Author Archives: dianaashworth

Butterflies, Health and safety, Neurophysiology

Summer (Black and) Blues!

Yesterday, buoyed up by recent success but frustrated by even more recent dull weather, the sun came out and we made haste to Royston in search of rare butterflies. It was very hot! Too hot really for a couple of septuaginta-tresgenarians (this might not be quite right but I’m concussed — I’ll come to that later!). It was also very hilly but the butterflies were fantastic.

Common Blue
Common Blue, underwing — there were swarms of them.
Brown Argus — Bill’s picture.

It is tiny but they were flitting around all over the chalk downs, more ‘ups’ at our age. So good was the butterfly watching that we decided to stay on after lunch — it was hotter and there were swarms of blue butterflies but only one possible Adonis Blue and it flew away before Bill could snap it — my camera is sadly at the menders — I dropped it and it is hurt.

By now I was all behind and had to rush into town before the shops shut — gosh it was hot!

During the night I didn’t feel at all well — why do we say that? I felt bad!

I got up to visit the bathroom — feeling very queezy. Next thing I know, I’m waking up somewhere I don’t immediately recognise — something diaphanous is waving above me — have I died?

I call out weakly, Bill is already up, he awoke with the crash but headed in the wrong direction. I call out again and am shortly found — head in the shower, huge bump on my forehead– how did it get here? I’m lying on my back. Turns out I am not dead. My knee hurts and is a funny colour but my shoulder decides not to make a fuss despite the huge contusion — it is biding it’s time.

I am picked up and put back to bed — I can make this last until lunchtime!

After a light lunch I rally to look at the Holly Blue in the garden.

Diagnosis? Was probably asleep all the time but fell off the loo when I slipped back into deep, REM sleep (do they still call it that) when I fell off my perch. It’s a miracle I’ve made it to 73!

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Butterflies

Summer Blues?

Last month we were on the chalk hills of Gloucestershire — butterfly hunting, and not without success!

Large blue butterfly
Another large blue on Daneway Banks SSSI in the Cotswolds

Daneway banks are famous for the butterflies. Their steep chalk grassland is peppered with clumps of wild marjoram and thyme. It was a sunny day and there was a helpful and knowledgeable volunteer from the Butterfly Conservancy to point us in the right direction!

No Brown Argus spotted, not for lack of trying, but there were cavorting Marbled Whites a plenty.

Marbles white butterfly on marjoram
Mating marbled whites

And several Essex skippers, similar to small skippers but with black tipped antennae and a black stripe parallel to the leading edge of the forewing.

Essex Skipper

It was very hot and cooling off in the dappled shade of a nearby woodland we found my favourite butterfly — the silver washed fritillary.

Silver washed fritillary

Next week, if the weather cheers up, we are off to hunt the Adonis Blue and the Brown Argus.

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Butterflies, Ecology, Hill Farming

Back on the Farm and a Moral Dilemma!

The hot dry spring was just what our thistles yearned for — they grew and grew. While our neighbours sheep gather in the shade it is time for us to deal with the thistle plague.

I was told by those who know:

Cut in June, they will grow back soon,

Cut in July they will surely die.

So we held our nerve, but once into July we have waged war on the thistles, Bill pulling the topper behind the quad bike and cutting every accessible thistle. 10 acres of thistles — not bad for a septuagenarian with no previous farming experience! It’s wonderfully adaptable, the human race.

All this time I have been busy managing and hiding in my cool office doing important paper work. But now the rains have started, waves of torrential rain coming in from the west, and the family are due next week so we are running out of time. Its all hands to the scythe and the sickle in the corners and the precipices where the quad bike cannot reach.

But wait!

There is a problem. In the sunny periods, between the showers, the butterflies and bees and hoverflies and beetles and flies come out as well as us. Finding most of the thistles gone without trace because once cut the sheep gobble them up, this profusion of insects settles on what is left.

The thistle beds are teaming with insect life, buzzing and fluttering and slurping up the nectar.

Just by the barn we saw about 20 pristine new small tortoiseshell, meadow brown and comma butterflies.

Small Tortoiseshell and friends on thistle.

One look at this beauty and guess what? We have decided to leave the edges for a while to give the butterflies a chance to mate and lay their eggs. Oh dear, the caterpillars feed on nettles — we’ll have to leave them as well!

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Uncategorized

A Glimpse of 16th Century Cirencester

This chap looks bemused as well he might — an erstwhile Abbot of Cirencester whose image was smashed and buried in the ruins of his once rich and powerful Abbey — his name forgotten.

This was the Dissolution of the Monasteries which was not just about getting rid of King Henry VIII’s infertile wife. Like everything else it had a lot to do with money, and the reformation and getting rid of rich and decadent priests. It was a re-organisation — a re-directing of resources into education and defence — sound familiar?

Cirencester was a town doing well — wealth and opportunity based on farming and the wool trade. One man who benefitted from the demise of the Abbey was John Coxwell.

John Coxwell (1516-1618) pictured here at the age of 98!

John was a local entrepreneur, from humble beginnings he was surprisingly socially mobile, rising to the gentry, he had made a lot of money in the wool trade and bought much of the Abbey land. Like many driven men he had a robust constitution living until he was 101.

This was not the rule.

One young man’s three young wives lost in childbirth.

What you needed in those days was a good doctor.

Richard Masters, physician to Queen Elizabeth I and richly rewarded for good service with Abbey land and this silver gilt chalice the Boleyn Cup. He has a certain je ne sais quoi, don’t you think. He was a generous man and made many bequests in the town and gave his cup to the magnificent Parish Church of John Baptist.

Nothing like a grateful patient!

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Architecture, British history

Ecclesiastical Surprise

We can never resist an open church door — except on a Sunday.

Recent travels have taken us to Beverley in Yorkshire, a market town (I bought a dress) with 29,000 inhabitants. It has a minster. What is a minster? I hear you ask. I understand it as a throw back to the administrative structure of the Church 1000 years ago — all that has changed but a few minsters remain. Some are cathedrals like York Minster. Some are parish churches with attitude like Beverley Minster!

It is a Gothic masterpiece built between 1220-1425 now dedicated to St John and St Martin.

John was a local boy in the 700s who made good becoming Bishop of York and established a monastery in Beverley. He was credited with many feats of healing and good works and was canonised in 1037 — before the great schism so he is still revered by the orthodox churches!

Martin, better known outside Beverley, was a Hungarian conscript into the Roman army and sent to France. On a cold winter’s day he saw a beggar, almost naked and shivering. He cut his cloak in half with his sword and gave half to the beggar. The beggar returned to him in a dream as Christ and he became a Christian, founding a community and later became Bishop of Tours. A good demonstration that you are never quite sure whom exactly it is that you help or, conversely, that you do down!

Both he and St John had significant biographers — the key to posterity perhaps. One of John’s students was Bede, becoming venerable as the chronicler of his own and earlier ages. PR was always important.

The nave — not surprising that the Minster was used as a set for Westminster Abbey in the film Young Victoria
Detail from above door — amazing collection of statues — 99 outside but late Victorian, although the one of the future Edward VII is a good likeness! Unfortunately the light wasn’t good.
Quire, magnificent woodcarving with 21st century chorister’s mug and music?

A fascinating, beautiful church, though my photographs do not do it justice — well worth a visit.

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nature, Spiders

Walking on Air and Hazardous Sex!

Drinking my coffee in the sunshine today I disturbed a spider that was sunbathing — she ran across the table then appeared to scamper through thin air, horizontally, a metre or so to the bushes. I looked more closely and there was her escape wire — a single strand of the finest silk only visible as it moved in the breeze and caught the sun.

What an amazing material spider silk is — strength, elasticity, organic, recyclable — I spent the rest of the morning reading about spider’s webs.

Then we went out to look for butterflies but look what we found!

A mysterious web in hawthorn scrub, and guarding it… Look carefully.

A nursery web spider — she makes a secure three-dimensional pen for her babies until they can fend for themselves. If you don’t believe me — see them magnified!

These will soon have used up all the yolk with which they hatched, be able to produce their own silken threads and catch tiny flies and each other — Mum will release them before there is too much cannibalism and they will disperse to complete their own life cycle. In the UK they live about a year, hibernating during the winter. Mating is hazardous for the males who have evolved various ploys to avoid being eaten by their mate like offering gifts of food to distract the female and also playing dead! Survival of the fittest — only the really clever ones mate more than once!

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Aviation History, Family History

How to Fly (for Grandchildren)

I called my grandpa Buckie. When he was born there were no aeroplanes — they hadn’t been invented but 50 years earlier a man called George had had an idea and he built a glider — this is how it looked:

It actually flew and was called George Cayley’s governable parachute. It was very scary so George sent his coachman up in it who afterwards was so shaken up that he stomped off and said he would never work for George ever again!

When Buckie was 4 years old, in 1903, two brothers called Orville and Wilbur in America built the first proper aeroplane — it looked like this:

Wright’s Flyer

The two wings gave it lift, they were shaped so that when it moved forward the air moved faster over the top and with higher pressure underneath the whole thing wanted to lift. It was made to move forward by an engine that drove two propellers in front of the wings. The first day it flew, each of the brothers had a go, Orville flew 37 meters then Wilber flew 260 meters.

By the time Buckie was 12, planes looked like this:

Mercury Monoplane 1911

By the time Buckie was 17 he had joined the Navy, because there wasn’t yet a Royal Air Force, and he would actually fly a Sopwith Camel like this one in the First World War.

F6314: Sopwith Camel

Flying was very dangerous then — Buckie crashed 16 times. He was quick-witted and lucky and lived until he was old but still drove his car very fast.

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Birds, Ecology

Crisis in Paradise!

This is not how a bird box for our precious pied flycatchers should look — it has a perfectly good metal reinforced entrance hole facing the front. This box has been illegally modified — but by whom?

Number one suspect! Greater spotted woodpecker. But amazingly when checked by the intrepid bird ringers, it still contained 5 warm eggs.

The cunning woodpecker will be back to raid this nest once the chicks have hatched — no time to waste!

Last week Bill chastised me for cluttering up the new garage with a sheet of aluminium rescued from the back of a discarded electric fire — it was just what we needed and after an hour of wrestling with a blunt hacksaw and only minor injuries we had a patch. At first light we advanced upon the box, silicon gun in hand, 12 foot ladder under arm. As I wobbled up the ladder a female pied flycatcher whizzed out through the hole in the side of the box. I lobbed my silicone-sticky armour-plating over the hole and withdrew. Mother bird was mystified!

Then ensued the horrible second thoughts that occur when one interferes with Nature — visions of abandoned eggs, of feathers stuck to silicon, of a gormless bird permanently baffled by the loss of her new improved access, etc.

5 days later the ringers returned — she was sitting on chicks — we did not disturb her.

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Writing

Good News from Su and Richard Wheeler, at Logaston Press.

They are reprinting my first book, Iolo’s Revenge again (5th impression!) because, they say it just sells and sells! I’m sure this, in part, is due to their efforts and reputation as publishers, for which I am very grateful and also to Wendy Wigley for her delightful illustrations that lift it to another level!

 Iolo’s Revenge ISBN 978-1-910839-24-9 £10 Available from Fircone Books, The Holme, Church Rd, Eardisley,  HR3 6NJ, United Kingdom.   Tel:+44(0)1544 327182

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British history

Battle of Britain Memorial Flight

The best adventures are unplanned. Yesterday on our way past, we called in to RAF Coningsby for Bill to do a bit of goofing at the end of the runway. It is where the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight is stationed — where they keep planes that survived the Battle of Britain in 1940, that still fly and do the memorial fly pasts on special occasions such as the coronation — though the weather prevented that. We were offered a tour but our guide Julian Maslin apologised because the planes were out — it was the day of the display pilots annual re-accreditation — if we stood outside the Hangar he would tell us about them as they flew past!

At that point, what he had to say was drowned out for a moment as the memorial flight hove into sight from behind the trees.

Well, that was interesting — but what’s this?

Creeping up on the 80 year old Avro Lancaster bomber — it’s one of the display typhoons whose pilot is also due to be re-tested.

Flying along behind at almost stall speed.

He kept his distance as they flew up and down in front of us, and the examiners.

Then along on top! Once the Lancaster had peeled off and landed the Typhoon showed its power and manoeuvrability.

Afterburners firing,

the Typhoon with a banshee wail climbs almost vertically

and loops the loop!

Before streaking past us one last time.

Here’s is her sister, on the ground from 29 Squadron. And a chance to see the Lancaster as she taxies home — a very big bird.

She disgorges her regular RAF crew, who come and greet us, standing on the tarmac. They seem excited by their exercise and relieved to be good for another year.

Time to have a proper look at the Supermarine Spitfire, in desert camouflage.

This one is painted for the invasion in 1944, the stripes to prevent it being shot down by friendly fire.

The Hawker Hurricane that was flying is painted black as for night flying as they did over London in the Battle of Britain in 1940.

‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few’

W Churchill
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