Exploring Exmoor

Wednesday 26 August

Map extracted from Ordnance Survey Outdoor Leisure map 9 of Exmoor

Our walks were becoming samey so we decided (sorry, I decided. Frog likes samey) to continue with our exploration of Exmoor. We’d been there quite a few times but had yet to find a walk we wanted to repeat. We decided (I decided) that we should head diagonally across the moor on a B road and stop at Winsford Hill, the first high point on the route.

We had an additional reason for our expedition. One of my sisters and her daughter had been to stay a couple of weeks earlier (much joy) and were going home (to Kent) via a stop in North Devon. I directed them on to this very same road, saying that the A road which goes round the moor wasn’t exactly easy (lots of twists and turns which make me queasy) so they might as well take the scenic route. My sister wrote afterwards that Exmoor looked stunning but ‘the 1 in 4 gradients were tests of our driving skills and the car’s brakes’. I felt a bit guilty and wanted to check out my advice, seeing as I couldn't remember when I'd last taken that road, or even if I ever had.

Dulverton

Dulverton on the edge of the moor was thronged with happy people in shorts and sandals. The town sits underneath steep wooded hills and always makes me think of Tolkien’s Rivendell. In winter it’s dark but today it was bathed in sunshine and I almost wished we were stopping for lunch. We’d decided however to take a picnic and not risk discovering that the eateries were still closed or imposing such stringent rules that visiting them was a penance.

Winsford Hill

As we climbed out of the car at Winsford we were hit by a cold wind. Frog had sensibly brought a jumper but I shivered in my t-shirt and waterproof. We know that it’s always colder (and wetter and windier) on the moors but it’s hard to believe that when you’re basking in warmth at home.

The Punchbowl

I’d seen interesting contours on the map and something called The Punchbowl and this was the first thing we encountered. It was impressive. Semi-circular, steep, not to say vertiginous, and matted with dark green trees and bushes. As I took out my camera, Ellie rushed to the edge to look over.

Ellie investigates The Punchbowl

Nervously we called her back.

    ‘It looks like something made by a glacier,’ I said, dredging up memories of geography lessons some 55 years earlier. ‘I think it’s called a “corrie”. But did the ice get this far south in the Ice Ages?’*

    I was intrigued by orange blobs hanging from what looked like dead branches. They were everywhere, hallucinogenic against the lowering clouds.

What are these hallucinogenic orange blobs?

I realised that they were of course rowan berries, but where were the trees’ leaves? There were a few other species of tree around and they all had theirs. It was exciting to see the rowans nonetheless as I only ever come across them on the moors and they always feel a bit magical. We had tried to grow one at home but it didn’t survive.

We stopped to eat at a grassy circle under a stunted hawthorn: Frog’s horrible shop-bought orange (red-pepper) hummus and my home-made stuff. For the first time, at the insistence of my sister, I’d boiled by own chickpeas. The hummus was crunchy and didn’t actually taste as nice as the stuff made with shop-cooked peas. I’d obviously undercooked them. (Will I ever make a proper housewife?)

A man in a Barbour walked past with three spaniels. He had the confidence of a local and I was hugely embarrassed when Ellie leapt out at his dogs, barking. Already she’d staked out our picnic area as her territory. In spite of that, he gave us a cheery ‘hello’.

There were lots of people around, something that’s par for the course on the moors. If I want solitude, I’m better off walking at home. Perhaps we don't go far enough in, but I have to be careful not to worry Frog. Unlike me, he doesn’t like adventures, and getting lost, and heading into the wilderness. He likes to know in advance the exact route and how long it’s going to take. Strangely, in the rest of his life he’s the opposite of that. (And perhaps I’m the other way round.)

We headed downhill through thick cover of low shrubs. The paths threaded through them like a maze and didn't bear much resemblance to the map. We took several wrong turnings and, even though he didn't say anything, I could see Frog becoming unhappy.

    Ellie on the other hand, was going berserk, scooting to and fro raising clouds of terrified pheasants.

    ‘Oh dear,’ I said, as their squawks echoed round the walls of The Punchbowl. ‘I bet that man we saw is a shooter and the birds are his.’

    Reluctantly, we put her on a lead, and after she’d panted painfully for a good five minutes we realised it was probably a good thing we'd had to slow her down. She is ten years old now, after all, roughly the same age as us in dog terms and, like me, she’s extreme in her emotions and needs restricting sometimes.

    I looked disapprovingly at the bracken as I knew it was an invasive species and I thought about Sunday’s ‘Countryfile’ (on BBC1) in which a landowner in Suffolk who’s rewilding part of his estate explained that his wild-living pigs rooted out bracken with their noses, a job which costs thousands of pounds if done by machine.

Bracken (and a bank of rowan)

I remembered the pigs we'd seen living wild at Knepp in West Sussex.

Pigs living wild at Knepp (and one of my brothers)

That’s another thing about the moors. I can’t help seeing them as the semi-desert that they are, cleared of their trees by prehistoric humans in order to encourage deer which led to soil being washed away. They could recover however if we removed the grazing sheep. (Now I start to write about this, I realise how little I know. For more see Feral by George Monbiot, the father of rewilding. In the meantime I'll do some research.)

Heather, like bracken a moorland staple and a sign of its damaged ecosystem, is however gorgeous in flower. Most of it had gone over but we did find one patch still blooming.

The gorgeous colour of  heather in flower

We headed back along a path that went round the inside of The Punchbowl, and the terrain wasn’t nearly as steep and scary as it looked from the top.

Even so, as we neared the car Frog leant on his stick, relieved to be returning to civilisation.

Thank you, Frog, for coming with me on yet another walk/adventure!

*Back home, on Wikipedia, I found this about The Punchbowl : 'Given the shape and orientation [north-east] of this deep hollow . . . it has been suggested that it was the site of what may have been the only glacier on Exmoor and indeed in southwest England during the Pleistocene ice ages.' And, if so, 'corrie' is the right word.

Hoist with my own petard

It’s all my fault, I thought, as I surveyed the remains of my purple sprouting broccoli, my fault for saying (in ‘Living together’) that we should welcome nature into our houses and gardens.

It was my second attempt at growing broccoli. The first lot I’d grown from seed and then potted up too soon. The little plants had never recovered, so I next bought a tray of seedlings from the garden centre. I left them uncovered for twenty-four hours before potting them up, thinking that they were too small to be of interest to the cabbage white butterfly. I was wrong. Even though I’d subsequently netted the pots (after I potted up the seedlings), the butterflies had obviously got there first, and now a host of caterpillars was munching its way through the crop.

On the soil around each stalk were strange jewel-like deposits. Were these the eggs of yet more caterpillars?

Either the plants would recover, or they wouldn’t, I thought. I might as well now practise what I’d preached, un-net the pots and let the birds enjoy the wee small beasties.

Then birds started invading the house. First, according to Frog, a wren had appeared while I was out walking the dog. It wasn’t there when I got home so it must have escaped through a window. Instead a robin now entered the kitchen and, after flying around banging itself against walls, perched on top of the microwave, which lives on top of the fridge as there’s nowhere else for it. It’s lucky both Frog and I are tall.

Usually, we reckon that birds arrive to tell us when they’ve run out of food, but all the feeders were full and this bird just sat there looking stunned. We wondered if it was a young one that didn’t quite know what it was doing.

Frog, who’s good with errant birds (and errant bees), stood on a stool and enticed it on to his finger.

We then took it out to the caterpillar-infested pots, thinking that we could ‘kill two birds with one stone’ – reduce the population of caterpillars and feed this poor lost creature. Frog even put some of the beasties on to his hand and put his hand under the bird’s beak.

The robin ignored them. It didn’t move. It just sat there looking miserable.

So we left it alone and when I went back half an hour later it was gone. The caterpillars were still there unfortunately and had started falling off the pots and drowning in the water left in the tray by torrential rain.

In my last act of nature conservation, I took the pots out of the tray, tipped the water out and returned the pots to the tray. That way, I thought, both the caterpillars and the plants might stand a chance.

Blue

Recently, three plants with flowers the same shade of pale blue-mauve have come to my attention, and I thought I’d share them with you.

I know I bang on about wildflowers, but someone has to. They almost never feature on television wildlife programmes but they’re just as important as fauna. None of us would be here without them, and each variety has its niche.

Chicory

Frog, Dog and I saw this uncommon plant yesterday while taking one of our regular routes along the East Devon coast. I also see it from time to time in the organic vineyard behind our house. According to the books it occurs on chalky soil (which that at home definitely isn’t) – but what do the books know?

Chicory, along the East Devon coast, yesterday

Chicory, a few years ago in the field behind the house (used for both growing vines and storing cars . . . ). It's a tall plant

Chicory belongs to the Dandelion family and has the same square-ended petals as Cat's ear (mentioned in a previous post)

Chicory's ground root used to be added to coffee to make it go further, and I remember my mother using ‘Camp coffee’, a sweetened liquid mixture of coffee and chicory, in her scrumptious coffee cake. Apparently chicory is now used on its own as a drink because it’s caffeine free (but what’s the point of that?).

Phacelia

While out and about on the edge of the Somerset Levels last month with Frog and Dog, I saw this plant on the edge of a field. It gave me a shock as I’d never seen it before, or anything like it, and it didn’t appear to belong to any plant family that I knew about. It was like seeing a Martian.

Back home I emailed Plantlife, the wildflower charity to which I belong, and they emailed back the following:

The plant is Phacelia Phacelia tanacetifolia, an annual which is native to the western US. It is widely planted on farmland as both a cover crop or green manure, or as a nectar plant for insects. Once planted, it does sometimes persist for a few years, and it can just pop up from spilled seed or bird feed, or as a contaminant amongst other sown seed.

I was impressed with the answer (its detail and its speed) and encouraged to learn that I was right to see the plant as an alien. I had heard of Phacelia, and had even kept a packet in the cupboard for years waiting to use it as a green manure (but had never done so).

Flax

I do see this plant myself, but this year it was a local friend who brought it to my attention, emailing me a few weeks ago to ask what it was. (Very flattering!)

Photograph by Trish Currie

It’s a cultivated plant which sometimes ‘escapes’, used for linen and oil. Flax (flaxseed) oil is the stuff we eat, and linseed oil goes into paints, the floor-covering lino (linoleum) and cattle feed. I seem to remember that we also used linseed oil on our wooden rounders bats at school. It smelt like cucumber.

And here's a picture of a nearby flax field a few days ago.

Photograph by Trish Currie

There is a wild variety of Flax, with smaller flowers, called Pale Flax. It’s a rare plant, of chalky soils again, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.

Living together

A couple of months ago, during the lockdown, I caught an episode of BBC television’s Springwatch. Chris Packham was showing the marks on his shed where wasps had been scratching off the wood in order to use it to build a nest. How observant he was, I thought, and how knowledgeable, and aren’t wasps extraordinary, and how extraordinary that I’d never known that this was what wasps did.

For the last four weeks or so, Frog has been building some solar panels for heating the water in our (small) swimming-pool, and last week he sat on the steps next to the shed, plumbing them in.

The shed, the pool and the solar panels, with plumbing in progress

‘Hey,’ he called to me. ‘Wasps are eating our shed. I can see the marks where they’ve been and I can see them doing it.’

    I hurried over, with my camera.

    Synchronicity had struck again. Not only did I now understand what was going on, but I had a chance to see for myself what Chris had been talking about.

Wasp at work

What the wasp left behind

Striped shed, after the wasps have been

‘We ought to follow them,’ I said, ‘and see if we can find their nest.’

    ‘Yes,’ said Frog.

    But neither of us made a move. Even though the wasps seemed good-natured and hadn’t minded me photographing them, there were a lot of them. It didn’t strike us as terribly sensible to get any closer.

    I was surprised however that Frog had agreed with me. He'd come a long way from the person who used to advocate ‘chemical death’ whenever nature invaded.

Later I visited a neighbour to drop off some runner beans. She lets me have her horse manure for my veg garden and I try and reciprocate with some of its produce. She had a garden full of grandchildren but took the time to show me the wild bees who’d made a nest in a wall of her house. The house used to be a barn and the bees had chosen an old beam full of holes. The little black shapes buzzed in and out, ignoring us.

    ‘What a compliment,’ I exclaimed. ‘They must love your garden.’

    ‘Yes,’ she beamed. ‘They’re no trouble and we just use a different part of the garden.’

The wild-bee nest in an old beam

I remembered a bees’ nest that Frog and I had seen hanging like a wind-sock in the doorway of a Greek house during a holiday many years ago (so long ago that I’ve lost the picture unfortunately) and the swallows that nested above the shop doorways and flew around the village's mini-market, perching on top of the fridges.

Greek swallows above a shop doorway

And why shouldn’t they? And why shouldn’t we leave space for bees? And why shouldn’t wasps have a bit of our shed? We can spare it.