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towering

Posted jane -->on 7th Sep 2021

the end of August doesn’t include a bank holiday in Scotland, as the schools have been back for a couple of weeks. there’s no official end of summer feeling, though we had some chilly nights and I started to obsess about frosts and plants.

I have finally removed the protective fence around the bigger new bed, and mulched it with some lawn cuttings. the only prairie plants that are flowering freely are the little cone flowers

the bigger ones seem quite stuck, some with buds that aren’t opening, or in the case of the rudbeckias, unable to open fully.

happily, the love in the mists are doing well.

I have one rudbeckia flower fully out ….

along the river the himalayan balsam is flowering in its punk pink, freckled and in all shades from pale to fucshia.

it sparked a few days of working over a big mainly blue and peach canvas I decided needed more doing to it.

I did this to it on my ipad. looking at it again I like the mark-making –

better than what I actually did, above. a painter I like on instagram, Karl Bielik, summed up his work in one sentence as “I make visceral loose process driven oil paintings full of doubt and chance.” I guess that’s what I try to do, in acrylic, and the doubt always gets me. not loose enough, Jane!

experimenting with impasto and gel

this was under some of that jabby pink …maybe I shouldn’t have covered it up.

river bank drawing on the spot …

a resolution for more pink and drippy stuff … the blue section caught the drips from another painting, the last of the three Glen Feshies, and the right hand was the spare bit.

I had to wait for another roll of canvas to arrive, then these cut out and painted,

I zig-zag stitched them together with my old semi-industrial Bernina,

since I  was sewing these pink trousers and had the thread in the machine

not entirely satisfactory as the lower piece got stretched a bit. an interesting experiment. putting this arrangement on a stretcher might even it out enough … sometimes I probably overthink my painting processes!

more pink – but turning to white fluff now as the seed pods split open

a grey morning – this summer most mornings have been grey, the low cloud burning off later if we are lucky –

while I was taking this photo I disturbed the resident sea eagle which was perched on one of the posts

I wasn’t quick enough to catch it with the phone camera, but it flew low across the estuary mouth, its huge wingspan and white wedge on the tail making it easy to identify

and landed on one of the banks exposed by the low tide. you can see a dark object there. it was being mobbed by the seagulls which appeared tiny. it had something to eat out there. it might have been feeding from the seal carcass which is slowly rotting into the sand at the top of the beach. another day in conversation on the beach I found that there are two pairs here, one nesting in the forest at the Eden end, the way I walk, and one further up the Tay. introduced, and doing well.

a sure sign of September – a big but lonely clump of sea aster in flower. this is all over the saltmarsh edges at Morston and Cley to Salthouse, but I haven’t seen it here before.

my big news is that I decided I’d had enough of the 2017 Leaf with its very restricted range, and having read that the new Renault Zoe has a better battery range than some bigger cars – 240 miles – I found a forecourt car with 10 miles on the clock for £5000 less than the new price minus the government grant. of course I lost on selling the Nissan, but it’s such a relief to know that I can drive to Glasgow and back, or Edinburgh, or even the Cairngorms. it’s more efficient than the Leaf. I haven’t been very far in it yet, though I have a trip to Glasgow planned in the next couple of weeks to look at an exhibition of wonderfully colourful paintings by Alison McWhirter

meanwhile, this is surely the last stage in this 50 x 50 cm painting’s evolution. braided river/closing over brooding stones. another reference to Glen Feshie.

twittering swallows at Craigsanquhar farm on Saturday’s rather damp drizzly walk from Dairsie. they are getting ready to fly to South Africa.

I made a cake for a walk this weekend, I had planned it during the week, an extension of the Eden river walk, for Lucy and my Sunday walk. Poor Em being too old and wobbly for much of a walk, Scott is sacrificed on the altar of daughterly love, and he’s the one that’s missing out.

so from the house we walked down to the little stone bridge that crosses the river, and followed the meandering Eden as far as you can. before Springfield the way is blocked by a big old stone mill that comes right to the edge, and is owned by a concrete block company. but the road is quiet  and has a decent footpath, as so many places do in Fife

we passed a flower selling stall from a grower in the field, and made a note.

if we had been able to approach via the river bank there would have been a photo of this beautiful high-arched stone bridge, but as it was, here one is looking down from it.

then on and across the A91, but the road I had chosen is not quiet at all, and narrow, so we went into the stubble fields and up through a wood, almost blocked with bracken, then along the side of the hill in more stubble

with great views

through to Scotstarvit, passing by the farm yard, as the track that’s marked on the OS map is now blocked with trees and scrub, to the tower house

you can just see this from the other side of the river

built in the 15thC and modified early in the 17th

a good place to sit below and have coffee and plum cake

then back through the Hill of Tarvit estate, up to Whitehill, over Ceres Moor and back to my front door. 8.3 miles altogether with some steep uphill in that wood, and the most beautiful late summer day, quite warm. I wouldn’t want to do that every weekend, but now and again … our next expedition may be Norman Law, shorter but much steeper. it’s the most easterly of the Ochills and more or less north of Cupar, with wonderful views, so we want a clear, fresh day.

and the last painting of this post, possibly (that doubt again) resolved yesterday with thoughts of the golden stubbles and the tower, but it started in my usual way with some fluid lines and a bit of colour, then it became a pour painting

on Saturday i did some pretty intense scrawly stuff on it

but by Monday was doubting that, and it did seem very dark, so I got out all my yellows and golds and a bit of white and lots of impasto gel, and covered a lot of this up.

with more of this

and worked back through it with the palette knife point.

it may be finished,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O Caledonia, stern and wild

Posted jane -->on 14th Aug 2021

as Walter Scott put it. I was privileged to get to some of it yesterday – my daughter took me to Glen Feshie, near Aviemore, where there has been a project in place for 20 years to enlarge the relict Caledonian forest there, by private landowners who are rewilding a shooting estate, bringing back the natural habitat by excluding sheep and restricting the numbers of red deer.

the ancient Caledonian forest consisted of quite open woodland, of native trees, principally Scots pine, plus rowan, birch, aspen and juniper, which formed the westernmost outpost of the boreal forest in Europe. It is estimated to have once covered 1.5 million hectares as a vast primeval wilderness. millennia of deforestation by humans has reduced it to a few spots in the highlands, overgrazing by sheep and red deer has prevented regrowth, and the remaining pine trees, (often four hundred years old and more, called granny pines) have been marooned amongst heather and grass. Luckily this habitat can spring back to life on its own, given the right conditions.

We drove from Fife up the A9, diverted into Dunkeld for a swift bakery raid, and parked as far up Glen Feshie as you can get, Auchlean car park, at the top of this excerpt from the OS explorer map.

Feshie is wide and open, flat bottomed with paths that wind along through heather, probably bog, we saw some cotton grass patches –

with this lovely pool next to the path

three kinds of heather, blaeberry,

the sharp red crowberry, or as it is in Ikea, lingon berry, mosses, and iconic wildflowers

like this devil’s bit scabious, noticeably smaller and a darker purple/blue than field scabious.

as soon as you go through the gate that keeps the neighbour’s sheep out, there is a ford to cross. just deep enough to wet barefoot walking shoes if you missed a stone.

it was about midday so we retired to this larch grove, out of the quite strong wind, to eat the wonderful baked goods from Dunkeld, and wash them down with coffee. there was a spooky hooting sound you could persuade yourself was some sort of owlish bird, but I think it must have been tree rubbing against tree in the wind.

here is one of them, a danish pastry (but so crisp!) with gooseberries, almonds, and elderflower syrup. eaten while sitting on a tuffet of rather damp moss.

the next adventure was a hair-raising part where the old path had been swept away at least four years ago

and the new path wanders right to the edge of this unsupported cliff of loose stone and earth

having scrambled down that, there is another ford to cross, a bit more daunting than the first, over or through, the Allt Garbhalach. (in the Guardian Country Diary for 28th of July this year there is a description of following this stream up to a hidden high valley, Coire Garbhalach)

we managed the balancing act, me with much waving of arms, and Bims just splashed through, wetting Lucy’s barefoot shoes quite well. then a high bank to scramble up on the other side, and finding a way to traverse another section of missing path.

after that the path took us through Coile an Torr, (forest on a hill) a smallish pinewood, probably a plantation as the trees are all the same age,

full of these elegant feather-like ferns, which are hard fern, and quite common in the west of England as well as here, but I had never seen them before.

on the other side of this wood which is quite steep in places, there are older Scots pine, “granny pines”

you can see they have grown up in an open landscape by their spreading shapes

the path leads us out into open valley bottom or river floodplain again

there are many recognisable grassland flowers, like this bedstraw, clumps of harebell

I had to look this little white petalled flower up – it is sneezewort, Achillea ptarmica, related to yarrow.

the river Feshie meanders across its winter courses, but it’s not a true slow meander in the wandering sense.

you’d think you could walk across all those pale grey stones (schists, or metamorphosed limestones, mudstones and sandstones) but it’s a highly active gravel river bed and the braided channels are turbulent with strong currents.

the results of past storms and winter spates are there to see.

the path takes us into a savannah like open woodland, with huge old pine trees standing amongst their seedlings.

this is real Caledonian forest

with huge wood ant nests

and junipers in between the pines. we were sad not to spot any red squirrels, or pine martens, (less likely) or capercaille (highly unlikely). I did think we might have seen an eagle or heard ravens, but there was not even a buzzard about.

there are grassy meadows full of dark brown ringlet butterflies, and wonderfully we did see a pearl-bordered fritillary, a speciality of this kind of habitat in Scotland.

it is another fritillary, like the silver-washed that you now see in Norfolk, that needs violets for its caterpillar food. Much darker and a bit smaller than the silver-washed. it’s very skittish and we couldn’t get near enough to it for long enough to photograph it, this is stolen off the internet.

I have been drawing in a small readymade notebook all the way, mountain shapes and tree shapes …

very quickly, so as not to get left behind

the triangles are a great simplification of young pine trees

drew in the car on the way there too –

I now have an ambition to find somewhere to stay close to or in the Glen, to paint outdoors there for a few days.

Idris Murphy should go there to paint! there are some extraordinary trees

their bark is deeply sculptural – a habitat in itself.

we passed the Ruigh Aiteachain bothy (that might mean next to fast running water and abounding in sloes) where you can stay for free if there’s room, but need to bring everything except a tent – bed, and food – the four miles from the car park. so I don’t think that’s an option for me with painting gear to carry as well. it’s very nice, recently done up with a kitchen, wood burner, and 2 rooms to sleep in upstairs. the ablutions are outdoors and probably don’t include running water – well, I imagine compost loos would be better for the environment; there are two stone built cubicles away from the bothy itself.

we find a fallen tree to sit on for our picnic

it is silvery with age and has a flora  and no doubt fauna all of its own.

B jumps up to be up high where she can see what’s coming and going. it’s drier than the moss tuffet, surrounded by soft puffy hummocks of grass with ringlets flitting.

there are three hills and the glen turns to the left,

but four and a half miles is far enough for us – another half a mile past the bothy

we come to the edge of the Feshie’s gravel bed and look across.

the OS map has these two hills where they slope down into the glen as Sròn na h-Iolaire and Sròn Díreachain – Sròn being a nose. Glen Feshie continues to narrow up to the left, and the gap we can see from here are two tributaries, Allt Lorgaihd, and Fionntag Burn.

so here we turn round and walk back to the car park, repeating our scramblings and splashings in reverse. enjoying all the views from a different angle. I run out of sketch book pages.

key species – red squirrels, pine martins, rare sawflies, ospreys, wood ants and black grouse. European beaver, wild boar, lynx, moose, brown bear and wolf would once have been here, and there is discussion ongoing about reintroducing lynx. beaver have already been reintroduced to the trossachs and have spread to much of the south – will they come up into the Cairngorms too? as well as several notable species of birds – the capercaillie, crested tit and the endemic Scottish crossbill. I imagine we probably heard crested tit subsong without realising it, birds being generally pretty quiet in August.

 

 

 

 

walking and painting

Posted jane -->on 24th Nov 2020

a couple of weeks ago we came to this place, Crawford Priory, near Cupar. it was remodelled at the beginning of the 19th century as a Neo-Gothic “priory” (originally a 17th century hunting lodge on the estates of the earls of Crawford) by the sister of the last, the 22nd earl, Mary Lindsay Crawford.

she never married, but ran the estate and its coal mines with great competence. this was considered very odd in her day, especially as she had a wild roe deer as a pet, and you can see its gravestone in the wall. it followed her around like a dog apparently, and she had a great many other pets to which she left enough money to keep them all, and there is apparently a cemetery for them at the back. the epitome of an eccentric aristocrat ….

by the 1960’s the family could not keep up the building which must have been fairly neglected already, and it was abandoned.

what did not rot in the next 20 years was destroyed by a fire in the mid 90’s, so all the roofs, windows and floors are gone.

trees growing inside are breaking up the stonework. there is a separate stable block which has been remade into steading type houses, through the very fancy archway. and the estate is largely wooded.

we didn’t see it, but her mausoleum is slowly falling into ruin in one of the woods

it was raining that day, so we cut our walk short. sadly a lot of the weekends have been wet.

none of my paintings have referred to that walk yet, though there’s a poem I’ve been working on.

Tentsmuir continues to inspire

the light and the mixed ecology

reeds, the burn outflow across the beach

the alders around the various pools

the wonderful pine trees (I think the forestry commission planted Corsican pine rather than Scots, they are very similar, but the Corsican needles are about twice as long.)

I’ve also been inspired by bullfinches and other birds, blackbird, blackcap, on the sizeable rowan in the garden here, eating the huge crop of berries.

and a pair of stonechats along the field fences, between horse paddocks and arable fields, on the way to Spinkie Den.

in Lade Braes, the wildernessy park along the Kinness Burn which connects all these more recent housing areas to the old town centre, there is a heron

and Hallow hill is covered in 7th century christian pictish cist graves.

some have been left to show in the ground,

under the enormous Leylandii hedge that protects a big swanky house built there in the 70’s (that’s when there was a huge archaeological dig there)

all these paintings (and a lot more) have been painted using the bed as a table in the “guest” bedroom where I sleep.

I really feel quite liberated by gouache and watercolour pencil and thick watercolour paper.

goodness knows how this will turn out when I get my studio set up in Cupar and have canvases and acrylic to work with again.

 

 

into the Cairngorms

Posted jane -->on 20th Oct 2020

on Sunday we drove up to Blair Atholl in Perthshire, in the foothills of the Grampian mountains, part of the Cairngorms National Park (since 2008). to get to it you drive past famous spots like Killiecrankie and over the Tummel river … and it’s only one and a quarter hour’s drive from St Andrews.

Fife and Perthshire are full of magnificent beech trees. obviously they are not native, but they certainly thrive. we parked in the village car park, as the walk-dedicated one was full,

and I am very glad we did or we’d have missed this part of the walk, alongside the river Tilt between mature beeches,

whose branches hung down to the river, and the river itself racing through a rock chute

then widening to pebble strewn beaches

we came at the best time to see autumn colours

maple trees are everywhere, obviously not native, but perfectly hardy for Scottish winters.

the walk was basically along the river, on a higher path, which took quite an effort for my lazy Norfolk legs to get up to, and then across and back along the other side. not to the furthest point as that would have been ten miles plus the extra from the village, so we walked seven altogether, crossing at Gilberts bridge.

small waterfalls and bridges on the path

once you are up the views are immense, and the landscape begging to be painted, not in the traditional way, but for me there were textures and shapes which made me think of Australian painter, Idris Murphy’s work.

the way the horizon and sky are often less present when you are enfolded into the hills

and the rock comes through the vegetation

and the trees are sparse and characterful, with their coatings of lichen

much to think about for the future

the phone camera doesn’t capture the brilliance of the colours – I’d call the overall impression orange-tawny, with notes of bright mustard and rust,

offset by the dark green of conifers

we stopped for coffee and snacks in a little grassy, sedgy spot just above the river where it raced through another chute

and trees cling onto the sides of the ravine

rowan, ash, larch

this dying trunk colonised by funghi

then not much further to Gilberts bridge where the river is much calmer and the tree colours perfect – more beeches too.

Bimba perfectly matches all these autumn tones

this photo looks like an English park

but soon we were out under these steep sheep pastures

walking downhill

through woods

of birch

and larch

these repetitive trunks surely are the food for paintings

I’m taking pictures on the march

always behind, never catching up

except when Lucy stops to photograph, and these larch turning golden-russet are a stopping point.

we slowed towards the end to pick sloes, and in the hedge were these rowans. I am sure I’ve never seen rowans turn this colour in Norfolk.

brighter than the Japanese maples which are quite a feature in suburban St Andrews just now.

how special it is to be so close to all this magnificence.

 

ways of seeing landscape

Posted jane -->on 1st Mar 2020

today’s walk in strong sunshine and stronger wind was from Kelling Reading Rooms up Muckleborough Hill,

chased by winged cloud shadows which flew out to sea.

it didn’t feel as windy up there as I expected, perhaps that was due to my own puffing after climbing up a bit over sixty metres.

in Norfolk it counts as a hill – in Scotland not so much – but it commands great views of the coast, and has a Bronze Age “bowl” barrow on the seaward slope,

somewhere in the trees and scrub. it shows on aerial photos taken in the 1940’s and 50’s. and there are awesome imaginary views of Doggerland, the area between Britain and Europe which was dry land until about eight thousand years ago, populated by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who migrated with the seasons, fishing, hunting, and gathering food such as hazelnuts and berries.

after returning from time-travelling, and after contemplating the wind-farm turbines and the racing clouds we turned downhill, through oak woods, and crossed the coast road to Kelling Heath, via Weynor Gardens, a seventies housing estate with a permissive path behind it through to the heath.

the camera on my iphone flattens things out, and the budding honeysuckle that’s climbed up a small dead tree is hard to read in the way that my eye read it. there are tree shadows that are confused with the branches that cast the shadows.

there are many wonderful trees on these slopes, and I walked along appreciating them, partly thanks to watching every Idris Murphy video I could find on the internet.

I’ve captured a few images from his website. this is Riverbed Ross River, 44.5 x 44.5 cm.

Idris Murphy works en plein air in the rather wonderful Australian landscape on smaller boards, the size of these three, and from the experience of working on those (some of which are completed out doors, and others worked on in the studio) he paints his larger works in the studio.

Waterfall cloud bank river-front, acrylic on board 65 x 69.5 cm

Views Walking Killcare, acrylic on board, 45 x 45 cm

as he says, using photographs to paint landscape just does not work, as they look flat like the photos, which as I pointed out above, are very flat, and especially with the wide angle type lens on my iphone – it just takes all the interest out of the picture.

Black emu evening and hill-side, Mutawintji, acrylic and collage on board, 65 x 65 cm

Murphy brings his extensive knowledge of ancient Aboriginal cave paintings, a spiritual sensibility and awareness of the meaning and history of place to his landscape paintings, which have nothing to do with exact realism. as he says, it’s all about making a picture – it’s very interesting to see his process in  several videos on the website 

hipstamatic helps to make my photos a little more interesting

but they can’t do anything like a painting. Here’s a big one of Murphy’s – Luminous green waterhole, 120 x 130 cm

the abstract qualities of this are gorgeous. Murphy’s colours are true to the Australian outback, the reds and purples of bare earth, and then the sudden greens after rain. the white gum trees stand out in many of his paintings,

yes we do in fact have white trees in Europe, but only in winter do they stand out as here against all the dead bracken,

and old oaks have the feel of spirit guides in these sandy hills by the coast where the Neolithic and Bronze ages still feel accessible and you can imagine Doggerland out there under the North Sea.

but I M is right about photography it really does not hack it compared to what one sees and one did not have time to stop and draw as the dear Galga certainly would not like it! perhaps minus dog when the weather warms up and before the green begins.

meanwhile I continue to paint from somewhere inside my head. this was something I thought complete a few months ago. I got it out yesterday and skated some paint around on it so that what was underneath was partly visible .. and it IS a landscape but a composite of things in my memory, partly from walks in Fife, Scotland, and partly Norfolk.

these details show how the thin paint allows what is underneath to become mysterious and suggestive

and in some parts completely covered

painting-over is often much more satisfying than starting from scratch

on our walk the gorse beginning to look like spring

and as usual the steam train’s morning trip from Sheringham to Holt passed us

 

chuffing and huffing up the gradient deep in the cutting, so that you can only see the smoke and steam and hear the engine. nearly as much as my huffing and puffing to scramble up the steep path to the level top of Kelling heath.

up there large numbers of Mesolithic worked flints and waste from flint-working were recovered from in situ deposits. some of the flints are now thought to date to the Upper Palaeolithic. this landscape has a long history, not least in its geology, but without the timescale and continuity of memory that the Australian landscape has.

walking from Kelling

Posted jane -->on 27th Oct 2019

at last a clear day after so many rainy and very gloomy ones

this bourbon rose still flowering and beautifully scented by my gate; I am astonished, because summer rain turns the opening flowers of this particular rose into tiny brown paper parcels and they don’t open. it’s a climbing version of Souvenir de la Malmaison.

we were on our way out for a walk from Kelling reading rooms to Kelling heath and back, via Muckleburgh hill; a walk that involves two big hills and wonderful views of the sea.

Just B and I and the sunshine

Muckleburgh hill has low growing oaks around its double crown, stunted by sea winds and poor soil.

you think you have reached the top and then find there is another higher point

the view is better from the second one

so up we go

looking over and down slope to the North Sea. interesting to think that 10,000 years ago after the ice sheets melted, you would have been looking at dry land down there, low chalk and sand hills, chained by marshy rivers and lakes, wooded and full of wild animals, what archaeologists nowadays call Doggerland. a rich environment for a sparse population of mesolithic human hunters.

East across to Sheringham and Beeston bump

West over the saltmarshes and shingle ridge to Blakeney point, Salthouse church and Walsey hill

down again through woods on the Weybourne side, easy to get lost, until we find the gate to the coast road, along the road a bit and through a gap on the opposite side, through tunnels of low ivy and woody groves up to the eastern edge of the heath. here it’s not really a heath any more but a wood.

rather soggy traveller’s joy, old man’s beard, or whatever you want to call wild clematis

Telegraph hill is the name of this steep slope, perhaps it had a signal tower or pole at the top for semaphore communications, which were used during the Napoleonic wars by the Admiralty, though I’m not sure that there was ever a chain of them in Norfolk.

here we are climbing up the Holt-Cromer ridge, which is composed of outwash sands and gravels deposited by rivers at the glacier edge, during the last Ice age. a steep northward-facing slope which would have been the glacier margin. probably Muckleburgh Hill itself is a kame, like Beeston Bump, a steep-sided mound of sand and gravel deposited by the melting ice sheet.

bracken turning all colours, some very pale. looking out across the fields here I spotted the snowy white steam cloud from the local Poppy Line steam engine chugging hard to pull its coaches up the gradient to Holt from Sheringham

the footpath crosses another road, and then very quickly turns up Holgate hill to the railway line, the most punishing slope. at the top you are higher than the railway line which is down in a cutting. I think I sounded like a steam train puffing up the last and steepest bit.

 

lovely steam train coming past, hooting for the pedestrian crossing then slowing for the little halt at Kelling, downslope. I couldn’t see a thing through the screen because of the bright sunshine, so I was trying to watch and film at the same time, hence the wobbles.

before diving down the steep footpath to Kelling village again I met some people with a lovely basket of fungi; the main collector a German woman who couldn’t tell me the English names of what she had found. one was as big as a loaf of bread, slightly bigger than this. I’m waiting for a Collins fungi book to be able to name it. we agreed that the ceps are over. that’s about the only edible fungi I recognise apart from field and parasol mushrooms.

this brilliant and perfect fly agaric was a neighbour of the edible one.

this one a few days older and already beginning to melt back into the earth.  they coexist with birch trees, and like most of the fungi we only see as “fruiting bodies” in the autumn, have extensive networks of hair-like threads which tap into tree roots, providing minerals and taking sugars in exchange.

the landscape changes as you walk down the path

at first bracken hangs down from high banks

and the slopes are steep and wooded with silver birch

as the slope becomes less steep there are small paddocks and large grass fields, oaks and a lot of ash trees, none of which are very old, probably dating to the disuse of the heath for common grazing. recent rains, some extremely heavy – Weybourne recorded over seven centimeters in one afternoon, where in Bale we only had just over three – have scoured out some sandy gullies at the top, and dumped sand on the path at the bottom of the hill.

back home in my garden there is more autumn colour than I saw near the coast – this guelder rose is full of berries and the leaves are turning very pretty colours

the hornbeam which is only nineteen and has got quite tall now has a lovely display

and the rowan

all berries gone, a delicate and elegant garden inhabitant. I put a new one in on the other side this year. I don’t really have room to plant any more trees, there are too many already, but my garden is a little oasis of wilderness amongst more conventional spaces and the industrial agriculture which we need to feed the country. though I must say growing potatoes for crisps is not the best way to do that! nor are crops to feed intensively reared livestock.

a quick burst in the studio, to start base layers on some ready-gessoed panels I just bought. 40 x 40 cm.

it’s lovely to just slap on some colour with a brush

and then some coloured texture (marble dust mixed into paint)

last week this one emerged, also 40 x 40 cm

.

and then this, which is just over 60 x 60. I’ve called it the Rain’s Voice. probably those bright things above will need more layers, but I think I will try to keep them bright, a bit of cheer as we continue towards winter.

 

 

 

October colour

Posted jane -->on 19th Oct 2019

firstly I have to squeeze in a succession of photos from the last day in September, really worthy of a separate post, but I put it off, so this is a catch-up

on Monday 30th September we arrived early at Morston knowing it would be a big tide, but after an overnight blow from the north-west the water had not got out of the lagoon behind Blakeney point between high tides and had risen right over the marsh

giving an impression of how things may be in a few years? decades? when more polar ice has melted

even the coastal path was impassable without waders or a boat

and B got several cold wet surprises leaping about in the long grass

but it was peaceful and very beautiful

and I took a nice clean dog with me on my taxi run for my good friend who has just had a lung transplant.

only two days before

I was taking photos of autumn on the edge of the marsh, where the samphire has turned all sorts of lovely colours, from maroon to shocking pink.

the sea asters are over but the sea pinks survived the inundation

inland colours are mellowing. here is an ivy bee, a specialist wild bee species that’s become more common recently

a little bit of bracken bronzing

and early leaf fall – at Holt Lowes it’s mostly the birch

of course Bims is a nice autumnal colour herself

the dartmoor ponies will stay out all winter, they have great resistance to cold and wet and are able to stay fat on very little

pools reflecting sky and leaves

as for painting I found these colours in a book of Diebenkorn paintings, this abstract done in 1951

and happily tried to transfer them

but my painting seemed so dull when I got it indoors I went back into it

with lighter versions of these early autumn shades

these details give me points of departure for new paintings

in the meantime I visited the original church of Edgefield, near Holt, in the 1880’s most of it was taken down and incorporated into a new church in the centre of the village. they left the Saxon octagonal tower

and some of the doorways and windows

the churchyard is full of hawthorns, bloody with haws – our visit on 1st october, the anniversary of Mary Tudor’s coronation – and some late tombstones

in heavy rain I took this photo of the biggest remaining window arch

which inspired me to add the shape to my painting

 

 

holt lowes – a favourite place

Posted jane -->on 14th Aug 2019

a few years ago I stopped going to this place, because under the aegis of the Norfolk Wildlife Trust all the mature silver birches were grubbed up, and a lot of soil removed back to flinty ashy subsoil

in an attempt to get it back to the four thousand year old heathland it had once been.

the idea is to encourage the heathers – bell heather like this –

and ordinary like this –

and to cut the gorse back.

the trees got in the way and changed the biome.

but nature is irrepressible, and a few Dartmoor ponies put in to encourage the grass will not keep back the growth of trees. Once it was common land with rights of grazing and furze cutting for households in Holt, and presumably there were hosts of goats, cows, geese, sheep and people using the land. now it’s dog-walker territory, with some rare flora and fauna – sphagnum moss and natterjack toads, more common on Dartmoor than in Norfolk. the birch seedlings sprout everywhere.

not many people walk here either, it’s very quiet,

the ponies are fat and peaceful,

a little mischievous perhaps,

appearing and disappearing mysteriously amongst the remaining trees.

I’d thought we were going to get a wet walk but the morning warmed up,

there were gatekeepers and painted ladies flitting about,

and the regrowth of the gorse makes the paths sheltered.

one could have done with a sit down,

but Em and Bims got a paddle at least.

the flinty dry upper heath is cut in two by a damp trickle and pools – a small wetland.

this pool’s trees are full of willow warblers in early summer.

it’s the time of year for heather –

here the gorse cutter has succeeded in making it look like a heath.

it’s a place that’s good for winter walking with these dry peaty, sandy paths. of course, you can’t let dogs off the lead near the ponies – but I wouldn’t have Bims off anyway.

 

the fortress of the high powers

Posted jane -->on 28th Oct 2018

the last day of the course at Ty Newydd was a trip into Snowdonia, hill-walking with storytelling and heightened speech.

we drove up the Nantlle valley from the coast on the Anglesey side

through the pass to a high reservoir

where we stopped so that two of us could deliver their invocation/heightened speech in the spirit of place

the weather collaborated and while the utterances were in progress we were enveloped in a hail storm.

we stood close together like penguins keeping warm in a snowstorm. reading from an ipad covered in melting hail was quite a feat, having climbed up a very steep little hill.

although the weather was uncomfortable at times, it would not have been so atmospheric without the huge fast moving clouds and intermittent sunshine.

we drove on to Beddgelert, refreshed and warmed ourselves, and those able to march up hills and scramble over rocks continued to Dinas Emrys, to encounter dragons and fortresses.

it’s a National Trust site. I am not normally fond of carved wood things on walks, but this dragon bench is very fine. the scales on its back stood up five inches proud of the spine, its tail, with similar scales, made a a complete three hundred and sixty degree turn at the other end of the seat, and huge claws splayed out at each end. Here Eric (Maddern, one of the course leaders) began his tale of Merlin’s prophesies at Dinas Emrys, taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. the story features the welsh red dragon defeating the saxon white dragon.

we walked on through woods on mossy paths and up and down stone steps

the hill we were walking to is probably a volcanic plug; it sits between the higher mountains – on the west side Moel Hebog, which blocks any view of Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon) itself, and on the east, Grib Ddu with Moel y Dyniewd higher behind,

in the valley of Afon (river) Glaslyn

we passed waterfalls – this the biggest, with its pool of blue stones

and a huge quartz block, a pulpit stone

then more stone steps as we climbed higher

through wood

and pasture

higher

with views of wooded hills

and bare mountains

until we reached the narrow neck of land

and the steep path

connecting Dinas Emrys

a very defensible precipitous path, looking down to the Arfon Glaswyn valley

coming down, after the rain which began soon after we got to the top, I slid on my bum over the steepest rockiest part, it seemed safer.

here the view of the lake

looking down to Llyn Dinas

at the top at last, to sit in the square of what are probably the foundations of an eleventh century tower, and listen to the last part of Eric’s re-telling.

below the tower is a hollow place with a pool, a natural amphitheatre. it was choked with rush and the ground covered with bracken, but Eric has been clearing it, and now the eye is open. in one of my favourite children’s books, written in 1959, the Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff, this place is reimagined as the mountain hideaway not of Vortigern, but of Ambrosius, the son of the leader Vortigern betrayed when he brought in the saxon warbands led by Hengist and Horsa. she uses the name Dinas Ffaraon and translates it as Fortress of the High Powers. Emrys is the Welsh version of Ambrosius, but it also means immortal one. her description of the approach, from the lake, although it’s not the way we came up, has the same feel of mystery and magic. “The path squeezed its way through, and plunged on upward. In the softer and more level places it was a slithering quagmire, at others it ran out onto bare, mist wet rock” and she places Ambrosius in the hollow place at the moment of meeting the main character, Aquila, “on the edge of a little hollow with the gleam of water at the bottom of it” Aquila hears the notes of a harp from buildings in this hollow, and finds Ambrosius within.

re-reading this book I get the feeling that Rosemary Sutcliff was quite an influence on my own writing; her strong sense of place, and detail of plants and animals make her fiction intense and vivid.

as we searched out fallen wood for our fire, and Eric dug away rush and turf from the stones, it began to hail. nevertheless the fire was lit and we ten uttered our heightened speech to our chosen entity; to the lost eagles of Snowdon, to the Green Man, to Pan, to Rhiannon (that was me), Artemis, Myrddin, Math, Sophia, Thor, and Taliesin.

although we couldn’t see Snowdon from the reservoir because of the cloud, when I left Wales the next morning I caught a glimpse of it, covered in a light dusting of snow, from the Porthmadog bypass. it’s on the very left edge of the photo and soon the cloud covered it again.

the danish camp

Posted jane -->on 25th Aug 2017

is what the locals called the iron age earthworks at Warham, nowadays it mostly goes under Warham Camp

you walk up the back lane to Wighton – we cut the corner off and went through the churchyard – one of the two in Warham, All Saints. the church is closed for renovation at the moment, an interesting mishmash of building styles and re-builds, and its tower collapsed a very long time ago by the look of it

we crossed the river Stiffkey, one of our treasured north Norfolk chalk streams

water clear as a bell

by a pretty little bridge with curved walls

and up the top of the road to the track.

the earthworks or fort – though the actual purpose of the site is not really understood – are huge, double ramparts with ditches, dug in the chalk, so the whole thing would have glittered white in the sun when it was new. the information board says it was built around 200BC and used until 100 AD with the remains of Roman building – tiles and so on, in the enclosure.

the river once curved around, cradling the circle of the fort, providing an extra barrier, but probably also providing summer pasture for cattle and horses. the enclosure-mad landowners of the eighteenth century straightened the Stiffkey, cutting off a slice of the ramparts in the process, while draining the wetland around it for agricultural use.

for us, apart from the glamour and resonance of the history of the place – wild celtic tribes, warrior queens, heroic charioteers, golden torc hoards and all the rest – the plants and insects here are quite special.

the chalk ramparts are a wonderful habitat for various orchids and butterflies

there are chalk hill blues, and common blues flitting about

autumn gentian is very common here – a plant I’d never seen before – amongst birds eye trefoil and ladies bedstraw –

the orchids are over in late summer, but I found seedheads of common spotted.

colonies of stemless thistle like the south facing slopes

clumps of mignonette

harebells all over the mounds, scabious and devil’s bit scabious,

meadow flowers in the thin grasses looking like medieval tapestry

self-heal

wild angelica

the area inside the rings of banks and ditches is covered in thistles and nettles – thistledown blowing across and catching on everything

and the surrounding hedges full of hips and haws

a holme oak, very old, stands inside the enclosure

probably seeded by a bird carrying an acorn from the trees in Warham’s churchyards. from the camp you can see two church towers, St Mary’s Warham and All Saints Wighton

next year I will be visiting in early summer, to catch those orchids in flower.