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losing the saltmarsh

Posted jane -->on 30th Aug 2020

walking at Morston again this morning, I reflected that this kind of landscape is one I won’t find in Fife.

there are sandy beaches with dunes and flowery machair

and rocky beaches

and reed beds in the Tay estuary at Newburgh.

at Tentsmuir there is pine forest behind dunes, with heather and ferns, more beautiful than Holkham’s pinewoods.

but there is nowhere as liminal,

where sky and land and sea segue into each other

with this very special mixture of plants – the sea-wormwood, the sea lavender, sea purslane, shrubby sea blite, sea beet, all the succulents that grow on the salty silt, especially the samphire.

soon to turn orange and red, their autumn colours, along with the mauve and yellow sea aster.

this morning the high wind was in our ears, echoing the surf thundering on the sand banks; curlew and redshank  loudly disapproving, although the nesting season is well over.

tide on its way out

and bladderwrack left behind, attached to its brick holdfast, all barnacled.

the texture of this place is extraordinary; pebble-studded, sometimes slippery with black silt; smooth clay deposits; loose sand;

stinging sharp marram stems; dry paths; wet channels and pools. always the pools that reflect upwards the light of whatever weather happens on the day.

I counted twenty swans in the Stiffkey’s freshwater outflow

and in the marram grass were these tiny ghosts of crabs.

on Thursday there were these ghosts of Covid-19 – disintegrating latex gloves all over the purslane lawns next to the channel

in the sun and wind it’s hard to remember the pandemic, still a rising tide.

in this seemingly empty place, empty except for me and the dog, for half an hour, until we turn back and meet more dogwalkers.

it’s full of life, of course, birds, insects, fish, crustaceans, seals, even hares. I shall miss this place most.

but now I want to paint its looping shapes and its colours, its drama, now when my studio is all packed up and I am busy organising the move, the change of address, and the last skip ……

 

 

 

high summer and low tide

Posted jane -->on 23rd Aug 2020

my last summer in Norfolk

this was high tide early in August when it came up high enough for a little paddling at Morston around the last bridge and some of the creeks. the blue reflections

of the early morning sky and the sea lavender were clear and gentle. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the marsh like that before. but it is always different.

the week before I had taken Bims for hr first beach walk since March. lock down and ground-nesting birds had made it impossible and she hadn’t had an off lead walk at all. I had intended to try Holkham, but at 7.30 am there were four horse boxes parked there, so I drove past and we went to Burnham Overy, stopping before the Staithe to park on the corner and walk down the cattle drover track between the marshes. A good half-hour walk before the beach.

up and over the last dune, and there was nobody and the tide was well out.

she had a wonderful time. I was almost tempted to swim.

next week, on the hottest day, Lucy and I took a break from shed-clearing to have a swim and a picnic breakfast there.

the tide was in, and there were a few people around already

and a little spaniel for Bims to play with.

we swam – and it was cold. so long since I had been for a swim – not since our swallows and amazons day on Blakeney point in 2010 – and I found it hard to breathe in the cold water. but I am very glad I did.

Bims is not a swimmer, she’s about ok to get her belly wet, but that’s all. I made sure she got wet before we walked back, it was already hot, and when we got back to the car at 9.30 it registered 35C, much too hot for dogs. she faltered for the last 300 yards of the track, and was a little indisposed overnight. I discovered my car’s AC is not working.

by the end of the next day a sea fret had come down on North Norfolk, and we were spared the worst of the heat.

it wasn’t cold like the usual haar though, 20C. early morning walks made your hair damp.

Lucy went back to Scotland, the skip filled and a list made for freecycling and recycling and dump-tripping. I shall follow her when the sale of the house goes through.

spoon in june or something like that

Posted jane -->on 30th Jun 2020

and I have not even posted until oh dear it’s almost July …

there are so many beautiful flowers in the hedgerows now

I hardly need to write much in between the photos

we have been taking some longer extensions on our regular walks (we being the dog and I) through Sharrington towards Brinton and then turning down a tiny lane with the most enormous hedges

and semi-wild pasture behind the big thorn trees

then turning up past Hill Farm through Swan Lane, a lovely green lane, back to the road that leads down to Bullfer grove. it adds an extra mile, and even more excitement for Bims when a hare crosses our path.

all the green lanes have been cut, some twice, so they are not hard to walk.

I hope the hedge verges don’t get cut too many times

I have been painting a lot, a slight worry, since I will be moving this year and I am just creating more stuff to take with me.

perhaps I will sell some, you never know.

just continuing the puzzle of how to make paintings work.

the garden is full of wild flowers too, this is woundwort, used since the ancient Greeks to make a poultice and stem bleeding.

knapweed is a favourite for insects, this red tailed bumble was foraging over the whole clump

hard to get a good photo

yellow rattle helps to keep the grass from dominating as it’s parasitic. the seed-heads do rattle!

more greens than ever in my paintings

this is one where there’s so much texture built up by successive paintings that in the end

I can achieve a complex abstract evocation of landscape with a few thin coats of paint and expressive brush marks.

and then this is quite different. again, there is considerable build up, but then I have glued on some already painted paper torn into shapes and then blocked in the dark brown and the grey, leaving some of the last goings-on to show, and suddenly it’s a still-life, “lustre cups on a table”.

this complex abstract is the final of three attempts at my Pool in the Wood theme. it’s so easy to over do it and make them too fussy. I’m pleased with this now, but my ambition is to keep them simpler.

a large box canvas, 100 x 100 x 4 cm, over a yellow painting I did in April. the yellow really helps everything going on over the top. again, a pool, The Last Pool of Darkness, a theme in tribute to Tim Robinson (see previous blog post), that’s the title of one of his Connemara trilogy. but also I have to admit to a big influence from Idris Murphy, the Australian landscape painter, who often paints waterholes and dams. it does mean the sky part of the landscape can be in the middle, or at the bottom of the painting.

back to the lanes and the hedgerows, a couple of weeks ago the grass was in flower, with these extraordinary red/pink colours

colour often surprises me

these luminous dock leaves

and the rusts and oranges

they are very bright

similar colours, yesterday I saw the first silver-washed fritillary by the wood. he wasn’t very cooperative and I couldn’t get closer. the females are paler and more leopard-spotted. I haven’t seen them this early before, usually it’s late July.

these are marsh thistles, should be good food for butterflies

another of my walk extensions is to take the back lane from Bale to Hindringham, then through Hindringham to Moor lane and back across the fields to the wood, and Cakes lane.

the footpath across the fields runs alongside a ditch

and it is full of wild flowers

scabious and meadow sweet, St John’s-wort (Perforate), white bryony, bindweed …..

I’m not sure what this tall thing is, I will have to check again when those buds have opened more. some damp-loving thing – now I have taken the trouble to leaf through Simon Harrap’s very thorough and useful Wild Flowers, I’m pretty sure it’s a figwort. could be green, water or common. I’ll have to get in close and inspect it properly.

I’m quite surprised there are so many wild flowers in this narrow passage between a field of wheat and another of barley, especially as one is informed by a warning sign as one enters the wood, that these crops have been sprayed.

 

 

 

May she will stay

Posted jane -->on 31st May 2020

in the Simon and Garfunkel adaptation of the old country rhyme …

May is nearly over tonight

two years ago I had just completed this painting, for the Cley 18 exhibition, this year’s version would have been opening in late July, but it has been cancelled due to the pandemic. as commercial galleries are now going to open on June 15th, perhaps this was not necessary, but things being what they are I am sure the artists are happier with a safety first policy.

poetry readings are taking place on line. I have a poem in Finished Creatures, so probably I can do an online reading of it for the launch.

it was inspired by a visit to Cley beach but also by a chapter in the late Tim Robinson’s wonderful series of books on Connemara, explaining the milky blue plankton blooms seen there amongst other flora and fauna of the west coast of Ireland. very sadly he and his wife Mairéad Robinson succumbed to the coronavirus this spring.

the virus has also prevented one of the mainstays of my writing life, the writing outside courses run by Dr Jonathan Ward from the NNW education centre at Cley, so I have been making the best of my local walks around Bale, and taking part in some online workshops. but I have been painting pretty solidly as well.

over the last couple of weeks we have been penetrating further into the wood at the bottom of the green lane, through the deer paths, which are quite open at present, into a part full of huge beech and oak, tall hollies, and dead or dying elm. it’s one of those places that seems very secret when you are there, but it turns out most local people have been in there. there is a swing on a high branch of one of the beech trees, and recently someone has built one of those stick wigwams.

I was very surprised to find this pool almost full. it is highly temporary, depending on the vagaries of the water table and springs which fill or empty in many ponds, streams and pits where the gravel slopes of the terminal moraine, the Holt/Cromer ridge, peter out in this high part of Norfolk, and the mix of sands, gravels, clays and chalk surface and create boggy land in the shallow valley that this wood  occupies.

I have been here when there’s been no water at all, just an amphitheatre full of dry beech leaves

it is always a magical place, there are paths that lead to great fallen trunks, and archways of ivy, hazel and honeysuckle. this spring the sunlight splashes through and the birds – thrush, blackbird, wren, chiffchaff – are loud, ignoring one’s presence.

the reflections are quite mesmerising

it has been the inspiration for some recent paintings. I love the fact that the sky is reflected, so that there is no horizon, everything is upside down

I am not interested in painting realistic landscapes, but reach into memory of place for colour and shape

texture too

blessed with this brilliant weather

it’s best to get into the studio early and then late, to avoid the strongest sun.

happily, a gallery in Somerset that already stocks my ceramics, has become interested in my paintings, so these three

almost landscapes – Sloping Field

Blue and Yellow Field

and Green Field in the Clouds

are off to Castle Cary this week for an exhibition titled “Pastures Green” at the David Simon Contemporary gallery, which will open again on June 15th.

 

in May he’ll sing all day

Posted jane -->on 31st May 2020

or in May his song is true   – sadly I can’t tell as I’ve not heard a cuckoo at all this year. Last year I heard one at Holkham at least once a week, walking back from Lady Anne’s walk to the Wells car park on the landward side of the pine woods, and a neighbour has heard one passing through here. I’ve heard willow warblers a few times too, but not from the same spots, so I presume they too were passing through.

the lanes around the village are just beginning to get their summer clothes on

chervil instead of cow parsley

the bracken suddenly up  and filling previously grassy patches

alexanders fattening up seeds – they will turn black over the summer

white campion or bladder campion in the dry hedgerows

wild roses in the hedges, and creamy honeysuckle too but I forgot to take a photo –

a few poppies

plantains and knapweed

a photo of the lane from the cemetery to the village which really could have been taken any time in the last 150 years – if you take away the pole holding up the telephone and electricity lines.

we took the shady scramble along the edge of this big “prairie” field (it did have several hedges and was at least four smaller fields before the sixties) it was early and there was dew blueing the blades of grass, jewelled with buttercups and ground ivy

today the sea was a faint smudge – sometimes you can see the wind farms ten kilometres out

we saw a couple of hares, to B’s intense frustration

I never get the chance to attempt photographs, with her taking up both hands under these circumstances

the winter wheat starting to show ear spikes already, but along the edge of the wood here the deer have been nibbling it down and the ears are emerging through the shortened leaves/stems

bare patches along the edge too – is that where germination failed due to the wet winter, or did the deer eat it as it was germinating?

the soil structure is pretty poor here at the edge too, there was a lot of run off in the wet winter and the years before have seen potato cultivation with irrigation and then intensive crops and nothing put back into it. it’s like concrete now.

there’s still some cow parsley in the shade of Cake’s lane

or there was until this weekend, it’s just had a cut down this narrow part.

we walked another green lane last weekend, Swan lane in Sharrington

everywhere is pretty at this time of year

but the last week has seen things looking much drier. we haven’t had significant rain for about ten weeks, or even longer, since before lockdown, and higher sunshine hours than ever recorded.

I have planted so much in my vegetable patch it’s overflowing

here’s a new little space for extra broad beans

some more broad beans popped into tiny spaces. currently I am harvesting salad leaves, though I am plagued by something tunnelling in here which has ruined some of the new salad area and the seedlings are pushed around. I had to put the plastic tunnel over them to keep the birds off.

and lots of protection for the climbing beans

the roses are marvellous and very early

irises and peonies

in the wild part the guelder rose is very pretty

just now the oxe-eye daisies stand out

and the rambling rector rose is out-competing the dog rose to scramble up over the old plum and into the sycamore behind.

April come she will

Posted jane -->on 17th Apr 2020

and so she has with all her early flowers and leaves, which are two weeks early by my estimation.

we are so lucky here in the countryside that self-isolation means (for me) a closer look at where I walk – now voluntarily restricted to not going in the car to close places, but to the two very beautiful 3 mile-ish loops I can do from the house. and lucky that it is spring, and dry  weather with a lot of sunshine. of course my experience of the pandemic is incredibly privileged by my sex, age, financial standing, retired status and all the other things that have me here in North Norfolk in a quiet village with super-helpful neighbours. In fact as everyone is around all day, every day, and doing my shopping for me, I don’t feel at all lonely, and I have more time to write and paint.

wood anemones, not in a wood but in a bank of primroses in the lane below Bullfer Grove, whereas I have not seen any of these flowers so diagnostic of ancient woodland in the actual wood. I have managed to establish a little patch of them in my garden, under the hazel which I coppice (I just sawed off some young poles to support the runner beans).

Bullfer is locally famous for its bluebells which are certainly very early this year, and it is full of birds

there is a less obvious path that takes you to the full glory of the bluebells.

a path which seems to have been maintained better this year, around various fallen trees and bramble patches

a little scan of one part of the wood this morning, in the chilly east wind.

Bimba patiently follows me around, hopping over the fallen trunks. on the lead of course.

I made this little video clip on the 11th, of the very loud thrush in the wood, with wren accompaniment, and the wild cherry blossom which is lovely here but doesn’t last long. I always trot out A E Housman’s poem –

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

with its memes of youth and beauty and loss

there is just one early purple every year. last year I saw so many of these in Fife, in Scotland – in the dunes fringing Tentsmuir beach, even in my daughter’s lawn, and in the wilderness near her house, Lumbo den.

Bullfer grove, with its dog mercury and wild garlic  is maintained by its owners, the National trust, in a way that produces great habitat for wildlife. the neighbouring landowner, Albanwise Ltd, has more commercial priorities and has recently cut all the mature oaks on its local estates, including a few on the fringes of Bullfer. they won’t regenerate on their own, as oaks do not grow from acorns dropped/hidden by jays and squirrels under the canopy, they don’t get enough light, and are further inhibited by oak mildew which affects seedlings and saplings much more than fully grown trees.

in contrast Bale wood is untouched, and browsed by deer to the extent that there is no underwood to speak of. recently I prowled through this part, which is actually overgrown wet meadow, looking for a little patch of primroses amongst the hazels.

the floor of the wood is so curiously bare and dry, all dead leaves and sticks. on the edge there are a lot of small ash trees that are badly affected by die off.

deer paths everywhere. the next section is full of elm and ash. the elms get to a certain size and then attract the beetle that allows the fungus that stops them being able to transport water up the trunk and so they die. then regenerate by cloning. so the wood is full of fallen elm that is all smaller trunks and branches. it is quite honestly a mess. but from it in recent years, hatch the most wonderful butterflies – the silverwashed fritilliary. the caterpillars live on the leaves of dog violet, having hibernated in rough bark crevices over the winter.

and now the oaks are pushing out their leaves and flowers

ash flowers have been evident for a couple of weeks, but birds/ squirrels? something has been ripping them off.

at home the garden is full of wild flowers – the cow parsley is just out, and the cowslips are still looking good

a couple of weeks ago I found this unfamiliar shiny black bee whizzing around a patch of cowslips. I looked it up – a carpenter bee, solitary, just out of hibernation.

pear blossom out early as usual, I wonder whether any will get pollenated, it’s a very young tree, and there was no fruit last year, after a lot of blossom. it is Moonglow, a fireblight resistant variety. I may have moved to Scotland before I get a chance to find out what its fruit tastes like. or on the other hand, I probably won’t have, considering the future eighteen months or so of COVID-19 disruption.

I found this painting “Pink Garden” by Elisabeth Cummings, an Australian painter (for me mostly it is Ozzie painters I find most inspiring at the moment) and so I sat in the garden and tried to draw an impression of its burgeoning blossom and leaves.

pen and ink and then acrylic

here’s the bee

another  sheet

and now I’m finding working on paper quite a nice change from canvas

this is on fabriano paper, the lovely tough creamy paper I bought in a ten metre roll for making folded books. it does need stretching on a board with gummed tape, which is trickier than you’d think.

having such large pieces of paper means I can work as large as some of my recent canvases. this is 74 x 82 cm. I had to stretch it after I’d painted it (pencil, charcoal and acrylic) as I hadn’t taken it very seriously until I’d finished it. expensive to frame of course, mount and glass as well as frame. and decent glass which gives you accurate colour, is really expensive. it would probably cost twice what I’d ask for the painting. but there is that freedom from the surface you are potentially messing up not costing £ 40.

and the brush slides around nicely on the smooth paper

however I did invest in three Italian-made nice box canvases with deep sides 70 x 70 cm before the virus got hold. (now you can’t get them, I suppose the factory has been badly affected and Jacksons have no stock)

so I have a trio of landscape abstracts finished

all three have ink and paper collaged under the acrylic, and some oil pastel and charcoal drawing  … the top one is from the field at the top of the road with the view of the sea at Blakeney and on a bright day the wind farm masts poke up from beyond the horizon.

the one in the middle is the pond in the wood, and this last one the huge prairie field that my friend Henry Carter sold to Albanwise, which has winter wheat making a shallow triangle if you are standing at the top of it from the road, and spring barley just coming through as a green veil,

here a veil of paint.

 

the vernal equinox

Posted jane -->on 21st Mar 2020

two days ago this thrush was singing so loudly in my garden I heard him over the Sibelius the radio was playing, and rushed out of my studio to record him.

now we are self-distancing, and in my case, being ten days off seventy, self-isolating, I am spending more time enjoying the spring light, and some of the time sunshine, in my garden and studio, as I’m not off to art groups and writing workshops. I’m very happy at home at this time of the year, the cowslips and primroses are coming up in the garden

I’m not restricting my dog walking;

we have these beautiful violets in the lanes

especially Clip street

and overflowing clumps of primroses, both in Clip street and our moss-lined road, and of course in Cakes lane

the fields have dried out at last, enough for tractors to be ploughing and harrowing on every farm this morning

there is a second later flush of blackthorn blossom

and some oak trees have thickening buds

the chiffchaffs are back in Cakes too, and a yellowhammer in ensemble in this clip, though mostly minus his wheeeze at the end of the classic “a little bit of bread and no cheese” song.

the sun strong enough to compensate for the blast of cold easterly wind today when walking, but not if you are just standing around,

and dazzling in and out of tree shadow

the primroses are not so obvious in the bright light as they are on a grey day.

the pond in the wood is still quite full – I love the reflections of the oak trees that surround it. a strange and spooky scene  ….

we have been walking at Holkham twice a week too – I should say galloping in Bims’ case – finding the western side quieter

yesterday there were heavy showers scudding in from the east

making theatrical reflections on wet sand

luckily we weren’t caught out by them. it was a refreshing and energising walk

they are fencing off the areas where oystercatchers and gulls nest now

but there’s plenty of room for us to keep away

on the foreshore and the dunes. Bims is more settled once she’s let those powerful muscles and long legs do what they are meant to.

I had the usual battle with this painting (don’t you love the pink chair! from an app which puts your picture on the wall of various unfeasibly smart rooms)

I think I’m quite settled on it now (Hilly with branches, 76 cm x 60 cm). there is something  female and landscapey about it which is all to the good.

now I’m not dragging all the equipment off out two afternoons a week I feel more committed to the studio and have been having a tidy up today. see the crap on the floor under the table –

well now you don’t! a wheelbarrow full of ceramics detritus gone into the grey bin.

and some paintings up here instead of in the “gallery” (my old office)

I do love this little one, it was very quick  to do but it’s enough and I managed to keep my paws off it somehow. Paintings which have got to the paws off stage are all for sale, just email me from the link on the website www.janewheeler.co.uk – I will have to be more pro-active about selling online, now that Open Studios is cancelled.

 

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.

more and more air and water

Posted jane -->on 23rd Feb 2020

and I’ve been even worse at keeping up this blog in the new year. still I have a stash of photos of more wet and watery so here we are.

just walking up the Sharrington road yesterday morning early with plenty of air blasting around my ears – and the clouds going at who knows how many miles per hour up there. the gusts down here were supposed to be around fifty three miles per hour; they felt pretty vicious, and it wasn’t even a named storm.

the soggy fields won’t absorb any more water so there’s plenty of this

and this

this

and this. some soaks away just a little – until the next rainstorm. however we don’t have big enough rivers in north Norfolk for flooding to be serious.

this morning the Glaven was looking twice as big as normal, after heavy rain in the early morning,

but here it has room to overflow into a wide valley of reed beds, sallows, sedges and rough grass which sops up much of the excess since dredging was stopped and raised banks got rid of.

several trees down; this is an alder

mayhem here in the river bed, with two more alders gone, one earlier in the year and one after Dennis. on Monday one had to duck under it but it’s been cleared up now.

but it makes the river gurgle and chuckle pleasantly, and the wren sings along. the cut alder wood is a bright orange-red. I wonder if it would dye fibre.

at the ford the level is very high. more wren song too.

but for most of it it seems the deeper it flows, the quieter.

up in the woods at Bayfield, the trees very dark and slick with rain, which had only just stopped as we got out of the car.

the sky clearing as the front swept on south east. the farrowing huts are all full again – the sows don’t seem to mind the weather – it’s quite exposed up here. in the distance you can see the woods that edge Holkham.

at home I’ve had a wonderful winter for snowdrops. they are almost over now, but this time last year they were brown with the sun and warm weather we had in February. this year it’s the wind that’s browned them I think.

wild daffodils were looking like this a week ago, they are fully out now. and all the nettles are coming up. some work is needed.

meanwhile Bims and I go to Holkham for her runs, where it’s quiet if we follow the horse entrance to the beach. there’s been a canine gastro-enteritis virus around, it’s really severe, with dogs needing veterinary care for several days, best avoided if possible. she doesn’t mind the light plastic basket muzzle at all. it means she can’t poke little dogs and make them squeak, and she can’t eat anything untoward which we know does sometimes fetch up on the beaches here – fish with paralytic shellfish poisoning, and palm-oil solids.

it’s more beautiful over on that side of the bay too

on Thursday the wind was ruffling the little waves.

and I found an asemic poem made by some lug worm ….

 

 

watery

Posted jane -->on 19th Dec 2019

weeks have slipped away and I have not managed a new blog post until now. perhaps this is because I have taken up my knitting again. it’s very slow, but I must do a bit every night if I can, the yarn was far too expensive (yak/merino/silk fingering) to leave in my previous fashion, perhaps only for the moths to enjoy.

it’s no news to anyone in the UK that we’ve been having a very wet autumn and now a wet winter too.

water is lying in puddles and ruts in fields and walking round the village involves wearing gaiters or wellies and dogs need a bath on their return, the lanes are full of mud.

on a day like today when the sky clears there is so much damp in the ground and in the air that my washing hung out on the line has more water in it at the end of the short day than it started with.

here’s the river Stiffkey on its way through the water meadows below Stiffkey village before it flows out through sluices at Stiffkey freshes, looking very full, about two feet higher than in August and September.

and today the Glaven, even fuller after yesterday’s rain, its surface pitted and burnished by the strong current.

it looks quite clear, unlike two or three days ago when it was definitely murky. these North Norfolk chalk streams should be as clear as crystal, but agricultural runoff can add silt and chemicals. they rise from chalk springs, from the aquifer that underlies the whole county, and from which our drinking water is pumped. it’s also used by farms to irrigate, especially potatoes, so it’s ironic to see a field of potatoes locally, unharvested, with water between the ridges, basically abandoned because it was too wet even two months ago to get them out of the ground.

on rainy days there is something magical about the drops hitting water and making circular ripples that widen and then disappear.

at Glandford the river narrows under the footbridge and then widens out into a deep wide pool that tractor men and others with large tyred vehicles love to cross in a wake of pebbles and froth.

a few weeks ago I came across this pickup sitting in the middle while its driver made a phone call, not stuck, just enjoying being in the middle of the river.

I’ve been filling a sketch book with these watery drawings. the khadi handmade cotton rag paper mops up the pools of water I brush across it, leaving tidemarks of watercolour. there’s something elemental about watercolour paint, the way it can imitate weather and light.

our writing outside group met in Edgefield this week to come to this place, Pond Hills, on a rainy day when the drops pattered down from the trees and the overflow of the pond gurgled happily down its sluice to join the Glaven.

you don’t see the water from the road, but have to climb up a bank covered with fallen chestnut leaves to stand and watch the raindrops opening their concentric ripples in an infinite pattern of widening circles that disappear into the silvery sheet of the pond’s surface.

on a still day the reflections are clear.

trees lower their tangles down to meet themselves

grey sky meets grey pond

and the mirror trees are perturbed by the ripple patterns.

larger drips from the trees make louder pops as they land on wet leaves

and submerged branches stick their rotting stubs up through the meniscus.

my new notebook for these sessions is a landscape-shaped hard-back sketch book. it offers a tempting space to draw as well as write.

fallen trunks crouch on the edge of the bank, limbs propping them like reptilian monsters. it seems as though we are in temperate rainforest, surrounded by otherworldy beings, as we wander between the feet of great trees in the misty rain. the sound of the rain and running water remind me of the soundtrack of Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, filmed in a wet spring in Estonia.

the other occupation that has side-tracked me is painting of course.

I’ve been making small abstract paintings on thick watercolour paper and small canvas-covered board

perhaps the watery weather has been influencing them

here there’s a saturnalian brushwork too.

 

 

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