Tish Farrell Writer

Day’s End at the Rookery

With sunset there is a general homecoming behind our house: hundreds of rooks and accompanying jackdaws return to the rookery in Limekiln Wood. The corvid air fleets head in from all points, returning from the day’s foraging grounds around the town. There are the strident greeting calls – a caw-cophony if you like – of passwords given and passwords received, as the early-bird returnees acknowledge the arrival of others. Sometimes, it seems, an incoming squadron ends up in the wrong tree, and then there is an avian explosion, black silhouettes shot into the sky. Much rook-shouting and abuse ensues.

They sort themselves out, and the wood soon echoes to sounds of companionable muttering.

As the year progresses we will be treated to elaborate twilight fly-pasts and synchronised acrobatics that resemble the murmuration of starlings. And, as the weather warms and we sleep with open windows, so the night will be sound-tracked by the chuntering of rooks. I know from the sleepless small hours that they talk all night. ALL NIGHT. Sometimes I want to tell them to settle down in their nests, and SHUT UP.

The collective term for rooks, of course, is ‘a parliament’, and anyone who has listened to the proceedings of Britain’s House of Lords or Commons on the BBC will have a rough idea of how a rookery sounds. Some might say the corvids are the more intelligent. I could not possibly say.

The rookery wood thus gives us much pleasure, but there are strains of melancholy too in the resonant kaah-kaahing, and the tchaka-tchak counterpoint of jackdaws. It evokes the kind of nostalgia that is so very English, the longing for a lost and perfect England that never existed; a feeling that A E Housman conjures so well in stanza XL of A Shropshire Lad:

Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

Post inspired by Jennifer Nichole Wells’ One Word Photo Challenge: Bittersweet, a colour that is roughly the colour of the sky in the photo.

A Shropshire Lad by A E Housman – you can read the full work HERE courtesy of Gutenberg Press

To see/hear rook acrobatics click on the link below to my brief video …OF ROOK DANCING

Wordless Wednesday from Wales

Sky Energy up at the Allotment

This climate change business is most perplexing. There was a time when winter was a time to get the digging done. Not so the last few years. With the autumn comes rain and more rain. By November the ground is sodden, the soil claggy. My wellies become giant boots in seconds if I am unkind enough to the soil to walk upon it. This year the situation looks set to last until March.

Certainly we have intervals of splendid skies like this, but these periods of unrain never last long enough for the soil to dry out. All I can do on my plot is pick a few overwintered vegetables (leeks and greens), add fresh supplies of pony manure to my compost bins (a nice man who keeps horses dumps regular supplies out in the lane), and well, take photographs.

The light was just going when I took this first photo, but the burst of clouds above the bare ash trees made me think of Ailsa’s energy challenge over at Where’s My Backpack. Simply to see them filled me with energy, and made me think that the generally dreary look of allotment gardens in February had its scenic qualities too. And of course there are signs of spring. Lurking inside this nest of purple and green is an emergent winter cauliflower, in real life, little more than an inch across.

And the marigolds that grow themselves all over my plot, are coming into flower, although they proved a little hard to capture in the biting wind. Perhaps these hopeful signs mean that I will soon be out digging.

Where’s My Backpack – go here for more responses to Ailsa’s ‘energy’ photo challenge

Sarah by the Sea ~ Black & White Sunday

This photo was taken two Christmases ago on the island of Anglesey (Ynys Môn) in North Wales. The island saw the last stand of the Celtic druids, who were defeated there during the Roman conquest of Britain. This edited image, with the faint glow of light around the dark silhouette, suggests to me the lingering Celtic spirit – quiescent and contained now, but still purposeful.

Inspired by Paula’s request for quiet. For more hushed compositions in black & white please visit her blog at Lost in Translation

Related: For more of the Druid’s last battle see my earlier post Island of Old Ghosts.
Rule of Thirds

The Dhow Builders’ Yard, Zanzibar

Zanzibar’s days of building large ocean-going dhows were on their last gasp when this photo was taken in 1999. Hari, our guide, told us that the large dhow on the right had been commissioned by a Somali trader at a cost of around £7,000. The building yard is on Maruhubi Beach, not far from Stone Town, and on the edge of a mangrove forest which provides much of the construction timber. All the work is done by hand, following centuries old traditions. It is a slow and painstaking process, and dhow builders camp out on the beach while working on a big contract like this.

Rule of Thirds

Winterscapes on Wenlock Edge: Thursday’s Special

I have said elsewhere (In the old stones of Wenlock) how our cottage in Much Wenlock is built from a recycled fossil sea bed – the stony remnants of the 400 million year old Silurian Sea that once lay in the tropics off East Africa. If you want to know more of this extraordinary geological phenomenon, please follow the link.

Here in the midst of northern hemisphere weather, a warm sea in Shropshire is a hard concept to grasp, but then Shropshire was south of the equator back then. All the same, I would give much at this moment to soak myself in clear tropical waters – as long as giant Silurian water scorpions are not included.

Anyway, this is the rear view from our cottage window. At the front we look at oversized passing heavy goods vehicles. In some ways I like the ambiguity of our position, poised between the rush and rumble of commercial imperative, and the monumental immanence of Wenlock Edge – between the speeding trucks and a hard, quiet place. The Edge of course is mostly made of limestone – the compressed remains dead sea creatures. At some point the sea bed was shunted upwards to make the long escarpment that is now a striking landmark across the south east of the county.

From our house we look towards the back of the Edge. Some undulating ‘foothills’ obscure an actual view of it, but we see the big sky above the escarpment, and have a sense of weather always moving behind the horizon. The cottage, then, is not only on the Edge and of the Edge, the Edge is the reason why it is here at all.

So far our researches have been rather patchy, but we think the house was built around 1830. It was probably a squatter cottage, meaning that it was built on the local landowner’s property, and a rent or fine was paid to him by the inhabitants. The first occupants appear to have been lime burners, working at nearby limekilns. The limestone was burned to make quick lime that was used for fertilizer, for building mortar, and for lime wash for walls inside and out . It was an immensely important commodity.

It is hard to imagine, though, what the atmosphere of Much Wenlock would have been like in lime burning days. The town sits in a hollow, a frost pocket. On cold winter’s days one imagines a fog of fumes from roasted limestone shrouding the rooftops. Doubtless it would have been corrosive on the lungs too.

This last shot was taken in January from the top of Wenlock Edge. Here we have the cooling towers of Ironbridge coal-fired Power Station (its days are numbered), and the Ironbridge Gorge beyond. Limestone once played a crucial role in that locality too, used as a flux in the iron masters’ blast furnaces in Coalbrookdale. Along the River Severn just south of these steaming towers, the Industrial Revolution began with the first casting of iron using coke as a fuel. It is hard to picture I know, much like a fossil tropical ocean in Shropshire, but the technological breakthroughs made in this English backwater spurred on the world’s drive to industrialisation.

It would seem that the Silurian Sea and its petrified molluscs and sea lilies have much to answer for.

Inspired by Paula’s Thursday’s Special: cold

Thinking of Zanzibar

Zanzibar is of course famous as a spice island. The Omani Sultans once made fortunes from their clove plantations there. And while saffron, I am sure, is not one of the local commodities, Stone Town at sunset seems bathed in a saffron light. It is the kind of light that makes you wonder if you are awake or dreaming.

I have written more about the island HERE and Swahili Culture HERE

Jennifer Nichole Wells One Word Photo Challenge: Saffron

Black & White Sunday: Lining up in NYC

It was just pure chance that made me look up as we were heading into Grand Central Terminal en route for the subterranean Oyster Bar. I was thus able to snap two landmarks in one – both the Terminal’s pediment and the top of the Chrysler Building. Between the two is the glassy face of the Grand Hyatt Hotel. We were not staying there I hasten to add, but at the upcycled Beaux Arts Hotel Belleclaire on Broadway in Upper Westwide. I can recommend it. I can recommend the Oyster Bar too. On the day I took the photo it proved a haven in more ways that one. The sea food and Brooklyn beer were not only delicious, but the place was so COOL. Out on the streets there was May heat-wave going on with temperatures of over 100 degrees. We had already spent most of our few days in the city sticking to the shade in Central Park, and drinking copious glasses of iced coffee at the Loeb Boathouse cafe. Very good it was too, but there’s only so much of this you can do when you have come thousands of miles to see Manhattan. Finally we forced ourselves out into the baking streets …

By the way, this reflected framing of the shot is a feature of Windows Photo Gallery which I use for writing my blog posts. I thought I would try it out for Paula’s challenge.

Paula’s Black & White Sunday: Lines

Going All Symmetrical At Portmeirion

Surely only a wizard could have conjured this place – or so I thought, aged six, when we, the Ashford family first made pilgrimage to Portmeirion on the North Wales coast.

Story continues with more photos at Arch Wizard of Wales: Clough Williams-Ellis “Architect Errant”
Symmetry

Thursday’s Special: Seeing Red

I’m in love with the Japanese crab apple tree in my garden at Sheinton Street. There is hardly a moment in the year when it does not give pleasure. Even now in February there are still a few tiny apples on its bare branches – minimally disposed like a left over Christmas tree that someone forgot to undress. The black bird still visits, although by now the apples have been frosted and lost their bloom.

But then I also know that by the time the last one has fallen, there will be tight rosy-red buds bursting to make the next crop, bees permitting. And while I think of it, I’m grateful to fellow blogger, Mélanie at Mon Terrain de Jeux who tells me that crab apples sound much lovelier in French, and I agree – pommes sauvages.

On the other hand, my little tree is so finely wrought and well bred, and its fruit so exquisite, that I can imagine no situation when it might be tempted to wildness – unlike its large, unruly English cousins that grow in our farm hedgerows. Those I raid in October for their not so pretty fruit to make jars of crab apple jelly. (How could I possibly pick my own pommes sauvages?). The jelly is delicious on toast and croissants, and the jars glow like jewels as the hot jelly is poured into them. Mmmm.

More things to look forward to then: blossom, bees, pommes sauvages, toast…

For Paula’s Thursday’s Special challenge ‘Red’ at Lost in Translation