Jane Wheeler's Blog 2008 July

anagama last day

Posted jane -->on 31st Jul 2008

eighth day of firing.

up at four thirty for my five am shift. its cool, the sky is clear in the east but there is thin cloud above. earlier there was a sickle moon hanging low.

T does a quite deliberate payback for the hours tied up asleep on the blanket, she runs out of the gate, across the road and into the cow pasture from which she flushes a hare back onto the road and up the hill. she disappears for ten minutes, and scrapes her front legs just below the elbow. so that’s the end of letting her run that way. I arrive ten minutes later than I wanted to for my shift. Gas is quite excited; the temperature is up high enough for the ash to be melting on the pots; Svend’s pot (the only one tall enough to be visible in the heap of ember) is shiny, and the flames are reflected in its surface.

using the larch, the flames are white in the firebox, and after stoking the flame from the chimney is huge, writhing round and bursting with miniature flame balls like fire dragons. it is yellow rather than red. all these are good indicators that we are up to temperature – twelve-fifty – which is what Gas was hoping for. he rakes the embers with the long chicken foot rake. this allows the kiln to breathe, and the chimney flame does its thing again. he goes off to his tent at six, leaving instructions to wake him at seven for a further rake, but I can’t raise him, and to tell the truth I think I can keep going for a while, I found a longer stick to push the embers aside when I stoke. this is fun. I find myself brandishing a metre of flaming wood. mostly I get the chimney flame to flower into the madly jumping flickering pyrotechnic display which indicates that I am doing the right thing.

Eventually I get Gas up at eight, and he rakes again.

Svend arrives to check everything is going okay, disappears for a walk, and then is back to dive in at nine. he first finds himself a plank, and with it digs around in the embers, turning them over and over. then he opens the bottom firemouth and uses a metal handled shovel to dig out a hole in the ash and cinder, quenching it again with water.

then another go with the plank in the embers.

one of Lisa Hammond’s teabowls turns up in the front and it comes out to cool in ash and ember. It has a shino glaze on it which is partly peeling off. It looks very rough. probably not what she wants, but the dryness and rough texture are what I am hoping for. Svend has to go at eleven, but now we have achieved temperature, and can relax a little, keeping it around twelve hundred degrees until midnight. the larch is almost all used up anyway, so it wouldn’t be possible to push any more.

I missed Phil Roger’s demonstration, and Lisa’s yesterday. but this afternoon Gas demonstrates making a teabowl, not on the wheel, but using a disc of wood rather as though it was a wheel, he flattens the clay onto it with a chopping action, then pulls and squeezes the sides up. someone comments that this is how a raised pie, like a pork pie, is made. so much hand building has similarities to handling pastry, or dough.

a series of deft gestural cuts with a bamboo knife finishes the foot-rim

he makes the point that Raku does not mean party, as the traditional translation says, but a place where the original teabowls were made by the tile-maker Chojiro, and the castle building works where the clay was dug.

now we are more relaxed all my energy has gone. it is very hot and humid and I sweat buckets on the first two and a half hours of my shift, and I’m feeling pretty tired. the kiln is so hot that the buttons on my shirt burn me. I should have a scarf to protect my neck and chest. Brigitte relieves me again, and I go off to wash and bed. I just can’t stay up any longer. I nod off over the laptop in the camper.

meanwhile Gas keeps going with Robert Sanderson’s help, and gets the temperature up even higher. Linda tells me the next day that she thinks it went to thirteen hundred. everything is finally closed down by three am.

next morning we all meet in front of the kiln for an extended coffee and chat. Linda and Erwin are staying on for a few days before Hatfield ceramic fair, Robert is flying back to Ireland this afternoon, and I have to pack up and get home today. its hot again. I feel dazed, sleepy and dehydrated on the way home, but we make it without incident, and I start on the blog on Monday night.

on Friday we open the kiln!

(2 comments)

anagama saturday

Posted jane -->on 31st Jul 2008

seventh day of firing.

Vicki gets up early to let me have a lie-in, theoretically, although I still wake at the same time and can’t get back to sleep. the demo is running through my head. at least I get a chance to have a yoga practice before it gets too hot (in front of the cars – it’s the only level space). it’s nice to be able to potter a bit, but I am up and down to get the clay out, organise tools, boards, clay condition. I think it goes alright. I make two pots, a bottle and a vase type vessel, one with the porcelain scraped over it with a knife, and the other with the random speckle of porcelain bits scattered over it. there are some good comments, especially about the cracks. they want to know why, of course, but a few times cracks and missing parts are pointed out to me, almost as if people can’t bear to see this imperfection going on – or maybe as if it won’t stand up with the cracks.and then the idea of them as flawed vessels which won’t hold water for flowers. in the end my comment is that perhaps it’s a good thing, as I don’t intend them to be flower vases.

I buy two little porcelain beakers and a big teabowl from Linda de Nil. they are like little paintings, with the ash from the firing, the ash in the porcelain body, and some dry porcelain added to the wet outside of the pot. I use the beautiful teabowl for my tea and coffee from now on. we need lots of tea. it is very hot and humid, and although the kiln site in the trees is cool in itself, firing is very very hot work. the camper is unbearable, even with everything open.I bring a blanket for T and anchor her to various spots, for the demonstration (and Sal, because I can guarantee that if allowed to be loose he would be spotted having a big pooh in the middle of the grass just as I am in mid flow) and by the kiln. she is very good about it and relaxes totally, covered in sawdust.

Gas and Svend intend their big push up to full temperature tonight, with long flames which will reach right to the pots at the back. the chimney already has a big flame every time the kiln is stoked, with explosive burning of the gases as they exit. the boards of the roof started to curl up, so they built up the back of the chimney and put a shelf across to force the flame forwards. I have seen kiln sheds whose protective corrugated sheeting has been burnt through by the chimney flame.

the blowhole has a beautiful flowering flame; exit gases play up and down it as the consumption of wood varies.

more potters arrive. Phil Rogers last night, this morning, Robert Sanderson, Lisa Hammond, Yo Thom, John Butler, and my old friend Sally Raven, a co-stoker at Nic Collins’ kiln. Sally tells me she has an anagama kiln herself now, built to Svend’s plan and with his help, in North Wales, and also that she got a first. very good news. Lisa, John and Phil all have pots in the kiln; Lisa has a lot, nearly as many as I do.

Lisa gives her demonstration before and after lunch, with a slide show, Robert Sanderson talks about wood-fired kilns, then Yo and John also do talks about their work, and in John’s case his revolutionary fast-fire anagama kiln. he is very concerned, and rightly, about the impact his work makes on the environment, and he is trying to develop a kiln which will give the same sort of firing as a traditional anagama kiln, but using far less wood. this is quite controversial! Svend does a talk on his latest kiln. it is very hot in the building; I see bits and pieces of things from the back, under the awning outside.

Brigitte takes the early part of my shift, so I only do two hours. as I leave Svend is pulling a vast quantity of ash and cinder out of the bottom of the kiln at the front, to lower the ember heap. it glows red until he pours water on it. everything is much more dramatic at night.

afterwards in the camper I leave every window and the side door and tailgate open, and have a sluice down in the bucket. instead of the electric I light a few candles, by the light of which I can read and write perfectly well, I can’t think why I didn’t use the candles before. it’s a clear night. what amazing weather for camping. the wood is so much cooler that even sitting around the kiln is much more comfortable. although I do have a few mosquito bites. drinking tea is better than water I think, and its enjoyable to use a beautiful teabowl.

off to bed. the camper has cooled down a little. everybody who is not firing is watching the Shiho Kanzaki “Fire Artist” film.

(1 comment)

anagama friday

Posted jane -->on 30th Jul 2008

sixth day of firing.

clear cool morning at four-thirty, mist lying in hollows, and thick dew. the dogs mess around and I have to grab Tilda to get them back in. the thrush is singing, but not for long. it is going to be a hot day.

the kiln is at about a thousand degrees, Gas firing as Svend began, with both firemouths covered, the wood pushed in almost all the way. a chunk of hardwood in the bottom, longer pieces of mostly cedar, but with some beech and hazel in the top, and when I run out of long, short will do. a nine inch flame comes out of the blowhole after stoking. the purring is a little louder but I wouldn’t call it roaring, and there is much satisfactory crackling.

in the spaces between stokes I listen to the kiln and to the wood. the roebuck is barking (it’s the rut); the woodpecker makes his rackety laughing call, the thrush adds a few notes, magpies call in the distance, and the robin’s chittering alarm calls. behind all the roar of the motorway.

I have to get my act together for my demonstration tomorrow. the clay is wet and sticky and good for throwing, not slab-building. I wedge in some sand and some small feldspar stones which are in Gas’s workshop. they give it some roughness, but they don’t absorb the damp like grog does. the sand will help to open it up and give it some texture. so I wedge up a lump and leave it to dry out a bit.

we have plenty of help today, Vicki is installed in her flowery tent, Linda is on hand, and Svend will be doing two shifts.

today the event begins, people are arriving after lunch, and Linda demonstrates her very fluid throwing and cutting, or centering, cutting and throwing without touching the outside of the pot. it’s quite an impressive technique, and in a way she seems to be going in the same direction as I am. she adds the felspar stones and the sand in as I did. she is trying to roughen her work to make it more expressive of the process of woodfiring, even the porcelain she adds wood ash to, leaving rough lumps and beautiful spots and speckles after firing.

by the time I start my evening shift Gas and Svend have put enough oomph into the kiln to send it up to about 1150 degrees. it is much easier to work this evening and I am happy. it’s hot work and hard on the knees. the easiest posture is to kneel in front of the kiln. so all my photos of people stoking tend to be views of bottoms. there is red flame at the chimney now, and lots of black smoke with that delightful steam railway engine smell of carbon, quite unmistakeable. Brigitte takes over from me at eight; she has just driven from East Ham especially to help with the stoking, but she will lose her shift to Svend at nine. the event attendees get together for a discussion of woodfiring led by Gas, but the conversation wanders off in all directions and I leave to eat, wash and sleep.

(no comment)

anagama thursday

Posted jane -->on 30th Jul 2008

fifth day of firing.

a very misty and warm morning, but cooler on entering the wood. at least two thrushes were singing as I arrived, but not for long. the warmer weather seems to have heralded the end of the need to defend a territory.

we are burning the coppiced hazel this morning, criss-crossing it three at a time diagonally in the top firemouth and filling it; red flame and little pops of black smoke at the blowhole. the cycle of fill and burn-down takes ten minutes or so. the hazel is snakily twisted and bent; I have to turn it around to get it to lie well. it burns very cleanly, hardly any smoke, good heat, but a lot of ember. I must look up its use as fuel in Oliver Rackhams’s book when I get home. Gas says they will coppice more this year, there is quite a lot in the wood. my camper is parked under a hazel tree.

there is hardly any crackle, but the purr is the clue; when it stops purring is the time to stoke. which consist of pushing the bundle almost all the way in; most of the time this gives another reduction. then I push it all the way in with another billet, piece by piece, each sent as far forward into a streaming river of fire over the embers as far as I can. they flare up instantly with a white flame. it is about nine hundred degrees in there this morning. I can see all the pots, buried up to their waists in ember. I love the hazel, it is beautiful, creamy wood and freckled grey-green bark, and each piece has a different shape.

we had a fright before Gas went off to his tent; a very loud explosion inside the kiln. we couldn’t quite understand this; pots should not be exploding at this heat; awful feeling of was that my pot which has possibly destroyed several others; but then we realised it must have been the wood. it was like a gun going off.

Gas is asleep now and I am enjoying my shift, listening to the kiln and the tit-mice. pigeons coo, there is that traffic noise again (it is six am). its very quiet without the thrush song. I recognise a woodpecker’s call, and a magpie family in the trees around, rattling and wheezing. the hazel burns with a rustling sound, not the snapping and crackling of soft wood. there is so much cover in these trees you hardly ever see the birds, except the robins, two juveniles, which pop down and find invertebrates on the soil surface. possibly the changes in temperature around the kiln bring a few to the surface. I found a poor snail which had unwisely chosen the hazel sticks as a hiding place; it had dropped out of the burning bundle, but it was sizzling a bit.

giant wood wasps are fascinating us. they are laying eggs with their drill/ovipositor in the bark of larch in the wood pile; little do they know that it is not a good place to leave the next generation. normally the larvae spend three years in unhealthy trees selected by the mother wasp. they are fearsome looking creatures, hornet sized, the ovipositor protected in a large orange sheath which sticks out from under her abdomen resembling a sting, with bright orange antennae and long yellow legs. their buzzing flight is quite alarming, but they are harmless.

last night’s enthusiastic stoking has broken the shelf which acts as a lintel between the two openings. Ko returns at nine am, I go off for a shower (at last!) and breakfast. when I get back he has the chimney puffing black smoke like an old fashioned steam engine; he has managed a steep rise in temperature.

Belgian potters Linda and Erwin arrived at eight am, off the early ferry, and watched me stoking for a while. Linda is staying, Erwin is off to a ceramics fair in Penrith for the weekend. andlater Svend arrived. Hooray. Now we have another pair of hands/eyes/ears and a brain used to wood-firing. and the event proper starts tomorrow. Vicki has arrived and been shopping for me, and gets herself set up in the trees.

my late shift is a disaster. the cedar I am stoking with is slightly damp and won’t split to the same width stick as I am used to for the “wooden lid”, the big pieces allow too much cold air into the kiln. temperature goes down over the four hours, and I get more and more tired and depressed. its made worse by having Svend Bayer and Linda de Nil sitting there watching me. as soon as Svend takes over he finds a piece of shelf to shut the top firemouth off with! when I get back to the van to my horror I am greeted effusively by a very hot and exhausted Tilda OUTSIDE. she has been loose and hunting, and then lost for how long I have no idea. even Sal manages to squeeze out through the side door when I come into the tent. it is too hot at five to leave them securely locked in. tomorrow they will have to come with me.

I go to sleep with all the windows open, but shut them in the middle of the night. It”s cold and damp. the sky is clear with the moon at the last quarter. T wakes me too, dreaming noisily, of some hunt, I suppose.

(no comment)

anagama wednesday

Posted jane -->on 30th Jul 2008

fourth day of firing

there are three thrushes competing for top chorister this morning at four-fifty am as I walk through the wood. it is a humid, rather grey morning, but I can still see the waning moon high in the sky. the kiln is crackling so loudly that Gas doesn’t hear me and I make him jump. this is Kamataki, the sound of the kiln feeding. when it stops you must feed it more.

Gas and Ko have been stoking with split hazel all night and now there is a huge ember bed covering all the pots around the firebox, which must be reduced, so we change to softwood, close the lower firemouth and open the top one. we can see the pots clearly, Svend’s like a huge pale moon behind Gas’s smaller one.

so now the whole firemouth is crammed with wood, one third sticking out, until the two thirds inside is consumed and we push the rest in over the top of the embers. there is not going to be enough of this exact width and length of wood, and I will soon have to wake Gas again.

the thrush seems quieter this morning. a pair of chiff chaffs are around, magpies waking up with complaining hoarse calls, an owl hoots. and again I am aware of the traffic sound suddenly.

on the next stoke I hear a pot fall with a ting – some partially burned wood slipped down the edge of the ember heap – there is a red flame at the blowhole, and a puff of black smoke, a mini version of what the chimney will do later on. not all the fuel can burn in the kiln straight away, and some of the gases ignite on their way out.

at eight-thirty we have run out of the wood, so Gas is up again, and now the firing has to be slower, using light two-year-old spruce (Christmas tree) stacked solid in the firemouth and allowed to burn right through so that only when the flame starts to burn outside the kiln is it pushed in, to reduce the ember pile. the pots round the edge of the firebox are in danger of being knocked when the ember is this high, and there is not enough room for more wood to burn properly. Gas gives the embers a good rake, and we can see that one of my pots has fallen against one of John Butler’s. later on it is fished upright again.

the wood stacked in the fire mouth plugs it; Gas calls it a “wooden lid”, so that no door is needed, and stoking is simplified. another technique from Japan, although Shiho Kanzaki does use doors, with wire handles, as do most western anagama potters. we spend the day keeping the kiln quiet, plugging the firemouth. it’s hot and humid. at night it is more comfortable to work with heat and there is a better draught. Ko arrives at eight-thirty in the evening, and ups the adrenalin rate; we know that when he comes the kiln will really get going.

I made a teabowl for the raku firing today .. slightly daunting task as it is my first. anyway, Gas approves, after I follow his suggestion that the base of the inside needs to be concave, rather than convex, as teabowls have the tea whisked in them, so a “pond” in the bottom is a good idea.

(no comment)

anagama tuesday

Posted jane -->on 30th Jul 2008

fourth morning, third day of firing.

I get up to a waning moon, halfway to the last quarter, the sky more or less clear, and its chilly again. Gas wraps himself up in a sleeping bag on a foundation of wood scraps next to the log splitter. he is silently out for the count for the next five hours. I creep past to the wood pile.

this morning there are two thrushes singing, and the song is different.

dweeb dweeb … followed by squeaky bird falsetto ..plink plink

pheasant type call again .. tweet tweet tweetjug-jug .. chuck-chuck-chuck

flutelike trill

pink pink pink

tuit tuit ! (after hearing an owl hoot)

do-it do-it do-it

quk quk quk quk

……………………….

the traffic noise seems louder this morning – perhaps the wind direction is different.

the fire is inside the fire mouth now, a mix ofsmall hardwood chunks and softwood billets. pure heat makes the air above the chimney quiver. I can see my two pots at the front, one in each corner, and Gas’s sacrifice pot which guards Svend’s huge one from the sharpest onslaught of heat.

the fire squeaks and purrs. we are burning oak and some poplar, and some larch and pine sticks to help keep it moving. the softwood flames up instantly.

Dorley Fieldhouse arrives this afternoon for the first of three stints. she fires a fastfire wood kiln at home. and Ko is back to help on the later shift.

later Gas pushes the fire right inside the firebox and changes the hearth, so that there is a white slab of kiln shelf standing in front. maybe four hundred degrees centigrade today.

(no comment)

anagama monday

Posted jane -->on 29th Jul 2008

the second day of firing

the morning starts early; I am on the five am shift for the whole firing, and last night Gas took the two concurrent night shifts, so he was looking very weary when I got here. a simple task; continue to put two sticks on the fire every time it dies down, keep the flame bright, but don’t let the fire move any further into the fire mouth. he retires to the summer house.

the thrush seems to be singing from just above the kiln, and the squeaking, twittering titmice executing a wall of death in the spruce all around. I try to find words for his song. each note is separate, not like the blackbird’s warble, and varies from a rich contralto to a scribbling high-pitched flute.

piu, piu, piu, teliel, piel, piel, piel,

rrrrrrr like a xylophone up the scale,

a downward whistle,

wet, wet, wet,

ding, ding, ding,

a rich contralto bubbling, then a spray of staccato notes. always with a gap between each phrase, as though he is listening for a reply. then he stops, and I think, that’s it, he’s finished for the morning, but after a few minutes he starts up again.

a pheasant alarums, pigeons flap heavily in the branches around, and coo. there is a young robin and a wren hopping around the stacks of split logs, the wren emits a beady string of little trilling clicky alarm calls, the titmice squeak like so many crickets, but the thrush is king of the wood. I hear a roe deer’s hoarse bark four or five times.

as full daylight approaches there are buzzards mewing above, and the roar of traffic on the A41 begins to be audible. the thrush falls silent for a while. there is sunshine and looking up through the many-fingered network of spruce branches I can see pale blue sky. away from the fire the air is still chilly in the wood.

you tend the fire, keep the flame bright, and the sparks fly into the kiln. the long questing tongue of the fire starts to look for pots to lap. time passes slowly, between the wood you place carefully and the waiting for it to burn. this is the pulse of it, place two sticks, watch them burn down, place two sticks, repeat.in contrast to the world of traffic a mile away, and the jets overhead, this is a timeless place and task.

tonight Ko returned to take the evening shift, and the fire has grown dramatically, it really begins to look like a firing now, the wood fills the whole of the bottom fire mouth. he is very industrious, working away with the log splitter in between stoking and bustling up and down the paths carrying whole logs and bundles of split ones. a perfect evening, still and sunlit. the dogs and I retire early to catch up on some sleep, with the four-thirty alarm set.

(2 comments)

anagama sunday

Posted jane -->on 29th Jul 2008

Sunday

second morning at Spring Meadow, and rather exciting for Tilda. the van is a good viewpoint for wildlife watching, especially when a small lurcher has been allowed the privilege of an early morning cuddle. first there was an innocent little bunny, neat and bright eyed, cropping grass. then there was a big hare, bold as brass, all ginger whiskers and big black-tipped ears. madam found that too much to bear, adrenalin kicked in, and she got the shakes. I did half an hour�s yoga practice outside in the sunshine, hoping that she would calm down. unfortunately when I took them out for a run, goodness gracious, there was a ginger cat outside. I wasn�t expecting it, the dogs weren�t expecting it, and the cat certainly wasn�t; it ran for its life puffed up like a marmoset. there are plenty of trees here, so it was perfectly safe. In fact, if a cat stopped and just swore at these two they would be stopped in their tracks.

the remains of the Christmas tree farm make a charming fairy-tale wood, Hansel and Gretel must be just around the corner. there are groups of thirty-year-old Norway spruce trees with their tiered feathery branches reaching out over the ground, and grass rides between them edged by false brome grass. it has silky ribbon-like bright green leaves and fine narrow spikey flower-heads, and everywhere amongst it are blue thumbs of bugle.

I found one lesser spotted orchid in one of the smaller rides. a thrush is still delivering his liquid song morning and evening, buzzards mew and crows croak above, families of long-tailed tits swoop around in the top branches, and there are hares and rabbits everywhere. in the dusk of the first evening we found a beautiful white horse with flowing mane and tail in the small paddock next to the camp. Tilda was horrified at this ghostly apparition, but luckily Millie was not bothered by her barking and came to the fence for an offering of clover heads. at daylight the next morning she had mysteriously disappeared.

yesterday we had all the hard work of unpacking pots from their boxes, sorting them out, and packing the kiln; we didn�t finish until past nine in the evening. Svend’s pot only just fitted; Gas lowered the floor, (it is sand on earth) dragged the pot into the kiln on a rug, then positioned it on a piece of shelf by clasping in between his legs as he sat on the kiln floor and raising it the half inch of spare space there was, while I shoved the shelf under it. then he was somewhat stuck as there wasn’t room to get his leg and his head out from behind it.

two students from the Czech Republic, Lukas and Pavla, spent the whole day splitting whole chunks of tree trunk down into small wedges with Gas�s petrol driven wood-splitter, slept in the summer house and were back off to London to their respective jobs this morning. Vicki Covacic, a local young potter who also has fired with Nic Collins, was here most of the weekend; she and Gas helped me set up the awning on Friday night, and then her work was part of the kiln load – she is coming back to help in the evenings during the week, and then staying from Thursday night on.

today is much more relaxed; first thing Gas built up the front of the kiln and the fire-mouths, and lit a small fire in front of the kiln to start warming it up. he made an exquisite miniature log cabin style structure of sticks finely split by Ko (an amateur potter and box-maker with experience of firing in Japan, who drove up from Finchley this morning to help) filled in with waste from the log-splitter to start the fire, with the kiln god and a pot of yellow wild flowers sitting on the kiln top above.

after two hours of keeping this small fire going the warm air began to be drawn through the kiln and smoke appeared from the chimney, although the wind blew down the hill and through the kiln shed so that the person in charge of the fire got a good smoking, and during my evening shift I couldn�t sit next to it.

(no comment)

anagama haiku

Posted jane -->on 28th Jul 2008

bright flames at kiln mouth

silent pots await the heat

thrush singing above

greedy fire monster

we feed you little sticks now

but later, whole trees.

single notes of liquid

while I, earthbound, feed the flame

below the realm of air

buzzards mewing high

my brave song bird is silent

the day shift arrives

christmas tree branches

green triple fringe fingers

spreading their network

three hours of thrush song

now he is silent and so

the words have fled too.

(5 comments)

the old meadow

Posted jane -->on 15th Jul 2008

we walked down Cake’s Lane yesterday in the early evening, and visited the old water meadow. it has been cut around the edges, but not having been mown for hay or grazed for some years, the lower section has more fen sedge and thistle than grass. walking round the north side under the trees of the next door wood is hard on unprotected ankles, the brambles have taken over here.

where there is grass it is full of meadow sweet

and the yellow spikes of agrimony.

a lot of this is so bristly that nothing domestic would eat it. there is probably quite a lot of forage for deer. I wonder whether it is much of a habitat for the rodent prey of the barn owls and kestrels which patrol it, compared to a carefully maintained but yet unsprayed hay meadow.

there are quite a few butterflies; mostly little brown ones. although they fly too fast and too far away to identify them, they are most likely ringlets, which like wet grassy places, or meadow browns, as John Clare described them; “Where their old visitors in russet brown, the haytime butterflies dance up and down”. or maybe both.

I saw this gatekeeper butterfly in Cake’s Lane, guarding his patch of nettle and bramble in the hedge. in this photograph you can clearly see the small white spots on the underwing. the Lane is very overgrown at the moment, it needs a haircut. it is a county road, an old bridle path or track owned and maintained by the local council, and they cut it with a tractor every so often, the hedges and banks less frequently, but the track itself about three times a year.

bracken and nettles tower over both sides of the narrow track, punctured by hogweed and in places dense clumps of great willowherb, with its large bright pink flowers, favoured by the ditch of running water which edges the track on its south side.

hemp agrimony flourishes in several places along the Lane. it likes the damp too. it is not related to hemp, although the leaves look similar.

we walked through the middle of the farm, not our old way along the wood, it was too hot to wear the kind of protective clothing you’d need at the moment, and Tilda suffers badly from nettle stings.

the wheat is a lovely colour, a couple of weeks off ripe, I think. looks as though barley fields should be combined any day now. combine harvesters on all the farms have come out of storage and are being given hasty last minute services and power hosed off ….

then we will hear the droning and whirring of machinery until late at night, and the air will be full of dust and harvest bugs.

(3 comments)

anagama last day

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