It’s Christmas Week — it’s still raining and we’ve had record high night-time temperatures. The grass is still growing, albeit slowly and the sheep who are usually complaining that they need concentrate by this time of year are not even bothered to lick the Rumevite block I put out for them.
And now, the first buttercup of spring;
it’s as if the shops were full of hot cross buns and Easter eggs — where will it end?
Our stream in summer
The exceptional rains continue, the ground is saturated, the reservoirs are overflowing and the rivers are in flood. It’s worse further north and it’s bad enough here.
Same stream today!
Last week, unusually for December, I saw a Dor Beetle on the path — moving to higher ground, I thought, ahead of the flood.
Just in time, as it happened, before water started to spew out of the burrow. In the valley bottoms the water table is higher than the ground so mole hills erupt with water, like volcanoes, and if you stab the ground with a stick it may spurt at you.
Water is running everywhere. Waterfalls appearing where they do not normally belong.
Impromptu waterfall
At dusk this evening the chickens put themselves to bed but the two ducks were nowhere to be seen. They weren’t in the sodden field, nor in the yard, not under the truck and not in the barn or in the road which has turned into a torrent.
The road
Way to a neighbours house, cut off by stream
The torch wouldn’t work and the hurricane lamp blew out, but somewhere, above the storm, there was a distant quacking. The two ducks had strayed into the wetland (well — it’s all wet at the moment) and become separated and were calling to each other over the stream. As I approached through the aspen and alder, one panicked and tried to cross the raging stream (remember, their wings are clipped), next minute she was in the churning, muddy water, whizzing downstream, spinning and flapping, quacking and squawking. I was downstream of her so, holding on to a tree, I managed to lunge at her as she approached and flip her unceremoniously onto the muddy bank where she disappeared into a holly thicket before I landed, splat, where she had just been. Traumatised (both of us) I carried her home over the bridge and reunited her with her friend, who came running to meet us.
Tomorrow, I think they had better try their new enclosure — it’s too rough for ducks!
It’s all down to the Jet Stream. It’s not a media construct, concocted by those who pull our strings to add weight to the recent climate change demonstrations — to boost the low-carbon economy and bolster sales of renewables. In fact the media haven’t even noticed that parts of the UK have dropped from sight — at first just soggy then gone — submerged.
Llangurig church earlier today, in the Upper Wye Valley
I can’t quite work it out — it’s warm and the grass is growing but it just won’t stop raining — I know it’s Wales but it’s poured, unremittingly for three weeks — 260mm and 60 of those in the last 24 hrs — and if it slips any further ( the Jet Stream, that is) it will all be snow and we’ll be living in Canada…
We’ll need a skidoo and not just new industrial water-proofs.
It’s not just the media that has been pre-occupied with more momentous events — I only noticed when I went out for some milk and had a Dr Gloucester moment. Splashing through puddles in my little car, it suddenly felt as if I were driving through treacle and the outside world disappeared under the wave that enveloped the windscreen. Where was the road?
Today on the back-road from Llangurig to Llandrindod Wells.
It reappeared only to disappear again almost immediately as I realised that I was wearing the wrong vehicle — I went home and changed.
Severn Break-Its-Neck, today, about 3 miles from the source of the Severn.
Alan put on is red woolly hat and we set off in our truck to intrepidly go and be amazed by the awesome power of water.
Everywhere sheep were damp and disgruntled.
Disgruntled sheep often with almost horizontal ears!
In Staylittle (Stay-a-little as it used to be called and which is a much better name) the water was rising.
Rising water
By the Clywedog Reservoir, used to regulate the flow in the Severn, men from the Water Authority watched.
I’ve told you this before, but you probably won’t remember: the Wye and Severn rivers both start within about a mile of each other on a hill just up the road from here. Llangurig is the first town on the Wye and Llanidloes is the first on the Severn.
Wye Valley near Llangurig about 6 miles from source
Both these towns are very near the sources of their rivers which go on down their respective valleys gathering volume and momentum — we have never seen them rage so much and so soon and so we fear for the communities downstream. Today, while I was taking these photos of the river by the Old Mill, I met the architect who was looking at the flats, converted about ten years, and he told me that he had never known the arch (which you can’t see — but you should be able to see) to be submerged completely before.
It’s all a bit worrying — the rain has stopped now but everywhere roars with draining water.
It is the mating season… For trampolines — a male bowls across the hillsides looking for a mate, tumbles down the bank and leaps over the hedge. He bounds down the slope then soars on a powerful gust, trailing his long netted plumage as he hurls himself down the valley.
Storm warning in Wales! 150mm rainfall forecast over night!
The wind moans high above our house– we are in the lee of the hill. It was built where the sheep sheltered — in the 1840s they noticed those things. I noticed the tall trees at the end of the house flailing about in the turbulence of the mounting storm but Alan wouldn’t sleep in the spare room at the other end of the house — out of the reach of falling branches.
In mitigation for my cowardice I’ll tell you that two branches of Douglas Fir did fall, crushing a steel hurdle but missing the rotting old chicken coop, home to our precious new domestic fowl. The old coop has been gradually sinking into the mud in the last week as the rainfall has reached 109mm. It’s been a dry summer and autumn — ever since I started measuring the rainfall — only 718mm since April (believe me — that’s not much) so we know we are in for a deluge — a couple of meters, at least!
As we obsess about our perennial preoccupation another storm hits Europe… A different sort of storm.
We watch our television and we catch sight of four people hunched over a coffee table at the edge of a crowded room full of milling men in smart suits and the occasional power-dressed woman. We are looking anonymously down on a room at the G20 and upon President Obama and President Putin and two interpreters. Did you see it? Their body language says it all — in a bubble, in a crowded room, they are straining to concentrate, to hear and to really understand each other. It is so contrary to their normal stance that it is shocking.
Here, back in our world, a man is startled by an unfamiliar shadow, he looks up into the great oak tree on the edge of his yard to see a skeleton hanging, draped in a black cape — it is the spent trampoline — like a giant dead crane fly.
Everything has changed.
Click here — An End and a Beginning — for the story of the end of WW2 in Mid-Wales and Japan recently published in PenCambria.
We live in the Northern Hemisphere, that means, as I write, it is autumn.
In Britain we do something very strange in autumn. We turn back our clocks an hour, to give us more daylight in the morning and less in the evening (is that right?) It started in the war when someone decided to put the clocks forward in the spring giving us long balmy summer evenings in which to ‘dig for Britain’ and increase agricultural production. Ever since we have been moving the clocks back and forth and generally confusing ourselves.
Last week-end was the time designated to move the clocks back (we are all supposed to do it at the same time) — not that the hours of daylight are impressed — they have continued to dwindle along their inevitable celestial way, getting shorter and shorter, leaving less and less time for the farmer’s chores, and we have to cope with the disturbance in our routine wrought by the hour change — waking too early, hungry at all the wrong times, confused animals, missed liasons, getting to the dentist at the wrong time and general discombobulation.
I blame this for the chicken incident.
Last week-end we went to Rutland for a wedding and Alan (who is thus culpable) noticed a sign saying
‘Point of lay chickens for sale’
Now anyone who knows anything about chickens knows that they stop laying in winter, which in the Northern Hemisphere comes shortly after autumn. The purchase of chickens at the point of lay in autumn is pointless — they, the chickens, will quite likely be eaten by hungry preditors during the long, dark, eggless winter months and you will never see the fruits of your investment.
Note to self — buy chickens in spring. But sometimes one just wants to do something extraordinary.
Meet our new chickens:
Those astute amongst you will have noticed something strange about two of them.
We did not lose our powers of reason entirely in Rutland — we noticed the huge pile of eggs on a box in the corner of the strangely muddy yard — duck eggs.
‘Oh yes,’ said the lady, ‘very good layers — our ducks, and they go on laying through the winter’.
So instead of four hens, we drove home with two grey hens (a Speckled and a Bluebell) and two Khaki Campbell ducks, shut in the boot of our camper-van.
We learned something new almost immediately as strange smells emanated from the rear of the vehicle unsettling the dog — ducks, unlike chickens, do not evidently switch off automatically when placed in the dark, they can see in the dark and they can squeeze through surprisingly small holes.
When we got home we had two chickens but no obvious ducks. After the removal of several panels, the mattress, and parts of the bed we found them, gone to ground, between the water tank and the chemical toilet (obviously not liking to pooh on the plastic sheets and newspaper that we had put down for them in the boot).
This week, while I shampoo the camper van carpet, Alan (partly culpable) has been constructing a new pen and coop for the production of the most expensive eggs known to man.
Meanwhile I have a nagging worry about the ducks — raised commercially from day old chicks in a yard with only shallow trays of water and small puddles and without the benefit of proper parenting, we may well have to teach them to swim. Life is full of new challenges…
Just now the chicken alarm went off — clucking wildly because two buzzards were making a low reconnaissance flight over the temporary poultry pen — I, but not the dog, was out there in my pyjamas in a trice.
Where had I got to? Getting to know ducks. They have laid 9 eggs in just under a week and are very meticulous with their ablutions taking a good hour to do what Granny called ‘a stand-up wash’ every morning then they flap around drying their wings.
They are very easy to herd, which is good, and although they are not supposed to, they put themselves into the coop at dusk with the chickens, even though they don’t seem to like them very much.
Once the new coop is finished we will start on the floating pontoon for the duck-house… If they can swim!
If you walk in the hills much in Wales you will occasionally encounter a strange, unpleasant smell. Your impulse, honed over myriad generations, will be to head in the opposite direction because it is the smell of death. If you are inquisitive you may poke around with a stick while holding your breath and you will find the decaying flesh hanging from the still-articulated skeleton — there will be lots of interesting insects and if you look carefully, with your CSI hat on, you might notice the brambles wound around the body.
You see, brambles grab sheep — they wrap them in their tentacles and the more the sheep thrashes and twists the firmer it is held — it does not last long.
Sometimes they escape
Don’t fret — most places are so thoroughly grazed that the blackberries never get a hold — it’s when the sheep sneak into places they are not allowed that the trouble starts — when they get into woods where they are not supposed to go.
Stuck!
Here’s Gladys (you remember Gladys — the floppy, pig-mouthed ewe lamb with teddy-bear ears who wasn’t prepared to die as everyone knew she should). She is still testing the limits of survival. Her baaing has dragged us out of bed — she and her friend are stuck — doesn’t look impressive because they have already eaten all the leaves and the thorny twine that binds them is embedded in their thick fleeces but they cannot get away and have to be cut free and the prickly problem painstakingly unravelled with much kicking and wriggling — thank goodness they are not fully grown!
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It’s a misty morning in Mid-Wales, the air is still and the leaves are silent and the weather has been unusually dry so even the streams are muted.
There is a distant sound of dogs beating distant woodland for foxes — there are no shots but the sheep are wary and cluster in the gully on the opposite side of the valley.
See how this landscape rises all around you carrying the sheep and cows into the tops of the trees.
At the edges of the wood where the tree canopy is less and bracken grows the first tentative frosts are turning the woodland floor amber and, as the giant branched fronds die back, the undergrowth of shamrocks, covered since May, bask anew in the pale daylight.
This is the season for fruiting fungi.
Soon the weather will change and a heavy frost will let loose the seasonal showers of leaves that fall like snow and drift and swirl in the spicy air. For the time being they hang on.
He wasn’t a hero.
He was a bookish boy with an academic interest in anything and everything to do with flight – that’s flying not running away. His father and uncle had been World War One aviators – the uncle was a hero (MC and DFC) and died. The father, whose wits were very quick and eyesight very good, was not a hero but survived and after the war produced the boy whose eyesight was poor and who took after his mother who was of a nervous disposition.
When the next war broke out the boy volunteered for the Royal Air Force, not to fly but to serve in the RAF Regiment as an officer on the ground, building runways and keeping up, just behind the lines, with all the logistics of flight – that’s flying not running away.
Unusually for the time, he had spent his childhood holidays, between the wars, in France and while a studious boy at Highgate School , had been paired with a German Jewish refugee boy (Gerard Hoffnung) – the one to learn English the other German – it worked.
On D-day +1, about a week after he had married my mother, a serious young man who spoke French and German was running up Omaha Beach in Normandy under fire, soaking wet and more terrified than he could ever have imagined. His kit was lost and returned, rotting in sea water, to his young wife in London; the family thought he had been lost but she would not believe it (she washed his spare uniform repeatedly until it smelled fresh and she had had news that he was safe — well not exactly safe… He went on (with others) to fight through France, Belgium and Holland, where he lived with a young Dutch family facing horrible hardship. Later he went on to use his languages (he’d added Dutch and a smattering of Russian), and his unit’s bulldozer to bury bodies, in Belsen and help process displaced persons, survivors from all over Europe..
Just when he thought that the nightmare was over (or was he really alive for the only time in his life) he was ordered to embark for the War in Japan — a war without the niceties of the Geneva Convention or Red Cross parcels, where capture could mean starvation or summary beheading.
He sailed through the Suez Canal and was half way across the Indian Ocean when the Allies detonated the atom bomb over Hiroshima (6th August 1945), and three days later, over Nagasaki; Japan surrendered; the war ended; my dad – Geoffrey Mitchell Buck (1922-1991), who was not a hero, survived and was re-routed to the North where, armed with a copy of the Koran and assisted by a Muslim bearer, he was seconded to the Indian Air Force to witness the partition of India and the death throes of British colonialism.
When I was a child my father used to scream in the night. Once he was showing me how to sail a dingy in Norfolk and I pointed out a duck — Duck! He threw himself into the bottom of the boat and went pale, with perspiration on his top lip. Then he got cross with me which didn’t seem fair at the time.
Last week I found and read a book of his (signed and dated 1947). It was Hiroshima by John Hersey, It contains first-hand accounts from survivors of the bomb – everyone should read it – it feels like a latter-day gospel about the sacrifice of people for the sins (and future) of others.
Pedro is more of a general-purpose farm-dog and having a little helper is as much of a trial as a boon. But there is nothing like showing another what you do to make you realise what a full and interesting life you lead.
Pedro and the work-experience student
Marley has come to stay for a couple of weeks while Alison and Dan have a little respite in Spain, he is ten months old and curious and learning to be good.
The sheep took one look at Marley, from a distance and on a lead, and withdrew to the uppermost margin of the field where they gathered, in a defensive formation, ready to stamp their feet and advance as one, heads low, armed for butting, should he approach — they understand dogs completely, especially young ones.
Pedro looked askance at their reaction — the sheep have ignored him for years, ever since the day when he had been placed to block their way — he held his ground like a good dog should and each of them, in turn, jumped over him!
I am taking them for a walk to wear out the youngster but something strange has happened to Pedro — he is in mentor-mode.
He shows Marley the ropes — the fences, the hedges, the tracks. He shows him all the holes in the fences where the foxes and the badgers come in — he doesn’t have to explain, he just shows him how to sniff them and, by golly, he’s got a good nose!
He sees, with his nose, where the badgers get in from the rain forest-
This is where the badgers have burrowed under the fence — can you smell them??
and what they have done to the pasture — this is the time of the year when the badgers scratch off the turf to feed-up on worms and grubs before winter.
Badger damage — the rootling of the earth pig (Welsh name – smells the same)
This is a run –can you smell a fox — when we find a good bit we’ll roll in it.
He shows him where the toadstools grow.
(No Sue, my last blog had nothing to do with mushrooms, magic or otherwise)
And now we’re going home for tea and a nice lie down — Pedro looks tired, it’s a big responsibility.
dianaashworth 