Garden bird-watching round-up, 2017

The Spring 2018 issue of Nature’s Home, the RSPB members’ magazine, arrived in the post a couple of days ago with the form for the RSBB Big Garden Birdwatch which takes place over the last weekend in January. I take part in this every year, although for the last two years I have had nothing to report as my front garden received a grand total of no avian visitors during the one hour I had designated for the survey (despite the various options that were available on the feeder), and back in 2015 two Ring-necked Parakeets who scared everyone else away. But one hour on a January weekend doesn’t tell the full story.

The bird-feeder in the front garden, situated so that it can be seen from the armchair in the corner of the lounge, actually gets a nice range of visitors. Over the past year, I have seen four kinds of tit (Blue, Coal, Great, Long-tailed) and two types of pigeon (Feral, Wood) on it, as well as Chaffinches, Robins, the odd Carrion Crow and the very occasional Greater-spotted Woodpecker. Ground-feeders have included Blackbirds and Dunnocks (and more pigeons), while I’ve seen Starlings and a Redwing perched in the tree.

Less welcome have been the squirrels, and I have tried various tricks to deter them. I thought that I had hit on a winning squirrel-deterring method by greasing the pole with some WD-40, and the resulting attempt by a squirrel to climb up the pole was admittedly hilarious. But then, of course, after several attempts enough of said lubricating oil had been wiped off to ensure a successful ascent, so an upturned plastic flower-pot with a hole in the bottom was deployed instead. I’m pleased to report that no squirrels have been seen on the feeder since.

Oh, and the parakeets visit too. Interesting birds, Ring-necked Parakeets. They’re not a native species to Britain, of course – but they have been a visible (and vocal) presence in the London area for a few decades now and are very well-established. Their exotic brightness has led to a couple of rather fanciful urban myths about how they got here; that the first pair in London were released at some point in the late Sixties by either Jimi Hendrix or Mick Jagger, or that the first ones escaped from Shepperton Studios during the filming of The African Queen back in 1951. There are a few question-marks over the extent to which they have affected native species (are they taking nest-sites from Lesser-spotted Woodpeckers, whose numbers are in decline?), although any queries about how a species from India manages to survive the winters here should be directed to the fact that their range includes the Himalayas; these birds may look tropical, but they can do cold. And, as they have shown, they are highly adaptable.

Harlech Castle

To Wales, where among other place to visit was Harlech, a small seaside town in Snowdonia best known for its castle which, by virtue of its cliff-top location, really dominates the surrounding area. It was built at the orders of Edward I during the 1280s, a time when that king also ordered the construction of the castles at Conway, Caernarfon and Beaumaris in order to secure his hold on North Wales; today, those castles (along with the town walls at Conway and Caernarfon) are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, described (by UNESCO) as the “finest examples of late 13^th century and early 14^th century military architecture in Europe”. It was the work of one James of Saint George, a master mason from Savoy who became Edward I’s castle-builder-in-chief.

If you’re coming down from the north, Harlech can be approached by two roads. There’s the high road – the B4573, which takes you into the town at the top – or you can stick on the A496 to approach it from the bottom. The latter, I reckon, gives you a better idea of how well the castle is situated as you approach the place, which I was very keen to explore. Well, it is one of the finest castles in a country which is renowned for having many, many castles! It just so happened that I was there on a quiet day, meaning that after I’d paid my entrance money at the café and visitor centre (the castle is run by Cadw, the Welsh equivalent of English Heritage) I basically had the place to myself. That doesn’t happen very often but it really is the best way to look around a castle!

From the top of the south-west turret of the gatehouse, the view is spectacular – across the bay (the tidal estuary of the Glaslyn and and Dwryd rivers), over places like Porthmadog and Portmeririon and towards the mountains inland – Snowdon, the tallest of the lot, can be seen from Harlech on a clear day. 

The bay itself used to be much bigger; nowadays, the castle is some distance from the sea but when it was built the sea came up to the cliff on which the castle stands. Harlech is not the only place to bear witness to the fact that coastlines change over time.

I had fun climbing the towers and exploring those narrow stone passages, some of which end rather abruptly at wooden barriers which look out onto courtyards where there were once floors (generally speaking, back in Medieval times the higher-status guests got the higher-up floors). 

A walk along the battlements, with more scope for the views of the coast and the mountains, was something that had to be done. At the gatehouse, I noted the grooves for the portcullises (Harlech Castle had three) and the murder-holes above the passageway and even arrow-loops to the sides, so that the castle’s defenders could fire on any attackers who got that far.

There were plenty of attackers over the years. Harlech Castle was besieged not long after it was built, during a Welsh rebellion against the English in 1294, and again during Owen Glendower’s rebellion in the early 1400s; after he managed to capture it in 1404, Glendower (or, as his name is written in Welsh, Glyndwr) used it as his headquarters for four years – it would fall to the English forces under the command of the Prince of Wales (the future Henry V) in 1409. It was also besieged during the Wars of the Roses, when it was held by the Lancastrians during the 1460s, becoming the last major Lancastrian stronghold to hold out against the Yorkists before it finally fell in 1468 after a seven-year siege; it was this event which inspired the song ‘Men of Harlech’. It was besieged again during the Civil War, becoming one of the last major Royalist fortresses to hold out before it fell to the Parliamentarians in 1647.

It was a cold day at the castle, though – it was December after all – so I eventually made it back to the café for a cup of tea and some lunch; I needed something warm, and thought it appropriate to order something Welsh; it turns out that the café does a good Welsh rarebit (they even make the cheese sauce themselves)…

Cocktail hour, part four

When getting ready to pour myself a Scotch-and-ginger recently, I grabbed hold of a tumbler which has cocktail measurements on the side. We have a set of four of these – one each for gin, rum, vodka and whiskey (I’ll let the Irish-American variant of the spelling pass); they’re square-shaped and each side has the measurements for a different cocktail marked on it. Out of curiosity, I had a look at the ones for the whiskey glass and found that one of the cocktails listed, the cablegram, wasn’t far off what I was planning to drink anyway. So, naturally, I opted to go the extra mile and turn my spirit-plus-mixer into a cocktail.

I’d not come across a cablegram before, it not being featured in our Vintage Cocktails book. It consists of whisky – over three fluid ounces of whisky if we’re going by the measuring-line on the glass, which we might as well do in the absence of any other instructions – mixed with a teaspoon of sugar and the juice of half a lemon, plus ice, topped with ginger ale. If three fluid ounces of whisky seems like quite a bit, I should point out that that is because it is; for reference purposes, a standard pub measurement of whisky (or any other spirit for that matter) in this country is 25 millilitres, which converts into less than one fluid ounce.

To all intents and purposes, it’s a whisky sour with ginger ale. On second thoughts, make that a pretty stiff whisky sour with ginger ale, for over three fluid ounces is a lot more whisky than I would usually put in a glass! But most enjoyable.

Interesting things in Wiltshire pubs (part 2)

Time to continue our tour of Wiltshire pubs that contain interesting things. From Avebury, let us journey further west (just under 15 miles by road) to Lacock. This village (or is it a town? It was given a market charter in the Middle Ages, which would technically make it a town even though there’s no longer a market) has remained unchanged for many years, with most of the buildings dating back to at least the eighteenth century. Lacock’s remarkably unspoiled appearance has made it a favourite with the makers of TV costume dramas, and it has appeared in plenty of those – Cranford, two versions of Pride and Prejudice, Moll Flanders and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (to name but a few) were filmed here, while the stately home, Lacock Abbey (“the birthplace of photography”, for that was where William Henry Fox-Talbot took the first photograph, in 1835), was Wolf Hall in Wolf Hall as well as being used as part of Hogwarts School in the Harry Potter films.

Lacock, which is almost entirely owned by the National Trust, has several pubs, including another Red Lion, but the one we’re interested in here is the George. As a pub name, the George also has more than one origin – either from St George or King George. The former has been recognised as the patron saint of England since the fourteenth century, although veneration of him in England goes back further. As for kings, there have been six of those but crucially that was the name of every King of Great Britain between 1714 and 1830 (starting with George I and ending with George IV), which is why the eighteenth century is sometimes known in this country as the Georgian period.

Inside the George in Lacock, we have our second unusual or interesting thing. In one of the rooms, there’s an old fire-place and in front of that is displayed an old spit or roasting-jack, as used for turning big joints of meat in front of open fires in the days before ovens. What is unusual about this one is that it was dog-operated, for it is linked by way of a pulley system to a large wheel in which a small dog was placed – the dog would run in the wheel, and that would in turn power the spit.

While such an arrangement seems odd at first, when you think about it it seems hardly surprising that people would have thought to get an animal to power the roasting-jack, for (as far as humans were concerned) being a ‘spit-boy’ was a low-paid, monotonous and – thanks to being up close to a roaring fire for long periods of time – uncomfortable job (see Tony Robinson’s TV series The Worst Jobs in History for more on this). Getting a dog to do it instead seems to have been a widespread practice by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – widespread enough for there to have been a particular breed of dog, long of body and short of leg, that was called the turnspit. Also known as the kitchen dog or the cooking dog, the breed does not seem to have been particularly well-documented, and it was more or less extinct by the mid-to-late nineteenth century, by which time automated roasting-jacks, powered by steam or by the hot air rising from the fire, were fairly widespread.