midwinter on the canal

Moored up at Diggers, between Bradford on Avon and Bath, in the Avon valley. The boat next door is Kestrel, an old working butty.  At dawn, the song thrushes are singing their winter song, and cormorants fly along the valley from their roost upriver. A pheasant is BOCKing from the woods, and a deer barks now and then. 

Every day I've been down to the post office to send off orders, even in the drenching rain, which my sou'wester and new-to-me Rohan raincoat kept out, though the rest of me got very damp indeed. But now that the post-in-time-for-Christmas deadline is passing, things are quietening down. 

Being so busy sending things off for other people's Christmasses, I've not done anything for my own, which is always low-key anyway; I was always quite happy to be working at sea over the Christmas season, when the fun was serendipitous and incidental rather than mandatory, which is what spoils it.

La cordonniere est toujours le plus mal chausse. This year, I solved the problem of not having sent cards to my friends, by marking St Bridget's Day instead, a time when the world is beginning to wake up again. I think I'll keep that up.

Kennet and Avon Canal 2026 Calendar

The 2026 calendar has arrived! I've gone back to focussing on the wildlife along the canal this time. There's old friends like the badgers in the woods around Bradford on Avon; and now the beavers that have arrived in the area, livening up life on the river. 

The calendars cost £10, and you can get them from my Etsy shop, or Devizes Books, or Noah's Pantry in the marina in Bradford on Avon. And I'll be at the Floating Fayre in Bradford on Avon on the last weekend of November.

Wolcum Yole, like Welcome Yule but in Middle English

I've been busy (at least, what I call busy) getting the pictures together for next year's calendar; and at last I'd got enough, which is to say, twelve.

So I got to work formatting them, and had just about finished when I got a call from the printers (Minuteman Press in Bristol, excellent folk). They'd got my Christmas cards ready.

Turned out nicely (by the way, you can find them in my Etsy shop here). I called the picture 'Welcome Yule', partly because the boater whose boat this is has obviously just brought the firewood in, and is about to have a reviving glass of Jaegermeister while the kettle boils. And partly as a nod to the medieval carol of that name, that appears in Benjamin Britten's Ceremony of Carols, which I first heard while driving home for Christmas after one of my seafaring trips. I'd come up from Dorset through snowy hills, and this came on the radio and it was perfect for the moment.

Candelmesse, Quene of Bliss,
Wolcum bothe to more and lesse.
Wolcum, Wolcum,
Wolcum be ye that are here, Wolcum Yole,
Wolcum alle and make good cheer.
Wolcum alle another yere,
Wolcum Yole. Wolcum!

Welcome Yule

I'm not drawing the pictures for next year's calendar in any particular order, and the latest one is for December, as you can perhaps tell.  

I thought it would be fun to do a winter version of my earlier picture, 'La vraie liberte c'est le vagabondage'. And I was right; I had great fun doing it. Thinking of a suitable title for it is proving hard; keeping the french theme, I thought of 'toi, prends ta flute, Robin', a line from the French carol 'Patapan' that we sang as first formers at school, walking into the assembly with candles and being all angelic, or at least as angelic as a ragtag of 11 year olds can be.

But maybe just 'Welcome Yule'. 

Anyway, there it is. Here's the summer one for comparison

 

getting horsedrawn narrowboats under Newbury Bridge

 The town bridge in Newbury, built over the River Kennet, pre-dates the building of the lock that was the first to be built on the link between the Kennet and the Avon. So there is no towpath under the bridge; and horsedrawn boats going upstream would have to pull in before the bridge, the horse led round the path to the other side, then the towline drifted down to the waiting boat using this float. 

The float's now in the canal museum on Devizes Wharf, where I saw it, and thought it would make a good subject for a picture.

walking round Andy Goldsworthy's Hanging Stones in the Rosedale valley

On Thursday, we went up to the North Yorks Moors for a bimble around the Rosedale valley, where some Andy Goldsworthy works have been installed in old buildings in a six mile circuit.

Sunlight and rainclouds were chasing each other across the hills, and thunder rumbled to north and south; and we were hit by sudden squalls of hail and rain, but managed to sit most of them out in the buildings on the trail. There was decidedly lots of weather.

It was good to be back among northern hills again; it's been a long time since I've walked in heather and bilberry, and had grouse fly away grumbling "go back, go back". The working of the landscape and the stone of the walls and buildings was as interesting (to me anyway) as the sculptures, tbh.

Towards the end, I managed to slip on a bank and get horribly muddy, and had to wash off my skirt and coat with a tuft of grass dipped in the stream, which still ran red with the iron that was once mined here. 

I left the mud on the rucsac, though, to remember the day by

lots of partridges, for shooting, alas

will we get to that distant building before the next squall hits us? Nope

a siskin!

even more weather heading towards us. Youo'll have to imagine the rolling thunder

lots of hail

that was handy, a nice table for eating our lunch

there was lots of looking out of doors, as well as the looking in bit

a mole joins in the art with this shameless rip-off of a Richard Long idea

this room was decorated with the local mud, just as I was about to be

this is indeed a hanging stone

 

a Flycatcher at Wootton Rivers

Moored up above Heathy Close lock, at Wootton Rivers, east of Pewsey, we watched a flycatcher dashing out from its perch in a tall ash tree, to grab insects out of the air, then return to its perch, easily identifiable by its upright posture and startlingly big eyes, like the dogs in The Tinderbox. The first time I saw one (flycatcher, not supernatural dog) was on a still and misty autumn morning when it was perched across the canal from me, and it spooked me rather. 

In the background is a grey wagtail, about to snaffle a banded demoiselle. And a Southern Hawker dragonfly bumbling by. Our boaty neighbours rescued a pair of these dragonflies from the canal, but they died anyway, and I collected them for reference. 

...but they went black shortly after. Too late, I read that their bright colouring is maintained by some sort of active biological process. Keen bughunters do thing like killing them quickly and dropping them in acetone, or other such things that I've neither the resources nor inclination to do.

Anyway, it all makes a good subject for this picture, which will hopefully be one of twelve for next year's calendar if I pull my finger out. 

Easily distracted, though; I've been out foraging elderberries, for making cordial. It's very late in the season for them; some trees are completely gone over, and the unpicked clusters of berries are shrivelled and hanging limply. But I found one tree that was still only just past the peak of fruitfulness, and it yielded over 2 lb of berries, which, when boiled up with enough water to cover, and some mace and cloves thrown in, yielded 2 pints of juice. Very cheerful stuff, and good for keeping lurgies at bay.