nightingales, singing around every corner, day and night,

cuckoos in contrapuntal harmony with hoopoes, bee-eaters warbling and tumbling above, sleepy turtle doves turring in the trees behind the house, blackbirds carolling at dawn and dusk, swallows (two kinds, barn and red-rumped) sipping mud from the puddles for their nests, azure-winged magpies stealing cat food and sitting on my railings to see if there were any more on my porch,

dartford warblers sizzling away in the cork oaks, sardinian warblers flitting about in the encinas, water rushing everywhere noisily,

frogs croaking in a range of voices from basso profundo to strangulated tenor high C, enormous puddles full of tadpoles, newts and salamanders in the pool,

cicadas and other noisy insects creaking away in every olive tree.

in succession, yellow flowers, white flowers

blue flowers

purple flowers

green flowers, dramatic umbellifers; wildflowers in great clumps like flowerbeds everywhere, lining the steep paved mule-tracks and donkey paths; all over my olive grove and in every little stone-walled pasture.

white horses and white cattle

that climb all over the steep sierra, so that I catch glimpses of them under the highest peaks from my bedroom window, which faces that way. So many shades of green as bracken, broom, bramble and deciduous oaks came to life.

olive trees full of flower, evergreen oak catkins showering us with golden pollen, gum cistus smelling of paradise, their huge white flowers all over a distant hillside and each side of the track.

waterfalls in all the old places, and in new ones, water spouting out of terrace walls, flooding my pool pump room, filling the old well and all the charkas, filling narrow paths with knee-deep pools, water glinting in the sun as it ran over rocks high up amongst the trees.

now I’m back to real life and spring only just creaking to life in may; a dry windswept north norfolk, primroses and violets still out in the hedgerows, baby lambs in the field – I didn’t miss a thing.

it’s actually great to work with a little damper than usual – cold conditions make it much slower to stiffen and dry – and being such a stiff clay anyway it behaves very well for slab-building.

these two bottles will dry to about one inch shorter than my kiln.

lots of patting and paddling needed to get nice rounded shoulders and a shape that is just slightly softened.

I didn’t light the woodburner when I made the first one – there was enough sunshine coming through the rooflight to warm the workshop up to about 10C and it was bearable, warmly dressed. I keep a storage heater on low in there during the winter, to stop the clay freezing and the books from getting damp.

radio three keeps me going …

for this one I needed that extra heat, the sun didn’t cooperate.

I think this clay needs a glaze that accentuates its roughness, like my very dry barium carbonate glaze, and I will double dip with the crawling magnesium. with enough reduction the barium gets tinges of ochre and green, and reacts strongly with the magnesium glaze.

the porcelain crumbs stay whiter under the glaze

a nice texture

and a bit extra texture round the neck …

a few simple tools, and lots of gooey slip to stick the parts together.

I pulled this bottle out of the grass from where I dumped it; it cracked in the firing. sadly I can’t find the bottom, or it would be a candidate for the japanese method of mending pots with lacquer and gold powder, kintsugi, which I am going to have a crack (haha) at in the summer – you need warm temperatures for the lacquer to harden. funnily enough I think the cracks accentuate the shape.

I have another bag of the pizza clay which I plan to make two more big bottles with but this time I’ll paint them with black iron oxide when they are raw, and then slip them with the crackle slip, to get this effect, but on the much bigger bottles.

after recent years of mild weather in march and spring being three weeks early, such frigid conditions are a shock ….

here everything looks dried up and in withdrawal, the small amounts of snow disappeared very quickly.

but after the very wet winter the harsh winds have at least made it possible to plough and prepare seed beds by the end of March on our lighter loamy fields.

primroses in Cakes Lane have  flowered at last

and a few brave violets are out in the deepest recesses of the grass verge in Clip street.

in the sun of the last few days, with the winds a little abated my crocuses are showing their faces, but most daffodils are holding back.

red alder catkins at the edge of Bale wood.

the pussy willow are holding back too, and hazel catkins have taken a bashing; a lot are strewn over the ground in the lane.

in the garden I have cleared my vegetable beds and covered them with weed suppressant cloth; nothing will germinate except for sycamore keys and all the weeds; I hope to be able to peel everything back and get going as soon as the ground is warm enough. which is not going to happen for another month according to forecasts.

it was quicker firing again – fourteen and a half hours compared to the eighteen I used to take.

a lovely green flame at 1207C – copper vapour from the black glaze. two days to cool down to 20C and opening time. it always takes a while to chip off the clay clamming and get the bricks out, clean them up and sweep up the mess.

everything looking good, glazes matured properly. one black piece had glazed itself to the kiln shelf, a run through the crack in the form where glaze had accumulated inside at the base, but it’s a soft glaze that knocks off with a chisel easily.

I had placed pieces strategically so that the matt ivory porcelains were next to the black-glazed pieces, with the result that two of them had acquired a beautiful raspberry blush. I love this effect.

the porcelains are firing well with no deforming at cone 10, and the “frozen snow” – chun over crawling slip – doesn’t seem to mind where it is in the kiln;

this one was right next to the burner at the back, no problems. I slipped and glazed these by dipping right way up and upside down, which accounts for the change in colour and texture, and on the taller ones there was still a gap, so I had to paint the glaze on in the middle. I would need big dustbins full of the slip and the glaze to cover them without dipping both ways.

you can see how active this crackle slip is. also the chun becomes dark blue over the red clay body (grogged pink stoneware), which is purely optical.

I am not quite sure what is causing this veined effect – again it’s the chun over the pink grogged – perhaps it’s the effect of slipping the bisc ware and the body holding some part of the slip’s constituents even where the slip isn’t covering it. and a very dramatic crawl from the crackle slip.

even more drama from this porcelain when it splits, and the colour is verging on lobster. porcelain is very different stuff from clay, quite different to work with. this is potclays grogged porcelain – still splitting even when grogged. the structure of the particles must not be able to cope with the curve I am putting on it compared to the thickness of the slab – so the inside shape compared to the outside shape is putting too much stress on it. the spiralling split combined with the fleshy smoothness of the porcelain, and then the pink reduced copper “sprayed” onto it in the terrific temperatures of the stoneware firing – well, I think it’s something quite special.

this is a close-up of one of the black-glazed porcelains. you can see a crystalline thing happening, which is very nice. this glaze has an equal amount (23 %) of dolomite and of felspar, and 25% of china clay, which keeps it quite stony, it also has 6% of copper oxide and .75 % cobalt. a lot of copper, no wonder the white porcelains are blushing.

on this one I only slipped the top half, and allowed the run to happen, knowing that I would get the lovely dark almost black chun without the slip.

you can see the rest of the pots here, in the hideous flash gallery. I do hope to find some better way of showing the pots than this eventually.

here’s a page for identification. however I am still not completely confident they are not linnets, as the RSPB site shows an illustration of a redpoll with no red breast, and also photos I have seen on the internet are divided. I just couldn’t see them clearly enough to pinpoint the black bib which would be diagnostic.

this photo of a linnet looks very like them; until I have another view of them I will have to call them linnet/redpolls.

two or three weeks ago I got very confused by a bird that looked like a weird chaffinch on the feeder containing hulled sunflower seeds (terrifically popular with all the finches). it turned out to be a male brambling, but for a whole morning I was trying to convince myself it was a hawfinch. it has chestnut brown shoulders and a big yellow beak with that heavy browed look the thicker-billed finches have, and a flecked brown upper back and grey head with a bandit black mask over the eyes. I only saw it on the feeder that one Sunday.

in between there has been a solitary siskin, on a more regular basis. all three birds are new to me in a sudden rush of more rare birds this winter; in the winters of 2003/4 I had a pair of tree sparrows regularly on my feeders, but nothing more exciting since then, except for spotting a goldcrest on the lavender outside my office once. as for sparrows – well I think they chased away the tree sparrows, and for a while there were some around, but not much recently, except for one male that has appeared this week, but I have only spotted him a couple of times. I have seen marsh tits for a few winters running; I think they are permanent residents. there was a nuthatch in early december, when I had been away for 4 weeks, and the peanut feeders had been kept going, but I haven’t seen it since.

in general I am very pleased with the effect my feeders have. I have three fatball/fat lump feeders at the moment, one with wireworms, one with fruit and plain old fat balls. the fruit one seems to particularly attract longtailed tits, which arrive in a big family group and swarm all over it. the great spotted woodpecker was on the plain fatballs yesterday morning, scaring all the others away. I get the usual tits, blue – about six of them and they are beginning to get territorial now – great, coal, and sometimes the marsh tits. I put a mixture of plain hulled sunflower seeds and a non mess feeder seed from Bird Ventures in Holt which has aniseed in it, in my main feeder, although I have had just the sunflower seeds this winter, and then it is emptied in a day. on it I get dunnocks, robin, chaffinch, greenfinch and goldfinches. in fact the goldfinches disappeared from my garden during the very cold weather in January (I saw very few birds then, despite fat balls and peanuts) but as soon as the sun came out and it warmed up a fraction one goldfinch appeared, then three, and since then there have been up to six, preferring the sunflower seeds to the nyger. I think they are a bit bored with me now I am mixing the feeder seed, but I still get a great crowd of birds competing for it. blackbirds and woodpigeons pick up the crumbs beneath mostly – the finches are very messy eaters, and as for the great tits – they pull out two or three seeds and discard them until they find what they want.

I have only seen one surprising bird out walking, and that was a redstart, which I saw in a hedge near Valley Farm in Sharrington.

anyway, it was an interesting firing; I lit it a little late, at seven thirty in the morning, and turned it off earlier than the last firing which I lit at six thirty, but I ran it at a higher pressure than before, with quite a lot of reduction, soaked it for an hour at 1008C, and turned the pressure down a bit when cone nine had gone, to give it less reduction – only half an hour after that cone ten had gone over and eleven was just bending slightly – as you can see below. so a speedier, more reduced firing, and it gave me everything I wanted. good ruddy oranges on the copper dolomite glaze, no pink on the magnesium cone nine glaze on the bottom halves of the chalk beach pots, just the right temperature for that glaze in fact.

and you can see the three frozen snow bottles tucked underneath the shelf – this is a horrible spot for most of my glazes, but fine for that combination.

there was a lot of green flame, the copper burning off these saltmarsh pots which were all near the burners.

a 100% successful firing.

I put two of the new porcelain pod pieces in, and they fired beautifully. the cracks which were present at drying got no worse.

I had to dump several pieces which split and then opened up like this. it’s probably partly that I need to make the inside of the shape the side which was last uppermost during rolling out. I tend not to because the porcelain takes up an imprint from the plywood boards, but I found that in fact I can scrape this off with a metal kidney.

this is the black glazed one

above is the other porcelain piece finished and below after drying. I glazed it with the same combination as the stoneware pod shape below. the magnesium glaze has reacted quite violently with the barium, and made this curling off crawl, which I like. luckily no pink staining from the copper glazes.

I made a lot of this shape in the various clays I have around. this is the grogged white stoneware from earthstone, with the sand from my finca added, mostly this gives the little nodules of feldspar you can see, plus various crusty little lumps. I have glazed it, and several of the other pots with first a dunk into the barium carbonate dry glaze, then the other end and an overlap in the old magnesium crawling glaze. this is cone nine and likes heavy reduction, but on the bottom half it is fine in my cone ten firing as the kiln is a lot cooler at the bottom.

on this very cracked bottle I tried pouring the glaze. I must do this more often, it has worked well.

this big bottle in the pizza clay has been languishing in the workshop for about eighteen months because the first one I made looked awful, really anaemic after firing with my shino glaze. basically there’s not enough iron in the body to get a good result with the shino. but with heavy reduction this barium and magnesium overlapping combination has worked very well.

I like the way the magnesium glaze has crawled and gone very grey.

there are lots more “pod” forms in my workshop waiting to be fired, especially in porcelain, and several “flagons” as I have found the fat bottles with the little handle/flange should be called. you can see the rest of this firing here

after the two dry winters we have had, Bale wood has been unusually dry. it is in fact a in a tiny valley, holding small streams and ditches fed by springs of water emerging from the last little bit of the Cromer Holt ridge – a glacial moraine mostly consisting of gravels and sands, with odd seams of chalky, or blue-grey, clay. the surrounding fields have drains and ditches feeding into the watercourse, which joins the river Stiffkey in Warham.

this pond was dry in September, even at the end of the wettest summer in most people’s memory, but sopping wet November and December have filled it up again.

the wood is a special secret place, used for pheasant shooting. every winter I see woodcock fly up out of its ditches, and it hides red and roe deer in the daytime. today I found a single tine from a cast red deer antler in the wet grass of the set-aside near the bottom of Cakes Lane. I have seen a tawny owl in this tree, being mobbed by small birds. hares use the wood as a refuge and its floor is covered with violets in the spring.

water is near the surface everywhere now.

the solitary beech tree, matriarch of the wood, keeping her leaf-covered clearing dry.

here the ditch becomes more like a stream, it runs under a small culvert. the water is still clear; two houses have their septic tank overflow into this, but they both have good modern systems that return clean water.

but at the bottom of Cakes Lane the case is different. the main flow of this stream is from the high watershed above Hindringham, and it comes around the west side of Bale wood, picking up water from field drains. you can see the silt making it yellow, which must have come off fields in the heavy rain we have been having. some of this will be dropped by the water anywhere it is held up in pools or where the stream is dammed by fallen trees or branches.

another branch of this system starts above Manor Farm in Bale, where there used to be medieval fish ponds and moats. Bale gets its name from the spring that feeds this little stream – it is a corruption of the name Bathleigh, which is a saxon name meaning a spring in a clearing. it runs a short way as a ditch between fields and then becomes a tiny stream through permanent pasture, used for sheep, all the way to Field Dalling. it has steep banks and is occasionally dredged, but you can see from the photos that it carries no silt.

here it is at a much higher level than usual; it can just be a trickle in places in dry weather. the river Stiffkey itself is a chalk stream, one of several running south to north in the western part of North Norfolk. it can support trout, and even sea trout, which come upstream through the sluices at Morston Freshes (see here). it is the subject of a proposed whole catchment restoration and management plan (see here ).  a quote from this website (http://www.norfolkriverstrust.org/); “it suffers from dredging, straightening (begun by Nicholas Bacon in the 16th century and continued most recently in the 1970s and 80s)  and excessive fine sediment loads caused by run-off from arable farming. In most reaches the river has been disconnected from its floodplain by drainage and the effect of accumulated dredgings on the bank that confines the river to its bed. Initial results of a PhD study into the effects of adding artificial gravels to enhance trout and sea trout spawning, suggest the value of these is severely reduced as a result of excessive siltation. …. Irrigation of potatoes in the dry time of year has a double impact here: it washes topsoil away with water that would otherwise sustain chalkstream flows. This is still the case if water is pumped to a storage reservoir during winter, because the aquifer functions to attenuate water for summer flows. There is a pressing need to store water naturally within the floodplain to buttress flows under the stress of abstraction.”

In 2009, working with the landowner, Holkham Estate, the Wild Trout Trust installed ten gravel riffle areas, using approximately 700 tonnes of gravel and creating 300 metres of shallow riffle habitat.  The river banks were re-profiled alongside the introduced

gravel to create low marginal berms and stockproof fencing and drinking points were installed. Since completion, a number of trout redds have been seen each winter on the introduced gravels.

Bale, Field Dalling and Binham all contribute to the Stiffkey and we need to take care of the catchment area. if you are in the habit of spraying a ditch next to your garden, think again and check where that water goes!

at last back in the workshop – the weather’s been mild so warm enough, but no dry – and I’ve been concentrating on this shape. I don’t really know what to call it – funnel form?

several different clays, starting with ones that had already been hardened a bit, rolling in sand grit and tiny stones from my finca, which is eroded or decomposed granite – quartz, felspar and some mica sparkle. the little stones are felspar, and leave white blobs in the clay body at stoneware temperatures.

some of these are as tall as I can get in the kiln.

also going back to the old flask shape – someone recently called them flagons

various buff-ish stoneware bodies with grog added, or the finca sand.

and a bunch of flask/flagons I made in the autumn from the Solargil grés St Amande clay with grog added. I should be getting all these fired by the third week in January, as I have an exhibition in Bath at the Hilton gallery in February.

almost at the solstice and an afternoon walk gives soft pinkish light and deep shadows

down in the fold of the land that holds Bale wood you look up and see bright sky

and five minutes later the sun is descending below the trees.

another day and there’s dramatic cloud and sun, and hailstorms

the oak trees at the Bale wood end of Cakes Lane are still hanging on to a few leaves

golden light and dark blue grey sky; the storm passed us by though

sun lighting up more oak leaves in Clip street lane, in between lowering

storm clouds whisking past.

a hard frost this morning and the lanes treacherous with frozen puddles

but the sun was warm in sheltered spots – Bullfer grove catching midday gold

today I wished I was working in my workshop – very little wind and all that sunshine made it a good place to be. soon I hope to get away from the computer and start making again.

I have to keep Em on the lead as he is not used to pheasants which turn his head completely, but he’s being very good now I have him on a muzzle loop halti.

the lane has been cut to its complete width; hopefully this will last through some of next year too. it means that the primroses will have a good show; they won’t be covered up by the undergrowth.

it looks like a proper green lane, with its big, full hedges almost meeting overhead where the hazels and field maples have grown into trees.

this dog rose with its bright hips is unusual, dogwood and blackthorn predominate between the hazel.

field maple always has glorious colour; this year yellow seems to predominate; in fact it’s early for autumn colour, mid-November is about the best time, and last year there was still quite a lot of colour in early December.

but many of the leaves that had turned and looked so pretty last week, pale yellow against the grey of the fog, were blown off in the storm on friday night …

and now decorate the track. mostly ash.

the oaks are generally still green, but each one has a different timing .. perhaps depending on what sunlight and weather they are exposed to in relation to their neighbours.

a big beech further down has lost most but there is still a show of orange where it has been sheltered from the wind.

most of the bracken has been cut, so we don’t have those beautiful stands of fern-shapes going yellow then rust colour, always at their best when saturated.

a few stems remain

but all the wet weather will rapidly finish them off.

some of the older oaks like this one at the bottom of Clip Street are already looking pretty threadbare. No acorns to be seen this year.