Skyhill and Ballure

Diary of an elderly, rather dotty woman.

Sunday 22 February, 2012.

This week I have been thinking too much - as usual.  One of my recurring thoughts is that homo sapiens is rather an odd creature.  The name which we have rather arrogantly chosen for ourselves denotes wisdom but we don’t seem to be very wise.  For instance, we study apparently inherited behaviour in other species - like migration in birds - but it doesn’t occur to most of us that we are also animals and that our behaviour may also be partly influenced by instincts originating in our distant past.

Why do we we perceive beauty the way that we do?  Perhaps we see beauty in water, trees and greenery because these things were vital for our survival in our hunter/gatherer past.

And what about our obsession with labelling people and “isms”.   Perhaps suspicion of strangers dates back to a time when we knew all the people in our group or village.  At that time we must have seen all our neighbours as unique individuals - and everyone else in a single category “stranger”.

The habit of labelling and judging people - according to their gender, age, language, skin colour, religion, political persuasion, sexual preferences, etc., etc. -  must be a fairly recent development.  I imagine it is partly due to the structure of language and partly an attempt to make sense of an increasingly crowded planet with confusing social structures where we no longer know all our neighbours, let alone all the people we pass in the street.  We tend to use labels mainly for people that we don’t know well.  Other people may see me and Tim as an elderly, white, heterosexual, english speaking, non-religious, vaguely liberal couple who live in a comfortable but not ostentatious house in a beautiful glen.   But as far as I am concerned I am just me, and Tim is just Tim.  We are each and every one of us the centre of our own universe - the point from which we perceive the world.

I started thinking about labels when I was reading Sea Fever, a book by Ann Cleeves.  One character has met a group of birders and mulls over the fact that . . . In her experience adult bird watchers were elderly, rather dotty women, who fed blue tits in their gardens and went for nature rambles.  Bird watchers can be divided into three general categories.  The ones that describe themselves as birders are serious students of birds.  Then there are twitchers who are mainly concerned with spotting rare birds so that they can increase the length of their ”lists”.  Sadly, I fall into the third “rather dotty elderly women” category.  It doesn’t have much status but we do get immense pleasure watching the birds in our gardens.

The dottiest thing I have done recently was to offer our birds some chopped up left-over macaroni cheese.  The robins and blackbirds, and even the titis, enjoy a bit of grated mild cheddar and I was curious to see how they would react to the left-overs.  I was slightly worried about about giving them the unfamiliar food but curiosity won the day.  It certainly caused a flurry of excitement in the local robin community.  It was interesting to watch the confident resident robins eating near the dish.  The more nervous robins, which came from the direction of the next door gardens, just grabbed a piece and flew away to the shelter of the shrubs.  Later I decided to throw away the remains but the plate had already been pecked clean.  I suspect the blackbirds.

We have kept up our daily walks but today will be quite a challenge.  The forecast was “Rain this morning into the early afternoon will be heavy at times and accompanied by strong to gale force southerly winds.”  and so far the forecast is right.   We are still hoping to walk later this afternoon when the worst of the weather should have passed over the Island.  

Last Sunday I walked up Skyhill on my own after we got back from Poyll Dooey.  The path was unusually busy.  I passed five people and three dogs!  One of the local dogs, Duncan, who never knows whether to be friendly or frightened or both at once, ran up the path behind me to check me out - then barked and rushed back to his owners.

At the top of the hill he repeated the procedure and then disappeared from sight.  I didn’t see him again until I got back to the road and heard someone shouting about a dog.  There was Duncan running around a garden amongst some extraordinarily composed free range chickens.  I told the owners of the chickens that he was not my dog but I knew where he lived, saw that there was no chance of catching him, and hurried down the road to let Duncan’s people know what was happening.  I assume all ended well because the next day we saw Duncan going for a walk down the glen road - on the lead.

We had over an inch of rain on Sunday night so the path up the hill is a lot muddier.  I didn’t take my camera on our Monday walk and missed the chance of photographing a robin which serenaded us from the top of the crab apple tree when we returned home.  But it didn’t matter because he was back when we set out on Tuesday - high up in the flowering cherry and still singing his song.

We walked up the cul-de-sac track that leads to the gate into the top paddock and I took another photo, from a higher vantage point than last week, of the gorse covered slope beyond the paddocks with Ramsey in the distance.

Then I zoomed in on Milntown, our local “sort-of stately” home, more visible than usual from the hill while the branches of the surrounding trees are bare.  Milntown has has had a varied history.  It was originally the home of the Christian family.  Then, from 1898, it was briefly used as a girls’ boarding school before becoming a hotel and then a private residence again.  The last owner willed the property to the Milntown Trust and the house and gardens are now open to the public.

Another day, another walk. Wednesday morning was foggy - almost drizzling but not quite.

The moss up in the plantation enjoys this type of weather.

It only grows at the side of the path under the deciduous trees near the streams because there isn’t enough light under the conifers.

Friday’s walk was later than usual which was a pity because the light was fading when we reached the top of the hill.  Tim enjoyed an impressive aerial display by two large birds while I battled to get a photo and missed most of the fun.  We think they must have been female hen harriers.  They appeared to be dark brown but were flying too high for us to get a good view of the distinctive white ring above the tail and make a positive identification.

We moved our “last desperate attempt to get photos for the blog” walk forward from today to Saturday because of the weather forecast.  This week we drove up the Mountain Road, past the Hairpin bend and turned into the parking area near the Ballure Reservoir.  While Tim was putting on his boots, I took a photo across the road to the Albert Tower.

The first part of our route was along a footpath from the parking area to the marshal’s hut at the Gooseneck.  It was less muddy than we feared, and the smell of sheep droppings wasn’t as strong as it was last time we walked here.

A little further up the path there was a lovely view looking back at Ramsey Bay and the clay cliffs between Ramsey and the Point of Ayre which are highest at Shellag Point, at the end of the Bride Hills.

Then we reached the most dangerous part of the walk - alongside the road just below the Gooseneck where someone had recently lost control of their vehicle and smashed down the rather flimsy fence.

We turned up the road that leads from the Gooseneck to the Hibernian.  Scattered showers had been forecast and the clouds to the north looked quite threatening.

The next section of the walk was along a forestry track leading down towards the reservoir.  And then we turned up the path that runs around the dam.  We were hoping to see some birds but only caught a distant glimpse of two ducks which disappeared into the vegetation at the edge of the water.

The last part of the walk was up from the dam to the car park - through a little woodland of broadleaf trees.  They look quite mature now but we can remember when they were first planted.

There are a few signs of approaching spring in the garden.  The crocuses under the elder tree are are on the verge of opening.  All they need now is another warm sunny day.

And the primroses are looking happier than they did in the frost.

And finally, a collage of this week's sunrise and sunset photos.

PS  I was browsing through some comments on the Guardian website after reading an article about motivational sayings when I came across a link to a “Demotivational” website which claimed “Motivational posters don't work. But our legendary demotivational posters don't work even BETTER!”  My favourite . . . Blogging: Never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few.  Many a true word is spoken in jest!