Painscastle Local Interest Group Visits Cusop

 Yesterday evening was the usual date for the monthly meeting of the Painscastle Local Interest Group (mostly history, but anything else that takes their fancy, too), and they decided to use the meeting time to visit Cusop Castle and Church just before the Dig starts.

A gazebo had been set up on the Castle site for tea and biscuits, with a good view of where the archaeologists and volunteers are going to dig.  John Price was there to film, and I got a mic because I was going to say a few words about the Castle.  That was after an introduction by Sue, and a few words from Jane (who actually owns the Castle site).  We actually know very little about the castle itself, which is why the dig is so exciting - we should be able to find out a lot more about what went on there, and how old the site is.  What we do know is that it is not a typical Norman castle - there's no motte, just a ringwork and the possible remains of a stone building.

Then we moved into the church, where Celia, who is one of the churchwardens, gave a talk about the history of the church and what they are doing in the churchyard, which is very wildlife friendly.  They've had help from the kids who come up to stay in Trewern House from Dagenham and Essex, and from young people doing their Duke of Edinburgh awards.  Recently an oak tree fell down, and Danny Thomas the chainsaw sculptor is going to carve the fallen trunk into a variety of local animals and birds.

It was a lovely evening, and the people from Painscastle were interested and asked some good questions. 

Festival Crowds

 I'd started to think that I wasn't going to see anything quirky at the Festival this year - then I went into town and found a busker playing the Uilleann pipes next to Spar.

There don't seem to be quite so many people around as last year, though of course the mid week part of the Festival is always a bit quieter than the two weekends.

I also saw three red kites circling over the middle of town! 

A Long Walk and a Bus Ride

 I'm really glad I decided to go for a walk up Cusop Hill yesterday, when it was so hot I didn't even need a coat (and I nearly always wear a coat).  I'd been looking at some aerial photos of the area and saw what looked awfully like crop marks on top of Cusop Hill - and my curiosity was aroused.  

The public footpath goes up past Capodolwyn, and I was pleased to see that someone is renovating the house after many years of it lying empty.  On the way up the field, I startled a hare, who loped off into the distance, and when I had a sit down later, higher up the hill, a red kite flew by below me.  There's another ruined building above Capodolwyn, and I was lucky enough to find a piece of a slipware bowl there, probably from the 17th century.  I was up that way because I slightly mislaid the path, so I was following the fence line round until I came to the stile, which is usable though not in very good repair.

The views from the top of Cusop Hill are spectacular - all down the Wye Valley and across the plains of Herefordshire.  The traces of archaeology were less so.  I think that the markings I had taken to be ditches were actually natural features draining the water from boggy areas - though there had been some stone quarrying up there at some point, and there's a fairly modern pond with the spoil heap from digging it out right next to it.

Still, it was a glorious day, and the hedgerows were full of wild flowers as I came back into Hay.

This morning the weather was decidedly chilly and grey, but I had to go into Hereford to do a few things.  The Golden Valley is still blocked off, I think at Peterchurch, so the bus turned round to go down the hill and cross the river, for a non-stop journey to Hereford.  Despite the greyness (and some rain) it was lovely to see all the apple orchards in blossom.

One of the things I wanted to do was to look at the local history section of Hereford Library.  The Library has been in temporary accommodation in the Town Hall for some time now, and it's a very ornate building inside as well as out.  Being temporary, until the new premises in the Shire Hall are ready, there is only a small selection of books available, but I still found something useful.  I also joined the library, so next time I can check out up to twenty books (!).  I was given the choice of four different pictures to go on my new library card, and I chose the one with shelves of books facing each other, with birds flying between them.

On the way back, the bus was labelled the X15 rather than the X44, and again went non-stop on the other side of the river from the Golden Valley. 

Flora of Brecknockshire

 Compiling a complete record of the flora of the local area has been literally a life time's work.

Mike Porter, the Recorder for the county for the British Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland, started collecting information for the book soon after he got the job in 1968.  In 2013, John Crellin joined him as co-Recorder, and started to help him with the book in 2021.  Sadly, Mike died last year, but by then most of the main text was complete, and John Crellin brought it to publication.  

There's a lot of diversity of habitats in the area, with mountains, moorlands, woodland, limestone pavements, and the largest lake in South Wales.  The book is hardback, with over 1100 distribution maps of the different species.  It's been illustrated by the wonderful local artist Meg Stevens - she did the most marvellous landscapes of the local area, often from a vantage point low down among the wildflowers.  I could never afford one of her paintings, but I do still have some of her greetings cards (which she kindly signed for me).

Not only does the book have the flora of the present day, but Mike Porter went back into the records as far as 1666, also incorporating the work of Victorian naturalists, especially Augustin Ley, vicar of Sellack in Herefordshire.

The book is available for pre-order now, at a discount price of £35, from Summerfield Books, www.summerfieldbooks.com  The publication date is 1st April, at which time the cover price of £40 will be charged, and there will be a press launch at the Bannau Brycheiniog Visitor Centre on 9th April.

The Brecknock Botany Group has a blog at https://floralimages.blogspot.com/ and it's well worth a visit or two. 

Spring is On the Way!

 

My first sighting of daffodils this year, at the top of the path near the school/library.  The snow covered Cae Mawr is in the background.

First Snowdrop

 

I always look for snowdrops, and this year the first one I saw was on the patch of ground at the top of Backfold.  The first sign that spring is on the way!

Charter of Rights for the River Wye

 Following on from yesterday's post, there's a new article in the Hereford Times today with some good news for the River Wye.

Herefordshire County Council have voted to put in place a charter to protect the river.

It grants the river:

the right to flow and maintain it's natural course (so no digging to make it flow in a man made channel)

the right to biodiversity

the right to be free from pollution (this one is going to be hard to enforce!)

the right to be supported by a healthy catchment feeding it (so extending the protections to tributaries)

the right to regenerate through natural processes, supported by intervention where necessary

the right to be represented and have its rights recognised.

Councillor Swinglehurst said she hoped that other local authorities would support the charter, and  would “find a place in schools and village halls, parish councils, environmental campaign groups, businesses and homes”. 

It's unclear how much legal protection that the charter would give the river, but it is a clear statement of intent, and signals the importance that the Council places on the river.  So maybe it will be one of the factors that the Environmental Agency takes into consideration when deciding how to best protect the river with a legal framework. 

The Secret Language of Trees

 The last part of the Tree event on Saturday was the film at 7pm, The Secret Language of Trees.

The Parish Hall was full, and the film was fascinating.

It talked about how trees can communicate with each other through their root systems, exchanging chemicals with other trees nearby to warn of predators so that the other trees could defend themselves more quickly, and about how the shared root system could keep stumps of felled trees alive.  The trees also share nutrients to help weaker trees, and can "decide" together when it's a good year to produce lots of acorns or beech mast or other seeds.  (This year has been a very good year for acorns locally - they were everywhere on the Offa's Dyke walk.)

They also talked about "mother trees", which are important to the health of a lot of other trees around them, and how plantation firs or other evergreens do better if there are birch trees in the mix.  They talked about using horses to pull the felled trees out of the woodlands rather than heavy machinery that compacts the soil, and lots more.

There were scientists and tree experts from Canada, including an indigenous woman who is also a scientist, who talked about the importance of indigenous knowledge of how their local forests grow, and a forester from Germany, talking about how German forests are managed.

After the film there was a Q and A session with four of the trustees of Botany and Other Stories, and the son of one of the trustees, who is also, I think, a soil scientist.

They spoke about the importance of sourcing local trees or seeds to replant woodlands - one of the problems of sourcing the cheapest trees from abroad is that they can import diseases, like Dutch Elm disease.  Also, they are less likely to be well adapted to the local conditions if they come from the other side of Europe.

In the Midlands, the National Forest scheme is trying to link together scattered patches of woodland, which will be good for biodiversity as animals, plants  and birds can move more freely between their habitats.

When talking about commercial forestry, they agreed that monocultures are a bad thing, and selective felling of mixed woodland is better, though they were doubtful of the possibility of scaling up horse power to commercially viable levels.

A Swedish lady who has recently moved to Hay talked about her time living in Scotland, where she had seen selective felling of trees targeting the trees described as "mother trees" in the film, which is very bad for the health of the woodland.

They talked about the need for long term planning, and for forestry and agriculture to work together - hedgerows are very important for biodiversity, for instance.  Leading on from the walk in the afternoon, they talked about the need for sensitive intervention in woodland - you can't just leave trees to do their thing, because woodlands in the UK have been subject to some form of management for centuries.  There is also the problem that about 75% of woodland in the UK is now privately owned - state owned woodland has quietly been sold off bit by bit.  So where once the Forestry Commission could implement a policy across the country, now there has to be a lot of negotiation with private owners of woodland.

And it's no good just planting a bunch of trees anywhere - around Birmingham there is a lot of heathland, a valuable habitat in its own right, which is destroyed when trees are planted on it, and it's not the best place to put the trees, either.

One of the trustees said she had been working in the sector since around 1978 - and things were improving, but there is still a long way to go!

So there was a lot to think about, coming out of the meeting, and a lot of expertise on the board of trustees of Botany and Other Stories.  It's quite reassuring that people with that expertise are getting together to do positive things. 

 

Tree Walk

 I'm back from a few days away (I had an awesome time in Manchester) and I still have a lot to say about the Tree event on Saturday (which seems like an awfully long time ago now!).

At 2pm, there was a tree walk down the Offa's Dyke path, starting from the Treehouse Cafe just over Hay Bridge.  The day was wet, and cold, and grey, but still about 20 people turned up.  There was some talk of doing an adult talk and a children's talk, but they decided to just go with the adult talk, and let the kids tag along.  If they got bored, there was plenty to do in the woods along the path, where there are a lot of outdoor games set up.

I'd been expecting a walk that pointed out the different types of trees, and one person had brought along a tree recognition booklet - but it wasn't really about that.

One of the trustees of Botany and Other Stories was there to talk about problems like ash die back - there are a lot of ash trees on that stretch of the riverbank.  One of the dying ash trees is right next to the cafe, covered in ivy, and they're trying to save as much of the tree as they can because the ivy is really good for biodiversity, nesting birds, insects and so on.

The owners of the land, who are actually doing the management of the woodland, were along for the walk, and they pointed out the strip of land that they can't touch to manage it because it is an SSSI.  Apparently, back when the UK was part of the EU, the Welsh Government could get EU grants for wildlife if a certain amount of riverbank was designated as SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest).  So, there is nothing actually special about this bit of woodland, but it was there to make up the numbers - and they can't touch it, unless it's to pull out the Himalayan balsam, or thin out sycamore trees, which are counted as invasive.  So it's basically just sitting there.  Meanwhile the woodland around it, which is being managed, has enough light to the ground to encourage flower species that indicate ancient woodland, like bluebells and celandine, and wood anemone, which make the woods look so beautiful in spring.

Coming out to the (slightly flooded) meadow, we were experiencing a completely different environment.  For the past couple of years, the owner has been mowing the meadow.  They tried other ways of managing it, but nothing really worked well - now, though, the clear stretch of meadow between the trees supports a lot of insects in the summer, and there is enough space for the swallows and martens to get a long flight path to eat the insects, so that's working very well.  

They also pointed out a couple of saplings, just in the water.  These were elms - but sadly, since Dutch Elm disease wiped out most of the elms in the country in the 1970s, any elms that do start to grow get to about the size that these trees are, and then die.

It was rather sad to learn that the woodland that looked fine at a casual glance actually had a lot of dying trees in it (and there's nothing they can do to stop ash die back or Dutch Elm disease), but at the same time, it's a hopeful sign that the woodland is supporting 76 species of birds, along with everything that the birds eat.

There was also a bit of discussion about what sort of woodland we want to see in the future - what sort of trees should be planted to be more resilient to disease and climate change, and so on.

It was a fascinating walk - worth getting my feet wet for!  (I wore a pair of boots that I thought were waterproof.  They were not.). 

T is For Tree

 Botany and Other Stories are holding a pop up Cabinet of Curiosities event on Saturday.

It's all about trees.

From 10.30am to 7pm, there will be an exhibition at the Parish Hall (exhibitions are normally at the house on Oxford Road, but that is being renovated at the moment), with botanical illustrations of trees and leaves, and all sorts of other interesting tree-related things.

At 7pm, there will be a film, also in the Parish Hall, called The Hidden Language of Trees, followed by a Q and A session with a panel.  Matthew Prior, a journalist, will be the facilitator of the panel, which will be formed of Jeremy Armstrong, Jenny Dicker, Imogen Cripps and Emily Warner.  These are all trustees of the Botany and Other Stories charity.

There will also be a walk along the Offa's Dyke path, starting from By the Wye Glamping.  There will be a children's version and a more scientific adult version, observing the trees along the river in the context of climate change.

I've got my walking boots ready! 

Blustery Fungi Weekend

 Storm Amy is causing problems for the Fungi Town weekend - the Saturday Market has been cancelled because it's too blustery to put the stalls up.  Only the Buttermarket has stalls today, because it's more sheltered.  Several of the shops have put up fungus themed window displays, but not many people are lingering outside to see them.

Lots of people were up at the Castle when I went in, though - and there is a magnificent array of fungi for them to look at.  I was pleased to find that I recognised about half of them (my ex-husband used to lead Fungus Forays for the Brecknock Wildlife Trust, and I picked up a bit of knowledge while I was trailing round after him!).  There are also talks and activities throughout the weekend.

They're hoping for better weather tomorrow! 

Dragonflies and Damselflies

 Stu Roberts gave a fascinating talk at the Enchanted Hour at the Library yesterday afternoon.

He talked about the differences between dragonflies and damselflies (dragonflies hold their wings out when at rest; damselflies fold their wings along their backs), and he talked about their life cycle.

Dragonflies spend most of their lives as nymphs, which crawl about in the mud at the bottom of ponds.  They can spend up to four years, getting bigger and bigger, until one day they crawl up a reed, and their body splits open at the back so that the adult dragonfly can emerge.  Stu brought some of these cases along to show us, gathered from his own pond.

Dragonflies will live for a whole summer, but damselflies only live for about a week - and August is the best time to see them, along the banks of the Wye and on the Warren.  Mary Anne suggested that he might like to lead a walk in the next week or so, to see if we could find any, and quite a few people were interested, so that might be happening soon.

There will be no Enchanted Hour in September, but in October there will be four talks, one on each Friday afternoon, on the subject of conservation.  Stu will be giving one of those talks. 

Enchanted Hour with Dragons

 

Well, dragonflies, anyway!

Is A River Alive?

 I think the answer is definitely "Yes!", after listening to Robert Macfarlane talk yesterQday afternoon.  I'd bought the ticket before I'd had any idea I'd be moving house, and I wasn't going to waste it.

Rob Macfarlane was being interviewed by Horatio Clare, who is very good at interviewing - and it helps that they are already friends.  The new book - Is A River Alive? - is his most personal yet, and he spent five years travelling around the world to write it, featuring rivers in Ecuador,  Quebec and Chinnai in India (which used to be Madras, when it was famed for its rivers).  

He started off by introducing a third entity on stage - he had spent the morning at the Warren, and brought back a flask of Wye water.  He spoke quite a bit about the Wye, including the information that there is a new post in Herefordshire Council specifically to be the Voice of the Wye, so that the needs of the river are represented at an official level.  Given the sad state of the river (it's not so long ago that you could paddle without slipping on slimy green weed at the Warren), this is much needed.

He also talked about chalk streams, in the south of England where he lives, and the desperate state they are in.

But he also mentioned signs of hope - a river system in the Pacific North West of America which was dammed in the 1920s has recently had the last dam removed - and the salmon are already coming back to spawn there, in what was once one of the most important salmon rivers on that coast.

Snowdrops

 I've seen a few snowdrops in people's gardens already this year, but these are the first ones I've seen in the wild - down on the Riverside Walk when I was taking photos of the renovations:

Walking Out

 Another lovely sunny day, so I've been over the bridge and half way to Clyro.  I went down the public footpath by Racquety Farm - I haven't been that way for a while, so it was a bit of a surprise to find the bridge over the ditch at the bottom looking like this:

The supports have been washed away on one side, but it's still crossable with a bit of care.

On the way across Hay Bridge going up, I saw a pair of egrets stalking about in the shallows at By the Wye.  I don't think I've ever seen a pair together before.  On the way back, there was a heron flying downstream.

Warren Wall

 It's a lovely sunny day, so I went out this morning to the Warren to see how they're getting on with the wall that's being rebuilt along the top of the hill.

I was standing by the gate to take the photo, so there's only a little way left to go.

There were quite a few people around, closer to the river, with several dogs.  The river was quite high and fast after the recent rain, and there was still frost on the grass in the sheltered places.  Great tits and robins were everywhere in the bushes.

Mistletoe

 It's the time of year that I take a walk out to a particular tree that is festooned with mistletoe in easy reach, and take a sprig home with me.

The weather was reasonably bright yesterday afternoon, so off I went.  By the time I got to the tree, there was sunshine with showers, and a rainbow was forming over Clyro in the distance.  Around the roots of the tree, a wren was hopping, and overhead a red kite was soaring.

I'm choosing to believe  that these are all good omens for the coming year.

Enchanted Hour Wildlife

 The talk by Stewart Roberts at the Library yesterday was very well attended - extra chairs had to be brought out.  He had a great many slides to show, of a wide variety of birds, insects and small animals that could be found in his garden, and also of local fungi and other plants.

As an organic gardener, he has a bird feeder which attracts a variety of small birds which also eat insect pests in the garden - and the presence of the small birds also attracts birds of prey like sparrowhawks, which eat the small birds.  There was a good picture of a female sparrowhawk which was feasting on a pigeon she had just killed, outside the Doctors' Surgery.  "The pigeon was beyond medical help."

He also has a pond, where dragonflies and damsel flies breed.  He also had pictures of toads, frogs and newts, though not all of them came from his own garden.

He even had a picture from the Begwns of the damage badgers can cause to a lawn when they're digging for worms and other insects.

I've seen slowworms in various places around Hay (which are neither slow, nor worms - they're a type of legless lizard).  He talked about trying to encourage a local grave digger not to kill them, and it was all going well until the slowworm panicked and shed its tail in a bid to escape!  He has also seen grass snakes, though he hasn't seen the other native British snake, the adder, locally.

There are birds and butterflies that are summer migrants to the UK - swallows for instance coming all the way from Africa - and some slightly less welcome visitors like Asian hornets, which have not been seen locally yet, but are spreading across the UK because of the milder weather we have now.

It was a fascinating talk, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one who was filled with enthusiasm to get out more and see what wildlife I could find.  For those on Facebook, he posts his pictures regularly on the Hay Community page.

The next Enchanted Hour will be a talk by an author from New York who now lives locally, about Christmas children's books.  She's hoping to introduce a local audience to some American classics.

Inside the Cabinet of Curiosities

 I went along to Henallt House quite early, but Françoise told me later that they had been busy all evening, up until 10pm (I was chatting to her before the talk about the legal action to save the River Wye, which I will talk about in a later post).

The exhibits in the house are beautifully laid out.  There seems at first to be only a small display - but they all go into such detail!  I was very impressed with the display of cords made from different plants - Cordage by Sarah Putt - with all sorts of plants from banana to wheat.

Each room is dedicated to a different author or other famous person.  So The Pencil of Nature, with the cordage and the botanical illustrations, is dedicated to Henry Fox Talbot the early photographer, and across the hall is Richard Booth's Kingdom of Books, with a lovely Beatrix Potter display in one corner - she is being recognised as a serious illustrator of nature now, rather than just a writer of children's books.

Upstairs two of the rooms are dedicated to Tristan Gooley (How to Read Water) and Robert Macfarlane (Underland) - two recent books that are best sellers.  In the Brent Elliot/Flora room I learned that there are 30 plants with 'Angel' in their name, and in the Claire Wilcox/Patchwork room I learned that French linen used to be sent to Haiti to be bleached, to give it a fashionable blue-white tint.

Upstairs again is a room dedicated to the night sky, named for Jun'ichiro Tanazaki, and one dedicated to the French author Colette.  Jun'ichiro Tanazaki was a Japanese novelist who wrote an essay called In Praise of Shadows, and at the end of Colette's life a publisher called Mermod, from Lausanne, sent bouquets to her regularly, which she wrote about in Pour un herbier, a book of twenty two short essays.

There's also an exhibit of the Earth drowning in plastic.  There are small notices all around the exhibition giving extra information, and many of these are reproduced in the copy of the Cabbage Leaf that was being handed out to visitors as they came into the house.  The notice for this exhibit had the title "5.25 trillion pieces", which is the estimated number of pieces of plastic in the ocean right now.

Signs in the Patchwork room talked about the impact of the fashion industry on the natural world, from the amount of water needed to produce one pair of jeans (3,780 litres) to carbon emissions (8 - 10% of all carbon emissions and rising) and micro plastics (2.2 million tonnes of microfibres from clothes entering the oceans every year).

In the How to Read Water room, along with the display of pottery and clay pipes found by mudlarks on the River Thames, there was information about the 500 poultry farms in Shropshire, Herefordshire and Powys, and their impact on the River Wye, polluted rivers across the UK, and ice caps melting at a rate of 420 billion tonnes per year, leading to rising sea levels.

The little display of butterflies on the landing (dedicated to Charles Darwin) noted that the numbers of Monarch butterflies overwintering in Mexico has fallen by 59% because of pesticide use and climate change, while in the UK the numbers of common butterfly species on farmland has fallen by 58% due to modern agricultural practices.

Also scattered about the house are a series of wooden puppets, each with a different costume created by Maizie Hardy.  There's a Welsh woman in a costume made from scraps of Welsh blankets, a Georgian dress covered in wild flowers called Lady of the Meadows, and The Queen of the Night in black velvet and silver sparkles.  The puppet in the Gardening alcove has a smocked top (that area is dedicated to Frances Hodgson Burnett and her book The Secret Garden).  There's also a Welsh miner, and a swimmer and a reader, and others.

All this, and I haven't even mentioned the kitchen, or the beautiful back garden, or the Rachel Carson area under the stairs - and there is far more!

Françoise and Pierre have plans for the house - I really hope they manage to achieve them!