Glastonbury, Burrow Mump and the Somerset Levels

On the surface Frog and I are opposite in almost every way. My ideal day out is to get as far away from human civilisation as possible. His is to go shopping. Glastonbury and the Somerset Levels are a good compromise.

The town is charming – lovely people, quirky and dog-friendly shops, attractive main street, and wonderful vegetarian café (Rainbows End). It has a rich spiritual history dating back (perhaps) to prehistoric times*, and sites to see include the mysterious Tor, a ruined abbey and the intricate Chalice Well gardens. Even I like the place.

The Levels aren’t everyone’s idea of beauty but I love their strangeness and the fact that the only tourists (apart from Frog and me) are birdwatchers. Frog likes them because the walks are easy - I'm not likely to drag him up precipitous cliffs or get him lost in remote moorland. Sometimes we walk along the Taunton and Bridgwater Canal and sometimes we climb Burrow Mump, which is a smaller version of Glastonbury Tor but without the crowds and the concrete paths.

Burrow Mump and its ruined church, probably built up here because the spot was once a pagan sacred site. Glastonbury Tor has something similar

Both Burrow Mump and Glastonbury Tor would once have been islands as the whole area, until it was drained in the Middle Ages, used to be marshland. Over the last two winters the Levels have started to flood again. Some blame exceptional weather, some lack of maintenance – the ditches haven’t been cleared properly they say or the river dredged. This winter, some villages and houses have been either marooned, or paddling in several feet of water, or both, for weeks.


Here is what we saw on our day out yesterday.

Floodwaters lapping at the carpark below Burrow Mump . . .

 

. . . and at the foot of the hill itself

An inland sea

The straight line crossing this picture from the (approximate) centre to the bottom right corner is the flooded main road (A361). A fire engine stands guard in case anyone is foolish enough to try and drive along it. Would anyone be that stupid, we wondered, as an ambulance and another fire engine raced past the hill flashing their lights.  (Apologies for my usual wonky horizon.)

The River Parrett, on the bank to the right of the picture, is higher than the floods. Just out of shot (and too far away to photograph), a pump is pouring water into the river (from the floods). Talk about emptying the sea with a teaspoon.

Floods almost as far as the eye can see. Contrast this with the scene in February 2011

The scene from Burrow Mump in February 2011

* For more on the spiritual history of Glastonbury and the surrounding area you could do worse than read The Mists of Avalon, a novel by Marion Bradley (who also writes science fiction under the name Marion Zimmer Bradley)

Our much-thumbed copy of this novel about the spiritual history of Glastonbury

For a factual summary you could check out one of my publications, New Age Encyclopaedia

Environmental despair

The Novel (with which I occupy my days when I’m not out walking Dog) is having a break at the moment. (Nothing to do with me. It just decides it wants to stop, and there’s nothing I can do about it.) I’m taking the opportunity to sort out my writing-room. Yesterday I came across a folder labelled ‘Inspiring bits and pieces’. In it were print-outs of articles, and quotations I’d typed out, as well as little messages I’d written to myself, one of which read, ‘Be positive about everything’.

I took my own advice and started seeing things in a different light. I even managed to be positive about my own lack of positivity. But there’s one thing I’m really struggling with, one thing about which I can see nothing positive whatsoever, and that is the increasing development of the area where we live – a new town a few miles away, 150 houses planned outside our nearest village, an Ikea store, all on what they call ‘green-field sites’, ie countryside which hasn’t been built on before. And that’s not to mention the fences, barns, phone masts and roads about which I’ve already written.

Since my teens I’ve been concerned about the environment and I’ve done my share of protesting. Then I gave up. I stuck my head in the sand and just hoped my little corner of paradise would remain untouched. However, as Roselle says, shutting ourself off from despair shuts us off from what makes us human. Despair is our spur. (Only she puts it a lot better than me, so do have a look at her blog post.) So that, I suppose, is the positive side of the situation. I can’t ignore it any longer. I have to feel.

But where I go from here, I have no idea.

Witches' brooms and the secret life of trees

Thanks to Nina, I now know what these bushy bits are.

Going by the lovely name of witches’ brooms (witch’s brooms?) they are a deformity caused by fungi, mistletoe and various bugs. Although they ruin the timber from a commercial point of view, they provide homes for many different organisms including some species of squirrel (in North America).

According to Wikipedia, the disease is also ‘economically important in a number of crop plants, including the cocoa tree Theobroma cacao’. (What that means I have no idea as I followed the link but the text about the cocoa tree was so dense I couldn’t be bothered to read it.)

If you graft twigs from a witch’s broom on to normal rootstock you can make a freak tree.

Now isn’t that fascinating.


While on the subject of trees, do have a look at this book, given to Frog and me by my sister. It is beautifully written and full of interesting information. Unfortunately it doesn't have much to say about witches' brooms except in relation to the immense damage that mistletoe can do.

Copied from Amazon as I can't scan fat paperbacks

Unidentified growing objects

Can anyone tell me what the bushy things in these trees are? I've been puzzling about them for thirty-five years. Are they squirrel dreys or are they rogue outcrops of tree? (Nina - I'm relying on you here.)

A perfect day on the Jurassic Coast

I’m wondering whether my pictures need context, whether I should write more about me, or about the subject matter of the pictures rather than letting them speak for themselves. So here goes.

Yesterday we go to the sea for the first time for ages. We used to go every other weekend (approximately speaking) but somehow recently there have always been Things To Do.

Frog comes to the top of the cliff and then goes back to the car: not only does he still have a hacking cough (as a result of the cold/flu he suffered over Christmas) but he also has a bad (arthritisy? gouty?) foot. Ellie and I continue along the cliff path and then back through the undercliff and down the beach, and because we don’t have Frog with us we can linger. (He thinks lingering on the beach is a waste of time – he just wants to get to the end of the walk.)

Sorry for the tilted horizon, but aren't the angles lovely

 

Apart from some fisherman (to whom Ellie just has to run and say hello), we have this end of the beach to ourselves. The air is so clear I can see from one side of Lyme Bay to the other. The sun is warm on my face. The sea, although slightly murky from all the bad weather, is only lightly rippled with waves. I am almost tempted to strip off and dive in. The only sea-like smell however comes from a nearby pile of seaweed.

 

This is the beach off which the container ship Napoli grounded and lost her cargo in 2006. A whole new batch of twisted lumps of metal, brought in by the storms, decorates the back of the beach. Frog used to collect these remains as trophies, identifying them as he went. ‘Ooh, here’s a car window-winding mechanism . . . spare-wheel mounting bracket . . . wing harness clip . . . blanking plug . . .’ His collection now sits outside the back door in a plastic crate. 

Ellie does her share of beachcombing, coming back with a plastic water bottle which she crunches for all of two seconds. She then sits beside me, pretending to be quiet and obedient, but unable to keep her usual rebellious expression off her face.

This is the Jurassic Coast where (as I understand it) sixty million years of geological remains are arranged in vertical stripes (because the land has tilted). In the picture above, and this one below, the cliffs are chalky and white.

If I look the other way however, the cliffs are red sandstone.

Another wonky horizon and more lovely angles

We trudge back along the shingle and arrive at the busy end of the beach, where children and their parents play in a stream which debouches into the sea. I don’t like to tell them it comes from a sewage works less than a mile away, but I suppose the water is clean.

 

Spot the dog

The tideline is almost up to the carpark – I’ve never seen it so high –  but I can’t take a photograph as I’m too busy trying to put Ellie on the lead in order to stop her going up to everyone to say hello. One man is busy snapping a tree which the water has planted upside down in the shingle.

And so back to the car, where Frog – I discover to my relief – has been perfectly happy listening to ‘Pick of the Pops’ with Tony Blackburn.

A perfect end to a perfect day.