The Dark Woods

Whoever planned the planting of the woodlands which stretch for some miles around Dunrobin Castle organised them into blocks, each with its own personality. The most pleasant to walk through are the mixed woodland where deciduous species outnumber conifers, and the least pleasant, by far, are the stands of spruce. These trees were planted very close together and have now grown vertically to some considerable height so....

....even on a bright, sunny day they are dark, enclosed and rather sinister places. The trouble is that fungi seem to thrive in these sunless conditions, and this means that my very able assistant recently had to deploy some....

....very modern technology to ensure we obtained good pictures.

Perhaps one of the most spectacular fungi that enjoy the spruce leaf-litter are the parasol mushrooms, of which there were, at this spot, some half-dozen large and very fine specimens.

Anything growing here has to be pretty vigorous as it has to push up through a depth of twigs and pine needles. This is the largest fungus so far, over a foot across. It may be the giant funnel, but a description of this species suggest that it doesn't like dark places.

I have no idea what species these are but it's a very nice picture of two fungi enjoying life in the Dunrobin spruce litter.

The Dairy Park

The agricultural land in the foreground is called the Dairy Park because it was once grazed by the cows which provided Dunrobin Castle with its milk but for the last couple of years it's been down to oats, a crop which is sufficiently important to the castle's economy that it was prepared to risk a contretemps with some local people who objected to the old north road, which ran the length of the field and is now a popular footpath, being moved closer to the shore.

Despite the soil being exceptionally sandy, the area having been covered by the sea at one time, it seems to produce a reasonable crop, this year's having just been gathered. The trees mask a steep slope which is an ancient cliff-line. Other pasture fields, particularly at Golspie Tower, have also been ploughed up for oats, some say because they are becoming increasingly popular in the manufacture of vegan milk.

As we walked the field in bright sunshine this morning skein after skein of pink-footed geese were on their way north, passing over exceptionally fast as they had a good following wind. One wonders whether, if the field were less frequented by walkers and their dogs, the geese would have landed to feed on the oat grains left from the harvest.

If the geese are now well settled for the winter, other species are just arriving. This is the first sighting of turnstones since earlier this year, which were feeding on the Diary Park beach in the company of oystercatchers, curlews and crows. We await the arrival of the ringed plovers and redshanks which are the other winter residents along this shore.

Slime Moulds

My interest in fungi has led to the discovery of another group of organisms which inhabit the same ecosystem - the slime moulds. It's a horrible name for what are obviously fascinating beasts which exist as single cells for part of their lifecycle but can then come together to form larger and quite complex bodies - which is what we see here - and these, amazingly, can move, as if they are a single organism, to reproduce and search for food.

It just happens that last week's New Scientist carried the winning photograph in the magazine's recent Photography Awards, of a slime mould taken by Barry Webb. The winning picture is on NS's website here, 

The slime moulds we have been finding locally come in interesting colours, including pink, orange, yellow, grey and white, so they're not exactly shy. However, identifying them is difficult, adding to the frustrations I enjoy when trying to name the fungi we've found.

More Badger Activity

As we arrived at Loch Fleet this morning a mass of pink-footed geese were rising noisily over the mudflats, heading north towards Golspie. We're told that they've been feeding in the fields around Brora and our informant, who has lived in the area almost all his life, agreed with us that there are exceptional numbers this year, perhaps in the region of 2,000, commuting north each morning and south towards roosts near Tain in the early evenings. Certainly this morning those that flew away left....

....as many again on the inner basin of the loch. The tide had been high at five this morning yet the sea still hadn't flooded the mudflats, even though it was flowing very strongly through the entrance. 

The wind has been in the east for the last couple of days and a choppy sea has begun to eat away at the beach again. Perhaps because of the sea state there was hardly a bird along the shore and when....

....we walked back across the links they were as lacking in wildlife. It wasn't until we were back in Ferry Woods that we found something of interest, in the form of....

....another wasps' nest that had been dug out, probably by a badger. The main nest, with a large amount of comb, can be seen at lower centre, with more bits of the comb scattered to right and left.

This is the second time this autumn we've found a nest attacked by badgers - see earlier post here. It would be good next to see them.

The attack must have happened overnight as....

....the wasps were doing what they could to repair the damage, rather hopelessly as they were very lethargic in the chill morning air.

A Wet Day's Soup

It's a proper Scottish day here today, low mist with thin drizzle and chilly, but we took our usual couple of hours' exercise, this time along the coast below Dunrobin Castle with its few bedraggled tourists pretending they were thoroughly enjoying their Highland holiday. What makes these wet walks more than bearable is the prospect of a bowl of home-made soup, the recipe for this leek and potato soup....

....coming from one of Mrs MW's mother's books. It's pretty battered from what may be as much as ninety years' use - the first edition was published in 1930 - but the recipes are still as good as new.

We derive some considerable pleasure from our continuing use of so many things that belonged to our parents - the dining room table at which we sat to eat the soup, and the dining chairs on which we sat, belonged to Mrs MW's parents. We only get rid of something when it really is no longer fit for purpose, and even then we feel bad as we say goodbye.

Fat books like this often have things pushed in to them. This one has a fairly ancient bookmark printed with a picture of Gloucester cathedral, Gloucester being a city in which the family lived for some years. 

Anyway, just in case any reader fancies trying a traditional recipe for a good potato soup or, as it reminds us, puree de pommes de terre, here it is.

'Fly Aragic'

We walked in Balblair Woods this morning and were pleased to see that someone at NatureScot has been putting up some new information boards along the main path between the car park and the bird hide but, oh dear, whoever did it either failed to get this board checked or was badly let down because....

....there's the sort of spelling mistake one would not expect of such an august natural history promoting organisation. I say, "Oh dear....", but we've all done it.

Fly aragic.... sorry, fly agaric.... is probably the most impressive of fungi and there were no shortage of specimens in the woods today including this almost perfect group which I managed to ruin by inadvertently knocking over the biggest; and in a national nature reserve! "Oh dear...," as they say.

Walking through the woods and along the shores of Loch Fleet was a pleasure in the bright sunshine but it was cold. The temperature last night in our back garden fell to 2C and the car was registering only 5C as we drove along Ferry Road to the woods.

However, the sun still has some warmth in it and if one chose a sunny spot along one of the tracks one could stand for a few minutes and bask in it. What disappointed us - and this is nothing new - was how few people were enjoying the woods: we saw only one family, even though this is the Scottish half term, and six other adults in a two-hour walk.

Late autumn, which is where we are here in northern Scotland, does have its spectacular side, it being the only time of year one forgives the invasive habits of the bracken. It's also a time of year when one has some strange juxtapositions, like....

....a dog rose in full flower bearing a mass of ripe berries.

I Am Who I am Because....

....a father thought his 21-year old son was wasting his talents in a lowly-paid post in an office in East London and arranged for him to have an interview with a Greek, Contimichaelos Darke, for a job on the docks in Port Sudan, a port on the Red Sea where the temperatures rise to over 40C in the hot season.

The father was Captain Ernest Haylett, and the son was my father, Cecil Haylett. Ernest's ship plied a trade from Britain to the West Indies and to east and south Africa. I have often wondered why Ernest chose the hottest, driest, dustiest, most barren port he visited as a suitable place for his son to learn to be a ships' agent. I can only imagine that he felt he needed to move Cecil quickly, or perhaps he had discovered that there was a job available in Contimichaelos Darke's office, or, perhaps, because Contimichaelos Darke may have owed him a favour.

This last idea is an interesting one. It is usually captains who owe ships' agents favours, as the job of a ships' agent, among many other things, is to look after every aspect of a ship's needs when it comes in to port. I know that my father used to receive presents from captains - after having lunch on board a ship he would often be handed a bottle of Scotch which we had to smuggle through customs when we left the port, and he also received boxes of Scottish kippers from Clan Line captains.

However, in those days there were ways in which agents could owe captains a favour. One of these involved coal. If a ship steamed carefully it could use less coal that might have been ordered in advance, so the balance of the coal was often sold by the agent and the money shared between himself, the captain and the chief engineer. I'm not suggesting that Captain Haylett bribed Contimichaelos Darke to take on his son but it may have been that a debt was owed.

I'm also intrigued that Captain Haylett felt it appropriate for Cecil to work for a Greek. In those days, the 1920s, prejudices against other nationalities were common with the British, and Greeks in particular were often discriminated against. Captain Haylett must have had some respect for Contimichaelos Darke though this might have been misplaced, as Cecil worked far too hard for excessively long hours, to the detriment of his health.

Yet it was the making of him. He became an exceptionally good ships' agent, trusted and respected. From Port Sudan he went on to work in Beira, Dar-es-Salaam, Mombasa and Zanzibar, where he met my mother.

Picture: Ernest and Cecil together in Port Sudan.