Burns Night Haggis Redux

This week, when my sister visited for her birthday, I ended up having haggis (both standard and vegetarian) three nights in a row.

The reason being that my stepfather threw a really rather excellent Burns Night supper for 16 neighbours, and there was an awful lot of haggis kicking around, haggises that just a few days before had been freely roaming the grousey highlands until being cruelly shot for our culinary pleasure.

We had no piper, but an iPad was able to play Burns' "Address to a Haggis" in all its incomprehensible glory to the guests, who then toasted the haggis and my mother with whisky shots I had poured.

I had one and then got a stinking headache straightaway, reminding me why I never drink the stuff.

My sister and I had two more Burns Night suppers of our own when she arrived the next day.

We love our haggis.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 31.01.20

Happy Hedgehog Has Heavenly Haggis

We celebrated Burn's Night yesterday. I got to celebrate it again today too, in leftover fashion.

Haggis is offal marmite, I suppose. People will happily eat liver and kidney, yet choke back vomit on the thought of eating haggis, as if heart and lungs are involved in the production of more unpleasant substances of those aforementioned organs.

I'm the other way round, I will eat haggis but no other organ things. It's the Scottish blood.

Mum insists we celebrate each year, and woe betide me if I turn up in my work gear. Burns is to be respected, even if it was the wrong night. We can't pipe in the Haggis, but I did pretend, and mum has to recite the Selkirk Grace that Burns himself did at a dinner on St Mary's Isle Kirkcudbright. Our home town.

Some hae meat and canna eat
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
Sae let the Lord be thankit.


It usually takes her three goes to get all the way through, but she makes it. Luckily it's the Selkirk Grace, and not the rude version of "Coming Through the Rye" that is associated with Burn's night. Burns wrote that one with his diamond ring on the window of a pub in Dumfries, up the road.

Of our two guests, only one was a haggis virgin. He was happy with the whisky, but you could tell he was only pretending to enjoy the mighty haggis, "Chieftain o' thae Puddin Race". His chewing was far too slow.

Our guest was a wuss.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 24.01.16

The Kirkcudbright White House

A return now to Scotland, and a visit to a local landmark that was recently featured on "Great Houses of the Coast" or some such More 4 type propertygasm show, although thankfully not one of the ones where someone gawps at a house and says "I never thought THIS would as cheap as six hundred thousand!"

At least I'll never have hateful hipster yuppies being shown round my flat by Amanda Lamb.

I'm not sure what the inspiration for the design is; there is something slightly naval and militaristic about the three turret design, like a Victorian battleship with its white upperworks. I believe the building is owned by a Russian sculptress or something rather exotic like that, although I hadn't realised sculpture was ever that financially rewarding unless you were Anthony Gormley.

Reaction to the building from the rather conservative local community  - OK,  the one person that I spoke to about it - is not positive. Said person said it was a monstrosity and added with satisfaction that its foundations were sinking.

Situated as it is, right next to one of the estuary lochs with its very boggy, muddy shore, I wouldn't find this too surprising.

The building certainly stands out among the deep red sandstone and pebble dash of town, and seems to be a popular spot for teenagers to visit. This is because it would appear that it marks the only spot in town you can get mobile phone reception on certain networks.

No wonder Kirkcudbright can't hold on to its younger population.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 28.10.15

Kite Hunting in the Barhill Woods

I wanted to make the most of the short time I had in my hometown. After the harbour, and a lovely scone and generous pot of tea at the Harbour Lights cafe, I was abandoned at the woods above my old home on Barhill Terrace to make my own way home.

I played army up there as a child, high above the town, in the dark of the trees, making daft "ka-ka-ka-ka-ka" noises while we pointed our toy machine guns at each other. Any birds would have long since bolted for the Isle of Man.

Today, I was going to be quiet, for I was hunting. I was looking for the red kites reputed to live in the area, probably the most beautiful of our birds of prey, and one I hadn't seen since one flew low over the crowd during a new-rave gig at the O2 Festival in Leeds. I'd failed to photograph a magnificent buzzard sat on a telegraph post near Carrick, so I wasn't hopeful. Oddly I spotted a buzzard being chased at high speed by two crows just as I entered the woods, but I barely managed to get a shot before all three birds were gone.

The woods were indeed dark as in my childhood, but coloured posts helpfully marked out various walking routes along the trails. The trouble was, I didn't believe them, especially as they led me in the opposite kind of circle from the one I was expecting. I retraced my steps, hoping for an ambitious path across fields back to the cottage, but all I did was find myself in a field through of cows and their by-products.

I tried again, and found myself stumbling through thickets and thorns, holding onto trees as I descended steep slopes. I found another gate, and our cottage was just through this field of cows. But the cows had calves, and were already looking at me angrily as I began to unlatch the gate. So I retreated.

Another field. A thin white ribbon stretched across it, between me and a gate that would get me home. Was it electrified? I brushed my hand against it; the jolt confirmed that it was. I limboed underneath it, and was soon safe in the cottage, if scratched and scraped and stunned. But there were no red kites for me.

But wait? What is that all the way back in the trees, near the gate I'd just tried to walk through?

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 20.10.15

In dark trees

Along the track

A burst of blue sky

Bark

Toadstool

Foxgloves still out in Scotland

Beyond the cows, the hills

Buzzard chase

Distant raptor. Probably not a kite, sadly. Looks like a kestrel coloured back.

A Harbour Walk

Our second day in Kirkudbright began with me making another walk along the Dee estuary photographing the ducks once again, followed by a trip into town to visit a very old friend, former lifeboatman and harbour master of the town.

After the tea and Tunnock's tea cakes - how long since I'd last eaten one of those?! - my sister and I decided to let the folks get on with their reminiscing while we took off for a walk along the inner Dee, just down from Tongland Power Station , a hydro plant with a salmon ladder.

The tide had just turned, we were essentially following the tide out as we walked past the new lifeboat station - a rib replacing the traditional design based further out to sea back in my day - and a fish processing plant. Since my last visit it looks as if there has been some kind of attempt to turn this stretch of river into a business park. Across the river from where the cheese factory used to waft its odours onto the town.

No longer. It seems to have been transformed into an eco-housing estate with solar panels reflecting a lowering sun. As we got nearer to the harbour, I remembered the feral cats I used to chase along here as they mooched in and out of the boat sheds, pausing now and then to snap up a morsel of decaying fish. Later semi-official town cats like Caesar the enormous ginger tom who used to roam around the square found their way onto postcards, but no longer.

The harbour was quiet when we got there, most of the boats had left on the 2am tide to go and gather their scallops from the Irish Sea and beyond. It was from here that the Solway Harvester went fishing in 2000, only to go down with all hands and wipe out the breeding male population of the Isle of Whithorn. Ghostly broken shells littered the harbourside like a memorial.

The harbour is not as busy as it was, it seemed to me, with fewer and larger boats tying up alongside.

The town is beautiful. But it is diminished. The streets are quiet, with few young people round, and by 9pm positively deserted. Houses are boarded up. Communications are dreadful. Where can the town go? What is its future?

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 19.10.15

Following the tide

Wreck

Another wreck, beautifully matching the landscape

Dee bridge

Sister inspects the queenie boats

Distant marina

Broken shells

Memorial

Redshank arrived after the tide left

Feeding on the mudflats

Clambering the Rocks of Carrick

After the Shore, we went to Carrick. My parents and her Scottish friends always considered Carrick the superior beach for reasons of snobbery I think - fewer people, classier people - while I always found it a little out of the way and dull would you believe, when you return and see how lovely the place is. As a kid, you want ice cream vans and sand and sea you can play in without fear of being mowed down by a member of the Scottish middle class on a windsurfer.

It was a rocky place, with sand only exposed at high tide, and being out on the sea proper a lot rougher than the Doon.

At low tide, there is an island offshore that can be walked to. Many old crofts seem to inhabit this and other islands, gable ends all that remains after hundreds of years exposed to wind and tide.

The day was still a fine one, and what was most amazing were the amount of butterflies - peacocks and small tortoisheshells - and silver Y moths that were feeding off a yellow flowering plant on the shoreline. It was almost as many butterflies as I'd seen in one place all year, and this was Scotland in mid October! With a hot sun, it felt about 6 weeks behind the actual season.

My sister and I explored, clambering over rocks like a gazelle and a gallumph, before I ascended Knockbrex Hill next to the beach to admire the purple hills across on the Isle of Whithorn. A group of people were learning conservation with a map of the bay up on high. Another man was water divining, a rather easy occupation right next to the sea, one would think.

Bird life was less evident than at the Doon, our avian friends being less snobby than my parents as well, but a heron put on a fine show of elegant flying and stalking at a distance. While no doubt laughing at my climbing.

Si

All text and images Copyright CreamCrackeredNature 18.10.15

Carrick beach and island

Small tortoiseshell

Interruption from Mars

Very handsome bull!

Heron hunts

Heron flies

Red admiral on this yellow flower that was very abundant

Island again

Small tortoiseshell basks

Purple hills far away

Knockbrex harbour

Island from Knockbrex Hill

The Shore at the Doon

First full day in Scotland meant an inevitable trip to the beach known as "The Shore" to my fellow kids, and "The Doon" to my mother and her contemporaries. The best beach in the area, where children swam in rubber rings and played in rockpools before getting an ice cream from the van parked on the field behind the sand.

Sometime it was the place where a child would get their first wasp sting, or encounter a dreaded jellyfish, a lifeless disc of blubbering death threat lying there like a sneeze. One memorable winters day the sea froze in waves and I slipped on ice as usual, while getting a bit older meant evening barbecues there when we were on holiday.

Like the town, it hasn't changed. Only the ice cream van wasn't there, which was ironic as this October day had about the fiercest sun I've encountered all year. I got a slightly burnt face, but in the shade, it was chilly.

The sea was mirror blue and the calmest I've ever seen it. And when the tide had receded, quickly as it does in these shallow waters, the wreck of the Monreith, a two masted schooner that sank in 1900, jaggedly dominated the view.

As a child I tried to walk out to it, but ended up waist deep in mud, and alarmed at sharp sensations by my toes I turned back.

Today, as ever the rockpools were empty, but the sands were not. As the tides receded, the birds arrived, the first being a piping interloper exploring the seaweed covered rocks. "Cooooo-weeeeeeeeeeee" it called. My first curlew.

As more of the sands became exposed more piping birds arrived, the smart black and white oystercatchers with their piercing cries and brilliant red bills. How little I had noticed as a child, how I wish I could have noticed more.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 17.10.15

Beautiful still day

This red admiral...

...has a very unhealthy diet

Tide receding. I love these beach streams

Sisterly art

The wreck of the Monreith

Black headed gulls

Curlew in the seaweed

Gull watches wader

Another one further out

Comical looking oystercatchers

You often see them in that "beaks open" pose in photos

Feeding in unison