had, there were gulls a-plenty hoping for a catch.

I love the smell of the sea, the way the air is full of salt and seaweed and magical tales of mermaids and Selkies or far away places and pirates treasure.   We felt incredibly blessed when Dylan, Son of The Sea, popped his head out of the water to see what we were up to.

In the most ancient stories of these lands - preserved in the collections of stories that have come to be known as The Mabinogion (a must-read for anyone who likes a good Myth)  - Dylan was the first of the two sons 'born at one birth' to Arianrod (and there are plenty of tales to be told about that too).  He and his brother Lleu are generally seen as being symbolic of darkness and light and all the powers that are held their-in.  It's the dark depths of the sea that I both love and fear.

Dylan was named 'Son of The Sea 'or  Son of The Wave' and no sooner did he have his name than he dived into the waters and swam like the most agile fish any man knew of.  To give a thing it's name in Celtic mythology is to give it it's power.

It is said that if a woman wants a Selkie man for her groom she must weep seven tears into he sea, and there are reasons a-plenty, it would seem, for wanting a Selkie man, for they are said to be devastatingly handsome and generous and considerate lovers.

There are stories for all over these islands about fishermen who see Selkie women dancing on the rocks and hide their seal-skin so that they are forced to remain on land and marry them.  Usually these tales end with the woman finding her skin and going back to the sea, perhaps leaving him, if he's lucky, with a child.

Here's a telling of the tale that I found on YouTube.

The Sea was very generous that day, giving us three shiny, iridescently beautiful Mackerel.

So we headed, happy, up the hill with our precious haul.

There were three hungry people to share the mackerel for supper and hearts and bellies full to the brim we all agreed that there's nothing quite as delicious as fresh caught fish and home grown vegetables eaten in the last rays of evening sunshine in the last days of a golden summer.

This was clearly a sentiment shared by the menagerie who each made valiant attempts to persuade us that due to their extreme cuteness THEY should be the one to have the scraps.

Luckily there are three of them too.

A Pocket-full of Promises

I have to start this post with huge apologies:  If you are one of the lovely people who has been coming here looking for a new post for the last two weeks... I'm so sorry, my computer broke, I had it fixed and it broke again!  This new post is part of the extravaganza of delights I had hoped to present you with between when it was mended and when it broke again but it has been truncated by the loss of access to all my photos!  Boo-hoo. So, this rather smaller affair is my offering for you on this lovely wild and windy day - hopefully I'll be back to a more regular spot by next week.


Summer has been skipping down the lane, her pockets full of promises and her green hair flying on the breeze.  Now the green is turning golden, the evening shadows are lengthening and the promises are ripening to fruit.

I ate my first blackberry of the year yesterday, it kissed my tongue with the flavours of rich earth and bountiful hedge and a good summer stored in a small potent berry; not too much rain so the flavour is intense but enough to make the berry plump and juicy.  The pretty pink flowers that portend blackberries are one of my favourite promises,

along with hazelnuts secretly ripening under strong green hazel leaves.  Each year I fondly imagine that I might harvest baskets-full of these, they are so plentiful at this time of year. But the Squirrels eat most of them before they are ripe and leave us only a handful.

We fare better with the apples and do get baskets-full of these, but ours are very late so all the first blackberries must be eaten fresh from the hedge or turned into wine or crumble or compote or.....  All the while I hold my breath for the apples, because my favorite place to put a blackberry is tucked up with an apple in Bramble Jelly. Yum.

While I wait, I walk.  I visit a secret place, past an Oak by a stream where no-one plays any more.

I cross the threshold of a blazing August day into the deep shadow of a woodland.

This is not the sort of place I might usually be drawn to - being a plantation - I prefer my woodlands native, mixed and deciduous - but deep among the trees, hidden to any who simply keep to the path and after many twists and turns in the deer trods I follow, I am in the company of The Guardian Spirits of the very ancient piece of woodland that was here before this plantation was a twinkle in the seed pods of it's Great-Grandparents fir-cones.

There are pictures of others that I would love to post here, but sadly I don't have access to them at the moment. The feeling of ancient power that emanates from these venerable remains is quite extraordinary.  From the woodland towards home I walk through a very overgrown area of rough land.  Once upon a time it was a small field in a clearing but it is no longer recognisable as 'field'. I've tried on numerous occasions to capture it's wild tangle but all you really see is a wall of green.  It's entirely possible that it's only me and the foxes on their way to their den on the edge of the plantation that pass this way, the path is getting narrower and narrower.  I'm spat out - generally covered in cleavers and bits of bramble and twig, then up the green lane (of which you have seen many photos already) and up our lane, past the harbingers of the changing seasons

to the beautiful sight of these Peacock butterflies, there were six of them in the garden this afternoon.
As you know I am a passionate fan of the wonders of the nettle plant and Peacock butterflies are in some ways another of nettle's magics.  They lay their eggs on the underside of  nettle leaves. Apparently nettles that have been cut earlier in the year are preferred, so you get the double blessing of nettle soup and beautiful butterflies if you harvest your nettles rather than attempting to win the never-ending battle for dominion over their territory.