Monthly Archives: June 2025

Birds, Ecology, Hill Farming, Uncategorized

Faux Christmas?

A friend of mine has just returned to the UK having lived for several years on the other side of the globe. She explains her disorientation in time and space on the disruption to her seasons (I have no excuse!). It’s mid-summer here and mid-winter in New Zealand, where those who suffer from European nostalgia have a pretend Christmas.

Here on our smallholding in Mid-Wales we do something similar — opening our gifts on one particular day. It’s exciting. It’s bird-ringing day! Not their necks so that we can roast them with pigs-in-blankets and plum pudding, but counting all the year’s baby birds, catching the fledgelings that are about to leave their nests and, in particular, those in our nest boxes and ringing them. A right of passage — a birdy Bar Mitzvah — we should have a party!

At a time when we feel we will be overwhelmed by the sheer fecundity of our temperate rain forest, it is good to have some positive feedback for our efforts for wildlife. We are engulfed in 8 foot bracken and torn at by wildly flailing tentacles of bramble that reach out across the tracks to grab us as the mower clogs and stalls yet again, which is just as well as it is overheating.

The cloud of buzzing flies that pursue us fails to reassure us that our local biosphere is healthy or that forswearing insecticides was a good idea. But counting birds does.

Jon and Jan

The stalwarts from the Habitat Protection group have made their annual visits and this year has been very good for blue tits — 52 chicks from 5 nest boxes. How’s’at for productivity! It represents a lot of caterpillars! Lots of work from this top-of -the-table, enterprising species.

A better year for our “target” species, the more endangered pied flycatcher. They produced 24 chicks from their 5 nests. Up 20% but one of their nests failed completely last year — we suspected a great spotted woodpecker. It’s harder for pied flycatchers as they are migrants and have to co-ordinate their arrival with the weather and the caterpillars, not to mention competing with the locals for nesting sites and finding each other again as the males arrive first.

Pied Flycatcher

There was only one nest of great tits but they produced 7 chicks.

Great tit fledgeling

Three of our 14 boxes were empty; today I noticed a great spotted woodpecker squarking a warning to its own fledgelings — wildlife is a balance.

They also ringed a treecreeper fledgling hopping about and keen to be included. They tend to nest in the holes between the roots of the oak trees and in the deep splits in trunks, we watched one earlier this year taking lots of spiders to a nest on the hill.

So, inspired by all this avian fertility, we bash on with re-establishing the tracks to maintain some sort of access to our wild areas and woodland and uncover the diversity that is appearing and a weighty crop of rowan berries and wild cherries that are already keeping the blackbirds and thrushes busy.

This is the time of the year when we regularly lose our well and it is quite important that we find it in its nest of horsetail ferns and overgrown by all this burgeoning diversity. Here it is and it’s full.

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Architecture, British history

Moat envy!

I am interested in history and architecture and we visit a lot of National Trust properties. I joined when my friend, Jane, pointed out that they have the best tea rooms and lavatories and are ideal places for a comfort break and a rest when travelling alone! I joined when I was widowed, Bill was already a member — now we do our best to get our money’s worth!

Last week we visited 3 but there was only one I’d care to live in.

Brockhampton house was built in the reign of Henry VI, about 1425 (before the Tudors), from timber that grew in the Hereford hills. It has settled very comfortably into its surroundings over the last 6 centuries. Sitting on a green island surrounded by lily pads and irises and overflown by swooping swallows and squadrons of house martins.

I love it’s relative humility! No mod-cons; an unapologetic mediaeval family house. But this family thrived on its productive farm (unlike so many of the erstwhile owners of our heritage houses — they did not gamble away their resources or run out of heiresses to marry). The family who owned this house moved out in Georgian times to a new grander manor house further up the estate and this old house was occupied by estate workers. By the Victorian era it was in a parlous state but thankfully was rescued, improved and sensitively restored, under the watchful eye of an admirer, retired architect JC Buckler.

The whole aura of the place seems unchanged; minimal modern intrusions, the coolness and quietness of the great hall on a brilliant summer’s day, the chattering of baby birds in nests under the eaves of the gate house on the bridge over the moat. A sparrow chick peeps out from a chink in the brickwork.

Gatehouse timbers.

Mediaeval Gatehouse

View over the moat to the ruins of the Norman chapel.

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trees

Historic Trees

This cedar at Charlecote seemed particularly monumental, then I read about these trees in Mary Elizabeth Lucy’s autobiography. She lived there from 1823. The beauty of trees is that they have long memories.

and can remind you of days gone by. Like this chestnut tree at Hever Castle, home of Anne Bolyne

What tales it could tell; Henry VIII, cavorting in its shadow, but it is discrete, it looks away and stays mum, a survivor.

Here’s another survivor; a chestnut at Ightham mote, in Kent. You can tell its a sweet chestnut, even in winter, by its spiraling bark.

Here’s a relative youngster, not Bill, he’s there for scale — another chestnut, this time at Upton House. The heritage trees at National Trust Properties can be huge but don’t get the attention from visitors that they deserve. It’s usually on the way home that I wish I had brought my tape measure to record their girth and try to work out their age.

Monterey pines at Plas Newydd on the Anglesey bank of the Menai strait, only about the same age of me, but beautifully lopped by the tree surgeons of the National Trust, to grow straight and tall and strong.

So few of our trees have the room to reach their full potential — or our hedges, for that matter!

Here’s a hedge with attitude. Yew hedge at Powys Castle.

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