Grapey delights

May16

The other day Chap and I enjoyed a really terrific bottle of red wine, given to us by my Aussie wine loving lovely, wonderful Pa: Peter Lehmann’s The Pastor’s Son Shiraz 2009. Dad is a massive Australian wine fan and regularly gives us great thumping great Aussie shirazes (his favourite grape variety for wine and ours too). All his wines are fantastic, but this one had that extra something.

So. Not that I’m a lush or anything (hic), but I somehow seem to have amassed a collection of grapey jewellery in my Etsy shop.

Here’s a vine leaf ring:

A vintage Danish 830 silver ring by S. Chr. Fogh of Copenhagen, for sale in my Etsy shop. Click on photo for details.

A vine leaves and bunch of grapes brooch:

Baltic amber and sterling silver brooch, for sale in my Etsy shop. Click for details.

Vintage Baltic amber and sterling silver brooch, for sale in my Etsy shop. Click on photo for details. (NOW SOLD).

A bunches of grapes bracelet:

Vintage Danish 830 silver link bracelet by Chr. Veilskov. Click on photos for details. (NOW SOLD).

and a French Art Deco brooch with fruit, leaves, and two birds after the crop:

Art Deco silver brooch by H Teguy, France, 1920s, Basque jewellery. For sale in my Etsy shop. Click on photo for details.

Art Deco silver brooch by H Teguy, France, Basque designer, 1920s. For sale in my Etsy shop. Click on photo for details.

(Okay, this last one might be a bunch of berries rather than grapes because the leaves aren’t vine leaves … but it has a grapey vibe that’ll do for me!)

Update. And the viticulture love goes on: a recent(ish) addition to the shop is a pair of blue glass grape earrings:

Grape earrings, for sale in my Etsy shop. Click on photo for details. (NOW SOLD).

Happy birthday, Hubble

Apr24

Happy birthday to the Hubble Space Telescope, which today celebrates 25 years floating above us and sending back amazing images of space.

The HST was launched on board the Space Shuttle Discovery on 24 April 1990 and deployed into its orbit the following day. A flaw with the mirror was identified, leading to fuzzy images, but after a servicing mission the HST’s problem was corrected and it was soon sending back glorious, sharp images, the first of which were released by NASA on 13 January 1994.

The above video is an amazing visualisation made using data sent back by the HST of a fly through of nebula Gum 29, finishing at Star Cluster Westerlund 2.

Many years ago as a kid, I was so affected by the ending of the film Dark Star, where one of the characters ‘surfs’ on space debris. In the movie he goes down to his death, to burn up as he enters the atmosphere of a planet, but in my young imagination I always converted this to him surfing through space for eternity, seeing the wonders and marvels that at the time we could only dream of. Now, thanks to Hubble, those dreams are being magnificently realised.

Hubble Space Telescope 2014: Frontier Field Abell 2744. Photo by the magnificent, utterly wonderful NASA.

Once again, hurrah for NASA!

There’s a fantastic album of some of Hubble’s iconic images in this NASA-curated flickr album.

(As a space nut I love that Chap and I have been together just two days shy of Hubble’s time in space. Our first kiss was on 26 April 1990 and we have been kissing ever since.)

The Salisbury Cathedral peregrines are back

Apr17

I wrote last year about the peregrines that were nesting on the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, and for the first time in 61 years had successfully hatched chicks—three of them.

Last year: peregrine parent and three chicks, Salisbury Cathedral, 27 May 2014.

Good news—they’re back, they’ve nested, and this year they’ve laid four eggs!

The eggs were laid over Holy Week and over Easter, which seems satisfyingly appropriate for an ecclesiastical nest site. The first egg was laid on Tuesday 31 March 2015, and with an approximately 33-day incubation period, it should hatch in the first few days of May, with the others hatching around the end of the first week of May (the Cathedral’s press release says mid-May. I’m not sure how they arrived at that date).

Last year there was a live webcam on which you could follow the progress of the family. The press release says the nest is being monitored by two cameras, but I’ve had a good poke around on the Cathedral’s website and they don’t seem to have provided a link to them yet. Maybe they’re going to wait until the eggs have hatched. I’ll add the link (or write a new post) as soon as I find it.

2 MAY UPDATE: The webcam is back – link here (webcam at the bottom of the page).

Even without pics, this is terrific news.

Young peregrine fledging, Salisbury Cathedral, 2014.

The last year that peregrines successfully nested at Salisbury Cathedral prior to last year’s brood was 1953. And lo! One of my favourite websites, Britain From Above, has a series of photos taken of the Cathedral in September 1953. I like to think that as the pilot circled above the Cathedral, somewhere alongside him in this photograph are the fledged chicks from that year’s brood:

Salisbury Cathedral, 5 September 1953. Image from the Britain From Above website: click on photo for details.

Salisbury Cathedral website.

Rather belated update: A total of four eggs were laid in the 2015 breeding season, and all four chicks fledged successfully in mid July.

Today’s partial solar eclipse

Mar20

I should be working this morning, but I have lost it to the partial solar eclipse. Where I live we had about 86% coverage at the maximum of the eclipse. It got very cold, and the birds started to roost in the trees. Our cats were also out of sorts, running around and behaving oddly.

Here’s the procession of the eclipse, as photographed on my not-very-good camera:

I also had the telly on, watching Eclipse Live with Professor Brian Cox and Dara Ó Briain, and they showed live footage of the total eclipse as experienced in the Faroe Islands—with a glorious diamond ring on the way out of the totality of the eclipse.

I also happened to snap some pics of the telly feed just as they were changing from a shot of Stonehenge (about 15 miles from where I live) to a closeup of the sun there, and got this amazing image:

Very science fiction!

The total solar eclipse of August 1999 was a bit of a wash-out here, as the cloud cover was so heavy I saw nothing of the sun. So even though it was a cloudy day here, it was great to see so much of the eclipse.

An ammonite gift

Mar18

Look at this beauty! Chap was given it by a friend the other day. It’s a huge nautilus-like ammonite. Our friend is another historic building conservator, and found the fossil in a weathered and degraded stone that she had to remove from an old building in Sherborne, in Dorset, in order to fit a replacement piece.

What a lovely gift.

The suture lines of the living chambers as the animal grew show clearly.

The opening where the animal would have lived.

The stone is almost certainly Sherborne Stone, a limestone which was quarried close to the ‘new’ Sherborne Castle, and the quarries have been recently reopened. According to the quarry’s website, Sherborne Stone dates from the Bajocian age of the Middle Jurassic, and Wikipedia tells me that the Bajocian lasted from 171.6 to 167.7 million years ago. Looking at the list of ammonite species known to have lived in that near-four million year period, I don’t think I’m going to easily identify it, which is a shame. I’d love to know which species it is.

A nautilus in the Himeji Aquarium, Japan. Photo by Daiju Azuma.

Three present-day nautilus species. Left to right, N. macromphalus (left), A. scrobiculatus (centre), N. pompilius (right). Photo by User:Mgiganteus1.

The shells of three present-day nautilus species. Left to right, Nautilus macromphalus (left), Allonautilus scrobiculatus (centre), Nautilus pompilius (right). Photo by User:Mgiganteus1.

Look how big it is! It’s really heavy.

So heavy that my hand’s starting to go red!

A present-day nautilus for comparison. Photo by DanielCD.

Chap and I love looking for fossils. Part of our work in archaeology back in the early 90s involved a lot of fieldwalking (or Surface Artefact Collection, as it later became known)—an archaeological surveying technique that seems to have gone somewhat out of favour (it’s very time and personpower-heavy). Essentially it involves walking line transects spaced at set distances up and down ploughed fields, and picking up everything of archaeological interest, so the distribution of various artefact types and densities can then be plotted. This may be an indicator of below-soil archaeological sites and features such as pits and ditches that have been disturbed by ploughing, activity which has brought the artefacts to the surface. Anyhow, a lot of our fieldwalking was around the Wessex region and so on chalk geology, so we would also find many fossils, mainly echinoids (sea urchins). As these aren’t of archaeological interest, we got to keep them. So we have a great collection of lovely fossilised sea urchins. Even now, when we go for a walk, old archaeological habits die hard and we’re usually scanning the ground for flint flakes and pot sherds (and of course fossils) rather than looking at the view …

Signs of spring

Mar5

The markers of spring are gradually accumulating: the first snowdrops, the first honeybee, the first chaffinch with its fluting descending spring call, the first beetroot red shoots of the paeonies. I took some photos the other day of the wonderful drift of Cyclamen coum flowering on a neighbour’s bank.

Cyclamen coum and snowdrops on a neighbour's bank.

Cyclamen coum on a neighbour’s bank. These self-seed freely, from seedpods with fantastic coiled stems.

A tight clump of snowdrops.

A pretty speckled Helleborus orientalis in my garden. I'm holding the flower up as it normally hangs down so you can't see the glorious interior.

A speckled Helleborus orientalis in my garden. I’m holding the flower up as it normally hangs down so you can’t see the glorious interior.

I adore this season, with its sense of promise and renewal.

A pterodactyl over my house

Feb5

Since Chap and I moved to our cottage 22 years ago, we have kept a nature diary. We record what’s going on in the garden, what wildlife we have seen, what the weather is doing, and general impressions of the natural world about us. We have a bird species list, where we note ‘new’ birds when we see them in or over our garden.

Yesterday morning I was chatting to Chap on the phone, looking out of the study window as I always do when I’m on the blower (my desk faces a wall so it’s nice to see the world …!), when I had a wonderful, chance surprise. A heron was flying towards our cottage, not very high at all and coming right at us. It is the first time I have ever seen a heron here (though there are some on the nearby streams and rivers and lakes). I squealed down the phone at Chap and near-deafened him, I think.

Grey heron (Ardea cinerea). Photo by Kclama.

It flew right over me and I had a great view of its belly as it passed. Beautiful.

Herons (Ardea cinerea) are such wonderful birds. We sometimes see them standing stock still in the local shallow chalk streams, poised and ready to strike, or walking with that slow, high-stepping tread through the water. They are a beautiful cloudy-sky grey. But it is when they are flying that they intrigue me most, and remind me of nothing more than the illustrations of flying pterodactyls in my dinosaur books from my childhood. Watching a heron fly you can quite easily believe that birds are feathery dinosaurs … Their heads are pulled back, their legs trail behind them and they beat their enormous wings with slow, steady flaps.

Grey heron in flight. Photo by Paweł Kuźniar.

Grey heron in flight. Photo by Mediamenta.

Their wingspan is among the largest of British birds, at between 155 and 195 cm for an adult bird.

(I know their proper title is Grey heron, but they are just ‘herons’ here as we don’t have any other type here in the UK—and they are, after all, the original bird to be called a heron).

Not a grey heron. Drawing by Matthew P. Martyniuk.

Not a heron. Drawing by Matthew P. Martyniuk.

Such an exciting day. But I think of all our heron sightings, the top one still has to be the day we saw a buzzard (Buteo buteo) and a heron having an aerial dogfight. We used to live in the Woodford Valley north of Salisbury, and were driving close to Lake House when we saw a tussle going on in the sky, just above the trees by the road. The two birds were circling round and round each other and occasionally clashing, and as they are both large birds it was quite a spectacle. We couldn’t quite make out what was going on, but we wondered if the buzzard was harrying the heron to make it regurgitate its catch.

PS. Our lone fieldfare is still with us, 36 days+ and counting. We had some snow the other day—not deep, but enough to remind him of home.

UPDATE Saturday 6 May 2017: This morning we had only our second ever sighting of a heron from our house in the near-twenty five years that we have lived here. And what a close encounter it was: it flew its slow flapping flight very low over our neighbours’ garden, and to our amazement landed in a very ungainly fashion on an overhead line just above the garden. It stayed perched there for about a minute or so before flying off. I hurried to look at our garden to see if it was heading for our pond, but sadly no – although I should be grateful that the tadpoles and newts and frogs live to see another day. Seeing such a massive bird perched on a wire was quite a thing.

Is it a ring, is it a hillfort?

Jan29

A vintage modernist moonstone and sterling silver ring:

Ring.

Cadbury Castle, Somerset, an Iron Age hillfort, as drawn by William Stukeley, 15 August 1723:

Iron Age hillfort.

As an archaeologist, I tend to see archaeological-related shapes everywhere: the ripples in a pond are the conchoidal ripples on the ventral surface of a flint flake; the tarmac repair in a pavement over a service trench is a prehistoric ditch, waiting to be excavated; the fruit and nuts in Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut Chocolate are the inclusions in coarse Bronze Age pottery (okay, maybe I’m getting a bit carried away here …)

So it’s no great surprise I suppose that when I saw this ring, the first thing I thought of was the famous Stukeley engraving of Cadbury Castle (which he called Camalet Castle: it’s near the villages of West Camel and Queen Camel, and local tradition holds that it is the site of King Arthur’s Camelot). I have a copy hanging in my study and love it very much.

Cadbury Castle, just to the south of the A303. The enormous earthworks show up much better in the winter, when there is no foliage on the trees. 26 April 2009.

Cadbury Castle, photographed from the A303. The enormous earthworks show up much better in the winter, when there is no foliage on the trees. As you can see, there is some artistic licence in the Stukeley version of this view … 26 April 2009.

I drive past Cadbury Castle frequently, as it is just to the south of the A303. I remember as a child being taken to the excavations there one summer when we were holidaying in the south-west, and the Iron Age body sherds were being sold for 3d a piece (I think it was) with a sign saying the proceeds would go to the diggers’ beer fund. I bought a couple of sherds and they were my treasured possessions for a long time. Until I lost them, and promptly forgot about them, as kids do.

It’s a great spot for a walk too, and always very empty of people. There is a terrific view of Glastonbury Tor from the hillfort.

Cadbury Castle. View from the top of the ramparts. 24 January 2010.

Cadbury Castle. View from the top of the ramparts (Glastonbury Tor sadly out of shot). 24 January 2010.

And as for the ring, it’s for sale in my Etsy shop.

UPDATE: 18 March 2015 – the ring has now sold. Sorry!

LATER UPDATE: This became the first in an occasional series on my blog, titled ‘Rings that remind me of things‘.

RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch

Jan28

Every year since 1979, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has asked people across the UK to spend an hour recording the birds they see in their garden: the Big Garden Birdwatch. The results are used to provide a snapshot of the bird life in our country, and to work out which species are in trouble and in need of help. The census is billed as the world’s largest annual wildlife survey, and last year nearly half a million people took part (not bad in a country of 64 million people), counting 7,274,159 birds. This year’s event took place over the weekend of 24—25 January, and we spent an hour on Sunday morning doing our bit.

Chap and I take part every year, and I love the enforced stillness that an hour spent at the window watching and counting birds brings (Chap covers the front of the house and I look out of the back). An extended period of observation allows you to see things you might not otherwise have noticed, such as the several times I saw a blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) and a great tit (Parus major) flying, perching and then flying on together, very much a twosome;

Blue tit (left) and great tit (right). Photo by Tatiana Gerus.

or the male blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla) feeding on the windfall apples—I have never seen this behaviour before (in fact, I have never seen a blackcap on the ground before), and always assumed they were insectivores rather than being fruit eaters as well. I saw two male blackcaps hanging around together, and wondered if they were perhaps part of a sibling or family group, or if simply male blackcaps aren’t very territorial (in contrast, the robins in our garden are forever chasing each other off), and later I saw a lone female. I hope they meet up and there’ll be lots of baby blackcaps this summer!

Male blackcap – well-named! Photo by Katie Fuller.

Female blackcap. Photo by Chris Romeiks (Vogelartinfo on Wikimedia Commons).

I was also really pleased to be able to add fieldfare (Turdus pilaris) to the list for the first time, as our Scandinavian guest is still with us. We first noticed him on 29 December last year, though he may well have been around before that, and since then he has been assiduously guarding the windfalls from his perch on the apple tree above them, or from one of the surrounding higher beech trees.

Fieldfare. Photo by Noel Reynolds.

Of the more unusual birds we see, no siskins (Spinus spinus) or bullfinches (Pyrrhula pyrrhula) or bramblings (Fringilla montifringilla) this year, which was a shame.

Last year for the first time we were asked about other wildlife in our gardens too, so we were able to enter information about the frogs, badgers and hedgehogs that we have seen, as well as other animals.

RSPB website.

What I’m dreaming of …

Jan21

It’s such a cold, damp, dismal day today (as Chap and I like to call it: A ‘Grade A’ Grey Day) that I thought I’d post something to cheer myself up.

Here’s a bluebell wood near us, taken on 4 May 2009:

A bluebell wood in Wiltshire, 4 May 2009. The beech and hazel leaves are just coming out on the trees.

So pretty. The big old tree is a mighty oak.

Coppiced hazels with bluebells growing underneath.

And here’s our tiny garden, taken on 21 May 2009:

Sunny days in an English country garden, 21 May 2009.

It’s hard to picture the garden like this right now, when all is black and grey and dingy out there, but things are stirring already—the snowdrops are nearly out and there are buds on the pulmonaria. And once spring gets going, it yomps along. So not long now ’til the walks in the bluebell woods that I so love!

Our visitor the fieldfare is still with us—24 days now. His apple supply is fast turning brown, so I think we need to buy some more to lob over into the secret garden to keep him with us for a bit longer.

Inglenookery

West Country witterings

Archives