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Our tribe of regular and seasonal home delivery drivers have given great service this winter. Frenetic peak activity over the Christmas and new year holiday period saw them driving even longer hours over vast routes, bounded by our regional market town to the south up to the wild Scottish border. It’s a mix of high open fells, steep valleys and dense coniferous forest with many a rough and ready off road track leading to isolated hidden properties. One of the drivers told me he works to a broad figure of eight, enabling return visits that same day to customers if called for. Running against the clock and wedded to their Satnavs they curse the US developed GPS system many have to use, which takes no account of localised UK geography. Another tells me he’ll make as many of the easier in by drops to villages first thing in the short day, leaving more flexitime to crack the hard to access places out by.

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The regular Royal Mail drivers know their large rural runs inside out of course. Where to safely leave the stuff that won’t go through the letterbox, which place harbours the pathological ankle nipping pooch; where the potholes lurk or lanes where ice never melts, and so on. Since privitisation these stoical souls have been left more exposed and pressurised than ever in the name of efficiency, with vans that aren’t always up to the rigours of rugged rural rounds. In recent periods of snowfall and sub zero temperatures we’ve clocked a van unable to get up a sloping tarmac drive. Covid has taken its toll too and under-staffing has been an issue. We all love our posties though, as they often make for an eyes and ears social service when out in the sticks. For many isolated and potentially vulnerable individuals he or she may be the only person they meet for days. One welcome advance the Royal Mail has made in recent times is the picking up of post when delivering. That’s proved particularly useful, especially during lockdown. 

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Other deliveries are nature’s own. Over the years we’ve had some puzzling drops. An unmarked recently deceased young rabbit, still soft to the touch, inside the east end field gate; an open mouthed weasel, its lithe little body showing puncture or possibly claw marks, in the west end yard; the headless lower half of a mature salmon in the back garden. The latter was not as surprising as it sounds. This early morning find was in the wake of autumn spawning in the big river, three miles distant. The bodies of spent mature salmon often wash up and are carried off by all manner of birds and beasts. We may have accidentally interrupted such a predator about their work. Our beloved old, but still fiercely active, cat Pip was alive then, so she may well have dragged corpses found elsewhere back home…Who knows!

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We have feathered friends aplenty in our garden every winter and feed them regularly from November to the end of March. Three different stations in place at peak periods, offering fat balls, peanuts and a mix of seeds. I also top up water in the stone birdbath, as garden ponds and water troughs are often frozen. The usual suspects appear without fail after each refresh of rations. Top of the pecking order – in numbers and disposition – is the tumultuous tribe that inhabits the dense cover I call Sparrow Towers…A ferocious chirping emits from that corner of hawthorn hedge, crab apple and privet. The ability to feed on holders as well as the ground ensures they cover all bases. Hard to believe that nationally there has been a dramatic drop in house sparrow numbers of up to 71% when they are so noisily numerous here round houses and farms.

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The extensive tit family are next. The ubiquitous blue tit and great tit maximise their superb acrobatic skills, giving them the edge in extracting food from otherwise hard to get to angles, as well as being great fun to watch in the process. I particularly like the smallest of their kin, the coal tit. Perhaps it’s because of their masked faces and dainty habits; darting in quick, before the chunkier birds can retaliate, wheedling out a nut with their needle beak, then flying off to a quiet spot to safely feast on it. Recent studies by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) have shown that both blue and great tits lose up to 5% of their body weight each night in winter. An 11g blue tit must eat almost it’s own body weight every day in order to survive (the equivalent of 300 insects) and that non stop forage will take up to 85% of daylight hours.

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A visit by that most colourful of seed lovers, the goldfinch, always cheers. Unlike many other small birds its population has increased year on year over the last decade. Elegant Siskin and thick billed greenfinch come calling too, lured from their home territories in the great conifer forest a short flight away. Sunflower hearts and tiny black Niger seeds are their favourite fodder by far.

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Of the ground, a battery of beaks sweeps the frosty ground, between shy clumps of emerging snowdrops, picking up debris flung out of the feeder above. Prominent among these foragers are dunnock (hedge sparrow) blackbird and robin, all of which remain resident the year round. The sparrow gang and many of the tits absent themselves from our winter hangout for their summer getaway destinations. From observation I’ve concluded that they shift base to the broadleaf wooded valleys of the burns to our immediate north and south. (above) Those environments offer the best selection and supply of insects to feed their spring hatched broods.

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One lone visitor is in a class of its own. Watching a greater spotted woodpecker on a peanut holder is like witnessing an adult swinging on a child’s play seat. Fascinating to note this bold bird’s posture – tail as anchor point, body stock still while head hammer drills into the nuts. There’s a huge punch there, so little wonder all the small birds wing clear and leave him to it. Last autumn our rural community had an arranged power outage over two mornings while BT contractors, in a complex co-ordinated operation, removed and replaced telephone poles along our road. The reason? Over the years woodpeckers had exploited holes in the timber to excavate the interior tissues for food and to nest, rendering the poles unstable and prone to collapse.

A reminder, if you need one, that the annual RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch will be upon us weekend 29-31 Jan. More information here https://www.rspb.org.uk

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Silently, softly but nonetheless surprisingly, the morning light delivers a wide awake vista of snow covered field, woods and forest as far as the eye can see. And around here that’s quite a way, with more flakes flowing gently earthwards. Light traffic has forged ribbed tracks along the C road that angles the house and the occasional lit up log lorry looms out of the settling mist to creep cautiously by or neighbouring farmers in tractors ferrying round hay bales on mechanical forks for feeding stock, nothing much is moving at all over this beautiful winter white landscape.

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We remind ourselves the snow will not be settled long so we walk out, well wrapped up, taking in the detailed highlights and recording them as images. If any of the grandchildren were here we’d be sledging on our field but as they’re not one mustn’t let that stop one from having some seasonal fun so I dig out the red plastic sledge from the garage and head out. Zig-zagging a wild course down tussocky slopes, I end up a laughing heap before a sprawl of recently cut timber.

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A few weeks back a friend, with me labouring, took his chain saw to some intrusive leaning willows. The edge of a dense Carr (willow bog) here in the north burn’s valley, part of our neighbour’s land, where ducks gather and the guns can sometimes be heard hunting them. The trunks of these succouring trees have been gradually breaking down the boundary fence that secures stock kept on our land from wandering. When time and weather allow my mate and I will finish the job, staking out new poles and re-fixing the fallen strands of barbed wire. We’ll break down felled boughs into portable branches, which, back in the yard, I’ll gradually feed through the shredder. The resulting material makes for great garden mulch, especially in the copses and spinneys where it will intensify and quicken the woodland cycle of decay, fertility and growth.

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On one of the local wanders in the snow up the lane I clock a mature cream coloured cat furtively hunting the verges opposite Easterhouse’s yard.  I know such a distinctive feline does not claim any of our immediate neighbours farms as home. The next day, crunching across the yard, cat and me come face to startled face in the old rail goods wagon that serves as our garden hut. With no obvious route of escape the panicked puss leaped backward into the far corner, diving head first into a pile of flowerpots and sacks where it remained motionless, rear legs and tail stuck up in the air. Bemused, I stepped back and retreated. Later I put food in a bowl out to encourage our hungry visitor to return, but it did not, and like the snow a few days later disappeared from view, at least for now. A pity, because since our dear little Pip died in the autumn of 2019 we were half expecting a replacement to pad its way in from somewhere to claim vacant territory. We would value such a creature for its necessary vermin control role, in return for board & lodgings. Without any other agency a suitable cat has to find us and not the other way round. 

In this most curtailed of Christmas times we found a new way to make merry for a permitted day of family reunion….or rather, we rediscovered an old one. The Anglo Saxon term ‘wassail’ means ‘good health’ and in the cider producing areas of England at midwinter the country people would assemble to visit their dormant orchards to ritually see off bad spirits and invite in good ones. A frost and fire, essentially pagan community knees up, featuring libations of mulled cider, beer or punch and alcohol soaked bread, (literally, offering a toast) to the trees in hope of a bumper crop in the coming year.

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Our welcome visitors this precious day were family out from the city, an hours drive away. A great time to reintroduce some traditional festive fun with a (socially distanced) outdoor homage to the oldest tree in our young orchard – a slightly off beam Arthur Turner – the same age as the youngest grandchild, at 7 years. She and older brother, 10, loved the idea of bashing pots and ringing a bell, with licence to shout and scream to their hearts and throats capacity! Before that cacophonous climax I read an old wassailing verse, recorded as being sung by farmers and their labourers in Devon in the 1790’s

Here’s to thee, old apple-tree,
Whence thou mayest bud, and whence thou mayest blow
And when thou mayst bear apples enow
Hats full! Caps full!
Bushel-bushel-sacks full,
And my pockets full too!
Huzzah!

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And then we all sang the first verse of one of the most popular of the old wassailing songs, with its chorus.

Here we come a-wassailing among the leaves so green
Here we come a-wassailing so fair to be seen

Love and joy come to you and to you your wassail too
And God bless you and send you a happy new year
And God send you a happy new year.

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I was tempted to do what the chaps of old would have done and let off a round or two skywards through the branches, but somehow an air rifle soft ‘phut’ would never match a shotgun’s sharp blast! There are two wassailing traditions – the domestic and the horticultural. The former reflected the ancient tradition of rich households playing host to their humble tenants and dependents in the bleak midwinter, centred on the feast of christmas or new year’s eve, where begging was replaced by exchange of services – sing us a song and you’ll be rewarded with meat and drink. The song’s second verse catches that provision nicely:

We are not daily beggars that beg from door to door
but we are friendly neighbours who you have seen before

Today (2020 excepted) the domestic tradition has been largely overtaken and tamed by door to door carolling. In contrast the parallel ritual played out in orchards has enjoyed a healthy revival as more people immerse themselves in celebratory communal customs born of manual work practices and craft skills. Peak wassailing seems to take place mainly between Advent (Twelfth Night) up to mid month.

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As for our impromptu rural homage, we found it one of the highlights of the holiday, Nicely apt for time and place; providing some family fun, a chance to revive jaded spirits and look forward to a time of fruitful renewal, in all senses of the term.

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With the first real snow of winter comes that age old need to be out in it; making the best of the atmospheric high pressure that has brought us this gift of dry cold air and clear blue skies. The stretch of Hadrian’s Wall nearest our home is a short drive away at a junction off the B6318 (Military Road) where we pick up the official long distance path.

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There is something particularly poignant about a winter visit to the wall. Snowfall adds emphasis to the remains and its setting in the rolling highland landscape. The Roman army built their definitive frontier structure in the course of just three years two millennia back, and though breeched and bereft it remained pretty much intact for centuries until 1746. It was then that another professional army deconstructed large swathes of it, in the wake of the Jacobite rebellion, in order to build a military road linking the garrison towns of Carlisle and Newcastle.

The path at this point skirts a wood and square legs it around some rectangular mounds in a field, the remains of one of the wall’s many milecastles. The narrow pathway is stiff and frozen, yet there are eruptions of soft black soil cast up by moles. How do they manage it in such conditions? After crossing a farm access lane the views open up as we gradually ascend. Here ‘thin’ wall (8 Roman feet wide) meets ‘fat’ (10 feet) conjoined at a turret, indicating a change of plan by the engineers of AD 122, perhaps driven by cost saving or construction deadlines. A couple we pass on the other side joke that the wall is proving ideal these days for enforcing social distancing.

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The low line of masonry vanishes again before attaining the summit. We pass a graceful hawthorn, unusually symmetrical, branches stark black against snow. The high bank along which the military road runs at this point is a reminder of just how much of the wall lies buried as foundation beneath its metalled skin. Local Georgian landowners too took advantage of the structure’s small blocks of dressed stone to build simple but elegant farmhouses that still grace the land hereabouts.

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A trig point defines the heights and snow lies deep over uneven tricky ground. Continuing the line of the vallum (defensive ditch) here proved impossible even for the mighty Roman army, the hard dolerite rock being too hard to break down, so they gave up after 60 yards or so. This distinctive abutment, with its stone spoil, is the most northerly point on their 73 miles of coast-to-coast frontier.

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Stop to take in the wide prospect before us. The broad valley’s fertile farmland features ploughed fields and permanent pasture, hedges, woods and blocks of conifer. These estate landscapes gradually give way to rough grazing and upland fells ending with the far blue prospect of the Cheviot range and Scottish border. Meanwhile, just below, a kestrel hovers then swoops, putting me in mind of the legion’s imperial eagles that once oversaw all activity on these ridged and rugged highlands. We leave content; returning downhill as the afternoon’s lengthening shadows add enriched tones to a mottled canvas of sharp and shaded whites.

We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time. (T. S. Eliot, from Little Gidding)

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I met my partner Kim in 2010 and we spent the next seven years commuting between our respective homes in Northumberland and Lancaster. By 2016 I had produced the last shows under the Demi-paradise banner at Lancaster castle and the following May quit the city for the country. Having grown up in a market town and later a village on the western edges of Dartmoor, the son of working class parents, It felt absolutely right to be moving back into a truly rural community at this stage in my life.

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I’d ‘retired’ soon after reaching 65 from a ‘day job’ I’d held for eighteen years, tour guiding at the castle. I was still in that working phase when the response of old friends to my Facebook posts on natural history topics encouraged me to take it on from there. Most posts are about about this corner of the north-east though Lancaster, the South-west, Wales, the South-east and other places also feature. Notes and accompanying images were posted on this website (before it crashed last year) or over on Facebook (Stephen Tomlin and previously on This Other Eden pages). Meeting further friend requests I will be publishing simultaneously here and on FB.

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Actual place names are avoided when writing about the home patch in order to preserve my own and other people’s privacy or anonymity and to keep observations and commentaries as open as possible. To that end some place names have also been changed. All mistakes and oversights are mine and I’m happy to be corrected where I’ve got things wrong.

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I have sought to re-balance a long and satisfying working life with rediscovering the things that first peaked my interests and passions when growing up in the Devon countryside. I hope you enjoy what you read hereafter. You’ll find little that’s original or revolutionary. There are wonderful professional writers out there who are brilliant at doing just that and I love to read their work. No, I remain a happy amateur scribbler who loves where he’s ended up and the people he’s ended up with and tries to pay to one and all the respect and understanding due to them. In short, a simple online diary attempting to capture something of the character and qualities of This Other Eden….

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Maybe it was the two border collies that flushed the creature from forest floor to the upper canopy of a scots pine, but we came across their owner ahead of us on the trail, peering upwards and taking us into his confidence. ‘There, can you see it, up in the fork, it’s got its back to us?’. Well, we did, and rejoiced. A red squirrel, beautiful chestnut hues, tufted ears, and of course the fine feathery tail. ‘I’ve seen them in the forest when I was working but in the five years since it’s the first time I’ve spotted a single one around here’.

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His comments put me in mind of an encounter I had with red squirrels back in the autumn of 1992, in Madrid of all places. I watched their antics from a bench in the Retiro, the capital’s former royal park. There they appeared as ubiquitous as the grey squirrels we are so familiar with in the UK. The story of the American greys escape from captivity at the Duke of Bedford’s Woburn estate in the late 19^th century, and their subsequent nationwide colonisation, is a well known one. The bigger, bolder Greys carry ‘squirrel pox’ which has little effect on them but has devastated the population of native reds. They also compete for vital food sources. Squirrels as a species do not hibernate and survive by foraging and relying on their secreted autumn stores during winter. Greys have better memories apparently so can more reliably recall where they hid their nuts and other foodstuffs, so tend to fare better.

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Today a population of between 120 – 140,000 reds are confined to the most remote parts of the UK countryside, with some three quarters of their number found in Scotland. The isolated strongholds in England are mainly in the north and range from the dunes and pinewoods around Formby on the Lancashire coast to the great forest on our doorstep. Kielder in fact is home to some 50% of England’s total. On previous walks here, at the forest’s edge of mixed woodlands & waterway, I’d sensed, if not seen, the illusive reds. Their ‘dinner tables’ of moss covered trees stumps (pictured) are often littered with the chewed remains of the pinecones they favour.

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I remember a retired forester friend tells me that some years ago the Forestry Commission replanted with native deciduous trees after harvesting and clearing blocks of conifer. The wildlife corridors subsequently created worked only too well in speeding up ingress by greys into the territory of the conifer preferring reds! That may have been a battle lost but the war goes on. I know landowners who trap and dispose of greys on their patch. (pictured) A natural solution though to controlling their numbers may also lie in the spread south  from Scotland of the indigenous pine marten, which is known to predate them successfully.  

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Our farming neighbours at Southridge tell me they spotted both species in late 2020 – a red running a stone wall to go feeding on apple windfalls, with a grey running into their shelter belt of pines a few weeks later. Reds also spotted by neighbours in the deciduous woods (mainly birch, oak and ash) in the valley of the burn flowing out of the forest a half mile north of us. At this time of year the male is seeking a partner so potentially a good time to see chasing pairs. I reported our sighting to Red Squirrel Northern England (RSNE), an umbrella conservation body led by the Wildlife Trusts. If you live in the north and spy a red squirrel why not visit the RSNE website and leave the simple few details they ask for? It only takes a couple of minutes and your arrow on the map will help the conservationists and scientists further their work: https://www.rsne.org.uk/