Islay

4th June 2018

I'm back from staying with my uncle on the Isle of Islay. This is the most southerly large island of the Inner Hebrides. It looks northwards to Colonsay, eastwards to Jura, southwards to Ulster and westwards to nowhere - or rather into the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean and beyond, to the chilly coast of Labrador. For better or worse, its climate and weather are intimately connected with the ocean.

A misty, eventide view looking south from Ben Cladville, with Donegal in the distance

Spacious Islay - open to the elements. It's a marked contrast to my cramped Suffolk homeland, with its woods, hedged fields and clustered villages. Houses on Islay are white-painted and built of stone and slate; they are strung in rows through 19th century settlement towns such as Bowmore and Port Charlotte, or scattered in farmsteads with strange, hybrid Gaelic, Norse and English names. Many of them have fine views over rough pastureland or boggy moorland, greenish-grey, brown and dotted with rocky outcrops and boulders, and a backdrop of mountains. Many of them have fine views over the sea, which is never far away with its stormy grey or shades of passionate blue and green. The inlets of Loch Indaal and Loch Gruinart almost divide the island in two.

View across Loch Indaal towards the distant Paps of Jura.</ font>

My uncle lives in the Rinns of Islay, a broad peninsula ten miles long at the south-western end of the island. The family farm is perched on a south-facing hillside with spectacular panoramic views to Portnahaven and a scattering of islets. The place is buffeted by wind and rain for many months of the year. The land includes over half a mile of sea cliffs, with caves, precipices and a natural arch, and even a prehistoric dun (promontory fort) and a cleit (burial mound). There are choughs and ravens, peregrines and curlews, stonechats and skylarks. Starlings bubble and squeak from the chimney pots. Sparrows and siskins jostle for space at the bird table.

View over Cladville and the south-western tip of the Rinns.

Rinns rock

The Rinns is founded on very ancient bedrock: gneiss dated to about 1.8 billion years old (by way of comparison the Earth is 4.6 billion years old). Chemical analysis tells us the gneiss originated in the roots of a volcanic mountain range[1], perhaps 20 miles down. Tectonic processes over eons of time have since brought it to the surface. The rocks of the Rinns Complex, as it is called, lie all round Cladville and Portnahaven in the form of the pinkish-coloured gneiss and a greenish-grey amphibolite. The one looks rather like frozen sausage meat; the other like frozen salt and pepper. Both are very hard, and were created through metamorphism of the deep crustal rocks syenite and gabbro respectively. 

A boulder of syenitic gneiss
with a quartz vein and lichen, Claddach

Sea-smoothed gabbroic amphibolite, Lossit

These rocks are the oldest thing I have ever contemplated. They originated in the late Palaeoproterozoic Era of the Precambrian Supereon. They are thought to have formed deep within a volcanic arc where the crust of the Columbia Supercontinent was being subducted.  Today - risen from the depths - they form the cliffs and underlie the boggy moorland of the Rinns.

These rocks push my understanding into a new dimension: they take me as far back in time as I can go in British geology. The only life-forms on Earth then were bacteria and algae.[2] They belong to a world dominated by physical processes in which micro-organisms had a precarious foothold. Today, 1.8 billion years later, the same natural processes continue but micro-organisms are everywhere, forming the foundations for the pyramid of complex life which surrounds me, and of which I am a tiny part. Apparently I may well have more micro-organisms inside me than there are cells in my body.[3] Elements of the Palaeoproterozoic world survive, and not just on Islay.


Snowball Earth

A week ago today I took a bus trip up to Port Askaig, crossing the island diagonally. On the way, I stopped at the Islay Natural History Trust centre in Port Charlotte, where there are displays about geology as well as wildlife. It was an opportunity to get a better overview of local Earth history. Among the specimens on display were samples of the Port Askaig tillite.

Tillite from Port an t-Seilich, near Port Askaig.

Seen here, the specimen has a grey, sandy mudstone matrix containing pebbles of granite. The mudstone is a lithified example of glacial till (hence 'tillite') deposited in very shallow sea water, with its matrix derived from the erosion of shales and granites[4]. The pebbles dropped into it either from melting ice floes or - more likely - melt-out from the grounded base of a wasting ice sheet.[5]

The tillite is exposed along the coast at Port Askaig and also in the road cutting next to the ferry terminal. On arrival, I knew only had two hours before my bus returned so decided to focus on the cutting, which has recently been extended. I soon found examples of granite and other pebbles embedded in mudstone.

A granite pebble in mudstone matrix.

This tillite has a special place in geology. It was first recognised as a glacial rock formation as far back as the 1870s, and attributed to the early Cambrian.[6] Where does it fit in the geological timescale today? It is classified lithostratigraphically as part of the Islay Subgroup within the Dalradian Supergroup, and deposited during the Cryogenian Period of the Neoproterozoic Era of the Precambrian. Evidence from remnant magnetism and carbonate chemistry in these rocks suggests that Britain lay close to the Equator at this time, however the fact that we have clear evidence for glaciation at this very low latitude has suggested that the Earth may have undergone periods of very extensive ice cover. This has given rise to the 'Snowball Earth' concept, which envisaged prolonged periods in the Neoproterozoic when the Earth was frozen as far south as the Equator. The Port Askaig tillite is most likely attributable to the Sturtian Glaciation, part of which has recently been dated to 716.5 million years ago.[7]. Back in Victorian times, Thomson speculated about the origin of the granite clasts. He found he couldn't relate their mineralogy to any extant granites in Scotland:

‘If ... we compare the embedded boulders of granite with the granites found in situ throughout the Highlands, we feel the necessity of tracing them to another source, and hope we do not overstep the bounds of prudent speculation in suggesting that those erratics are the reassorted materials of some great Northern Continent that has yielded to the ceaseless gnawing tooth of time, leaving scattered fragments as wreckage of its former greatness, and that the material of which the mass is composed have in time, deeper than we have hitherto suspected, been transported by the agency of ice.’

We now know that the mudstone matrix was derived from some now-vanished source rocks somewhere south-east of Islay.[4] The granites may well have been derived from rocks related to the syenites of the Rinns Complex, probably an eroding part of the 'igneous province' of tectonically mobile crust which then spanned Scandinavia, Greenland and north-west Canada as part of the Neoproterozoic Rodinia Supercontinent.[8] I touch my hat to Thomson for his scientific insight.

Image courtesy Fitches et al, 1996.

An ice age legacy

Jumping forward 716,250,000 years in time, Islay was covered with ice at the height of the last cold glacial period, the Devensian Stage of the late Pleistocene.  The limits of the ice sheet are thought to have lain many miles to westward at this time.

Devensian ice limits about 23,000 years ago.
Image courtesy Clark et al, 2012, fig.18.

The Devensian, and presumably earlier glaciations, have left traces everywhere on Islay. There is ice-scratched and -scoured bedrock and other glacially-sculpted topography; there are eskers and moraines, sub-glacial meltwater channels; layers of till and outwash gravel. The general direction of ice flow was towards the Atlantic. The till is unevenly distributed, and underlies the most fertile parts of Islay. My cousin William has noticed that his best farmland lies to the south-west side of Ben Cladville, and speculates that the till was deposited more thickly in the lee of the hill as the ice flowed over it. This seems very plausible to me.

Cnoc Bhi Bhuirn, a glacially-sculpted rocky knoll in the classic shape of
a roche moutonée, The direction of ice flow was from the right (north-east).
Ben Cladville is in the far distance.

A glacially-scoured outcrop of gneiss bedrock, with accentuated jointing.  

An erratic boulder of dolerite in glacial till at Claddach.
Dolerite is found on Islay as intrusive igneous dykes of early Tertiary age.

A distinctive ridge of glacial moraine (the 'Blackrock Moraine') at the head of Loch Indaal.
It is thought to have developed in a retreat phase of the last ice sheet.[10]

Another legacy of the last ice age is a suite of raised beaches on Islay. They were formed at a time when the land was depressed by its overburden of ice, but were raised up as the land rebounded after the ice sheets melted and retreated. These are well displayed as a series of planed surfaces in the coastal landscape around Portnahaven.

Raised beaches on two levels at Orsay island, Portnahaven:
c.+ 15 m OD near the lighthouse and c.+10 m OD at St Oran's Chapel (right).

A raised beach at c. +15 m OD behind the houses at Portnahaven.
(Snoozing grey seals in the foreground.)

Coastal deposits on a raised beach at Portnahaven, at the +10 m OD level.

After the ice

The ice sheets have retreated, but seemingly only just. The blanket of meadowland, bog and heather can scarcely cover the the bare bones of the recently glaciated landscape. I say recently, but the ice sheets vanished from Islay between 16,000 and 17,000 years ago.[9]

There is a pass called Bealach Froige on the north side of Ben Cladville. It looks like a glacial overspill channel through which meltwater once flowed westwards. It has a gently sloping long profile and a level, boggy floor which terminates abruptly in a steep declivity, breaking down to a narrow, rocky inlet called Port Froige. The level floor may be the remnant of a raised beach or - more likely - a moraine-dammed lake, as there appears to be a bar of glacial till defining the steep break of slope and marking the still-stand of a small retreating lobe of ice. 

Bealach Froige, a likely glacial meltwater channel - view looking west.

Reddish-brown till exposed at the seaward lip of Bealach Froige

In the 1980s the valley's sediments were cored to a depth of 7.5 metres and analysed for fossil pollen. The results have provided information about the environmental history of Islay in the early post-glacial period.[11]

Far from being the treeless moorland we see in the Rinns today, the pollen record shows that the Cladville area was once forested with birch, Scots pine, elm, oak, alder, hazel and willow. The Bealach Froige profile is undated, but comparison with dated profiles from nearby Loch a' Bhogaidh suggests the expansion of forest took place about 9,000 years ago.[11] There is oak and hazel woodland elsewhere in sheltered parts of Islay, no doubt directly descended from the first colonising trees.

Oak woodland at Kildalton in south-east Islay.

The earliest evidence of human life on Islay after the ice sheets retreated is flint tools of the Ahrensburgian industry, product of late glacial and early post-glacial horse and reindeer hunters. Ahrensburgian-type chipped stone tools have been found beneath Mesolithic layers at Port an t-Seilich.[12] The excavators speculated as to whether these people may have been seal hunters.

The Mesolithic site of Bolsay Farm, close to Loch a' Bhogaidh, has yielded large quantities of microlithic flintwork,[12] and is dated to about 7,930 years BP. David has found a single worked flint flake on his cliff top, so perhaps there is a prehistoric campsite under the peat close by. It could be Mesolithic or equally Neolithic, as there is evidence of Neolithic activity at Loch a' Bhogaidh in the form of stone tools and pollen profiles that indicate forest clearance.[13]

For peat's sake

Peat is found everywhere where there is poorly-drained land on Islay. Initially formed over wet patches and hollows, it spread and coalesced to form a blanket over areas of level moorland. Dead plant debris marinades in a deoxygenated stew of its own decay, becomes compacted, turns into layers of peat. It has been forming across Islay for millennia, but received a boost 4,000 years ago in the early Bronze Age when the climate became wetter and forest clearance was well advanced.[13]

I first came to Islay in the summer of 1968, and remember seeing drying stacks of peat dotted across the landscape near Porthahaven. It was a picturesque sight. Today, fifty years on, very few people continue the practice; David tells me that the struggle to cut the stuff, dry it and cart it away are now beyond most people's patience and endurance. The trenches near Portnahaven are now healing over. Elsewhere, it seems the only large-scale peat cutting still carried out on Islay is destined for the whisky distilleries. They rely on peat smoke to lend its distinctive aroma to the drying barley used in the malting process. The barley itself was originally grown on local areas of loamy soil, though today most of it is imported.

Vegetated former peat cutting scars near Claddach, Portnahaven.

Some small-scale peat cutting near Airigh Sgallaidh, north-east of Ben Cladville.

Peat cutting at Duich Lots. Perhaps the peat is going to one of the nearby distilleries 
at Ardbeg, Bowmore, Lagavulin, Laphroaig or Port Ellen.

As compacted plant remains, peat contains the layered history of the successive plant communities of which it was formed. Its twigs, leaves and pollen are an immediate archive of plant history in the landscape. The deepest peat contains the longest archive. Yes - this means that peat on the fire is part of an ancient landscape library going up in smoke.

But we needn't worry too much, as each volume - each shelf even - is pretty much the same for a given patch of landscape: small variations on a theme in a repetitive music score; a few changed words in otherwise identical paragraphs. Only when we have research questions to answer, as at Bealach Froige and Loch a' Bhogaidh, is it worth the time and trouble to play the score or decipher the text.

Life goes on, oblivious, over and within the Holocene peat bogs of Islay. They hum with insects of all kinds, from infuriating midges to serene damselflies; from gadding cleggs to bumbling bees. Bacterial and fungal action as ever carries out its dark alchemy. Cotton grass flurries in the Atlantic wind which almost constantly buffets the island. Sphagnum moss absorbs water, swells and dies; provides nutrients for its neighbours and descendants. Sundews clasp flies and draw them down into dissolving liquors.

Out on a bog near Airigh Sgallaidh a cuckoo calls incessantly from the echoing walls of a forestry plantation. Palaeoproterozoic rocks continue their unimaginably long journey to becoming grains of sand. It is a Monday morning, and everything has its special place in the world's story.

Blanket bog on Islay, springtime. 

Variations on a theme of peat.

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REFERENCES

1. Muir, RJ. The Precambrian Basement and Related Rocks of the Southern Inner Hebrides, Scotland. PhD thesis, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 1990.
2. Conway Morris, S.. The Early Evolution of Life. In: Brown, GC, Hawkesworth, CJ & Wilson, RCL (eds). Understanding the Earth. Cambridge University Press, 1992.
3. Sender, R, Fuchs, S, & Milo, R. Revised estimates for the number of human and bacteria cells in the body. PLoS Biol 14(8), 2016. Online at https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002533. [Accessed June 2018]
4. Panahi, A & Young, GM. A geochemical investigation into the provenance of the Neoproterozoic Port Askaig Tillite, Dalradian Supergroup, western Scotland. Precambrian Research, Vol.85 (1–2), 1997.
5. Spencer, AM. Late Pre-Cambrian glaciation in Scotland. Geological Society of London Memoir, no. 6, 1971.
6. Thomson, J. On the stratified rocks of Islay. Report of the 41st Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Edinburgh, John Murray, London, 1871.
7. Macdonald, FA et al. Calibrating the Cryogenian. Science, 327 (5970), 2010.
8. Fitches, WR et al. Provenance of late Proterozoic Dalradian tillite clasts, Inner Hebrides, Scotland. In: In: Brewer, TS (ed.) (1996). Precambrian Crustal Evolution in the North Atlantic Region. Geological Society Special Publication No. 112, 1996. 
9. Clark, CD et al. Pattern and timing of retreat of the last British-Irish Ice Sheet. Quaternary Science Reviews Vol. 44, 2012.
10. Peacock, JD. Late Devensian palaeoenvironmental changes in the sea area adjacent to Islay, SW Scotland: implications for the deglacial history of the island. Scottish Journal of Geology, 44, 2008.
11. Edwards, K. Vegetation History of the Southern Inner Hebrides during the Mesolithic Period. In Mithen, S (ed). Hunter-gatherer Landscape Archaeology: The Southern Hebrides Mesolithic Project 1988-1998. McDonald Institute, Cambridge, 2000.
12. Mithen, S, Finlayson, B, Finlay, N & Lake, M. Excavations at Bolsay Farm, a Mesolithic Settlement on Islay. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, no. 2, 1992. 
13. Edwards. KJ & Berridge, JMA. The Late-Quaternary vegetational history of Loch a'Bhogaidh, Rinns of Islay SSSI, Scotland. New Phytologist, no.128, 1994.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

• To William for interesting local details, and to David and Morven for making it all possible.

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A Red Crag whale

A fossil whale vertebra can be a beautiful thing. I was delighted when a friend gave me one he'd found on Landguard beach, near Felixstowe, south-east Suffolk.

The front (anterior) side of the specimen still has its flat articular surface, but the back (posterior) side has been worn away by the sea. There are two projections on either side. These are the eroded bases of the bony projections supporting the neural arch.

Thoracic vertebrae of Greenland right whale, showing
centrum and bones of the neural arch.
Image courtesy Eschricht & Reinhardt (1866)

Given its findspot, a Red Crag origin for the specimen is likely. It must have been washed out of the Red Crag strata which outcrop in the Felixstowe area. The town is founded on these reddish-yellow, sandy, fossiliferous sediments of Pliocene age about 2.5 million years old. They also outcrop to the north at Bawdsey and to the south at Walton-on-the-Naze, Essex.

My first exposure to whale fossils was when I was working on the geological collections at Ipswich Museum in 2004/05. There were racks and boxes full of Crag specimens like this, but very few of them had any firm identification. Spencer (1970) recounts everything known about the Crag cetaceans in Ipswich Museum.


I contacted the Natural History Museum in London to see whether I could find out more. Dr Travis Park, a fossil cetacean specialist, gave helpful replies to my questions.

It is a partial thoracic vertebra from either a small baleen whale or a big toothed whale... it's likely [to be] either an anterior or mid-thoracic. ... 

In terms of size, it’s probably closer to something in the 5-10 metre range. That’s a very rough estimate given the degree of wear of the specimen. So it could be a small sperm whale or one of the beaked whales which easily get that size and even bigger. If it’s a baleen whale then a minke whale would be a good proxy although there was quite possibly other small baleen whale lineages around at that time too. 

It's unfortunate that the specimen is so worn as to make it impossible to narrow down to Order level (mysticete or odontocete), let alone Family. Still, it's an attractive thing to have on my shelf, and it prompts me to find out more about the cetaceans of our beautiful 'Blue Planet' as they were in the Pliocene.

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References

• Eschricht, DF & Reinhardt, J. 'On the Greenland Right Whale Balaena Mysticetus. In: Flower, WH (ed). Recent Memoirs of the Cetacea. Ray Society, London, 1866.
• Spencer, HEP (1970). A Contribution to the Geological History of Suffolk. Part 5. The Early Pleistocene. The Crag Epochs and their Mammals. Transactions of the Suffolk Naturalists’ Society, vol.15, pt. 4.

For further information about the geology of the Suffolk coast see my booklet 'Tides of Change' (2015).

Land gulls

Two 80-acre fields at Cookley, near Halesworth, with winter wheat

(shades of yellowish green, blueish green)

on clayland, undulating, empty - just the crop, the soil, the flint.

Setting for a cold wind.

January the last.

Beyond me in space: white gulls.

Gulls in flight, over the field's face, roving. A few standing, breasting the sun.

White owls over a green sea.

A skylark sings, aloft. 

The gulls think downward. Raised on ocean-space and sprats, they turn to terrestrial matters: beetles and worms. 

All beneath a milky, blue and infinite sky.

They flutter to and fro: staring, stopping, turning to drop and rise - a mere second or two. Focused then refocusing. Steady meditation. Body thinking. Time.

How many are there – forty or fifty? 

But who watches gulls - those dustbins of the bird world!?

One could map their delicate trajectories: a script of white on green. Their nodes and lines, objectified. 

Instead, each bird enters my vision, enters my thoughts. 

In this moment each one enters my heart.

Their wavering flights criss-cross my sight in a ceaseless, white-winged ballet. 

They catch the sun, like dew on wheat and roof-lines in distant villages. 

Land gulls.

Norfolk Island Pine

There's a Norfolk Island Pine (Araucaria heterophylla) sapling on the 6th floor at County Hall, Norwich. 

It is not looking particularly happy, but I'm told it is a lot happier here than in its previous location downstairs in the foyer. A gift to the County Council from a well-wisher, it was given a home by the Environment team last year when a decision was taken to remove all potted plants from the foyer.

I am delighted to make the plant's acquaintance. It is a member of the Araucariaceae, a family of primitive conifers with their evolutionary roots over 200 million years ago, in the late Triassic period. The Araucariaceae once thrived around the globe, including Europe, but since the great extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous, about 65 million years ago, they are only native to the southern hemisphere. Members include the monkey puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana) which makes spectacular forests in Chile, the towering New Zealand kauri (Agathis australis) which produces kauri gum, and the extraordinary Wollemia nobilis, a living fossil discovered in a remote Australian ravine in 1994. They are thought to have diverged from a common ancestor in the early Cretaceous period.[1]

The plant has an upright stem covered with pointed, scale-like leaves towards the top and bristling branches that emerge radially. It has an aromatic, resinous smell. I can imagine a small Composognathid dinosaur hiding behind it.

I'd like to have a specimen of A.heterophylla. It is not hardy in the British climate, so it would have to be kept in a plant pot then brought indoors in autumn. However, it is said to be fast growing and can reach a height of over 50 metres. I may have to think twice about the idea!![2]

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[1] - Kunzman, Lutz (2007). Araucariaceae (Pinopsida): Aspects in palaeobiogeography and palaeobiodiversity in the Mesozoic. Zoologischer Anzeiger. 246 (4): 257–77. Online at http://www.thefossilforum.com/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=364312 [accessed Jan 2018]

[2] - Araucaria heterophylla. Wikipedia. Online at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Araucaria_heterophyllahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Araucaria_heterophylla [accessed Jan 2018]

The Wisdom of Solomon

It is Spring, and flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle dove is heard in our land.[1]

Sadly I expect turtle doves will be in short supply this year, despite the best efforts of bird conservation organisations, Chris Packham et al to explain the catastrophic decline of this species - along with the cuckoo and other precious summer visitors. According to Project Turtle Dove, its numbers have plummeted by 91% since 1995.[2] Cuckoos have declined by 65% since the 1980s.[3]

Instead, the voice of the lawn-mower is heard in our land, as some people strive to achieve uniform, level, striped surfaces. I suppose such lawns are the outdoor equivalent of a plain fitted carpet. The result is just lawn. It is not even 'lawn with flowers', or 'lawn with flowers and bees', or 'lawn with flowers, bees, ants and moles'. Lawn means lawn. It is monoculture.

Here is an example of a lawnista's approach to gardening.[4]

I'm delighted to have some of these species on my lawn. What is a weed?

About 15 years ago, the Bungalow garden was visited by a local TV reporter. Somehow she had discovered a web page I'd made explaining that I have notable biodiversity here, including Testacella haliotidea, a rare carnivorous, subterranean slug living in the vegetable patch. As we wandered round the garden trying to find the slug I wittered on about the wildlife, for instance the seven species of grass and sedge I have identified on the lawn, and its notable anthills. She then asked why I did not destroy the ants. They are "bad for lawns", she said. I was dumbfounded. I did not know what to say. I didn't say how much I love watching green woodpeckers probing around in the anthills or that all the piled up earth must indicate the existence of a phenomenal network of subterranean tunnels. I fell silent, struggling with my disgust at her question.

I feel a similar disgust when I see uniform lawns. A biodiverse lawn is more useful to birds, mammals, insects and plants; it has more ecological value. From a biosemiotic point of view, a biodiverse lawn is more meaningful than a monocultural one because it intrinsically contains more encoded 'difference', and hence more meaning. In my eyes that makes it more beautiful. Where a card-carrying lawnista might see disorder I see beauty and a wealth of meaning - and my heart rejoices. This wealth is not just there for me to perceive but for many other organisms to thrive in, as they search for home habitat and food. This is a shared world.

I suspect the lawn here is the last remaining fragment of the ancient parkland surrounding Brome Hall. The rest was been ploughed up many decades ago.

Uniform lawns are instances of the tide of biocidal monoculture flooding through the world. Rainforests are being replaced by plantations.[5] Faced with this creeping impoverishment of biological meaning, I invite all lawn owners to cherish their biodiversity in practical ways. For instance, wait a few weeks before first cutting, and see what species are already present. (It was only after doing this that I discovered I had two orchid species.) Don't use fertilisers or herbicides. Use a rotary mower with a grass box. Leave areas uncut until later in the summer and cut other areas in rotation. Don't kill all moles. 

Perhaps we should also go out and buy a kelim or Isfahan rug for the house - one featuring a Tree of Life or floral design !

Lesser Celandine

Spotted Orchid

As a joke currently doing the rounds has it, God and St Francis would surely approve of both designs.

---

FOOTNOTES

[1] - The Song of Solomon 2.12.
[2] - Project Turtle Dove - http://www.operationturtledove.org/ [accessed April 2017]
[3] - 'Cuckoo decline' - https://www.bto.org/volunteer-surveys/bbs/research-conservation/cuckoo [accessed April 2017]
[4] - Lawn Weeds website - http://www.lawnweeds.co.uk [accessed April 2017]
[5] - 'The Impact of Industrial Agriculture in Rainforests' - http://rainforests.mongabay.com/0811.htm  [accessed April 2017]

Flat field - Ancient oak

22-4-2017

The parish of Bressingham (south Norfolk) is hardly a hilly place, but it does have 'upland' and 'lowland' areas. Its uplands are the gently rolling till plateau north of the A1066 turnpike; its lowlands are the flatlands of the Waveney valley lying south of the road. The one given over to clayland arable farming; the other to pasture and woodland on relict valley fenland.

Prof Tom Williamson (University of East Anglia) gave a walking talk today on the parish's cultural landscape history. The event was hosted by the fledgling Bressingham History Group, courtesy Linda Holly, and was enjoyable and well attended. I contributed a geological dimension to the discussions.

Apart from the congenial company, two features of the walk were outstanding.

Firstly, the view south from Fen Street. A long, narrow field - flat as a runway - leading the eye south towards woods known as Horse Fen and the hidden River Waveney. It looks a suitable pasture for sheep. The BGS map tell us this field is underlain by peat. If so, what we see today are the dried-out and shrinking remnants of the thick mattress of decayed swamp woodland and fen vegetation which has covered this land for most of the last 10,000 years. Our ancestors cut turf here and went wildfowling. According to Faden's map of 1797 it used to be part of Bressingham Fen. Today, drainage has reclaimed much of the the land for farming, and it is a remarkably flat expanse of pasture. It owes its long, thin shape to the historic pattern of 18th and 19th century enclosures in the Fen. This can be seen in the early 19th century tithe map. Four of the old fields have now been knocked into one.

Tithe map [1840s] courtesy Norfolk Heritage Explorer
http://historic-map.norfolk.gov.uk/mapexplorer/ 

Secondly, the view of an immense, ancient oak tree in a clayland meadow at Valley Farm.

The tree has a stalwart trunk and colossal boughs, and is as stag-headed as the horns of Herne. It must be over 500 years old, as Tom suggested. It is truly an ancient, Mediaeval being, worthy of veneration. I wonder when the crown began to die back. Perhaps the field was ploughed for agriculture in one of the World Wars? Nevertheless, I am impressed that the occupants of Valley Farm have come & gone over the centuries without significantly interfering with this extraordinary tree. I am reminded of the celebrated Winfarthing Oak, sited only a few miles away, once the largest in England, which finally died in the 20th century. What makes people preserve such trees rather than fell them for firewood?

Horse Fen field and the Valley Farm oak - the one smooth and the other craggy - are phenomena of the parish; both are products of human cultivation, and both have stories to tell about Norfolk's landscape history.

Hockham Mere

9-12-16

My friend Julia B and I met yesterday at Great Hockham for a wilderness expedition.

Julia is researching a book on Doggerland, the inhabitable land area in the North Sea basin which was drowned as sea levels rose at the end of the last glacial period, the Devensian. Its landscape changed from tundra to forest, then marsh and finally sea, in a process that spanned the transition from the Devensian into our own Flandrian warm period, roughly from 10,000 to 7,000 years ago. This ancestral land is now out of reach of our exploration: we needed somewhere else to experience elements of its vanished wilderness.

Is it possible to talk of 'wilderness' in Norfolk? Other countries have tracts of land we can easily label wilderness - areas defined by the lack of human habitation or disturbance, graced with plant and animal communities and geomorphological processes that operate in ways unshaped by human agency. 'Tis true, we are hardly likely to encounter wolves or frost-shattered peaks in Norfolk - let Ansel Adams picture them for us - but I think the intertidal zone is implicitly wilderness. We have some 90 miles of coastline at the land/sea interface, where the fluxes of wind, waves and tides shape the sand and shingle without reference to humans, and plant and animal lifeworlds may create their biological meshes of meaning undisturbed.

Wind, sand and razor shells on Titchwell beach.

We also have wilderness at the micro-level: life with its processes, unmediated and raw, at the levels of cell and leaf, in every wood, field or garden, under every stone, in every lump of rotting wood. There are beings for whom this spatial level is their life's horizon, and I imagine it is pure wilderness down among the grass roots in my lawn - the selfsame lawn I walk or picnic on. Wilderness is the landscape that belongs to the Germanic vill or wild, the Latinate desierto, selvaggio or sauvage. The word enfolds, in English, a sense of the alien, empty and untamed. At its heart is wildness.

We carry wildness in ourselves, for instance in our blood flow, breathing, dreams and borborygmus which have their own strange, untameable life-logic, even though we know them to be truly and organically ourselves. There is also wildness we experience in others when we realise that they are simply 'not me'; they have their own life-logic which may overlap with our own but it is radically Other and different, perhaps alien. It could be a friend, a neighbour or a bird. We find they are partly 'me' - but mostly not.

Thus, our perception of wilderness may have its roots in the radical Otherness of a landscape: we are forced to meet it on its own terms and not ours. We may be able to find resources and affordances within it, places of identity, attachment and utility, but it remains - at its core - essentially 'other' and wild.

Tyresta forest, Sweden - beavers at work. Photo courtesy Lena Ohre.

Our expedition had prehistoric wilderness in mind - specifically any evocative traces of the lost life-world of Doggerland to be found in the Hockham area. Its task would be both dreamwork and a perceptive attention to the present landscape through which an imaginative experience of the late glacial and early post-glacial landscape might become possible. The result would be writing.

'A text of nature writing is a representational model of the meaning relations that a writer has perceived in the environment under specific conditions, determined by the time, location, and the biological and cultural abilities of the perceiver.' [1]

As a 'representational model', nature writing is a translation from the Otherness of nature, as we experience it, into the selfhood of words. We go outward into Otherness: we return to Ourselves. In the case of Doggerland we are dealing with a world of plants, animals and human life which can no longer be directly experienced. Translation may risk going awry and descending into ungrounded phantasmagoria that have the ring of fantasy but not of vital truth. What we need is eye-opening places where what is experienceable today and what was experienceable 10,000 years ago can come together and bear fruit: the fungi and berries of lifeworld visions.

Suppose we wanted to experience a Devensian environment today we'd need to go north, to the Arctic. The last ice age lingers there, clinging to the circumpolar zone in the face of the planet's encroaching hyper-warmth, along with its refugees the snow buntings and musk oxen, beetles and midges, pingos and permafrost. My studies tell me this part of Norfolk is awash with physical (and even some biological) evidence for life in the Devensian.

If we wanted to experience an early Flandrian environment we'd need to go north-east, to visit the low-lying landscapes around the Baltic, for example Soomaa in Estonia, where bogs and boreal forest go hand in hand; landscapes of birch and pine, beetle and midge, lake and moraine. The marshy, forested land at Frost's Common and Cranberry Rough, Hockham, has a similar aspect, though no longer inhabited by wolf, elk and lynx.

For Doggerland itself, scientific research has begun to lay bare the geography using remote sensing and sampling techniques[2].We are beginning to chart the layout of drowned estuaries and low hills, fens and plains, on the seafloor and beneath it. We know about the kinds of plants and animals present, and the timing of the submergence. We now have details of this lost, low-lying landscape available to us in words and maps. It probably looked rather like parts of Norfolk.

For understanding the people of Doggerland, we could draw on the experience of the hunting & gathering peoples of the northern forests, coasts and tundras. They are the ones who grappled in deed and myth, in actions, words and songs, with the realities of life in this kind of environment. This would complement the traces of local Mesolithic occupation. Perhaps some of the people settled at Hockham were refugees from Doggerland. What language, stories and skills did they bring with them?

A digital terrain map (DTM) of Frost's Common (right), with the eastern margin of Cranberry Rough (left).
A pattern of ditches can clearly be seen, evidence of 20th century drainage work.
Imagery © Forestry Research, courtesy Breaking New Ground data.

Hockham Mere

Our expedition was focused on the western side of Hockham parish. It included Frost's Common, an area pockmarked with a concentration of ponds. As a digital terrain map shows, the land slopes hence gently westward into a broad basin area, a shallow sump for water draining from the glacial sands, gravels and clays which underlie it. This is the area called Cranberry Rough, the site of an ancient lake known as Hockham Mere. Its muds were investigated by researchers in the 1940s, who cored down and recovered samples to a depth of 30 ft (9 m). They were able to show that the Mere holds a sedimentary sequence going back to the end of the last ice age, with a fossil pollen sequence to match[3]. 

The Mere probably existed in some form until Tudor times before being drained with a network of ditches. 19th century maps show this reclaimed land as swamp woodland and rough pasture, with the eastern part set aside as a Poor's Fen allotment; altogether it covered some 190 acres (76 ha). Patches of worked flint near the western end and traces of charcoal in the lake muds are evidence of occupation by Mesolithic hunters & gatherers, more than 7,000 years ago. There is a Roman road, the Peddar's Way, tracking nearby, and the vestiges of a deserted railway line cutting across it. The southern half of the site is managed by the Forestry Commission, and so theoretically it is publicly- accessible. Until recently almost all Cranberry Rough was covered with woodland, but a programme of publicly funded works has now cleared trees and bushes from the southern half of the site, revealing a flat tract of boggy pasture. The oozing, privately-owned core of its northern half is swamp carr, pristine and impenetrable.

Swamp carr at the heart of at Cranberry Rough, May 2015

We parked that car near the entrance to Fire Route 83, and entered the forest. We followed our own trackless path.

Frost's Common

'Maa iidse tiigid'

'The land of ancient ponds'

Deadened by crowding trees, the sounds of traffic on the A1075 are muffled and soon die away. Frost's Common has an extraordinary power of dépaysement, of taking one elsewhere - in this case somewhere boreal and strange. I have been in similarly odd, crumbly forests in Sweden where the delightful and the sinister are woven together equally. An attractive variety of broad-leaved and coniferous trees presides over a complex of brooding ponds; the tracks of deer (and some bigger animals) are woven here and there over the earth; in some places dense mats of dead bracken mask a jumble of rotten trunks. Mosses, lichens and fungi abound. Time passes and - pixie-led - one finds oneself going in green circles, for one cluster of ponds looks much like another. One steers by instinct - or the sun, if its position can be discerned.

A forest glade

Evergreens beside a periglacial pond.

Reflections

Geologically speaking, the land at Frost's Common is a mosaic of sands and chalky clays, and the ponds are probably relict lithalsa or pingo landforms. Fourteen thousand years ago the ground here would have been swollen with permafrost ice. The surface layers would melt in summer then refreeze in winter. Patches of water-bearing sand in the subsoil would swell up and form large blisters of ice, with freezing and thawing happening on a seasonal basis. At the end of the ice age these active frost mounds became permanent ponds. There must be fifty such ponds and wet depressions surviving at the Common. It is a landscape ravaged by periglacial pox.

'Piirneva niiske luht'

'Bordering a damp meadow'

The hummocky terrain of Frost's Common gives way, on its western side, to an open area surrounded by forest. It is less a glade than a rough, tussocky, damp heath. The ground undulates with a few ground-ice depressions, and is sporadically studded with willow, hawthorn and gorse. It seems to be a tract of clear-felled forest that was not replanted. It is not attractive, but does have a very strong sense of place about it. Many years ago, in the Åland Islands of the Baltic, I waited at dusk for elk (Alces alces) to emerge in such a place as this. Stepping into the open here, one is aware that other eyes may be watching.

'Ja tume männimets'

'And a dark forest of pine trees'

The damp meadow gives way to patchy, mixed woodland of oak, pine, poplar and willow. This in turn gives way to regular pine plantation. Passing through it means treading underfoot a spongey carpet of dead needles; one's horizon is reduced to a brown world of spiky and straight-planted bole corridors; one's hearing is hushed and closeted. Vestiges of freedom still remain in the tree tops, however, where occasional titmice twitter and flit, and breezes may ruffle greenery in the topmost twigs. Our attention is mostly on the ground. We stumble over half-buried snags. We find a startling splash of chrome yellow slime, a creeping myxomycete. We notice the landscape's resources, its tracks, trails and signals. Deer droppings; scraps of egg shell; the tang of a fox; tufts of foxglove or fern. Overhead, away above the tree tops, passing pigeons and carrion crows. The trees are mostly young, perhaps 20 years old, but have none of the casual spontaneity of youth: they are already dry, serious characters. It seems a human body could lie here, in the silence at their feet, buried beneath a steady rain of needles for decades before being discovered. But I suspect my imagination is running away with me here: the foxes would soon make it their own and the crows would strip what remained, leaving just wreckage. The place is more populated than it seems, and there are large, fresh-looking animal tracks meandering among the pines, evidence of other-than-human wills contributing to making the place.

Trackway

The myxomycete

Corridors of forestry brash

We navigate westwards through the forest, until the pines loosen as the ground becomes wetter. Birches and willows step in once more. They mark the eastern margin of the former Mere. We reach a gate from which, 1000 years ago, we might have surveyed wild water and fen.  

Cranberry Rough

'Siin on sissepääs suur raba'

'Then the entry to a large swamp'

We are walking across the old lake ground and its soggy, partly-drained successor. Dark, peat-rich soil has been mechanically stripped of encroaching trees to reveal a wetland in the remaking. Cattle have poached the ground into a black chaos of wet potholes which we step through to reach a balk of higher ground which runs westward across the site. This will be our only access route.

Like hunters, our senses take in the layout of woodland and water bodies, the direction of the wind, the evidence of bird and animal life. At each step we evaluate threats and resources, check our orientation, adjust our thoughts to the terrain and to each other. We find we are not alone.

This marsh is alive with living things that shy in our presence - the birds. They are signs in our wilderness, and we in theirs. Geese, ponderous and clamouring as they rise. Herons, craking. An explosion of teal in a whirr of wings that peels off the marsh, swings round then refocuses farther off, each bird dropping back with a white splash to water. And distant, about 800 yards away, the eye discerns what look like aurochsen - ochreous cattle, hairy and over-horned - pasturing on what the swamp has to offer by way of December's dying herbage. If we want to reach cross the Mere and find the place where the Mesolithic flints were found we shall have to pass them.

Courage fails me. I am unnerved by the aurochsen and the birds. We are standing exposed in a chilly emptiness. Is it wilderness or nature reserve; public or private space? It's only two o'clock but daylight seems already to be fading.

I notice that I have lost or misplaced my mobile 'phone. I want to retrace my steps - our steps - to look for it before the light fails, and Julia agrees. 

We turn back.


The return

'Suur raba,

Piirneb tume männimets,

Siis niiske luht,

Ja maa iidse tiigid'.

'A large swamp,
Bordered by dark pine forest, 
Then a damp meadow
And a land of ancient ponds'.

Walking back, our attention is on the ground, on little details, as we walk; they become the thread back through the labyrinth of our expedition: back across the great swamp - through the forest of pines - across the damp meadow - between the ancient ponds. We revisit our walk's geography in reverse, following my memory's representation (such as it is). I recognise my boot-prints. I remember where I stood to watch a pair of carrion crows. We cross the same beast paths; navigate between the same boles (or just about). I notice a patch of yellow slime. Here is the place among the damp pine needles where we picnicked on green olives, boiled eggs and black chocolate. I recall the crossing of a clearing or the skirting of a pond; the place where we doubled certain bushes, or stepped over a fallen trunk; a pile of droppings or a feather. It is extraordinary how vivid some memories are: I find myself able to retrace tracks and relocate localities we were at two hours earlier. The hunter/gatherer in me is impressed: I am an asset to the tribe.

Back at the car park I find my mobile phone buried safely in a bag, so all is well there. This story poses some awkward questions about the quality of my memory. Perhaps I'm not such an asset after all. However Julia has been discovering the landscape and taking notes about it, and I am pleased to have been her guide.

I have since learned that the yellow myxomycete is Fuligo septica, a species with a strange Fenno-Scandinavian mythology: said to be the vomit of troll cats or, in Estonia, the leavings of the demon Kratt. Each society in each age interprets natural phenomena in its own way. Today, in 2016, the texts books can tell me a lot about the biology of slime moulds, and I find the idea that troll cats may roam the Hockham Woods an appealing one. However, the most important thing seems to me that Julia and I encountered this strange organism together here – out in the heart of a Norfolk wilderness – much as our ancestors, some 9,000 years and perhaps 500 generations ago, might have found it on a pine forest floor in old Doggerland – a landscape now submerged by more than time.

‘Seal on heita pilku kulla kõnnumaal'.

'There is a glimpse of gold in the wilderness'.

How would our ancestors have named this thing?

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[1] - Maran, Timo & Tüür, Kadri (2016): From birds and trees to texts: An ecosemiotic look at Estonian nature writing. In: Parham, John & Westling, Louise (Eds): A Global History of Literature and the Environment; Cambridge University Press.

[2] - Gaffney, V, Fitch, S, and Smith, D (2009): Europe's Lost World - The rediscovery of Doggerland; Council for British Archaeology.
[3] - Godwin, H & Tallentire, PA (1951): Hockham Mere, Norfolk; Journal of Ecology 39.

With acknowledgements to Google for Estonian translation, and apologies for the inevitable faults of grammar and meaning ...