Vouga voyage

August 28, 2025August 28, 2025 ~ stephentomlin ~ Leave a comment

Recently returned from a week’s holiday in the valley of the River Vouga, mid-way between its outlet at Aveiro on the coast and the city of Viseu near its source in the Serra Lapa.

Like the other major rivers of Portugal The Vouga runs its 148 KM course from east in the mountains to the Atlantic in the west. It was once a major transport route for countryside produce; from wines, granite, metals and timber to fruit and other agricultural produce. (In the 17^th Century most of their oranges were exported to England) By 1913, a train line had replaced the inland river boats, which in turn gave way to EU funded new roads that twist and turn above the Vouga’s sinuous green waterways. We enjoyed three separate outings sampling distinctive phases of the river’s flow and topography.

Took a fun day out to swell the ranks of other tourists milling around ‘The Venice of Portugal’, as the city centre of old Aveiro is dubbed. A major port in late medieval times it later became famous for commercial salt abstraction, fishing and seaweed harvesting.

Ria Aviero ecosystem image credit: CESAM

The extensive lagoon and dune ecosystem of the Ria de Aviero, as this estuarial stage of the Vouga is known, now enjoys international status as a major bird sanctuary, home to some 20,000 overwintering wildfowl, the most photogenic of which being pink flamingos.

Trips around the centre’s canal system are a must and the colourfully decorated flat bottomed barges – Molicheiros – that once carried seaweed, salt and general goods now carry human cargo on 45 – 60’ guided excursions.

Unsurprisingly, the last fishing lofts lining the canals have finally closed and are being developed into luxury waterside apartments.

Back on land we visited an Art Nouveau house, now a museum with fine decorative detail, one of many tasteful villas that reflect an early C20th era of increased wealth and pride amongst its leading merchants.

The other end of the Vouga could not be more different. Foreign tourists like us were in short supply here in the mountains, probably because of the limited visitor attractions to lure people up from the popular coastal strip and dangerously high summer temperatures. The Upper Beira region suffered badly last September from wildfires, causing evacuations and widespread disruption, and we sensed a nervousness even now, lest they return.

We stopped off at the Ribeirado dam and looked along the 14km long reservoir it created. It was built earlier this century to supply hydroelectric power, ease flooding and increase scarce water reserves. The road runs along the broad arc of the high dam wall, the power station and its infrastructure far below, where the river re-emerges. With the sheer valley walls either side the whole presents as a peerless study in concrete.

The brightest objects encountered in this uniformly grey spot were the red, blue and yellow recycling bins in the car park. Ominously, the control tower in the reservoir emitted flashing light and warning noises every few minutes. If this location were to feature in a future James Bond film or dystopian TV drama it would not surprise us. A perfect setting of its kind.

Another day we walked the middle reaches of the river. Was keen to access an upper trackway I’d clocked above the road while driving to our holiday accommodation nearby.

As suspected this was once a single track railway. Built just before WW1 it closed in 1980 and its repurposed state, the former Vale Das Voltas line offers superb viewpoints of the valley.

Our parking place by the road revealed a picnic table made from a single slab of local granite set under the awning of a mature horse chestnut tree. Masses of richly purpled convolvulus – bindweed – curled around the wood rails.

The track is understandably popular with cyclists, yet we only encountered four other pedestrians on our amble to and from the route’s spectacular highlight, the Santiago rail bridge at Pessegueiro do Vouga. It’s one of the highest stone masonry bridges in Portugal, with eleven arches and 165m high deck, gracefully spanning river and wooded slopes.

Our walk revealed a stark reminder of last year’s big burn. Blackened trunks and boughs in abundance. A contentious issue in these parts is the preponderance of silvery leaved eucalyptus trees, commercially planted to supply nearby works with biomass and extracted oils. That process is also understood to cause environmental air pollution.

This alien tree, of Australian origin, successfully sustains itself on steep slopes with minimum moisture and burns easily. Eucalyptus rapidly colonises cleared land post fire and is hard, if not impossible, to eradicate.

Our walk ended ‘off line’. Carefully crossing the white walled switchback of a highway, we descended to the quiet stillness of river bank and cooling shade of willow and alder that thrive here on its stony floodplain.

This middle stretch of the Vouga is officially designated a ‘Site of Community Interest’. That means minor blockages like weirs that present obstacles for migrating species of trout, eel, shad, barbel, lamprey or mullet are being gradually removed and in some places fish passes are being installed. Otters, birds of prey and many other species of birds and insects are also able to thrive here where human habitation is scarcer.

Delighted in encountering dragonflies and butterflies I waded barefoot in and allowed the hundreds of trout fry mingling in the sunlit shallows to continue feeding and flitting around my feet. A cooling calm end to our lovely lone amble under the afternoon sun.

Bountiful Berwickshire

August 14, 2025 ~ stephentomlin ~ Leave a comment

We’re recently back from a celebratory weekend away, organised in secret as a gift to share with the significant other. Found a place near enough to drive to easily but far enough away to make for a proper countryside adventure. Some highlights then, as follows.

We arrived in Berwickshire, in the wide valley of the River Tweed and its tributary the Whiteadder, for our stay in the village pub at Allanton. All around the area huge combines, tractors and trailers were cutting, winnowing, baling and carrying off barley and specialist wheat. They continued late into the night, headlights glowing, growling over wide rolling fields with the lanes alive to traffic up to midnight. A fascinating contrast for us who live in the grassy uplands of west Northumberland where log lorries and tipper trucks loaded with gravel for forest roads are the big beasts of rural transport.

We sat out in the pub’s pleasant back garden with a refreshing pint before supper gazing over a scene of blond stubble and waving grain, shadows stretching to far woodlands, the land glowing warm under a setting sun. The Allanton Inn really is at the heart of its rural community. A family run business, part of an ecosystem of small independent local producers and suppliers, proud of their good food offer – from honey and ice cream to meat and eggs – as we were to partake of it. The perfect relaxed hostelry from which to explore this side of the border.

This is a land of big estates and large farms, the metal and concrete barns mostly modern and huge enough to properly house mountains of grain and straw. The population is much sparser now than it would have been in the pre-machine agrarian age. It’s extraordinary to note that within the radius of a couple of miles some of the great figures of the Scots enlightenment were born and grew up. These include the moral philosopher David Hume, geologist James Hutton and botanist and populariser of the tea plant, Robert Fortune.

Most touchingly of all is the story of the least known of these worthies and the revolutionary device he freely gifted to agriculture, one that would help fashion the arable landscape around us today. In the 1770’s local engineer James Small used a smithy on the former Blackadder estate at Allanton, using mathematics to experiment on different mouldboards, curvatures and patterns to produce his improvement on the ‘Rotherham’ cast iron swing plough. Previously many men were needed to work teams of oxen to pull a flat wooden plough while Small’s only required a pair of shire horses and a single ploughman to operate. Small even demonstrated his invention to ‘Farmer’ George III and his ‘Scots Plough’ was rapidly copied and developed by others as he not wish to profit from his invention by taking out a patent and sadly died in 1793 of overwork and poverty. Modern day embroiders have honoured his memory as James and the plough feature as one of the wonderful metre square panels in the Great Tapestry of Scotland, on permanent display in Galashiels.

Situated on the eastern edges of the Lammermuir hills, below the lofty summit of Cockburn Law and overlooking a steep valley sits Edin’s Hall Broch. It was the high point of a circular five mile walk we took over fields, through woods, along tracks and heathland paths.

We made two separate crossings of the infant River Whiteadder by ford and footbridge. Summer picturesque as the scene was, one could imagine the place when the waters were in spate. The road sign at Abbey St Bathans reminds drivers of the risks.

Brochs – ancient fortified tower houses – are usually found in the highlands and far north of Scotland so the one here is something of a geographical oddity. Our slow climb to reach it enhanced by seeing male wall brown and small copper butterflies basking in the sun and fluttering ahead as we climbed through swathes of tall bracken.

Dated to the 1^st century AD what really lends Edin’s Hall broch a sense of wonder is that so much stone remains to define its walls, wide enough to incorporate chambers and stairs. The centre point gives a 360 degree experience of what was once a whole community’s secure home and stores, standing at least two levels high and probably roofed with timber. Hard by the broch are remains of later hut circles, ditches and ramparts. Awed as we were we couldn’t help wondering though where its inhabitants would have sourced their water supply, with not a spring in sight.

Picking up a metalled lane diving down into the wooded valley bottom we came upon this weathered sign at a hairpin bend. The only thing near a toot we heard on the descent was from the occasional whirr of spokes or tinkling bells as racing cyclists shot by with friendly waves. Like them we appreciated a rest break at the friendly informal tearooms in the old stables of the original village woodyard by the river. We can testify that the home baked fruit scones are superb.

Every few years sees us on a return visit to Berwick. A preamble along the massive Elizabethan ramparts leads literally ‘off the wall’ into the multi-storied Granary gallery, a former Georgian warehouse on the quay overlooking the three great bridges, monuments of different centuries, that carry road and rail links across the great border river.

The retrospective exhibition we’d come to see at the Granary was of the respected artist, teacher and plantsman Cedric Morris (1889-1982). We found it something of a mixed bag. His flower painting, especially of Irises, remain glorious testimony to his knowledge and ecological awareness. The best known self-portrait and studies of Parisian café life in the 1920’s insightful and sensual.

The art that really moved us though was on the seafront across the border at Eyemouth. In October of 1881 a terrible storm wreaked havoc on the Berwickshire coast, and 189 local fishermen were drowned, leaving behind 78 widows and 182 children. The town’s fortunes went into long term decline in the wake of this, Scotland worst recorded fishing disaster.

‘Widows and Bairns’ represents real people, arranged in groups above the name of their boats. Sculpted by Jill Watson and cast by Powderhall Bronze it opened in 2016. We watched visiting families stop and talk about the story. The best kind of public art, rooted in people’s history, powered in this instance by tragic drama to command our attention and stimulate conversation.

In the 21^st century, the community here has been embracing eco based industries and sustainable tourism and this attractive harbourside town – like Berwick across the border – seems on the cusp of change for the better. The broader Eyemouth story is well told in the delightful volunteer run museum housed in a former church.

We also enjoyed taking a leisurely stroll along the narrow harbour around the mouth of the river Eye with its working fishing boats, quayside processing plants and local produce stalls. (kipper rolls anyone?) These merge with an array of smart locally based retail businesses (excellent Italian ice creams), the sandy town beach and restored stone jetty with its bright red handrails and fine prospect.

A little further up the rocky coast lies St Abb’s Head, named for a Northumbrian princess who founded a monastery here, now long lost, following her safe delivery from shipwreck. Fittingly a lighthouse, dating from the 1860’s and built by the Stevenson family (who else?), still casts its powerful light from the head. Unusually, it is tucked into the cliff below the lighthouse keepers cottages (now holiday accommodation) as the higher ground above and beyond has always been prone to mist and rain, obscuring vision at sea. Hence the red painted fog horn, seen below.

If we’d been here in late Spring we’d have witnessed the vast flocks of gannets, razorbills, gannets, kittiwakes and other seabirds that crowd the nursery rockfaces and for which the bird reserve is nationally renowned. Their guano, whitening the masses of red blue sandstone rocks, is striking but the birds and their fledglings were no longer in evidence this bright breezy morning in August. Instead masses of house martins dominated the clear blue skies above small bobbing boats filled with visitors tasking in the awesome sea level view of this spectacular headland.

Our return leg, mostly along the single track lighthouse access road, revealed a stunning surprise vista of more cliffs running northwards. Once out of the severe wind tunnel blast between those cliffs and St Abb’s head, the path drew us away into the calm serenity of a narrow fresh water loch in a ravine fringed with reed and sheltered by woods. The National Trust for Scotland run the excellent visitor centre in an old farm complex where we parked to start and finish our wonderfully rewarding four mile trek.

Recently shorn cheviot sheep at St Abb’s head

Marvellous Moths

August 8, 2025August 8, 2025 ~ stephentomlin ~ Leave a comment

Humming bird hawk moth. Image credit: Butterfly Conservation /Graham Mounteney

Mention the word ‘moths’ to people and I suspect the majority are likely to think about those nasty critters whose larvae consume clothes or chew carpets. I confess to being a bit indifferent to moths in general until I saw a humming bird hawk moth in my town garden years back. That remarkable encounter made me sit up and take note yet it wasn’t until I moved back to the country that I eventually got actively involved this spring in entering the world of the amateur lepidopterists.

There are some 50 species of butterflies and 2,600 species of moth in the UK. Roughly 900 of those are macro moths and the rest a bewildering range of micro moths, many virtually indistinguishable one from t’other to the non-expert eye.

Where to start when trapping and identifying specimens? Online research around the options makes for a good start. Thinking through what best suits your situation when matched with what’s affordable and you’re ready to proceed. There are three main types of moth trap, named after the experts who devised them. The Heath trap consists of a collapsible rectangular metal box with a funnel and fluorescent UV bulb. The larger Skinner trap has a slot entrance below the light. The Robinson is a large round, non-collapsible trap, most likely to catch and retain the largest number of moths. It’s also the most expensive to buy. I opted for the Heath model.

I nearly got a version powered by an extension run from the house mains. On reflection thought that a daft idea as the more places to set the trap of an evening around the garden (or beyond) would be a much better proposition. So I also bought a battery and charger. It’s proved a great investment, not only giving me pleasure as well as visiting friends and family, young and old alike.

My first and most numerous species caught, back in April, was ‘Hebrew Character’; so called from the dark marks on its forewings that look like letters in Hebrew script. They’ve now been replaced as most numerous by a scrum of large yellow underwings, clustering in a gang around the egg boxes I’ve furnished the floor of the steel box with.

Although Latin nomenclature is essential in classification worldwide it is surely the common names, reflecting archetypical characteristics, that catch the imagination and lodge in one’s mind. Here are a few favourites:

Burnished brass. Small, widely distributed, lover of damp places, feeds on low lying plants like red valerian, honeysuckle and buddleia…all of which we have in the garden. The wonderful metallic sheen on the forewings is a entrancing sight.

Wainscot. Named for resemblance of wings to the ribbed wood raised panels of interior walls, introduced in Tudor times. The caterpillars of this common moth feed on grasses and our meadow and surrounding pastureland provides ample acreage.

The Herald. Scalloped broad forewings and splashes of orange colouring give this medium size moth a distinct dynamic appearance hinting at speed with a purpose. It overwinters in barns and outbuildings and we have both. The caterpillars feed on willow trees and again no shortage of them hereabouts. Small resident birds like tits and robins we see working wands of willow in the spring are probably feeding on the larvae of the many species of moths and other insects that live there.

Riband wave. I love the poetry of the name reflecting the subtle patterning of its wings displayed when at rest, drawing on the imagery of a sandy seashore.

The Antler. The pale markings on the forewings resemble deer antlers. This medium size moth is at home here in upland moorland country, its caterpillars feeding on acid grasslands. The antler also flies in the daytime, feeding on thistles and ragworts.

Poplar Hawkmoth. Sure to wow any observer when first sighted. Varieties of hawkmoth, like their avian namesakes, spread their wings and the large size and studied stillness never fails to impress. Most of my specimens (or the same ones recaptured) feature when the trap is left near the mature poplar tree in the east end copse.

As spring turned to summer the moth count increased in variety and number. Warm, still, humid nights with good cloud cover tended to produce the greatest number of captives. I discovered that when the trap was set in amongst shrubbery and trees it upped the number and variety even more. Some species flew off immediately on opening the container in the morning but the vast majority remained static, happy to linger, having to be emptied out at the same collecting spot once recorded.

One morning one of the parent swallows nesting in the eaves above the porch where I’d parked the open trap, flew down and snapped up an unfortunate escapee as it fluttered skywards. Daytime insect feeding birds apart, bats are the main nocturnal predators, and these we see regularly so the numbers of insects must be high enough to sustain populations, which is good. Nationally, the situation is not so good. There’s been a worrying decrease in UK macro moth numbers in recent decades, much of that due to human activity, and that has had a knock on effect in the wider ecosystem.

So far I’ve identified around 50 species in this Northumberland garden. Use of the phone camera has proved invaluable as it utilises AI to help identify a subject by family or common name; a real boon to beginners like me. Bernard Skinner (he of the trap) produced ‘Moths of the British Isles’ handbook, a definitive colour identification guide, back in 1984. My updated ex-library copy is still invaluable too, with 1,600 of the UK’s moth specimens recorded, with very useful notes. There are lots of good guidebooks out there so well worth investing in one. Triangulate by visiting excellent online sites too, like Butterfly Conservation charity https://butterfly-conservation.org/ or joining a Facebook moth trapping group.

A fascinating element of moth survival technique is camouflage. Some species I’ve come across when trapping are past masters at the art. The Buff tip for example. At rest its wings are held almost vertically against the body with two buff area in front of the thorax (body) at the tip of the forewings. Looks like a twig or chipping. Colouration varies but its favoured tree is birch, into whose bark it merges. On the wing from May to July, it’s one to marvel at.

A problem gardeners like us who have an orchard is probably more alarming than deadly. The apple ermine moth lays its caterpillars on apple trees. The ghostly tent like web that surrounds the larvae give protection from bird predation but the caterpillars devour the leaves and can denude the tree and restrict budding. I’ve had to carefully peel off and destroy the tent caterpillars found in our trees each spring.

When I came across the handsome white ermine moths in the trap I mistook it for its cousin causing the problem so was relieved to discover the difference when looking it up. Appearances are more obvious when you see them together.

The white ermine’s caterpillars live in webbed tents feeding on nettle, dock and other common vegetation. Apparently this medium size moth has few predators because it is highly poisonous. (But not to humans if touched). Like some other moth species they have another defence mechanism against predators; dropping, seemingly lifeless from their perch, into undergrowth beneath.

I’ll look forward to what the autumn brings to the moth mix. As one observer remarked, ‘trapping is like a lucky dip for adults’. For me it’s yet another strand to an understanding of the wonders that surround us in the world wide web of nature and the farmed environment.

Hanging Stones

July 4, 2025July 5, 2025 ~ stephentomlin ~ Leave a comment

When it comes to rest and recreation it pays to walk. The health and wellbeing benefits are obvious. It’s not so often though that you pay to walk. But that’s what we did a few weeks ago. And for a very good reason.

The Hanging Stones art project is unique. Ten restored or rebuilt former agricultural buildings, each containing a bespoke art installation, situated in the heart of the North Yorkshire Moors National Park, all linked by a 6 mile walk. It’s the creation of one of the UK’s – and indeed the world’s – leading sculptural landscape artists, Andy Goldsworthy. His long working relationship with stone dates back to time spent as a teenage farm labourer, maintaining and repairing dry stone walls in his native Yorkshire.

Our party of five was one of four groups of no more than six members booked each day. The trail begins and ends in the village of Roseland Abbey. Parties set out every two hours along public paths, tracks and bridleways into the increasingly steep sided valley that is Northdale, defined on both sides by high bare moorland. At the highest point we saw the group ahead descending and those behind us ascending.

In his 2018 prospectus Goldsworthy wrote: ‘The walk is an integral part of Hanging Stones, the artery by which people will give life to the buildings….It will be both discreet and dramatic. Visible to those who know it is there and hidden to those that don’t’.

The Roseland Abbey area has a long history of mining and quarrying although tourism, agriculture and field sports appear to provide most employment income these days. The highest part of our walk was on a permissive path that threaded through the source waters of the north beck, on whose steep bracken and heather clad slopes stand a dozen or more shooting butts. Returning along the lower valley floor we skirted an immaculately kept shooting lodge, currently under wraps, awaiting the open season in August.

This project clearly could not have happened without the approval and financial backing of the area’s main landowner, the Rosedale Estate, a 4,000 acre commercial grouse moor. Most of the North York Moors is owned by the King as Duke of Lancaster but this particular holding belongs to Carphone Warehouse founder David Ross. His philanthropic foundation supports arts, educational and sports activities. http://www.davidrossfoundation.co.uk/

With the buy in of the local community, the foundation and the National Park Authority, Goldsworthy’s vision and consummate skill has harnessed all the necessary elements to produce an outstanding example of renewal within a protected upland landscape. Work started in 2019 after a struggle to accommodate the proposal to the strict planning laws governing national parks it was given permission to proceed. The result is emotionally charged and thought provoking in its playful linked exposition.

Goldsworthy says: ‘One of the rationales for working with buildings is that sound, atmosphere and materials are amplified when experienced inside a confined space’ That sense of theatre, which also invokes the atmosphere of a shrine or chapel, is the hallmark of the most effective of the interiors. Dramatic use of natural light and intense application of materials or textures onto the building fabric is fantastic.

From weave of rusted barbed wire to powdered ochre paint, burnt boughs to woven logs or light bending thicket of poles in gravel – each environment works its rough magic, drawing you into a sensual response.

The barn that displays the eponymous hanging stone – all 11 tonnes of it – is brilliant testimonial to structural engineering that teases visual perception of mass in space.

Elsewhere a new build barn traverses the ruin of an old farmhouse floor where the mosaic of concrete and broken flags yield clues of former occupation. This put me in mind of Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘The Self-Unseeing’ whose opening lines run: Here is the ancient floor / Footworn and hollowed and thin,/ Here was the former door/ Where the dead feet walked in.

We enjoyed our packed lunches at the ramble’s half way point, following a steep upward scramble through swathes of bilberry covered moorland slopes. Here a large table sits in a little house perched on the open moor’s cusp. Through the open door on a clear day we enjoyed fine views across the high moorland plateau and cleave of dale spread out below.

Passing the shorn trunk of a wayside ash at one point I noted the cut section and wondered if this was an incidental wayside art work or just some essential tree surgery.

Goldsworthy’s attention to detail helps seal the overall impression. His way markers are subtle oval metal markers set into stone gateposts, some of which also feature small square through holes.

We spoke to a friendly farmer who asked if we were enjoying the art works. Later we saw him rounding up sheep with his collies astride a quad. I suspect he, like many here, are pleased to see redundant buildings restored and repurposed. Later, passing by another farm, we were presented with a picture book collection of ducks, geese, lambs, calves, dogs and goats, all putting up a cacophonous chorus of sound, much to our delight.

Cistercian nuns founded a priory in 1258 at Roseland, establishing the wool trade which sustained them up to dissolution in 1539. In more recent times, from the 1850’s – 1920’s, high quality magnetic iron stone mining became the principal industry. On leaving we passed abandoned roasting kilns atop the valley’s precipitous Chimney Bank road, but with gradients of up to 33% it felt wise not to stop.

I came away from this remarkable walk with a deeper understanding of how Goldsworthy and his collaborators created these amazing site specific art works, utilising natural local materials to complement and enhance a sensitive and highly protected rural environment.

It proved a memorable immersive experience in which we as visitors are part of the synergy generated within each of those boxes of delight. Like all great art the effects are cumulative, resonating and lingering in the imagination long after actual contact.

The complex, often contradictory issues and compromises involved in the planning, funding and execution of this project has intrigued me almost as much as the actual installations themselves. I feel that’s worth a tenner of anyone’s money, to allow one the chance to walk in wonder, to witness and reflect on a particular genius of place and time.

If you are able to experience Hanging Stones for yourself I’d urge you do so. Along with a set time on the allotted day you get a map and key that unlocks each building. Moderate map reading skills and stamina are needed, depending on seasonal weather conditions. Demand is high though. We hear that there’s no availability until February 2026.

More information and to book: https://hangingstones.org/

Apart from Plants

June 29, 2025 ~ stephentomlin ~ Leave a comment

But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye. (Kipling)

My wife’s the gardener and I’m staff. It’s an old joke and together we love and care for our horticultural patch all year round. The never ending work generates pleasure and many rewards in its wake. Small corners of our spread add up to a whole box of garden delights, especially now in mid-summer when everything is so lush. Ornamental additions enjoy a special status, being either useful or decorative and are rooted in time and place.

Garden seat. There are a few different sorts set around the place which get used regularly. This old metal one I moved to the ponds earlier this year has not been used, as you can plainly see. Nevertheless the incidental invasion of monkeyflower and woundwort in a benignly neglected corner draws and cheers the eye.

Julius Ceaser We go back a long way, from when I bought my last house in Lancaster a quarter century ago. His handsome bust, made of something akin to coade stone, is a class act and he remains eternally contemplative and unfazed. The emperor cheered my tiny terraced house yard garden in Lancaster and here a few miles north of the Roman wall he lives discreetly amongst fern and hosta under a potted apple tree by our own stone wall.

Stave Basket. A gift for the gardener a few years back to remind us of times together in my home county of Devon. The maker has his workshop and 10 acres of ancient coppice woodland which he works with heavy horses on the other side of Dartmoor from where I grew up. Traditional Devon stave baskets come in different sizes for different tasks. This one has ash for handles and fixing of fir splints. We gather apples and other fruit with it, or in this case a mixed cut of elderflowers for the annual making of cordial.

Wooden Henge Another pressie for the gardener. This I got from a friend whose garden was playfully adorned with wood and metal salvaged pieces. I asked him to keep an eye out for something grey and weathered which I knew would appeal and he turned up one day with this jointed piece of oak beam from a ruin. It now stands embedded in the lawn bank border by stone steps. It’s favoured by opportunist robins keeping an eye on gardening activity in hopes of a juicy worm or two surfacing.

Watering Can I was thrilled to inherit a vintage BSA air rifle a few years back and have subsequently relived those far off days with my brother shooting tin can targets with his identical gun. Visitors these days – especially the younger males – like to try their chances hitting the old watering can, which resides on the field gate post. It gives a satisfying resonating ‘thung’ when hit and doesn’t topple over.

Green Man. Like Julius, he sits tight in a mass of greenery and represents the spirit of nature and seasonal renewal in our happy half acre. Delighted to come across him when last on holiday in the county of my birth, in an artisan workshop cum gift shop at Polperro.

Heart’s Wave We were blessed with a lovely range of thoughtful generous wedding presents in 2021. This distinctive gift was extra special because the young forester, son of one of our farming neighbours, tasked with clearing dead timber at work cut this section for us as he could see the heart and/or wave in the stump and thought we might like it. Like it? We love it and it’s out there every day, weathering nicely….A little like the pair of us, I hope

A Nest of Singing Birds

June 10, 2025June 10, 2025 ~ stephentomlin ~ Leave a comment

‘Years ago every village in England was a nest of singing birds and the folksingers of today are the last of a line that stretches back into the mists of far off days…an unbroken survival of pagan observances and a musical inheritance of priceless worth.’: Cecil Sharp

I love what is termed ‘retirement’ and all the pleasures and opportunities for activities and socialising that it brings. But, every now and then, a work project comes out of the blue and the most recent proved more leisure than work, a unique opportunity to re-visit a happy past and bring it to life in a new way.

In 2008 I was employed to play the folk music and dance revivalist Cecil Sharp in a Heritage Lottery funded project in the village of Winster in the Derbyshire Dales. Sharp had travelled by train from his home in London in June of 1908 to research the Winster Gallop and other Morris tunes peculiar to the village and practised by the lead miners who made up most of the local dance team.

I was friends with fellow actor David Frederickson, a former resident of Winster. We’d met when working together on an ITV Docudrama about the 1984 IRA Brighton Bombing and he’d also performed as Polonius in my company’s production of Hamlet at Lancaster Castle. David thought me a perfect fit for Cecil Sharp so I joined him and another locally based colleague, Sue Daniels, to put on his play ‘A Nest of Singing Birds’ as part of Winster’s ‘Look Sharp’ weekend festival.

David’s play covered not only the great man’s visit to the village but the story of his interaction with those singers, dancers and fellow travellers who featured alongside in the revival of folk song and dance during the early years of the 20^th century. Cecil Sharp (1859- 1924) collected some 5,000 songs and tunes over 20 years and despite the contradictions and personal conflicts over methods, attitudes and philosophy which typified the age he left a priceless musical legacy to the nation.

‘Look Sharp’ was a very successful community celebration in 2008 and our fully integrated participation as performers replicated most of what had happened a century previously, including a steam train arrival at nearby Darley Bridge station, Sharp’s introduction to lead mining history, a carriage ride up the hill and visit to the local school. The festival went one better in showcasing not only the village Morris side but five more from around the country who’d travelled to join us.

Our good friends and collaborators at Buxton based theatre company Babbling Vagabonds had fashioned the fabulous giant stick puppets, likenesses of traditional characters associated with the Morris, in association with local primary schools, and students from the local secondary school made a great short film documenting the event. The giant puppets headed the street procession to the playing fields where the entertainment, including our play, was performed in and around the big tent.

Seventeen years on from 2008 – in late May this year – our company was re-united to make a live recording of David’s wonderful entertainment in front of a live audience in the village hall, the Burton Institute.

The locals had secured extra Heritage lottery funding to ensure a permanent record of ‘A Nest of Singing Birds’, professionally staged and recorded, would be held in local archives available to all.

Our brilliant sound engineer, based at an arts centre in Derby, was Richard McKerron and his high spec recording equipment impressed us all, along with the skill he demonstrated as a musician himself rigging and recording our live event on the night of Saturday 31^st May..

The musical element of our show was of course key. Re-joining David, Sue and myself to perform were our original musicians – folk concertina player Keith Kendrick and partner and co-singer Sylvia Needham. Funds allowed us on this occasion to be joined by Josh Wood. (He as it happens was one of the children involved at Winster school back in 2008).

Josh’s piano accompaniment was the perfect companion to Keith’s concertina. Sharp’s dilemma as collector and propagator lay in transposing the authentic folk music accompaniment -represented here by the concertina – to that of the drawing room or classroom, and the piano in our production would speak eloquently to that transition as well as providing underscoring of text at key moments.

During breaks from rehearsal David – now back as a resident – showed me around Winster. Its attraction for me lies not just in the grander wide main street with its varied multi-storied older properties but in the three dimensional interlocking of domestic buildings on the steeply rising hillside behind.

The village has an integrated fabric of stone structures with a maze of lanes, paths & ginnels between them. Today’s restored cottages once housed extensive families of miners, quarrymen, labourers and artisans. The verdant valley location sets the whole off perfectly.

Like many other Derbyshire Dales settlements Winster has a remarkable community spirit. This is exemplified not just by our one off production but by the shop and post office, community run for the past two decades. Wakes Week and Secret Gardens open days were in the offing and David told me that the village used to feature regularly as location in the TV soap Peak Practice.

We ambled down a pretty lane lined with terraced cottages to the valley bottom and tried out the impressive outdoor gym equipment (perfect for pensioners like us) and admired the fine community orchard and pond beyond. The former boasts local varieties of fruit, the latter alive with tadpoles wriggling in the shallows while a family of moorhens were splashing over lilies or diving between stands of flag iris.

Another ramble of discovery led Sue, Richard & myself above the village to gain panoramic views over meadow rich grazing, tumbled stone walls and ruined barns. Our gradual descent brought us by rambling roses and dense bushy thickets. Nearby were remains of the lead workings which fuelled the 18^th century industrial boom that made Winster the biggest, most prosperous town in the Dales at that time.

After three days of rehearsal and setting up we played to a fabulously receptive full house on the Saturday night there in the Burton Institute and despite a couple of technical hitches, which required some re-recording, it went with a swing. Words and music flowed and built beautifully, creating a great atmosphere that left everybody happy as could be, as the applause and sea of smiling faces at the end testified. A pint at the Bowling Green pub afterwards went down a treat as the performance had left us all with a fine thirst!

Bumped into more audience members the next day as we indulged in a leisurely breakfast in neighbouring Elton’s village hall. Local volunteers cooked and served a superb fry up in a bunting draped Victorian hall; visitors and locals alike full of laughter, chatter and general bonhomie.

Later, back in Winster, I joined Keith and Sylvia for tea and cakes outside the parish church. Both catering events are regular Sunday summer dates to raise funds for their respective heritage buildings.

I came home on the train from Chesterfield comforted and grateful for such a joyful and welcoming immersion in community culture, thankful for the rarest of treats as a performer in being re-united with colleagues to record a piece performed all those years earlier. It also amused me that for the first time ever a character I played would feature on the publicity poster and tickets…a career first!

Dingle: Dun, Bee & Boat

June 6, 2025 ~ stephentomlin ~ Leave a comment

The distinctive peninsulas that characterise this south west corner of Ireland present challenges to the modern day tourist, with cars and coaches traversing narrow twisting roads. Meanwhile the locals have to put up with peak season congestion as they go about their everyday business. It’s lucky then that nobody seems in a hurry to get anywhere fast.

The Dingle peninsula boasts over 2,000 historical monuments and that reflects its remote location and farming way of life over thousands of years. Rocks cleared from patchworks of land built drystone field walls and farmhouses that distinguish this rugged landscape.

The ancient inhabitants of the peninsula were skilled in using the water as their sea roads. These would also have been trade routes and their culture and artefacts reflect that. We were lucky enough to get some sense of their world from the handful of sites visited on our traverse of the 38k/24 mile circular route marketed for tourist purposes as the Slea Head Drive. As advised we drove clockwise, with the traffic and not against it.

A Mountain range dominates the centre of the 48k/30m long peninsula, ending at the westernmost point in Ireland around Dunmore Head. It was here in 1588 that two of the remaining ships of the Spanish Armada’s failed invasion of England were tragically wrecked. The narrow road in and out of Dingle town, its busy main population centre, hugs the jagged coastline by cove cliff and beach.

Dun Beag (‘small fort’) on the cliffs at Fahan has a beautifully created visitor centre inspired by traditional vernacular design. Here we watched an introductory film while sitting in the dark on animal hides in an intimate environment, suggesting the domestic interior of the 5,000 year old promontory fort below.

The streamside path leading to the fort with its massively wide dry stone walls is unexpectedly graced by lilies, while the bare sea cliffs below sport patches of thrift.

Storm damage this century has been extensive and fences now secure the site from over enthusiastic exploration but it still exudes a strong sense of its ancient role guarding the wild sea ways. This once formidable stronghold created was in the Iron Age, though archaeological evidence suggests Dun Beag remained in use between 8^th – 11^th centuries.

A short drive westwards brought us to the a group of Clochlans, better known because of their shape as beehive huts. Dating from the early medieval period they were home to Christian communities of farmers and fisherfolk and are remarkably well preserved. We learned that although significant historic monuments like these belong to the state, owners of the land have the right to grant paid access to the public.

Here the huts are part of a wider offer by Aiden, the occupying farmer and his family, to feed lambs and watch sheep dogs at work. A nice line in farming for tourism in the C21^s. Good on them.

Beyond this compact set of interlinked dwellings I glimpsed another cluster higher up the hill and the farmer’s dad (who it turned out had spent most of his working life in England as a labourer), told me access rights were in dispute and the owners were keeping it as was and unvisited. He felt those buildings were even more complete and whole than their own.

Our trio of antiquities was completed by a visit to the early Christian oratory at Gallarus. Dating from around 500 AD and fashioned in the shape of an upturned boat, the chapel is lit only at the far end by a simple window. An austere and striking symbol of the Celtic Church overlooking a harbour that has outlasted Viking raids, Norman conquests and everything the weather has thrown at it.

Made of gritstone the oratory measures 8m long x 5m wide and 5 m high. Some graveyard stones remain, like this simple cross inscribed in stone.

Thought of the skill seen in constructing beehive huts when viewing this little church, as the stones of various graded sizes meet to form the roof ridge. Also bore in mind that the central aisle of a church is called the nave because of that upturned boat shape, from Latin ‘navis’ for ship.

We left Dingle entranced by the extraordinary sights, sorry not to have time to do more but glad to have sensed the life of the past through wonderfully well preserved examples of its fortifications, homes and churches.

The Burren

June 1, 2025June 1, 2025 ~ stephentomlin ~ Leave a comment

There is a world apart, / of elemental beauty carved by glacier, / where tiny wildflowers/ pierce through limestone. (From The Breathing Burren by Maureen Grady)

Living as I did for decades near the Silverdale & Arnside AONB on the Lancashire/Cumbria border I got to appreciate limestone pavements and the flora and fauna that thrive there. Coming to the Burren in County Clare for a day gave an even greater appreciation of such a landscape at scale and extremity. What at first looks like a barren and otherworldly landscape is in fact quite the opposite.

Much of the Burren (Irish Boireann for a rocky place) is a national park, part of the UNESCO Geo-park along with the Cliffs of Moher. 1500 hectares of karst limestone, calcareous grasses, hazel scrub, turloughs (lakes) petrifying springs, cliffs and fens. Limestone formed from sediments millions of years ago has been further ground and compressed into fractured state by glaciation. In those gaps or grikes plants thrive in their mini eco chambers.

Some 70% of plant species found in the island of Ireland are represented here and 23 of the land’s 27 native orchids too. Most excitingly for botanists it’s party time for the world’s plants as flora from Arctic, Mediterranean and Alpine environments all thrive here and the grasses between rocks are species rich, providing quality grazing.

People have lived on this plateau for many thousands of years, and the wider area boasts some 3,000 registered ancient sites. We were fascinated to find out more when visiting the Burren’s best known dolmen, or burial chamber, at Poulnabrone. This striking structure is the oldest dated megalithic monument in Ireland. A portal tomb type it has two capstones, although at some point in the past the rear one had collapsed.

Archaeological excavations in the 1980’s revealed that 33 people had been buried here and that the tomb was in constant use between for 600 years between 5,200 and 5,800 years ago. This visit to Poulnabrone put me in mind of another dolmen of similar design and age I have visited often in the past; Pentre Ifan in Pembrokeshire.

Early purple orchids were growing in abundance through the short wiry sward around the tomb and the grikes were full of ferns grasses and other calcareous loving plants. The land about was also dotted with erratics, large rocks left by glacial action. These are mostly limestone but some, being carried from a distance away, are of gritstone and granite.

A local we spoke to bemoaned the huge rise in tourism in the age of social media and the problems caused by it. Although the majority of the thousands of visitors here each year respect the place a significant minority do not, he said. They camp here, leave rubbish or worst of all attempt to make offerings or cremate remains in the tomb. One such misguided event a while ago caused cracks in the structure and visitors are urged to tread lightly, with care, less we damage the things we’ve come to admire.

A Cromwellian officer in 1651 captured the paradoxical nature of the Burren when he reported ‘A country where there is not water enough to drown a man, wood enough to hang one nor earth enough to bury one… yet their cattle are very fat’. I was fascinated to read up later about the ways that traditional agriculture and contemporary conservation have learned to partner here in the 21^st century. Farming families on the Burren practice husbandry that runs counter to conventional cattle management in putting their beef herds – mainly shorthorns, but also Herefords, Dexter and other breeds – onto the exposed high land in winter as opposed to taking them off. In so doing they are key maintainers of an eco-system famous the world over.

Winterage, as this practice is known, ensures dead herbage is grazed off and creeping hazel scrub contained, thus preparing the ground for spring flora to flourish. The calcium and mineral rich grassland pockets between rocks provide healthy bite, with water from renewed springs and the well-drained stone ground, heated through the summer months, giving a dry lay for the beasts. The cattle have clearly learned to be nimble footed too, avoiding leg breaking crevices as they forage and roam.

Today this outstanding example of transhumance is increasingly appreciated by the wider public and acknowledged by the authorities through a custom made subsidy basis. Every October The Burren Winterage Weekend Countryside Festival culminates in the participating crowds following farmers as they herd their beasts up along the ancient drove roads to those winter pastures. What an unusual and heart-warming sight it is.

Cliffs of Moher

May 27, 2025 ~ stephentomlin ~ 2 Comments

You know that Ireland’s road infrastructure has improved dramatically in the 21^st century when you see day trips offered in Dublin to this tourist mecca in County Clare on the ‘Wild Atlantic Way’. That’s a 3.25 hour coach journey to cover the 268k (166m) trip, mostly by motorway, and the same back. One very long day out. And there are no shortage of takers.

We visited on a weekday evening after the park had closed and crowds had left. To my mind this has to be the best time as the setting sun was starting to illuminate to great effect the 8 Km (5 miles) of high cliff faces, 214 m/700ft at their tallest, to dazzling effect. The place lives up to its hype, especially on yet another glorious blue sky day, offering sublime views over becalmed seas towards America way out west. The sheer cliff faces, eroded by wind and water into caves and stacks in places, providing a wealth of different breeding sites for over 20 species of sea bird and we watched some of them wheel about us in the golden light.

The cliffs consist of carboniferous rock, including shale and sandstone, and once formed part of a delta system 320 million years ago, carried up here from the equator on vast tectonic plates; broken, fractured and stratified on its snail’s pace journey north.

We climbed and descended the cliff tops on wide black marble like steps, tucked in behind a protective barricade of grassed flagged bank, preserved to accommodate the thousands who pay to visit each day. These handsome steps are fashioned from locally quarried Liscannor stone and I loved looking closely at them as they contain a wealth of fossils: crinoids and ammonoids and other unidentified creatures whose trails are preserved for eternity.

The Cliffs of Moher are named for a deserted prehistoric fort on a headland that once stood here before being replaced by a look out during the Napoleonic wars, when national defence was key. In peace time the invasion has been internal and despite concerns about road congestion and overcrowding the locals we talked to welcomed the income tourism brings in its wake.

Reflecting the intrinsic importance of music in the culture buskers have pitches set aside for them at key points along the walks and the nearby village of Doolin is acknowledged as a centre of traditional Irish music.

A far sighted local landowner built a viewing place in 1835, now named after him – O’Brien’s Tower – to help foster a growing trend and provide local alternative employment for the remote rural community of the day. Since 2011 The Cliffs of Moher have been part of Ireland’s latest UNESCO Geo-park, along with that most remarkable of internationally renowned landscapes, The Burren….More of which in the next diary.

Thoor Ballylee and Coole

May 22, 2025 ~ stephentomlin ~ Leave a comment

Our recent holiday with family in Ireland threw up the opportunity to visit two inter connected places in the Galway countryside associated with two of the country’s great cultural figures.

An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,
A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,
An acre of stony ground,
Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,
Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,
The sound of the rain or sound
Of every wind that blows;
The stilted water-hen
Crossing Stream again
Scared by the splashing of a dozen cows.

W.B.Yeats ‘My House’ (1928)

Thoor Ballylee is a C14th Hiberno-Norman defensive tower on the gentle banks of the Streamstown river in the west of Ireland built by the De Burgos, or Burkes, a Norman clan whose power base was in this area. It had fallen into a state of decay when the poet W B Yeats first saw it in 1898 while staying with his friend and artistic collaborator Lady Augusta Gregory at neighbouring Coole Park.

Eventually, as a newly married man with two children wanting a home away from Dublin in the west from where his own family originated, Yeats bought the romantic though ruinous structure for £35 in 1916. Working closely with local craftsmen he and his wife George carefully restored the structure to make it habitable as their summer residence through the 1920’s.

Interesting to note that neither he nor fellow protestant notable Lady Gregory were directly threatened by either of the feuding sides during the rebellion against British rule or the bitter civil war that followed. As respected cultural icons they were otherwise shielded from the violence and atrocities that marked the ‘Troubles’ across Ireland.

It’s not hard to see why the tower became the Yeats’s happy place, acting as both a refuge and an inspiration. George decorated and furnished rooms in the arts and crafts style while also developing the skill of fishing from the windows! Friends visited regularly and everyone enjoyed the socialising. Yeats wrote some of his best poetry here; work that appears in the collections ‘The Tower’ (1928) and ‘The Winding Stair’ (1933).

Yeat’s deteriorating health, along with the damp and damage wrought by winter floods eventually caused the family to sell up and move away. Summers were increasingly spent abroad in France, with its kinder climate, better suited the ailing artist, but he never forgot this place or its importance in his life. Nor did admirers of his work forget him when in the summer of 2015, to mark the 150th anniversary of Yeats’s birth, the Yeats Thoor Bally Lee Society re-opened the tower to visitors and have continued to do so each season ever since. It is now a thriving cultural centre offering courses, talks and literary themed events.

We loved chatting with the cheerful knowledgeable warden and exploring all four floors of the tower. Intrigued by the stack of crow’s nest below one of the slit windows and surprised by the alarmed cries of a returning parent just as I caught sight of the fledglings within.

From the top, I took in extensive views over surrounding pastoral landscape rich in hedging, banks, woods and fields. The white flood of flowering hawthorn everywhere. Curiously the gentle sparkling stream below literally disappears within these woods. This distinctive Karst limestone country is known for its turloughs – intermittent lakes that fill with water from streams like this one that drain back into the water table, having no surface outlet.

Under my window ledge the waters race,/Otters below and moor-hens on the top,
Run for a mile undimmed in Heaven’s face,/Then darkening through ‘dark’ Raftery’s ‘cellar’ drop,/Run underground, rise in a rocky place/ In Coole demesne, and there to finish up/
Spread to a lake and drop into a hole./What’s water but the generated soul?’

( W.B. Yeats ‘Coole Park and Ballylee’, 1931)

We followed the hidden line of flow on leaving Yeats Tower and within a few miles were at Coole Park, now a national nature reserve stretching over 1,000 acres (400 Hectares). The woods here have been attracting visitors from when they were first developed by the Gregory family in the late C18th. Coole Park was home to Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932) and in her widowhood her genius for inspiration made it a centre for the movers and shakers involved in the Irish Literary renaissance, from Synge to Shaw, Casey to Yeats.

“These woods have been well loved, well-tended by some who came before me, and my affection has been no less than theirs. The generations of trees have been my care, my comforters. Their companionship has often brought me peace.” ( Lady Gregory, 1931)

We were quickly enfolded into that peaceful, unhurried arboreal world and instantly appreciated the spell it must have cast on others. Although there was no time to discover the lakes with their swans or walk the woodland paths beyond the centre we did find the famous autograph tree – a venerable copper beech – where the great men of letters carved their initials during their frequent visits. Their incisions now stretched and compacted by growth and stoutly defended from further additions by the public by railings.

‘Here poet, traveller, scholar take your stand / when all these rooms and passages are gone’ (Yeats)

The Georgian house was demolished in 1941, although the handsome restored stable block has a museum, facilities and excellent tea rooms serving imaginative good quality food, so a most enjoyable lunch was had here.

Yeats had first arrived at Coole in 1897, physically and psychologically exhausted and was nursed back to health and a more sustainable lifestyle by Lady Gregory. As he described: “I found at last what I had been seeking always, a life of order and labour” Lady Gregory prescribed for him a balanced regimen of work and relaxation. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship that saw them in 1904 co-found with others the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. In so doing they were preparing the ground for independence by writing, producing and performing plays about Irish life for Irish people.

More here: www.yeatsthoorballylee.org and https://www.coolepark.ie