A DIFFERENT CHRISTMAS

 A DIFFERENT CHRISTMAS

FROM OUR AUSTRALIA 3 LOG : FROM CAIRNS TO PERTH JULY 1995 TO JAN.1996

 

This last leg of our journey took us to the far south of Western Australia, to Albany and the Porongorups and Stirling Ranges.

 

 "Tell 'im that Bruce sent you"

We met a bird-watcher in Albany on a previous trip in 1993 who told us about Waddy's Hut in the edge of the forest skirting the Porongorup  Hills about twenty miles north.  With Bruce's message to back us, we asked the Ranger in the Porongorups National Park if we could stay a couple of nights and he gave us the key.... So on this trip two years later, we knew where we were heading.

FROM OZ 3 LOG,'95 - '96

Wednesday Dec.20^th

Tony....

We left Albany and made our way up towards the Porungorups, a wooded range of hills to the north. We stopped to pick up a Wood Duck, and later a Bronze-wing, dead on the road. They must have been knocked down very recently before the scavengers got them. They were both warm. The pigeons really ask for it as they pick up grit at the edge of the roads, apparently quite oblivious of anything passing and then fly up at the last possible moment.

 

Heading towards the Porongorups

 Bronze-wing Pigeon

 

 

Waddy's Hut. Bill Waddy was once the editor of the Perth Times and he had this forester's hut erected in the forest at the foot of the Porongorups as a hideaway. When he died the hut passed to the National Park Authority, who let occasional campers stay for a night or two.

 

 

 

  

We drove along the southern edge of the hills till we found the track up to Waddy’s Hut. There was no-one there, nor was the usual tin with the key. We posted Kim through a window that had lost its glass [why?? For some reason it didn't occur to us to try the door!] before we found the door was open! The place was full of dead leaves and even twigs and had much gone back since we last saw it in ’93. After a brew we decided to go round to the Ranger HQ  and clear it with him to stay for a couple of nights.

Luckily he was there and not out and about Rangering. In fact he’d only started the job yesterday, having moved up from Cape Arid Reserve “ To give the wife a neighbour and the kid a school’  he told us. He looked bemused when we asked if we could stay in Waddy’s Hut. He obviously had no idea about its loose arrangements and gave us the nod. We find we now have to pay a fee for both the Porongorups and the Stirlings. We coughed up, had a quick lunch in the car park by his HQ and then back to the hut. Mary was most insistent we rushed back in case ‘squatters’ had moved in ahead of us. In actual fact, not long after we got back and were still moving our stuff in, a Landcruiser arrived and looked long and hard before reversing out, so maybe her hunch was right.

We hadn’t long settled when the thunder started and soon we had a downpour. So out with all the buckets and bowls we could muster to catch rainwater despite having filled the van tank before leaving Albany this morning. The big rainwater tank beside the hut is connected to the gutter at the front of the hut but the tank sounded hollow and empty and a hole about 6” up from the bottom was roughly stuffed with a stick and a rag but it was leaky. I instantly made things worse by trying to fit a wooden peg. The metal at the base is paper-thin and things went backwards as soon as I touched it.

Just in front is an apple tree with one tiny apple and across the track is what looks like a nectarine with plenty of (unripe) fruit on it. It took Kim, as ever the hunter/gatherer, to make the real find...a plum out the back, with lots of ripe and succulent fruit!

As we had the benefit of ‘civilization’ we decided to have our ‘Christmas’ on the solstice which is tomorrow. So she and M. have been brewing up ideas and this afternoon as we were still rained off, Kim carried on painting, I wrote this log and Mary started on the ‘Christmas Fayre’. I should have plucked and drawn our two birds before the rain set in!

K. & M are now composing menus around what grub we have and can cook. There’s an oven in the little stove in the hut but we aren’t sure how it’ll behave. M & I didn’t use it last time we were here. Luckily there’s some dry wood under the hut and I’ve put our previously-collected ligno-tubers in the oven to dry. They’re the next best to mulga for good hot heat.

The rain lasted for well on in the day but cleared eventually and we had a little stroll in the last of the evening light. As Kim says, it’s a little holiday within the holiday. Just having CHAIRs!

 

Waddy's Hut

  

Thursday Dec 21^st Winter/Summer solstice!

Mary....

A good night. We quickly decided not to fight over the single mattress on the bedstead up the other end. Someone must have fumigated it as it smelt really chemically and toxic. So we put the tarp. on the floor to stop the drafts coming up between the floorboards and we put up the mozzie net . We are much more cautious since T was bitten on the elbow when we slept outside, unprotected , in central Queensland. He was really quite ill for several days after it. We were watched over by an enormous spider which came out in the evening and sat above one of the windows all night. It was an amputee with seven legs. But we were none too warm.

A fine morning and after breakfast of toast and the marmalade we’d made with the semi-wild oranges we found before Albany, we packed apples and an orange and set off up the very steep path over the Devil’s Slide on the col above us to go on the Wansborough Track  which cuts through the ridge from south to north. Up on the ridge we first cut off uphill in open Marri (Red Gum) woodland and a lot of various flowering shrubs scenting the air. Plenty of bees. A big party of New Holland Honeyeaters worked through the Banksias enjoying the nectar.Other birds were travelling with them.

Walking up the ridge from the Devil's Slide.

Boulders on the col, The Devil's slide

New Holland Honeyeater feeding on Banksia nectar.

 

This Western Spinebill was among the honeyeaters.

While we were stopped on the final summit, waiting for Kim to catch us up as she was drawing  we were passed by a couple of middle-aged chaps in hard hats. They were working for CALM[Conservation & Lands Management] surveying the extent of the Karri They were obviously forestry rather than conservation-orientated. As Kim says, there is an inherent conflict in the title of the organization, in that conservation sits ill with lands management which at least here in the south of Western Australia, is largely about timber extraction.

Looking south from the top.

 

 

 

 

After the rounded tops with low shrubs and shriveled grasses and herbs, and now getting blotted out by low cloud, we descended to the Wansborough Track which ran through a great area of Karri forest.

Tall Timber: the Karri forest along the Wansborough Track

The soaring Karri have a strong presence in the cathedrals of their forests .The airy canopy held on fine leaved slender branches so many metres aloft allows sufficient light down between the lance-straight smooth grey trunks to give an almost impenetrable  ground cover thicket of strong-smelling Karri Wattle.

This glorious woodland, growing as it does in areas with deep soil and over 40?” of rain a year, was the focus of the post-war Group Settlement Schemes, and over a third of the prime forest was cleared at the cost of huge sums of government money and many broken hearts and lives. Most of the Settlements failed, but the forest was gone leaving ill-drained clearings punctuated by  stumps and ring-barked wrecks standing upright and solitary .

We had a steep very slippery descent back down among the huge granite boulders of the Devil’s Slide (well-named!) and got back to the hut about two, hungry and knackered so we had an easy afternoon. K & I got firewood after our late lunch before it rained again. Thunder was rumbling all round. Kim painted, I prepared the evening meal and T did a better job mending the hole in the water tank and patched up some holes in the stove with stiff clay. Then he dug out a trench at the back of the hut where the soil is building up against the base, and by standing on the van reached over to clear leaves out of the gutter at the eaves.

We started off our festivities with early wine and nibbles. This helped us cooks! Tony sat outside watching the Western Gerygones coming and going from their nest hanging up in the tree by the water butt. He had lovely close views of an extended family of Splendid Fairy-    wrens too.

Male Splendid Fairy-wren

Tony.....

Then came our Solstice Dinner. Boiled spuds and carrots and steamed cabbage with gravy heavily loaded with caramelized onion. Then a spicy herby bread stuffing cooked in foil in the big cookpot around the Bronzewing and Duck. To garnish we had preserved spicy lemon and prunes. The whole meal was absolutely delicious. As good as any Christmas dinner I’ve ever had. The Bronzewing was especially flavoursome and gave us a surprising amount of meat. The flesh on the breast was dark but quite pale further in, so that when carving, it looked as though I was carving through a roll of different meats. Both birds were tender and we have enough of the duck left for another meal.

We followed the main course with a sweet of our own stewed plums picked from the tree Kim found. They were absolutely delicious. Good strong flavour. Excellent bush tucker!

Kim had also planned an egg custard baked in the oven, but the stove let her down so we weren’t able to eat it with the plums, but left in the oven overnight it was set in the morning and we ate it for breakfast with our muesli.

During the afternoon Mary has been secretly making up a crossword for us to do in the evening. Kim and I had also been making a start on our own but M’s was the only one completed for our evening’s entertainment. We had a lot of fun teasing out her cryptic clues. Finished off the evening with coffee and chocolate and carried on with our own crosswords.

Friday Dec.22^nd

Tony...

Peaceful night though we all heard rain and it was raining heavily when we got up, and all morning, though there are occasional breaks. Between the showers I have been decanting water from all our buckets into the water butt. My clay repair has slowed the leak to a drip. I don’t think the gutter at the front of the hut is contributing much as there’s a big hole in that too!

During the showers, we have done Kim’s crossword, with much hilarity and alterations to its structure and content as we went along!

K & M have also cooked lots of biscuits and fancy cakes, so now we are about to test them with our cuppas. (very good.)When the rain eased off we went for a walk along the foot of the range. Initially it ran through Karri but then came out on an area that looked as if it had been felled but is now regenerating. Then into an area of burnt-through Marri (Red Gum) till we came to the paddocks of the farm. Got pretty wet just as we turned back.

After a brew while M & K composed menus for the next week so we could shop properly, we drove in to Mount Barker about 20 minutes along the other side of the range to the west. Did our shopping in the supermarket and hung around till 5 o’clock trying to phone Angie at Cambridge without success. Eleanor in Perth had forwarded a letter from him and we picked it up at the poste restante but saved it to read over the evening meal.

We were dogged by rain both ways, but I’d left a tarp. over the gear on the van roof and it held, at least for this short journey. The dirt sections of the roads were a bit iffy in places with all the rain.

Settled in for an early evening. Tea of spiced rice, duck, salt beef and a salad. Another egg custard (Kim made it in a bain marie on top of the stove this time) and more plums. Excellent!

We read Ang’s letter. He planned to go to Cornwall climbing on the cliffs with Isobel over Christmas. First meeting her in N.Wales after she’s finished her shift at the hospital. No wonder we couldn’t reach him in Cambridge.

 Mary had made up another crossword which made K & I scratch our heads for an hour or so and it was ten before we turned in.

Saturday 23d Dec

Kim...

A good night, though it was STILL wet when we got out of our scratchers about 6am. Because of all the rain we were somewhat at a loss as to our plan of action. Got into the van and listened to a broken up and crackly radio weather man. After giving a ‘sheep weather warning’ he said something about frequent showers continuing in the SW section. Typical Aussie understatement for pretty-well unremitting rain for days on end!! We debated whether to run away further north in hopes of dryer weather, or stay put for one more day. We stayed put.

In the middle of the morning we were dismayed to hear cars approaching. Four cars drove up and stopped in front of the hut. Like ostriches, we sat tight, imagining ourselves invisible while footstep, voices and eventually heads appeared, passing the windows. Then a knock on the door. A girl in a short rather motheaten fur coat and very high platform-soled shoes stood in the doorway and said they hadn’t expected anybody to be here, and they’d come to hold a Wedding Ceremony!! They’d originally planned to hold it up on the Devil’s Slide, but in view of the weather had opted for the hut.

Behind her appeared the Bride, with a garland round her head and a long purple dress, three young bridesmaids, (her 2 daughters and young sister,) the bride’s mother and father, the first girl’s man, very nattily –dressed, almost like a Teddy Boy, another, rather ample woman, and in the rear, a woman in a tailored grey office suit with a briefcase under her arm, the Officiating  Officer. Oh yes,  lurking to one side was the Groom, with long hair and a well-worn anorak which he never took off so we don’t know whether he was in his best bib and tucker or had come straight from work.

They were friendly, almost apologetic, as we stood back and they filed in out of the rain. We hastily scooped up our bedding and the mozzie net which we didn’t want to grace their family album in perpetuity, and offered to clear off while they did their thing but they insisted we joined them. So we did, huddled into a corner and feeling rather de trop. I’m glad yesterday we’d slung up a branch of Christmas Tree so it looked ever so slightly festive!

 After much self conscious giggling, and squeaks from the little girls, nervous laughter and apologies all round, a ten minute ‘service’ and it was over. They invited us to their get-together in a roadhouse a few miles away but we politely excused ourselves as we’d intruded enough. And they left. Our mouths were still hanging open!

It transpired that they hadn’t checked with the Ranger, so at least we were in rightful possession! That earned us another fancy cake and a coffee to get over it.

Tony...

It belted down for the rest of the day. Kim painted, M. read and I tried stopping up more holes in the stove with the left-over clay.

 

Christmas Tree. This is one of about 32 different Mistletoes in Australia. This species grows to the size of a substantial tree and flowers at Christmas-time.

Sunday 24^th Dec.

Mary....

Decided to go up to the Stirlings today, come hell or highwater. Kim and Tony raced round to the derelict farmstead we’d found on our 1993 visit here, in the hopes of fruit. Nothing was ripe last time in an orchard behind a burnt-out dwelling and a great blue spread of gone-wild Agapanthus.

It was still drizzling. I reckoned I was better-employed clearing the hut. They found three sorts of plums and more nectarines but none ripe. However they filled their cagoules with lemons and grapefruit and by the time they got back I’d packed the van and cleaned the hut so we packed the fruit and were away.

We found the weather had cleared considerably once we got round to the north side of the Porongorups and we had distant glimpses of the Stirlings rising up quite  peakily about 30 miles north. Drove through rolling grassland and some corn. Sheep and some cattle. Tanks in all the paddocks usually with Wood Ducks standing around on the edges or out in the paddocks grazing. The farms must be fairly small blocks judging by the frequency of the homesteads set back a little from the road. Quite a lot of uncleared blocks.

 

 

Stirling Range ahead.

  

The skirts of the Stirling Range extend some miles out onto the plains this side. Already seeing new plants and Kim’s itching to get out and walk. Must be most frustrating for her. But at her pace we still wouldn’t have left Darwin where we met her off the plane all those months ago!

Being in a National Park we couldn’t wild camp and we pulled into  ‘ Pappa Colla’ a private site on a homestead. Very spacious and informal. Excellent facilities, lots of info. especially on the natural history. We could pitch where we wanted among thicker or thinner groups of tall gums with fireplace rings of stone and few occupied sites, all about 200 yards apart. We pitched in the open and immediately dashed off to the shower block.

The proprietor lent us a book about the wildlife of the area and we took it in turns to read it out in the evening but we invariably fell asleep. Tony put a tarp. over the tent and another as a shelter  extension as there was rain threatening.

 Monday De3c 25^th Christmas Day.

Kim...

What an eventful night! At some time in the early hours it started to thunder and it went on with lightning and getting closer and closer and it chucked the rain down. It woke the 3 of us and we lay there in the dark wondering when we were going to float away. Periodically Mum looked round the inside of the tent with the torch but it held up OK and we wondered if our bedroll mattresses were soaking it up through the groundsheet. In the event, in the morning they were damp but not too bad. It started to trickle into the porch and our boots were floating in a puddle so we rescued them. When we got up there was quite a lake round the back of the tent, but the rain had eased off and the puddles began to drain away. It continued showery on and off all day. Thank goodness we’d put the firewood in the dry.

 

 

After the wet night.

 

It eased sufficiently during the morning for us to put on waterproofs and walk from the camp round the fire trail on the edge of the nearby woodland with grassland the other side, and then across heathland. The soil was very pale and sandy and the ants in the track were busy spring-cleaning and carting sand out of their entrance holes. They were pale reddish brown and very aggressive. They crowded round our feet and started to swarm on us as soon as we stopped by their holes.

Walk near Papa Cola

 

Port Lincoln Parrot known as Twenty Eight because of its call

Elegant Parrot

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We were seeing several new plants and it was quite birdy too. Flocks of Regent Parrots, ‘Twenty Eights’, Elegant, Red-capped, Purple-crowned Lorikeets, and good but fleeting vies of Little  Eagle and Square-tailed Kite.

It’s very good for birds round our camp-site too, with superb views of Rufous Treecreepers, Yellow-plumed Ho0neyeaters, all the parrots and Restless Flycatcher.

 

In the afternoon we went for a short drive through the eastern end of the Stirling Range. A very uppy downy dirt track, cut up in places after the heavy rain.  Saw a Western Brush Wallaby. A pretty little thing with grey fur, a white streak from ear to nose, black feet and tail tip. Tiny front legs. But we didn’t stay too long as we wanted to get back and cook meal and try phoning Angie again.

 

Western Brush Wallaby

  

Second Christmas Dinner; this time spuds baked in their jackets in the fire, the remains of the duck, salad and onion bahjis with our own home-made (long job!) mincemeat. We’d chopped dried fruit, the kernels from all the plums we’d been eating,(we’d saved the stones in case they came in useful!!) a lemon, some wine and brown sugar. It was very good. With no pastry, we cooked it in a sort of crumble mix.

Mary.....

We got Ang this time. He and Isabel had been climbing down west and got home to find Paul’s wine-making stuff all over the kitchen. He remonstrated and helped him move it all out to the shed. He’d built a shelter under the cherry which was also full of his clobber! [ Paul, our house-sitter, is a pathological hoarder]They are hoping to climb on Sharpnose tomorrow if it’s dry. The time difference and long intervals between exchanges of our remarks was disconcerting and I was suddenly very aware of the 15000plus kms between Cornwall and southern Australia and rather than feel elated I was a bit cast down by the call.

Tuesday Dec 26^th

Tony....

We broke camp in the dry, returned the book to the office with a note thanking them, and set off for Bluff Knoll.

Bluff Knoll (on a fine day in '93!) The highesr peak in the Stirlings at 1099metres.)

 

It was completely overcast and the cloud was right down to the car park, coming and going but we decided to go up as far as poss, and put on our waterproofs. It was inevitable that we were going to climb it come what may, despite M’s protestations that she wasn’t going to climb in dense cloud. The walk was rated as ‘Difficult’ which alarmed her a bit. But of course the cloud is never that dense, the footpath though narrow  and very steep in places, was very obvious. 

 

Wet Ascent

 

Visibility in 1995!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We had more or less continuous drizzle and rain as we climbed but once on top there was only a strong wet wind and we sheltered in the lee of the crags before going back down. We passed several people toiling up as we went down, able now to enjoy all the flowers. So many are endemic to the Stirlings that we kept seeing species completely new to us. .......Ironically, the sky cleared right away as we went down!

 

Stirling Bell, one of many endemic plants in the Stirlings.

 The photos are copies of slides taken in the 1990s with an 'up & fire' Instamatic. These were the days before digital.

The drawings were by Kim done in the field  as we waited.....and waited!.........sorry Kim! There was always the 'push me, pull me' as she wanted to stop and draw and we wanted to push on. 

It's easier now, 25 years on. We are happy to just sit.

 

 

WINTER MOORLAND

WINTER MOORLAND

Autumn Walk (from notes, one November)

As often happens, when we go for our first short autumn walk up on the edge of the moor above Trebartha, we are chased off by the weather.  

   So far we haven’t seen any of the winter thrushes in the hedges around here, but will often see them in the in-by pastures and the hawthorns dotting the moorland slopes. We went in search, and chose a morning of patchy blue among the clouds, following the rain and wind of the past couple of days. Parking in our usual gateway we at once spotted a fox making his way round a corner of bracken towards the woodland of Trebartha below. His coat shone brighter than the rain-soaked dark russet of the dying bracken.

  Going up the lane towards the moor, water gushes off the fields and issues from every orifice in the banks to join the overflowing gutters and we play our childish game of clearing the masses of dead leaves which clog the grids over the culverts and enjoy the rush of released water.

      The patches of blue sky begin to close as we negotiate the cattle grid and walk up onto the moor. The last in-by pasture was dotted with birds; mixed gulls and corvids and a whirling flock of starlings but they were almost the last birds we saw. Tony thought he had the merest glimpse of a woodcock swiftly rising from the bracken beside him before flitting out of sight.

      Rain was soon spitting in our faces as we walked into the chilly NW breeze. Crimson and orange wax-cap fungi studded the close-bitten turf and haws still covered their lichen-bearded trees.  A lone blackbird chacked in alarm as we flushed it from a gorse bush but nothing else stirred.

      We crested the rise, now in steady fine rain and the moor ahead was blotted out by an unrelenting pall of low cloud. The horizon from the north right round to the west was lined by horizontal bands of rain cloud of dark blue-slate through greys to a silvery shimmer.

      Time to leave, rejected once more by the fickle weather.

 

Gorse flowers all through the winter.

 

Bodmin Moor is smaller and more intimate than the great wilderness of Dartmoor. It’s more or less round with streams and sunken lanes radiating from its sweeping open upland. 

 

 

Streams and sunken lanes radiate off the moor.

Bodmin Moor with the highest point, Brown Willy on the right and further away, to the left, Roughtor (pronounced to rhyme with plough)

 

The horizon is punctuated by granite Tors.

The boulder-strewn clittery slopes were once quarried for stone.

Occasional ancient hawthorns feed the winter thrushes.

The clean damp air gives rise to abundant lichens.

Unfortunately these days, the uncompromising geometrical shapes of blocks of coniferous plantations jar the senses and I won’t go into the ecomomics of them, but have to admit that they do provide another habitat for wildlife, notably, in the more open replanted areas of a second or third generation of Sitkas, nightjars breed.

 

Smallacombe Plantation.

The high humidity also favours abundant mosses. Below, the Spruces in the plantation are bestrewn with moss.

 

Until a couple of hundred years ago it was known as Foy Moor, no doubt because the River Fowey (pronounced Foy) rises on the northern side of the moor, and flows some nine miles across it before tumbling off to the south and running towards the sea. Extensive mires spread across the hollows within the uplands, tufted with rushes and cushioned with bright green sphagnum or bog moss.

At most times you can hop across these mires, staying on top of the tussocks. Tony says, when I hesitate, "Just KEEP MOVING!"

 

Clumps of bright green Sphagnum (bog moss) betray the wetter places.

 

There are occasional pools of peat-stained water, but the only natural lake of any size is Dozmary Pool (this isn't it.)

 Several reservoirs have been constructed over the years,

Crowdy Reservoir with Roughtor in the distance.

and if you walk the shores when the water level is down, you can pick up an occasional tiny flint ‘microlith’, evidence of early man’s presence on the moor before conditions became colder and wetter and peat began to be deposited. These tiny flint artefacts lie below the peat, and show up where the water’s edge erodes the peat banks. This begs the question; granite is the native rock here. What trade, or movement of people was there, to givethem the flint for these little flaked tools ? This was back in the time of the hunter-gatherers, in the Stone Age.

Microliths are little flint flakes no more than a couple of centimetres long, with carefully-worked edges.

Unlike its Devonshire cousins, Bodmin is largely a grass moor with heathers growing mostly where the grazing pressures are less intense. Sheep, cattle and ponies have traditionally been kept on the moor and these days the numbers of winter-stocked animals are much reduced for the welfare of both the animals and the quality of the habitat. The moor is bisected by the A30 the main trunk road which largely follows the route of the old coaching road from Penzance to London. The sides of the road, fenced off from stock, are still heathery in places.

 Going upslope, one can look down on patches of regular green fields, the semi-improved in-by meadows surrounding an occasional farm, solidly built of granite, and its associated barns. In a few places. When the light is right, a low sun with show up the shadows showing the traces of mediaeval fields.

 Walking from East Moor in a south westerly direction one sees the dramatic spring called Rusheyford Water. A small deep pool has a gravelly bottom and a vigorous upwelling of crystal-clear water swirls the gravel in the centre. Much to our consternation, Tony dropped the lens of his camera in as he leaned over to look. He retrieved it of course but got a wetting! Further on we come to the stone and earth banks marking the remains of a mediaeval village. House enclosures and the walls bordering little tracks leading among them evoke vividly past times and the rigours of their isolated position.

 Walking the moor in winter, the clean crystal-sharp air is invigorating; the benign and rare totally windless days are balm; more often there are the uncertainties of rapidly changeable weather when sudden storms can be downright unpleasant!

 BLOWING THE COBWEBS AWAY (from December notes)

We emerged onto the moor into the teeth of a strong northerly wind in the clearance following several days of unremitting rain which had tied us to computers and indoor jobs. I was exhilarated  by the crystal clean air. The wind moaned in the telegraph wires strung out along the road, visiting each farm in turn; Ryland,North Bowda, Bowayland, Industry, till it reaches Tresellern. This atavistic sound at once gives me a feeling of connection right back to early man and I feel as one with the earth.

Tony got out of the car and said ‘It looks like rain.’ A couple of hundred yards up the road, and he said ‘I don’t like the look of that cloud’ and then a bit further on, the wind really tore into us as it blew ahead of the next shower. As we sheltered under a big clump of gorse, he said ‘There’s sleet in it too.’ A magpie looked uncomfortable as it was swept downwind, its tail blown sideways, before it plunged into the shelter of some firs by a farmhouse.  We realized, as we looked through cold-teary eyes, that behind each clump of grass on the moor stretching away from us, was a Golden Plover crouching, also sheltering. They squatted even lower each time a sharper gust of wind blew. The squall passed as quickly as it had blown in. After that, Tony’s cobwebs had been blown away and he enjoyed himself.

Ragged flocks of starlings hadn’t strayed far from their winter roost at Rough Tor. They battled into the wind, rising to skim over the road bank and low over our heads before settling in the next paddock. A big flock of sheep was strung out in a line, in the lee of the next bank of the in-by fields cut out of the moor’s edge. Fieldfares and redwings hurried from hawthorn to hawthorn, but the bounty is mostly over. They’ll have to go down into the farmland below to get more haws. A buzzard got up out of the grass and flew downwind a little, then banked and sidled crossways before settling again. But the farm flocks of jackdaws seemed to enjoy their brief flights up into the air, chacking cheerfully.

The wind has taken just about every tree leaf except for a few willows crouched in the ditches, their leaves yellowing but still plenty of them. Oddly, the occasional elder on the banks, had bunches of tender green, soft-stemmed leaves still intact and unseered, on the gaunt branches.

Blown off the moor in another mean gruel of rain and hail, we came back abruptly into a gentler world of autumn coloured hedgerow bushes and amber-leaved beeches in the farmland below.

Writing the moor.

Some years ago I spent several years in a ‘creative writing’ group and did an on-line course in short-story writing. Over the course of some months I wrote, among a lot of other stuff, three shortish stories based on the deserted village  up by  the great spring of Rusheyford Water and the small area around it and the edge of the moor. I set it in the Dark Ages because little is known about this time and I was able to give more leeway in my imagination without challenging myself about the accuracy or otherwise of any detail.It was a strange experience. I was totally immersed in my mental association with the whole project. I found it was like stirring a dollop of raspberry compote into a bowl of yoghurt: the physical facts of the situation combined with my imagination, produced a swirling mix  of the geography of the area with my imagination of the people within the stories. I even found, when walking up in that area for quite some time after I’d finished those stories, that I would pass a place and either wonder why such and such a simple building wasn’t there, or think ‘No! This should be marshy here’. I was still half-into the life I had conjured up in the stories!

 

 The moor is claimed to have traces of the most densely-settled area in Britain in prehistoric times and there is abundant evidence of hut circles, stone rings, cairns, cists or stone-line burial chambers. In one cairn a very rare example of a  Bronze Age gold cup was found in 1834. It now sits in the British Musuem. One feels like saying‘ bring back our Elgin Marble!’

One of the abundant hut circles.

 

Ninestones

The Rillaton Gold Cup

  

The boulder-strewn slopes with enormous part-buried grounders of good quality granite have long been exploited. Early quarries were simply based on splitting such huge boulders in situ and carting off the split shapes .

 

Split stone. This was abandoned, perhaps it split in the wrong place.

 

 There are numerous slightly bigger  18^th and 19^th Century quarries with traces still of old buildings and tracks, even small branching railways for carrying the shaped stone away off the moor. Dumps of discarded stone remain. The only working quarry where granite is still extracted is the big de Lank Quarry in the de Lank river valley to the west of the moor, renowned for its high quality stone.

 

 

 

Small quarry on south side of Kilmar Tor.

 

 

 Remains of old railway taking stone from moorland quarries.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 In places, underlying volcanic activity has changed the feldspar content of granite into kaolin or china clay, once a major industry in Cornwall. This valuable mineral was also mined in the moor at the extensive Stannon works near Roughtor on the north side of the moor. This same vulcanicity also deposited veins of minerals particularly tin, and mining was another important industry on the moor in Victorian times.

Victorian tin mining, Gonamena.

Peat,a source of local fuel, was also cut from the deposits on the moor until about a hundred years ago. No wonder the moor has such a long history of settlement; the apparent wilderness has a lot of resources.

WINTER MOORLAND ( From more December notes)

We tiptoed over the cattle grid and headed onto the moor in the teeth of a needle-sharp north westerly. The road, narrow pot-holed tarmac, leads past three farms, each down its own side-track, and ending at a fourth, Tresellern, where the road gives way to a tractor-rutted mushy turf onto the moorland and then dissipates towards the ruin and tiny fields at Rushyford.

One farm is called ‘Industry’, an odd name ,perhaps referring to past mining or quarrying of the big granite grounders lying half buried in the peaty turf.

Another side turning leads down to the Bastreet Water Treatment Works. I hope it doesn’t ‘treat’ the water too assiduously. It takes its water from the Withey Brook which runs from Tresellern Marsh, with tributaries from Watery Moor to the north, and beyond Rusheyford Water to the West, but the main flow turns south at Trewartha Marsh to the Witheybrook Marsh just above Minions. By the time it reaches the treatment works on its way to join the Lyhner a couple of miles downstream, it runs deep and fast, with cushions of green weed trailing in the current of clear, weak-tea stained water, cold,  peat-soft water which we have always believed supplies our house.

The road passes in-bye fields of improved grass, with granite walls and the odd wind-riven hawthorn and oak. Away to the south, beyond the Withey Brook is the ridge of Hawks Tor and Trewartha Tor, and beyond again another ridge,  Kilmar Tor bounding Twelve Men’s Moor. Who are the Twelve Men? Do they refer to the tors and granite outcrops marking Kilmar?  I must count them. Or were they farmers wresting a living up there?

The grassy fields are home to mixed bunches of corvids, the odd Lesser Black-backed Gull, maybe a few Lapwings, black and white shapes among the rushes in a damp hollow. The bushy trees shelter Blackbirds, Fieldfares and Redwings, flying down to the grass and, easily spooked, back up into the trees again.

To the north of the road the ground rises up through a scrub of gorse and hawthorns. A couple of dozen small shaggy moor ponies, bay and skewbald, hide away from the wind, and then the ground rises higher, slopes pocked by granite clitters and a granite cross, before reaching the crest, a long dome called, appropriately, ‘Ridge’.

 

 

 

High in the sky, what seemed like a wisp of smoke resolved into a flock of  Golden Plover  flying fast, wheeling and twisting, plunging down but then up and away, glistening as they turned to catch the sun. At the side of the road lies a dead pony, the carcase muddy and bedraggled as if already sinking into the earth, its head thrown back and mouth open in a toothy rictus. But it can’t have been there long. Its eyes, the first to be taken by scavenging crows, are still intact.

Picking our way back through the scrub, we disturb Redwings feeding on the mummified remains of last year’s crop of haws. They flit from tree to tree with thin calls. We are retreating before the menace of slate-grey clouds over Halvana  far to the NW. Streaks and veils of cloud are being torn down to the ground; a squall is coming down-wind straight for us and soon the sleety hail is wetting our backs.

Near the cattle grid a Buzzard floats away from us. Had he been after frogs?  A lot of spawn has already been laid, showing as glutinous humps above the sodden turf and sphagnum of the boggy ground at the edge of the moor. It’s going to get left high and dry, even after the copious rains of the last two months, but there are bound to be a few survivors.

Winter Fieldfares (Kim Atkinson)