Once again I see / These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines / Of sportive wood run wild… (Wordsworth)

Like many walkers who want to combat littering on their local patch I pick up rubbish – mainly drinks tins or bottles – from the verges of our lane. Lately I’ve taken to adding another duty –  voluntary hedge warden.

I was delighted by our neighbour’s efforts in bordering roadside boundaries with the planting of hedges last autumn (See previous diary). Recent bouts of snow followed by a severe storm took a toll of the stripling plants in their plastic covers, staked with bamboo. Reuniting all three elements  when taking daily constitutionals has been a satisfying thing to do. Stretching or leaping across roadside drainage ditches in places adding an extra fitness testing edge to the exercise.

Southridge will also be getting a new shelter belt planted soon by the steep farmhouse lane. Lime, oak, chestnut and hazel will be going in to replace Sitka and Norway spruce harvested over a year ago, complimenting the remaining line of handsome Scots pines at the field wall. It’s only a small block but having native hardwoods back on the scene is as encouraging as the planting of new hedgerows and shows genuine commitment to long term landscape recovery. Many such actions replicated around the country must give cause for cheer.

Clearing last year’s dead foliage round the garden ponds has spurred a bonus product. The brown leaves of Iris sibirica make for good material in soft textile basketry weaving so I cut and dried this bundle by the kitchen Aga to pass on to Sara, the family’s natural fabric worker of fine pieces.

Cleaned out all the old nest boxes and added a couple in strategic places about the garden. Always fascinated by the shapes of trunks and boughs so I rescued this one with its cavity from the log pile and slotted it into the side of the west end log store. Maybe a pied wagtail or robin will take advantage of it this year as both species like this quiet corner.

On bad weather days Kim has been turning her attention to sorting material for another quilt. (A long family tradition down the female line) When decent weather allows she’s been getting the kitchen garden ready to receive this year’s crop of seed potatoes and other bulbs and seeds. Also been clearing flower beds and drains before top dressing with mini-bark. I meanwhile continue to chip branches to add to the nourishing protective layer.

Who doesn’t love snowdrops?  Nothing cheers a drear February day more than the cheering sight of these freewheeling waves of white blossoms. We love it that they are so at home, spreading year on year to grace more corners of the garden with their welcome presence.

Some of the family took themselves off for a guided walk in the grounds of one of the county’s big houses and saw the gardens team plant flowering snowdrops ‘in the green’ as they have done for decades, so the vast swathes of them multiply year on year. Most are common snowdrops (galanthus novalis) but amongst them are a distinctive form of the common variety – the Sandersii Group’ – named after the man who discovered them at Chillingham, James Sanderson.

Commonly known as ‘The yellow buttercup’ and sometimes ‘the Northumberland snowdrop’, Their leaves too often take on a paler colour due to differences in the levels of chlorophyll within the plant. Because these unusual plants are coveted by unscrupulous collectors their exact location must remain anonymous.

The moles have been active wherever one looks. The bare open landscape dotted with their prodigious eruptions of soil. Andy, our window cleaner, tells me that a straight line of molehills indicate the male’s subterranean course while isolated clumps are most likely to indicate the presence of females with their nests and stores close by. Not sure if that’s right or not bit I like the sound of it.

A few weeks back we retraced a short local walk. Signs en route warn the unwary and thank the thoughtful.

Highlights included a view along the side of a substantial former water mill which once ground barley oats and wheat for farms and businesses. The burn runs deep and fierce here in its narrow sandstone bed before meeting the big river a mile or so downstream.

 Pulling slowly up the opposite bank, we passed through stands of old oak by stretches of a sunken lane. Gained the metalled lane by a farmhouse, seemingly uninhabited, though the extensive outbuildings were in use. From here a footpath sign beckoned. The weather fair and with no recent rain we thought, why not? The map showed it to be a short cut to the village via a ford of the burn we’d recently crossed. We rose to the bait.

The broad field was easy enough to cross but the precipitous zig zagging stepped path through the raggedy wood proved hard to find and even harder to follow. Handholds of thin trunks and avoiding whipping branches. Eventually, having gained the wild valley bottom, we find what has to be the former ford in a river bed strewn with the evidence of flash floods and further erosion all around; boulders, trapped brash and ripped tree trunks.  

Flat bedrock and strands of barbed wire to duck under. Took walking shoes off before wading over to dry off and reboot on the grassy bank. We wondered when the ford was ever used and by who. Was there ever a track?  Easy walking up the field to a hillcrest to come into sight of the village and main valley once again. The most remarkable building in sight, at the settlement’s edge, might otherwise go unnoticed, until you read about it in the national press.

It’s the first church in the world to be certified to the international standard for energy efficient homes: – Passivhaus. The Victorian Congregational chapel, closed since 2019, has been converted by the couple who live in the former manse next door, using the services of one of our local builders, and is now available to rent for holidays. More at: www.warksburnoldchurch.com

My last diary mentioned the hired scarifier. I not only did a thorough job on the grass but also alas on my poor aging body. A literal pain in the bum, or right buttock to be precise, whether nerve or muscle related I don’t really know. But oh dear I do know it hurts and is only now diminishing after some two weeks of acute discomfort and disturbed sleep.  Trying not to overdo stuff, have gradually resumed daily exercises and in turn swept more leaves into the mould sack, turned compost in the bins and chipped willow wands. The latter we learn makes an excellent mulch for apple trees. Research is showing that the wonder substance present in willows – salic acid – acts as a natural protection against scab. We shall see in due course. This wet year saw an upsurge in the disease everywhere.

One of my regular perambulations takes me over the big permanent pasture field which borders our house (and gives it its name). Our neighbour currently has a flock of blackface ewes in there, all marked up. I’m followed home by a border Leicester tup. He’s perfectly fearless and very curious. I climb the style in the wall into our garden and he comes stepping up after, forelegs resting on the stones as I stroke his head and let him sniff my hand. I feel the cut stumps of horns once possessed and marvel at the bold bow nose and rectangular pupils. Thus acquainted he drops back down and goes off in search of another ewe to cover. The prodigy of these two breeds – the mule – is a popular flock choice for northern upland farmers. We’ll just be happy to see anything other than the ubiquitous Texel or Texel crosses which normally dominate the ovine scene.

Our first stop out of Toronto was Cobourg, a town and beach resort further east on Lake Ontario in , of all places, Northumberland County. Still a matter of some fascination for a European to see a lake so big it powers breakers like the proper seaside!

Not sure if Turkey trotting would ever catch on in our home county of Northumberland, but it certainly seems to be a popular entertainment hereabouts.

The old pleasure steamers are long gone although the marina was full of pleasure craft while the beach and adjacent playgrounds were buzzing with happy  family groups making the best of the Labour Day vacation weekend.

We stumbled upon a pocket park purpose built as a pitstop for migrant Monarch butterflies They are as big as a small bird big –  9-10 cms wingspan – and get their name for their main colour, after King William III of Great Britain,  the Dutch William of Orange. This handsome creature is notable for its mass migration from the northern US & Canada to Florida or Mexico. The larval stage feeds on a variety of milkweeds while the migrating adults – as we were excited to witness –  fill up on buddleia, goldenrod, chrysanthemums etc.

Later, having wandered down the main thoroughfare with its wide sidewalks spaced with shade giving trees and cheering swags of flowers on lamposts, we had lunch outdoors at a café. It stood opposite the Victorian town hall, and we’d earlier admired a local craftsman’s model of the grand building, fashioned from old rulers, displayed in a shop widow next to our café.

Everyone surprised and delighted when a male praying mantis alighted at each table in turn. Rather disconcertingly we observed Its green triangular  head turning right round. pity I couldn’t have used a ruler from next door but I reckon this chap was around 6-7 cms in length, with enlarged forelegs perfect for catching and gripping a wide variety of insect prey. The locals love them when they feast on mosquitos and blood sucking black flies that can plague the lakeland areas in Spring, we were told.

 Mantis are chiefly remembered though for the (larger and more sedentary) female’s habit of eating the male after mating. Introduced from Europe to the eastern seaboard in the 1890’s, in a rather misguided attempt at biological pest control, their population is now well established in North America.

Of all the historic properties visited as a tourist, as opposed to the ones worked in as an actor, Traquair remains a firm favourite. For centuries the home of the Stuart (now Maxwell-Stuart) family it exudes an authentic sense of history while still being accessible to the world. It draws  you in to its lively story as Scotland’s oldest inhabited house, with the colourful characters who inherited, extended and developed the place down the centuries.

The Stuart family, kinsmen to the Scottish monarchy have been resident at Traquair since 1461. The family rose to national prominence as their wealth and influence grew, as visits by twenty seven monarchs bear witness. The Catholic Mary Queen of Scots amongst them and her bedroom furnishings here are particularly striking. You see the oak cot her hosts had made to accommodate that tragic monarch’s infant son James, who would become king of both Scotland and England in 1603.

The family paid a protracted heavy price both as Catholic recusants after the reformation and for their later loyalty to the exiled Stuart cause after the revolution of 1688. How the family managed to hang on to remaining land and property given their fiscally challenged state and Jacobite sympathies was a wonder in itself. The most famous legend attached to the house is that of the elegant ‘Bear’ gates at the top of the long straight grassed over drive. Closed in 1745 after the departure of Bonnie Prince Charlie and his army, they are never to be reopened until a Stuart monarch is restored to the throne.

In the wake of one failed Jacobite rising Traquair was attacked and part looted by a mob of angry local protestants. The Priest’s room here on an upper floor has a secret passageway enabling the incumbent to flee to safety in the neighbouring woods. Liked the detail of the incumbent’s vestments, unique in being plain white and quickly convertible to bed covers when such an emergency disappearance arose.

The museum is worth the climb with guide rope up a steep winding stone staircase to the highest level of the original medieval former hunting lodge. The plaster walls with faded C16th frescoes of hunting scenes is the backdrop to well displayed family memorabilia and object d’art.

Curiosities range from Jacobite drinking glasses and miniature sets of C18th travel essentials to an intriguing set of ‘Napier’s Bones’ for calculating logarithms.

The organic nature of Traquair house adds greatly to the charm as you walk seamlessly from one century’s habitation to another, over different floors, through rooms adapted to time and place, marking the family fortunes. These rose and fell and would rise again through enterprising ways as the place opened up to the world in the modern era.

The title passes through both the female and male lines. In 1875  Lady Louisa Stuart died childless, aged 100, and the estate passed to the nearest relative who happened to be a Maxwell. The current, 21^st Laird, Lady Catherine and her husband Mark, run the house and its 100 acres of grounds today through a charitable trust. Their programme of events has one unusual festival –  Beyond Borders  –  coinciding with the final week of the mega festival up the road in Edinburgh. The marquees for which were being delivered as we arrived.

In the 1950’s Lady Catherine’s father Peter re-discovered the abandoned C18th brewery and gradually renewed the craft on a commercial basis, a forerunner of today’s micro-breweries, that’s now  a thriving business exporting nationally and internationally. Naturally we stopped in the shop to buy a sample or two.

 A pleasant café in the former gardeners cottage, part of the extensive walled garden, now largely grassed over, complete with a pond and mature orchard. Particularly loved the sculpture of a life size heavy horse made up entirely of agricultural machinery and ploughs, painted black. Entitled ‘Epona’, it was made in 1999 by Rachael Long. We didn’t visit on this occasion but there’s also a beech tree maze created in modern times, with paths leading through the woods to the children’s playground and river beyond.

In honour of the printers – past, present and to come…the multipliers of recorded thought, carrying down knowledge…the preservers of art, the promoters of culture. (Printers Association of Chicago, 1914)

Traquair House apart, Innerleithen in the Scottish Borders has an historic time capsule within its purlieu at R. Smail & Sons printing works on its high street, in the same premises it began business in 1866. Three generations of the family ran the firm up until 1986 when Cowan, the grandson of founder Robert, retired. By a stroke of great good fortune the whole premises, complete with all the original printing presses, equipment and archive came into the possession of the National Trust for Scotland (NTS) who moved to restore and reopen the business as a working museum. Staff and volunteers still print commercially for customers near and far using that original machinery, as well as operating daily tours and running courses out of season. This was our second visit, we enjoyed it so much when visiting for the first time years back with the grandchildren who live locally.

Our 90 minute guided tour, was led in turn by two experienced printers, Being engaged as apprentices, here to learn the trade, was a neat way of engaging our interest and involvement.

For most of its working life the premises were powered by a race off the burn that threads through this attractive Tweed valley settlement, formerly known as St Ronan’s Well. A mid Victorian boom town, water powered a host of mills in Innerleithen, and there was a lot of work out there for an enterprising printer. Between 1893 and 1916, when labour shortages due to wartime conscription ended circulation, Smail’s also produced the local newspaper. What a demanding job that must have been as a huge amount of rapid typesetting by hand was required to produce the weekly four page ‘St Ronan’s Standard and Effective Advertiser’ for up to 800 subscribers, while staff also doubled as reporters and salesmen.

Emigration to Canada, Australia, Africa and the U.S. was a common occurrence  in Scotland back in the day and Smail’s ran a booking agency for shipping lines up until WWI. The company office where we started the tour, illuminated by the acid etched shop front windows, has paperwork aplenty stacked in every nook and cranny. Keen fishermen, the Smail’s also stocked a range of flies for sale!

As we were to discover the family never threw anything away and their 52 hefty volumes of ‘Guard Books’ holds samples of every job produced between 1876 – 1956…advertising leaflets, posters, dance tickets, police reports, letterheads, concert notices, order forms, invoices, hymn sheets, menus, postcards and so on and so on. (After 1956 they kept job samples in files)

We were shown the original undershot water wheel in its casing as we entered the paper store. Quirky highlight here was the home engineered machine for dusting silver and gold leaf excess from finished print, utilising locally sourced fur and feathers from game.

Ascending the stairs we were inducted into the business that went on in the case room situated under sloping overhead windows, maximising the light. Here Robin, our guide, instructed us apprentices how to pick letters from the big wooden galley case. ‘Upper Case’ capital letters from the top, the rest from the ‘Lower Case’. We then compiled them, back to front, right way up, into our metal setting sticks, ready to hand over for individual framing and printing by our compositor in the great C19th Columbia eagle press.

Everyone – especially the children in our tour party – loved being handed back the souvenir bookmarks printed with our names. Task completed, we’d ‘made a good impression’. Other expressions born of the letterpress tradition started by Guttenberg in the 1450’s were explained here. Particularly liked to ‘Quoin a phrase’ which refers to the quoins, plain metal pieces of various thickness, that separate, frame and secure a phrase within the hand held stick. We saw the soft leather rounded stick or ‘dab’ used with practised skill to ink the set type thinly and evenly. Hence the reference to someone doing a job well as ‘a dab hand’.

The tour ended back down in the ground floor machine room. We were handed over to printer Colin who gave live demonstrations of the 19^th & 20^th century working printing presses still in their original positions. The oldest, biggest machine for the largest paper size runs was a cast iron Wharfedale Reliance roller press made by Fieldhouse, Elliott and Co in Otley. Watching and hearing it in motion printing a run of A3 posters, driven by belts that would originally been powered by water, was quite something.

Seeing the smaller but no less impressive pedal powered ‘clam-shell’ machine in action  proved fascinating too. Depending on the operative’s skill and concentration around 1,000 copies of small jobs – like bills, tickets or leaflets – could be printed every hour. Great hand eye co-ordination not to mention stamina required! Small wonder that a similar machine designed without guards, called The Cropper, caused many life altering accidents. Hence the expression ‘to come a cropper’.

Gift shops at heritage sites often fail to excite great interest but in this case our browsing produced a flush of sales, from a fabulous guide book with sample print pullout and wrap, to letterpress postcards, greetings cards, facsimile calendars and posters.

Smail’s has restricted opening days and tour numbers are limited so pre-booking essential. More at nts.org.uk