Eye to eye with an eagle

'The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.'

Matthew ch6 v23 (King James Bible)

Getting up close - eye-to-eye close - to a bird of prey is an unnerving and thrilling experience. Even in the field, through binoculars or a telescope, that unblinking stare fires back a warning. 'I am on a short, fierce fuse' it says, 'you have been warned.' With a few exceptions raptors lead a solitary, highly territorial life. Being eyeballed by one it is easy to understand why. They are definitely not for trifling with.

Having a large bird of prey perched on my wrist sends the adrenalin up another notch. A leather gauntlet feels barely adequate to protect against talons capable of generating enough force to crush bone. I try not to stare, for fear of provoking her, but there is a world behind those eyes that is incomprehensible and irresistible. It is like looking at a Mark Rothko painting; there is a yawning primitiveness that beckons me to step through the canvas.

Golden Eagle. Her heavy brows protect her eyes against wind
and dust, giving a characteristic penetrating stare.

The vision of raptors is legendary, proverbial. 'Eagle-eyed' we say, or 'hawk-eyed'. The udjat, or Eye of Horus the falcon god of the sky and hunting, was one of the most powerful symbols of the ancient Egyptians, the all-seeing eye worn on amulets as a source of royal protection. So just how well can a bird of prey see? It is a question that is almost impossible to answer without making comparisons with our own eyesight.

It is an unwritten law of nature that almost everything is a compromise. Things evolve to be just good enough to shorten the odds of survival, no more. Resources are directed at what is important, at the expense of things that are less so. Nature is not interested in perfection, only pragmatism. Take the golden eagle for example, what can we say about her?  To start with she hunts during the daytime and from a great height. Even more than those murderous talons, eyesight is the sharpest weapon in her arsenal. The light receptors on her retinas are packed so densely that she has a resolution six to eight times greater than humans. She also perceives rapidity of movement that would leave us shrugging. A television screen appears solid enough to our slow eyes but try taking a photograph of it. In the eyes of a diurnal raptor it would flicker on and off distractingly, just as it does to the camera.

High speed killer. Aerial strikes by a Saker Falcon at 200mph
require pinpoint accuracy. The slightest error spells disaster.

So she has high resolution, high speed imaging, then where's the catch?  The receptors in her eyes don't function well in low light. Visual performance tails off sharply at dawn and dusk, forcing her to roost. The receptors also lack the pigmented oil droplets found in many other birds, so her colour perception is mediocre at best and she cannot see in the ultraviolet spectrum like many other birds (or us). Her plumage provides a clue here; birds of prey are not brightly coloured as a family. Why waste energy on what they cannot see? Colour is unimportant when zeroing in for the kill, so colour discernment is sacrificed for what really matters - needlepoint precision.

Not windows to the soul then, as the anonymous author of Matthew's gospel might have us believe, but the eyes of the eagle, falcon, hawk and harrier are chinks of light through which we can spy on nature at work. It is an unsettling world of stimuli untroubled by notions of morality or compassion or beauty or hatred. And that makes it quite beyond our ken; utterly alien, utterly compelling.

A ring of bright mushrooms

Gavin Maxwell was left unimpressed by chanterelles. In Ring of Bright Water he recounts them growing in profusion near Camusfeàrna, the fictitious name he gave to his home in the West Highlands. But he describes them as insipid and flavourless, not worth the bother of collecting, 'their beauty but skin-deep, more appropriate to the magic of moss and fern and rushing water than to the table.'

Mostly chanterelles and a few edible boletus

By his own admission Maxwell wasn't much good at identifying wild mushrooms and, unsure whether what he had collected was safe to eat, disconsolately consigned his haul to the rubbish pit. It was perhaps a wise precaution if in doubt, especially as he lived alone (otters excepted), but such a shame. If he was truly coming upon chanterelles in such quantity then they were a lucky find indeed. It is not that chanterelles are especially rare, far from it, but they are quite localised and have a tendency to grow in inaccessible locations. Last year I spent a thoroughly enjoyable day hanging upside down on a precarious river bank in Galloway trying to pluck the yolk-yellow trumpets that seemed to grow quite deliberately just out of reach.

On that day I went out with a seasoned forager who knew just where to look. Chanterelle haunts, I learned, tend to be closely guarded secrets. Contrary to Gavin Maxwell's lack of enthusiasm, many hunters prize them above all other species and for a short season in late summer / early autumn the race is on to find the golden treasure. Hotels and restaurants will pay a fair price to suppliers willing to brave the mud and the midges, so no wonder the best locations are not generously broadcast.

A few inedible Russula on the right

As our eyes grew accustomed, once we knew exactly what we were looking for, they were unmistakeable. The colour alone is enough to identify them, rich yellow-orange like they had been freshly squeezed from an artist's tube of oil paint. The wide gills run into the stem giving them their classic horn-like shape. They have a rubbery texture and smell faintly fruity. We got a good catch that day and they weren't for sale.  We lived on chanterelle omelettes and chanterelle risotto and chanterelles on toast for days and they were delicious. I can only assume Gavin Maxwell wasn't cooking them right. The tasty compounds they contain are fat and alcohol soluble, so they are no good for boiling. Frying in oil or butter or with a little white wine brings out all the goodness. And if you need a further justification for eating them, they are a valuable source of vitamins too.

Gavin Maxwell was quite an adventurer, traveling widely in the Middle East in the 1950s and trying his hand at all kinds of escapades including a spell of shark farming! But fungi he grew up to treat with suspicion. Consequently the rich supplement to his diet of tinned food that grew all around him at Camusfeàrna went 'unmolested' to use his word. They were left 'to flourish among the ferns and dappled sunlight of the birches by the burns and the hidden waterfalls, their many hues of violet and green, red and orange, nibbled at by discerning and appreciative rodents'.  Oh well,  suum cuique pulchrum est (to each his own is beautiful) I suppose.

Season of mists

'Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too -'

from To Autumn  by John Keats

English poets have always been bewitched by autumn. Shakespeare, Keats, Browning and Blake, Clare and Rossetti, dozens of others - they have all turned their pens to sonnets and odes in honour of this most poetic of seasons. They have personified it, as Keats does above: 'Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;' They have found deep melancholy in its declining days, beneficence in its harvests, gothic frisson in its festivals and rituals. And, of course, they have mined it for countless metaphors of death.

Autumn is a long season and an extravagant one. It begins in abundance, the swelling coffers of the crop. It is fat and wealthy and dripping with gold. Keats' bees are duped into thinking warm days will never cease because 'Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells.' But plenty begets excess. Excess begets wastefulness which, in its turn, begets decay. By way of this profligate sequence Nature re-stocks the pot for a repeat showing. There is eternity in rottenness, the indestructibility of elemental matter.

Autumn is ripe for poetry because of the way it assaults our senses. Keats knew it and reaped it in some of the most concrete poetic lines he ever wrote. He makes us taste the plump hazel shells 'with a sweet kernel'; we watch with him the long autumn sunsets that 'touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue'; we hear the 'wailful choir' of gnats and the bleat of full-grown lambs, and we are there with him by the cider-press, patiently watching 'the last oozings hour by hour'.  It is a rich pudding of a poem, every line as o'er-brimmed as the cells of his bees.

To Autumn is not a long poem by the standards of the romantic poets but, over a reading of its three stanzas, months have gone by. We are not told directly of the passing of time, it is more subtle than that. With each verse the temperature of the adjectives becomes colder. The industrious bees of the opening verse have, by the poem's close, given way to the gathering swallows, twittering in the skies. And there Keats breaks off, on the brink of the birds' departure. It is a master stroke on which to leave us. The laden apple trees under a 'maturing sun' have been harvested and in their place a winnowing wind stirs the chaff on the stubble fields.

I sat reading To Autumn on the waterfront in Dundee the other day. The sky was distinctly autumnal and a ragged mist snagged in the trees on the opposite shore. I know there are brambles and blackthorn bushes heavy with ripening sloes on that shore. As I read a sudden breeze brought a skittering of crisp sycamore leaves along the path, blotched yellow and black. They passed, the breeze vanished and the sun was once more warm. It was a little taste of what is to come. We are on the cusp.

Out with a bang

So that's that then. The season of Edinburgh festivals is over for another year. It ended, as it always does, with an exhilarating firework display to music on the castle rock. There can surely be few more dramatic settings for such a show, and for those not fortunate enough to have tickets to Princes Street Gardens the city centre has many fine vantage points from which to coo and gasp. This year, in keeping with the theme of the International Festival, the music was chosen for its eastern flavours; the composers, mostly Russian, drawing their inspiration from the Orient. Each year the most appreciative cooing and gasping is reserved for the waterfall, a magnesium white cascade that tumbles and bounces down the bare black rock.

For me the Firework Concert is one of those punctuation marks in the calendar by which time is notched. Whatever the weather it signals the end of summer. As the echoes of the last detonations fade, as the streets clear of spectators and the convoys of road sweepers get to work, there is no longer any denying it - autumn has been heralded in. The concert starts at nine o'clock. A month earlier and it would have been unthinkable to start so early but by now the days are shortening alarmingly. Our wobbly Earth has lurched onwards, like a homebound drunk, veering to the winter side of the street

By Monday morning the streets had returned to normal and Edinburgh's daily traffic of suited commuters and shoppers and schoolchildren went on their way. The city is never without tourists but things get decidedly quieter for a while after the fireworks. At Haymarket railway station and in the queues for the airport shuttle it suddenly seemed as if everyone was heading for the exits. And just as suddenly it again becomes possible to book a table in a restaurant and the buses run more or less to time without throngs of disorientated sightseers asking for directions. It doesn't last long. There is just time to draw breath before the first Christmas displays appear in shop windows. No sooner has the temporary seating on the Castle Esplanade - for the past month home to the Royal Military Tattoo - been removed than the skating rink and big wheel will arrive in the gardens. And so the Edinburgh year rolls on.

Invariably the tourists I meet seem genuinely wowed by my home city. They have travelled the globe to be here and Edinburgh doesn't disappoint. Despite the weather doing its level best to rain on everyone's parade, despite the eyesores of the perennially stalled tram project, and the rash of lowest-common-denominator gift shops selling every imaginable Scottish cliché, despite the litter and traffic and scaffolding and street clutter, they are left with an overwhelming impression of an elegant city. I feel very proud and privileged to sit with a coffee in the Canongate, or to stroll along the Water of Leith to Stockbridge and be able to say 'I live here'.

Edinburgh is a wealthy city. But much of its money is sterile and corporate, sealed off behind faceless legal and financial institutions. Tourism brings money too, lots of it. But more importantly the tourists bring vibrancy and colour and life. During the summer festivals the streets are buzzing with their excitement. There's a certain class of Edinburgh resident who gets very sniffy about the festivals but I am not one of them. Of course there's plenty of mediocre art among the thousands of shows on offer, some of it very hammy, some of it pretentious and excluding, but there is also a lot of fun, energy, talent and idealism to be found.

So, summer 2011 goes out with its traditional bang. It won't be long before next season's programmes start arriving through my letterbox. All those things to choose from and all on my doorstep. That's something I hope never to grow complacent or nonchalant about.

A border raid to Lindisfarne

Returning to the Whin Sill briefly, here is a photograph taken last weekend of Lindisfarne Castle, built on an isolated tooth of whinstone on Holy Island. Beblowe Crag, as this fang is known, is like nothing else on the generally low lying grassy island, accessible by a tidal causeway from the mainland. It is an instantly recognisable landmark for miles along the Northumberland coast.

The castle was first built in Tudor times, a fort to garrison English soldiers for defence against border raiders from Scotland. 'Marauding' I believe is the preferred term in this part of the country. It seems impossible for heritage bodies to mention the Scots without portraying them as marauding, rather overlooking that these were times of hostilities on both sides of a fluid border. Defending the island's haven was a headache Henry VIII had largely created for himself when he dissolved Lindisfarne Priory in 1537 during his vindictive and indiscriminate purge of the nation's monasteries, thereby bringing to an end nine hundred years of monastic life on the island.

The fort has seen some colourful occupants down the centuries, none more so than Captain Rugg. Renowned for his ebullient hospitality and monstrous bottle-nose (the two may be linked of course), the Captain composed rhyming ditties to Charles I, signing himself 'The Great Commander of the Cormorants, the Geese and Ganders of these Hallowed Lands.' For Holy Island has always been a place renowned for its wild birds, ever since the days of St Cuthbert who befriended its wildfowl.


As relations between the English and the Scots improved the castle's military importance declined although it continued to house modest numbers of troops right until the 1890s. By then in severe disrepair, it was occupied briefly by coastguards before being abandoned altogether. And this was how Edward Hudson found it while holidaying in 1901.

A year later Hudson, who was later to become editor of Country Life, had acquired it and at once hatched a plan to turn the castle into a summer house. He excitedly summoned his gifted friend, the already established architect Edwin Lutyens, and between them they contrived to convert the vaulted dormitories, corridors and batteries into an Edwardian holiday home.

The result is a virtuoso design of twisting staircases, galleries and niches, filled with decorative artefacts and furniture, some designed by Lutyens himself, and feeling as if it had been carved out of the rock rather than built upon it. Lutyens style has been described as 'Romance without Period' and it is certainly hard to pin down, combining Norman arches and herring bone brick floors in a design that looks at once modern and medieval. Later, Lutyens invited his former patron Gertrude Jekyll to design a walled garden, quite an achievement in this wind-scoured, salt-bleached landscape.

Ever since St Cuthbert's mortal remains failed to decompose Lindisfarne has been a destination of pilgrimage and on the day I chose to visit I was far from alone. However, this day the crowds had not come to see his shrine or the renowned illuminated gospels. They had come to see those who harrassed his peaceful Christian retreat. English Heritage, in whose care the remains of the Lindisfarne Priory are entrusted, were staging a re-enactment of Viking raiders from the seventh century. Vikings, it seems, have rarely been more popular and the car parks were brim full of spectators up for a spot of rape and pillage.

I arrived at lunchtime when the Vikings were taking a break from raiding to have a smoke and a Mr Whippy while catching up with their mates in Scandinavia on their mobiles phones. Call me grumpy, but historical re-enactments of this type have a tendency to arouse my latent misanthropy. I don't usually have difficulty suspending my disbelief but there always seems something so... so what? ahistorical, I suppose, about such dramas. I simply cannot forget that underneath their sackcloth and chainmail these characters are wearing wristwatches and nail varnish and M&S underwear. I acknowledge this is a failing on my part and I was clearly in the minority.

So I took my misanthropy for a walk around the island and fortunately for me these Vikings seemed content not to stray too far from the facilities. Holy Island's justly lauded beaches, sand dunes and grassy meadows were left largely uncolonised. Among the tall wind-riffled grasses and the comical cooing of eiders it was not difficult to see why this beautiful island was favoured for a monastery. The word 'Farne' derives from the Celtic for a place of retreat. I would not have been at all surprised that afternoon to have come across St Cuthbert himself, crouching among his beloved birds. You see, my imagination is quite intact.

A floral lexicon

'I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine.
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:'

from A Midsummer Night's Dream : Act 2, Scene 1   William Shakespeare

A few months ago I read Olivia Laing's first book To the River in which she describes her walk the length of the river Ouse in Sussex one scorching midsummer week in 2009. It is an enjoyable debut and one that is hard not to describe in riverine metaphors as it leisurely meanders through Laing's varied literary interests, mirroring her earthly journey. Chief among these is Virginia Woolf who drowned herself in the Ouse in 1941 and whose ghost stalks the author's footsteps over the course of the 42 miles from source to sea.

Common Knapweed

The Sussex Ouse is not one of Britain's great watercourses. Gentle and sluggish for the most part it has known moments of violence, Woolf's suicide aside, and has witnessed some turbulent history including devastating floods. The river's name is deliciously onomatopoeic, summoning images of brackish estuarine mud, and Laing speculates on its origin. Ouse is a common name for rivers in England and most likely derives from the celtic usa which simply means water. Its similarity to other river names - the Ure, Aire, Wear, Wyre, Usk, Esk, Isis, Erewash etc - suggests a common ancestor. But there are other theories, foremost among them that the name may derive from La Rivière de Lewes as the major town through which the river flows.

Lady's Bedstraw

However, I digress before I have even started. My chief reason for mentioning Olivia Laing's book is that some of its most bewitching passages recount the wild flowers she encounters as she walks. Laing is knowledgeable about floral botany and she identifies each species with enviable facility, reciting their names with a reverential slowness that falls in with the pace of her footsteps. Riverbanks are rewarding places for flower hunters, offering rich habitat and abundant variety. There are successions that change with soil and shade and season, so a walk among meadows and hedgerows is never the same twice.

In a twenty-first century, urban Britain there is something mysterious and occult about flower names. Like the rivers whose margins they populate they have arcane and ancient origins mostly lost to us. They are words only half-remembered, harking back to a time of monastic herbalists and alchemists, pregnant with lore and liturgical significance. Aconite, agrimony, asphodel... they should be in every serious Scrabble player's arsenal! Shakespeare's fairies knew them all, as quoted above, where Oberon describes in floral terms to the mischievous Puck the place where he might find his Titania sleeping, in order to teach her a lesson about love. Equally, Macbeth's hags might have tossed them into their bubbling cauldron, cooking up a dark magic.

Common Comfrey

Betony, bedstraw, burnet... discovering flowers forces us to slow down, to cease from marching on, to take notice of the smallest detail. Perhaps one day I might stumble upon Titania who there sleeps 'sometime of the night. Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight;' Apparently there are more than 140 different plants and flowers referenced in Shakespeare's plays and poems. Some literary historians have cited the wide botanical familiarity in his language as evidence that the Bard did not work alone, that he engaged specialist researchers. I prefer a simpler explanation. He grew up a country lad who wrote at a time when the names of wild flowers were still part of the vernacular, within the vocabulary of common folk. He employs flowers both literally and emblematically and he expects his audiences to be familiar with them and to understand their symbolic significance. 'There's rosemary, that's for remembrance' Ophelia says, and Elizabethan or Jacobean playgoers would at once have heard this as premonitory, for rosemary was thrown onto coffins by graveside mourners.

Devil's-Bit Scabious

Celandine, centaury, comfrey... I lack Olivia Laing's broad knowledge to always identify on the spot what I see. But with the aid of my camera and a bundle of guidebooks I can afterwards hope to put names to most of what I find. It's a pity but to some extent digital photography has supplanted the need for the field notebook and the art of meticulous observation in situ. As I look at the photographs later, from the comfort or confines of an armchair, I am back there walking the riverside path, drinking the aroma of damp earth, hearing the electric crackle of dragonflies, halting every few steps to examine yet another of nature's inexhaustible designs for seducing pollinators. These are a few of my pictures taken on recent river path walks.

Self-heal

Olivia Laing's admiration for tenacious weeds is especially palpable, describing with glee how quickly they re-colonise land laid waste by human vanity or destructiveness. In weeds we find true eternity. 'The rosebay willowherb swells up through the ruins of law courts and cathedrals, the dandelion marches across battlefields and infiltrates the gardens of mansions... these weeds have come and will come again, time immemorial, time without end. It is as well to remember this, for humans believe against all evidence in stasis...' This is wonderful, persuasive writing and I hope to be able to tell her so, for tomorrow I will meet Olivia Laing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Above all I want tell her how much I enjoyed meandering with her along the banks of her chosen river and to thank her for helping me to slow down and expand my floral lexicon.

Walking the Whin Sill

We learned about The Whin Sill in school geography lessons, when we were coming to terms with the mind-boggling notion of fluid rock. Back then it bore the epithet 'Great' and for us Londoners it was a reinforcement of everything we were taught to believe about the north of England; a gritty, faraway wildnerness that spawned gritty, uncompromising peoples. These days I travel south to get to that not-so-faraway country. The wilderness has become familiar, although no less awe-inspiring. And the people? Well I guess they are the melting pot of humanity I have come to expect wherever I go, uncompromising only in their refusal to be stereotyped.

Irresistible force meets immovable object. The Tees finds a
weak point in the Sill at Cauldron Snout

Wherever it breaks the surface The Whin Sill makes for exciting scenery. My geography teacher was accurate in introducing us to it as one of the dominant and defining features of the landscape of northern England. From the Farne Islands in the east to the sudden Pennine escarpment in the west, it crops up in many of the region's most celebrated natural wonders. The river Tees hurtles over its ledges in a series of thunderous cataracts at High Force, Low Force and Cauldron Snout. It forms vertical, castellated cliffs at Holwick Scar and Falcon Clints and provides the setting for a geography master's dream, the near perfect glaciated valley of High Cup Nick. It delighted the Romans too; they built their famous wall along its ramparts at Hotbanks and Cuddy's Crags.

Made of a tough, dark igneous rock called dolerite, The Whin Sill was intruded into the horizontal strata of the surrounding bedrock some 295 million years ago, during a period of tectonic stretching. Wherever there was a gap the 1000 degree magma poured in like hot wax, bubbling up through a vent from unimaginable depths. Because it was not laid down on the surface in sediments but forced entry later, the Sill is not uniform, as generations of quarrymen and drillers have discovered. In some places it is hardly there at all, in others it may extend to a thickness of sixty or seventy metres.

Textbook dream. The Whin Sill forms a perfect band around
the glaciated High Cup Nick

It was quarrymen, in fact, who in the nineteenth century gave the Whin Sill its name. Whinstone is a local term for the rock which makes first rate road stone but which is generally thought too hard to fashion into blocks for house building. They called it a sill because it lies horizontally. It was therefore the original sill, before the term was coined for more general use by geologists. The typical columnar forms of the whinstone crags are a consequence of the magma cooling and fracturing along the vertical plane. Whinstone quarries are very much in evidence in this part of the country although many of them, like the mineral mines, are now thoroughly worked out. It is stll referred to as the 'Great' Whin Sill in some places, to distinguish it from the lesser 'Little Whin Sill' to be found outcropping in parts of Weardale.

The Whin Sill exposed: fracture columns of dolerite at
Holwick Scar, Teesdale

It's hard to be blind to the geology in this part of the land and, with an accustomed eye, it is possible to discern some remarkable shifts in the curves of the landscape, the pH of the soil and the flora over the length of a leisurely walk. One could hardly expect an event as cataclysmic as that creating the Whin Sill to leave the surrounding country rock unaffected. Above Cauldron Snout, superheating of the overlying limestone has altered its crystalline structure to produce an alkaline granular rock known rather wonderfully as 'sugar limestone'. I don't recall learning about that in Surrey school geography classes. Perhaps it didn't quite resonate with the craggy northern image my teachers were so keen to depict. Anyway, sugar limestone is home to some uncommon alpine plants like the beautiful blue Spring Gentian. Sadly there were none to be found on my last visit to the Cow Green Reservoir, which sounds like the perfect reason for going back.

What's your poison?

'Who are you?' said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, 'I - I hardly know, Sir, just at present - at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'
'What do you mean by that?' said the Caterpillar, sternly. 'Explain yourself!'

If we were to choose one mushroom to stand for all mushrooms would it not surely be this? The Fly Agaric. The archetype 'toadstool' with its blood red cap flecked with white and its snowy gills has gone beyond being a mere living organism. It is a totem, a potent emblem branded into our consciousness from infancy through countless tales of folklore and fairies. From the brothers Grimm to Angela Carter, wherever there are wolves and woodcutters and wicked stepmothers it's a fair bet the Fly Agaric will be painted somewhere into the backcloth.

This mushroom - arguably more than any other living thing except perhaps the wolf - has come to symbolise our deeply held fears and suspicions about the malevolence of the forest. Red, as Snow White should have known before accepting the proffered apple, signifies danger. The bloody cap of the Fly Agaric, which seems to glow with its own light even in the forest penumbra, positively shrieks 'poison' at us. The skull-and-crossbones warning symbols in nearly all modern fungi guidebooks attest to its toxicity. But it hasn't always been that way.

There's no doubting that the Fly Agaric, Amanita muscaria, is cousin to some very dangerous mushrooms indeed. The large genus includes some notorious serial killers; the unambiguously named Death Cap, Amanita phalloides, and the beautiful ghostly white, and altogether more poetically named Destroying Angel, Amanita virosa. Between them these species account for the great majority of mushroom fatalities in Europe. The aforementioned guidebooks like to dwell on the gruesome symptoms, the delayed onset of which means their cocktail of toxins has already set about turning vital organs to soup before we know we need help.

By comparison, the Fly Agaric rarely kills us, although it may make us very ill especially if eaten raw. The principal active ingredient is muscimol, a simple little molecule but then so is ethanol (ethyl alcohol). Where the latter makes us behave like idiots, muscimol enables us to fly, to shape shift and, perhaps most intriguing of all, to see God. Not a drug for me, I should stress, but for those with more courage and less prejudicial cultural baggage than me, who are prepared to put up with the sweats and palpitations, it is an enticing way to meet our maker. Its use in shamanic rites in Siberia and Lapland has long been documented. It is hard to believe its psychoactive properties haven't been ritually exploited more widely.

When Alice encounters the hookah-smoking caterpillar who befuddles her with existential questioning, it is perched on a mushroom. John Tenniel's illustration isn't obviously a Fly Agaric but Lewis Carroll's text makes it plain he has an hallucinogenic fungus in mind. As a parting shot the disdainful caterpillar (the perfect shape shifter of course) advises Alice that eating one side of the mushroom will make her grow larger, the other side smaller. Dimensional mind-bending is apparently a commonly recorded experience of those who have indulged.

Fly Agarics are widespread in temperate mixed woodland across the northerm hemisphere. In the right conditions they can be locally common, as I encountered walking in Hamsterley Forest, County Durham, last week. There had been days of rain and mushrooms of all shapes and sizes had truly inherited the earth. The fruiting bodies of the Fly Agaric begin life above ground as tight buds enclosed in a white veil. When the veil ruptures fragments remain on the cap giving its typical warty appearance, but they may wash off in heavy rain. As the cap opens the gills separate from the stem leaving a white ring, or annulus, but again this is not always present.  Old specimens become flat and paler in colour, often full of holes where they have been eaten by insects, molluscs and even small rodents.


The toxic effects of this beautiful mushroom are potent and unpredictable and it is surely right that we teach our children to admire them without touching. It is a pity though that our caution fosters a more general, less focused, fear and ignorance about what is sprouting on the forest floor. Growing within a few feet of these Agarics I found some delicious ceps, Boletus edulis, left unharvested by the side of a well walked path. It is a peculiarly British prejudice I am learning to overcome with the help and knowledge of my continental friends who are avid mushroom hunters. Lewis Carroll's Alice, also a peculiarly British creation, seems to have had no such hang-ups, and lived to have many another adventure.

Them dry bones

'Time in the sea eats its tail, thrives, casts these
Indigestibles, the spars of purposes
That failed far from the surface.'

from Relic Ted Hughes

'Hydrogen peroxide?' 'Yes, that's right.' The shop assistant shook her head a little nervously. 'I'll ask the manager.' The manager eyed me up and down before confirming what I already suspected. 'We are not allowed to sell it any more.' Afterwards I thought how glad I was that she hadn't asked me why I wanted it. I would only have dug myself in deeper. 'Well, you see, I have these bones...'  I discovered later that it is quite easy to buy hydrogen peroxide on the internet (but then what isn't?). It seems rather perverse that something deemed too dangerous to stock in a chemist is safe enough to send through the post. In fact the chemist did stock plenty of hair products containing peroxide but I only wanted to whiten my bones, not condition them or give them a shiny bounce.

When I say my bones I don't actually mean my own, which I aim to keep safely tucked away on the inside for now. I mean the animal bones I have found on my travels and can't stop myself from picking up and bringing home. A few weeks ago I found a seal skull on the Fife coast near St Andrews. It lacks a jaw bone but is otherwise almost complete, even keeping some of its upper teeth. It is astonishing, ribbed and vaulted like a cathedral or a crypt, sculpted with precision for its purpose. I have washed all the sand out of it and it now sits in the bathroom, waiting to be treated. Hydrogen peroxide sterilises and whitens bone without reacting with and softening it as domestic bleach does.

For me, bones are among the most irresistible objets trouvés, rivalling shells in the intricacy of their design. They are things of beauty and curiosity and, cleaned up and brought into the setting of a modern home, they make striking ornaments and talking points. Reactions to my little collection of skulls and antlers vary, as you might expect. Some visitors find them ghoulish, others faintly unhygienic, overlooking the fact that they are far more sterile than houseplants or pets or ourselves! But plenty of folk seem to share my enthusiasm and are a little covetous. Some admit to having collections of their own. 

Gathering bones is as old as the hills. Of course many of their practical uses have been superseded and their decorative uses largely outmoded if not thoroughly outlawed. But bones retain powerful symbolic significances, much exploited and trivialised by popular culture. Their intricate architecture aside, what mostly entices me to pick them up is that strange capacity they have to remind me simultaneously of our transience and our permanance. In Ted Hughes' poem Relic, on the everlasting cycle of consuming and being consumed, the 'indigestibles' - the claws and carapaces and vertebrae that the sea disgorges - 'continue the beginning'.

It is an enviably succinct phrase. And that's what we all do, as we go through our lives, isn't it? We continue the beginning. Perhaps one day far from now, when I have quite done with my own inside bones, some stroller will find one by chance and admire it enough to take home. I find that very comforting.

The whole truth

'Facilius per partes in cognitionem totius adducimur'
Seneca the Younger (4BC to AD65) from Epistulae morales

I remember my early science classes at school. I don't think at that age we had split them into their separate disciplines. Sometimes, when the season was right, we would collect wild flowers from the school grounds and take them inside and dismantle them to learn about their constituent parts. Buttercups were a favourite; they were cheerful and simple and in plentiful supply. Looking back, I don't recall any qualms about us picking them, no cautionary lessons about sparing their less common brothers and sisters. There were words that hadn't been invented in those days, like 'ecosystem' and 'biodiversity'. Eden was there to be reaped, and raped.

Anyway, with nimble fingers and tweezers we pulled apart our chosen flower, laying out the fragments on a blank page. A tiny dab of glue was a precaution against sudden sneezes and boisterous classmates. Once we had our design just the way we wanted, a yellow and green five-pointed star, we would annotate it in pencil. Stipe and stigma, stamens and sepals, the alliterative words rang at once clinical and musical, equally at home in the poem and the operating theatre. When we were done the whole thing was covered in a square of transparent 'sticky-back plastic' (a phrase forever linked in my mind with Valerie Singleton, John Noakes et al). And there they were, our dissected flowers preserved for always, or at least until we grew tired of our no-longer-new exercise books and lost them.

It was a harmless enough lesson I suppose, but even at a young age I remember a certain disquiet about it. There was something a little unseemly about the end result, something not entirely edifying about dismantling a private thing of beauty and splaying it in this way. I must be careful here; with my adult sensibilities I can add connotations of sexual violation to what we were doing of which I am sure to have been innocent at the time. So what was it exactly, this undefined uneasiness? Disappointment, I think, and sadness. It is like the feeling I get in provincial museums and private collections looking at trays of displayed moths and butterflies. Musty and mouldering, they signify age suspended, a chimera of everlasting beauty. Drop the tray and these little pinned-out Dorian Grays will disintegrate into dust.

Our exercise, intended to reveal, had merely exposed. The flat page showed us what but not why. We learned nothing of how our specimens aligned themselves to the rays of the sun, or how they opened to the insect vectors of their choice, why they grew abundantly here but not there, why they flowered in June but not April, why they were golden yellow and not blue or white. Our neat two-dimensional creations had anatomy but lacked vitality; stems and stamens yes, but no soul.

The quotation above, written by Seneca in a letter at the end of his long life, translates as 'We are more easily led part by part to an understanding of the whole.' This linear and very Latin approach to learning has been enshrined in our education system ever since. We break things down, take them one step at a time, allow time for assimilation before moving on. But it is a method not without fault. A compartmentalised approach to learning can easily accentuate the differences between things rather than the commonalities. It spills over into other aspects of our society, leading to linear cause-and-effect responses to probelm solving. Our piecemeal approaches to clinical medicine and law-making are examples, they are rarely holistic. It seems we can never entirely put Humpty together again.

My disappointment with my buttercup was, I suppose, a first lesson in Gestalt; the whole is not merely the sum of its parts, an aphorism attributed with some dispute to Aristotle's Metaphysica. It has become fashionable to disparage the grand old philosopher in our iconoclastic age but his explorations of the origin and essence of things, of primal existence, have illumined our view of ourselves in a way that is unparalleled in Western thought.

Later I went on to study natural sciences at college, at times conducting laboratory exercises far more brutal and pointless than dismembering buttercups. And often I was left with that same elusive unease that we were missing something. We found out what things were made of but not what made them the way they are.

I have some of my school exercise books still, those jottings of another me. None contains a flower preserved under plastic I'm pleased to say. These days I prefer to wade knee-high through buttercup fields, relishing how radiant they are in their wholeness.

The Balmerino chestnut

Like the first monks I came to Balmerino in Fife on foot. Unlike them I had walked only a few miles along the coast, carrying nothing but a packed lunch and a camera. They came across open country all the way from Melrose, bringing the religious trappings they needed to found a new Cistercian monastery. No doubt they had beasts and covered carts and plenty of help from the lay community. And they had their unswerving faith in those early days. Nevertheless, in 1227 it would have been quite a trek. But then, unlike me, they came at the behest of a queen.

The story goes that Ermengarde de Beaumont, widowed queen of William the Lion and the Abbey's founding patron, planted a Spanish chestnut tree on the site to mark the occasion. It is tempting to believe the story that the tree growing in the grounds today is Ermengarde's gift to her new monastic community. If true, that would make it some eight hundred years old. Sweet chestnuts are certainly confirmed as living to that age in other places. Some Corsican specimens are said to have lived for a milennium. Sadly the tired old giant at Balmerino is likely to be only half that age. Ironically, that would have seen it planted around the time of the Abbey's demise during the Dissolution.

Supported by props, the scars of past amputations patched over with mortar, the Balmerino chestnut could almost be a metaphor for the ruined Abbey itself. The little that remains of this always small, never wealthy, daughter house of Melrose is presently off limits, deemed unsafe by its keepers, Historic Scotland, for clambering visitors. The hope one day is that sufficient funds will be raised to stabilise the masonry that survives and allow full access. Meanwhile, the Balmerino chestnut lives on, instilling a sense of secular awe in latter day pilgrims like me.

A Sky worth subscribing to

The much heralded 'digital switchover' has taken place in our part of the world. Our trusty old terrestrial analogue television signals are no more. I suppose it will be a little piece of history by the time the switchover programme completes in 2012; another milestone in the digital communications revolution. Despite all the advance publicity and my desk-sharing with a colleague working on a project to support those less able to manage the change, I still managed to forget about it when the time came. I had a grumpy five minutes on returning from holiday to discover nothing was where I had left it on my television.

Now I am thoroughly re-tuned and unsurprised to discover that in spite of having the best part of a hundred channels to select from, I still have difficulty finding much I can be fussed to watch. Lucky, then, that there is no shortage of alternatives to the (not so) little black rectangle in the corner of the room. Top of my list just now has to be weather watching; probably not what News Corp and the other stakeholders in BSkyB had in mind when trying to entice me to subscribe to Sky, but a whole lot more entertaining.

Spot the glider!

Although it may be deserving of many epithets, nobody could accuse this summer's Scottish weather of being dull. After the fierce, tree-culling gales of May, in Edinburgh this last week we experienced violent thunderstorms and flash floods accompanied by strange mammatus clouds. These clouds, so named because they have the appearance of breast-like mounds projecting below the main cloud base, are quite rare in Britain. They will be more familiar to my readers in the US where their appearance is often an early warning sign of tornadoes. They signify unusually turbulent currents within the thunderheads above, and steep temperature gradients

Storm moving across Fife

On a calmer note, our prolonged daylight hours after sundown have this week been showing an even rarer feature, one of the best displays of noctilucent clouds for many years. Noctilucent clouds are made of tiny ice crystals at great altitude, far exceeding that of any other clouds. On summer nights, when the Earth's surface is in shadow but the sun sinks not far below the horizon, high layers of the atmosphere (the mesosphere) are still illuminated in the northern sky giving the clouds, where present, a ghostly, diaphanous glow.

Some of these effects have been quite localised. They require being in the right place at the right time and with a camera to hand. I haven't managed either of these particularly well and sadly have no pictures of these phenomena of my own. However, there is a wonderful shot of the noctilucent clouds over Portobello beach on the website Talk Porty. I was out of town when the Edinburgh storms came although a week earlier I did witness something similar in Dundee; no mammatus clouds but midnight skies in the middle of the afternoon and the city bombarded with hailstones the size of hazelnuts. This picture of RRS Discovery was taken on my mobile phone shortly after the storm passed, about 4pm on a midsummer day!

Unstable airflows have been moving across northern Britain for months now. They may not make for ideal summer weather but the visual effects have been dramatic. As our great painters of clouds, John Constable and JMW Turner, knew well, there isn't a single colour on the palette that can't be found in the sky in the right conditions. It makes for great viewing day and night. It is a Sky worth subscribing to, except of course we don't need to.

Poppies in July

'You flicker. I cannot touch you.
I put my hand among the flames. Nothing burns.
And it exhausts me to watch you
Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.'

Sylvia Plath wrote two mature poems on the theme of poppies, both dating from 1962 and bearing in their title the month of their composition. Both appeared in the posthumously published Ariel although it is not certain that would have been her intention, had she lived to assemble the final manuscript herself. But they surely belong together, disconcerting twins born a few months apart but progeny of the same stock.

Like most of her late poems Poppies in July (quoted above) and Poppies in October are written in free verse. The language is sparse and urgent, pruned of the superfluous words that filled and sometimes flawed her earlier style. They share an imagery too, of skirts, mouths, blood and noxious vapours; the flowers represent splashes of vibrant, pumping life addressed by a protagonist who is pale and listless and passive by comparison.

Poppies are startling flowers, often gaudily sumptuous in a landscape of muted shades. Seeing them scattered red and black among fields of summer wheat and barley it is easy to understand why they were favourites of the impressionist and pointillist painters. The flowers in Claude Monet's Poppies, Near Argenteuil (1873) almost seem to flicker in the way Plath describes them.

Their association with euphoria and painlessness ('your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule, Dulling and stilling.') and the sinister payback of dependency, decline and death were not lost on Plath either. 'There are fumes that I cannot reach. Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?' she asks in July, while the allusion to carbon monoxide in October is, of course, agonisingly prescient.

Sylvia Plath had a genius for taking everyday things, especially things to which we more usually ascribe benign romantic associations  - candles, mirrors, the moon, flowers and so on - and injecting them with new significances, subverting them into things charged and edgy and dangerous. I can gasp at poppies, but I can never quite look at them without recalling these poems, Sylvia Plath's 'little hell flames.'

An incantation of moons

THE Scottish night sky promises rather lean pickings for planet watchers in the month ahead. Of our Earth's five solar system companions visible to the naked eye only one, Jupiter, offers much to look at during July and even then only for early birds (or very late owls). Venus will soon move behind the sun. Mercury - always a challenge at the best of times - might be glimpsed in the post sunset afterglow. Mars and Saturn are low in the pre-dawn sky but faint enough to need binoculars, Mars getting slowly brighter as Saturn fades.

Part of the reason for the poor show ought to be obvious, there isn't much night sky at the moment! Another is the angle of the ecliptic. The solar system is a remarkably flat disc. Most planets orbit the sun in the same plane with not much more than a few degrees of variation. On summer nights the sun dips only shallowly below the northern horizon. Correspondingly, the planets are low too. Light from objects at low elevations reaches us through more atmosphere. The atmosphere with all its movement and pollutants disturbs the light rays, resulting in fainter, fuzzier images.

But Jupiter is fun to watch, often by far the brightest thing in the sky (our moon excepted of course). Even viewed through binoculars its disc grows larger, where stars remain the same size. I use a birdwatching telescope and on good nights I can clearly see Jupiter's famous coloured bands and the four Galilean moons, so called after their first observer Galileo Galilei four hundred and one years ago. The moons have an ecliptic of their own and can often be seen strung out in a line to one side of the planet.

The Galilean moons! As a child I used to chant their mysterious names over and over, as if through my incantation I might summon the mythological lovers of Jupiter (or Zeus) in the flesh. Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto... Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Conquests of Jupiter might be a better collective description as all, three girls and a boy, were pursued, deceived and taken by force. Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto...  In fact it wasn't Galileo who named them but a rival, Simon Marius, a German astronomer. His claim to their discovery has been largely forgotten but his apt names have persisted.

An incantation of Jovian moons

Attempts to get my camera and telescope to speak to each other have so far yielded disappointing results so this picture isn't mine, but it gives a good idea of what you should expect to see. Galileo was a generous, or perhaps just prudent, man. He dedicated his discovery to his patron and former maths pupil Cosimo de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.  He was also genius, devising a means of telling the time and longitude from nightly observing the relative positions of  'Cosimo's stars'. And he was fortunate to live in a part of the world and an age where clearer skies were guaranteed!

As July goes on Jupiter will rise earlier, so by the end of the month it will be up by midnight. I'll be away in my tent again by then, free of Edinburgh's light pollution. Telescope at the ready I will start up my incantation. Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto... Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Join me?

Return of the giant hogweed

'Turn and run! Nothing can stop them. Around every river and canal their power is growing.' Funny, but it has never occurred to me before now that Peter Gabriel's apocalyptic, if rather fanciful, lyrics to The Return of the Giant Hogweed (Nursery Cryme 1971) are about the true story of the introduction of the plant to the Botanic Gardens at Kew during the great age of Victorian acquisitiveness, and its inevitable consequences. In Gabriel's re-telling the giant hogweeds take on the guise of John Wyndham's triffids, bent on vengeful human annihilation.

Giant hogweed by the river Esk

Last week I was writing about our harmless native hogweed. Today, walking the river Esk in East Lothian, I came across an immense infestation of giant hogweed, Heracleum mantegazzianum, an altogether more frightening encounter. There were many specimens of easily twice my height and the large area, completely overrun by the plant, was sealed off behind barbed wire. And for good reason... giant hogweed is best given a wide berth.

The plant produces a sap which reacts with ultraviolet light. Even mild contact such as brushing against the hairy stems can leave the skin hyper-sensitive to sunlight, resulting in painful and persistent blistering that may recur for years. The giant stems are hollow, making them attractive for children's games as swords, blowpipes or telescopes, with potentially horrible consequences. There are cases of hospitalisation every year.

As Peter Gabriel laments, giant hogweed, which originates from the Russian Caucasus, is virtually indestructible, requiring a co-ordinated effort by landowners, local authorities and environment agencies over a many years. According to East Lothian Council's website, council officers are engaged in a long-term campaign of eradication, backed by legislation making it an offence to plant giant hogweed or to allow it to grow unchecked on private land.

Sandra has written recently about the tenacity of weeds and the futility of our attempts to submit them to our will. Readers of my earlier posts will know that I, too, am an admirer of the weed. I am left with a sense of deep ambivalence about plants like the giant hogweed and Himalayan balsam and others. After all, we reap what we sow. Brought to Britain as ornamental curiosities, they are one legacy of the colonial hubris of our ancestors. In spite of all our best (and costly) efforts at eradication they are almost certainly here to stay. Containment through responsible environmental management is probably the best we can hope for.

Let me stress I have absolutely no wish to see children blinded or disfigured through contact with this plant, any more than I would want to see people bitten by adders, poisoned by mushrooms or injured by any other agent of our natural world. In that sense we are fortunate in Britain that there is not much out there to do us serious harm. But in our enlightened twenty-first century do we still entertain the eradication of species on the grounds that they are potentially harmful to us, our pets or our livestock? What is missing from East Lothian Council's website is surely what should be the second prong of its campaign, education. There are no photographs or drawings by which to identify the plant, no advice for parents or gardeners on avoiding contact or what to do if experiencing symptoms. We must kill it, that is all.

The giant hogweed is undoubtedly impressive although not especially attractive. It is certainly a plant to be treated with extreme caution. On balance it would probably have been better if Victorian gentlemen collectors had not brought it here. But they did and we must learn to live with it as we must the grey squirrel, the sycamore, the mink, the rhododendron, the New Zealand flatworm and the myriad other newcomers to our islands. We should remember that unlike John Wyndham's sci-fi triffid, the giant hogweed isn't an invader, we introduced it.