This Flushed October

fire lore & tattered ribbons

Autumnal incense curls from my bronze-flushed River Song candle vessel by The Hundred Stream, East Ruston, Norfolk. This is the time of year when we start encountering wraiths in the mist - can you see the smoke-spirit?

Hello and welcome to this New Moon in Libra edition of Bracken & Wrack.

This morning I set out along the lane for a little walk, alert to the changes in the season brought by these first couple of days of October. It was a strangely disorientating experience for me as I realised just how much my perception of the turning wheel is coloured by the scents in my nostrils at any given moment. That, I know, is one of the key ways I can tell the difference between any New and Old feast date, the 13 days’ ‘slippage’ really showing itself in the mingling and shifting of aromas.

There has been Covid (I’m pretty sure!) in our little household and although it was just like a mild cold it’s left me with a most peculiar sense of taste and smell, and not a pleasant one. I’m keeping my fingers firmly crossed that given a few more days it will sort itself out as I’m surprising myself at how much it’s bothering me. Still, things could be very much worse and I feel extraordinarily lucky to have just come back from a wonderful three-day back-packing walk along part of Norfolk’s coastline with amazingly varied terrain and in the best company. Woods, heathland, cliff top, sea wall, sand, rough pasture, tarmac road and more hills than you might expect. Especially when you’re near your limit and one of the last churches to be visited is set on a commanding rise. Oh, and did I mention the rain and high winds? :-)

Morning beach mandala at Mundesley, Norfolk, 26 September 2024

But back to the cottage and to this morning’s new moon wander. I’d picked a moment where I could see a few tattered blue ribbons among the torn-paper clouds but somehow as soon as I had walked a few steps along the lane the rain started to fall. I was glad to put up my hood, but at least it wasn’t cold. There was just this odd smell in my nostrils which I was trying my best to ignore. Suddenly the two white geese in the garden opposite started making an enormous din. As usual it was impossible to believe there’s not a whole gaggle of them, but through my observations I’m absolutely certain that - unless it heralds feeding time - a cacophony always signals the arrival overhead of a skein of wild geese. It really is something to ponder, the way these two retain their kinship with their wild cousins, and I find it beautifully reassuring.

The other birds really making their presence felt at the moment are the young pheasants who run pell mell up and down the lane in family clusters. They are very sweet but have little idea about jumping up onto the hedge bank for safety at the approach of a car, just running a bit faster down the middle and hoping for the best.

Turning up the long lane with fields on either side, I thought I would just go a little way to see how the land, quite literally, lay. Everything was heavy with rainwater and moist air, and the middle of the lane was strewn with leaves and acorns brought down by the recent winds. Although in a way it felt autumnal, the warmth and the sense of green that still prevails contradicted this. Yes, it’s still very green. Trees like the oak, ash, hazel and sycamore - even the blackthorn whose leaves are usually quick to turn lemon-yellow - would still speak of summer were it not for a certain tiredness and a little dry curling at the edges. The bracken is turning, true, but even that transformation seems to be happening in slow motion this year when I look at my photographs from this time last year.

Acorn Wood, 4 October 2023

I had just been listening to a podcast by the ever-inspiring Val Thomas, who was talking about making October charms, weaving in your wishes for the month ahead. So as I walked, I found myself looking for tokens to put together into a simple new moon spell of intent. I picked up a beautiful three-colour pigeon feather which, with its white and light and darker grey, put me in mind of the Flint Lord and Chalk Lady of Norfolk and brought other meaningful connections too. Then there was an acorn, rose hips, hawthorn berries, a strand of willow. If I were to start thinking too much about ritual I would probably not do anything with them, but just putting them together and lighting a candle for focus, well, that’s something that I can and will do, and it’s a new moon practice I would recommend to you, too, if you would like a gently potent way to greet this new phase.

Reaching the antlered tree; its silhouette is a landmark in all seasons. 2 October 2024

In this issue of Bracken & Wrack:

• News from the cottage

• ‘Cock-Pheasant’ by Laurie Lee

• A Good Tangle of Ash & Blackthorn: fire lore

• Nimble as Twigs in the Breeze: the tale of a dweller on the edge

• Baked October Apples

(Press play to hear me read the poem)

Gilded with leaf-thick paint; a steady

Eye fixed like a ruby rock;

Across the cidrous banks of autumn

Swaggers the stamping pheasant-cock.

The thrusting nut and bursting apple

Accompany his jointed walk,

The creviced pumpkin and the marrow

Bend to his path on melting stalk.

Sure as an Inca priest or devil,

Feathers stroking down the corn,

He blinks the lively dust of daylight,

Blind to the hunter’s powder-horn.

For me, alike, this flushed October -

Ripe, and round-fleshed, and bellyfull -

Fevers me fast but cannot fright, though

Each dropped leaf shows the winter’s skull.

Laurie Lee, ‘Cock-Pheasant’

Graveyard, Bacton church, Norfolk, 8 October 2022

A GOOD TANGLE OF ASH & BLACKTHORN

The beginning of October seems like a fine time to turn our attention to the hearth and home (if we are lucky enough to have a roof over our head of course). Of course, since time immemorial this has been the place for a group or family to gather around to cook food, keep warm, exchange news and for story and song. Whether or not you’re able to have a working indoor hearth there’s a lot to be said for warming the hands and heart by an outdoor fire or even opting for a symbolic fire like a glowing candle, which in its own way touches an ancient need for living flame as the days grow shorter.

As I bring in wood from the shed, I’m grateful to have such a heartening heap and grateful for the help I had in getting it that way. Recently, I read that after the harvest was gathered in, many farm workers would ask the farmer if they could have a hedge to cut for winter fuel, and this would have constituted part of their wages for that season. A good tangle of ash and blackthorn - both excellent burning woods - was favoured and they would work long hours getting all the wood cut and stacked ready for carrying home. I’ve carried plenty of foraged wood home myself in the past and it has certainly been life-enhancing, but it’s hard to truly appreciate how much difference this fuel allowance would have made to the life of a farmworker’s family constantly on the edge of poverty.

I reflect, too, on how much fire-related folklore there seems to be. Needless to say, as such a crucial element in our ancestors’ lives there are many, many examples and I’m sure I will learn more in time. In his Walking the Tides, Nigel Pearson has collected together a generous array of lore:

• A new hearth must have a + marked upon it, or made by drawing a + with iron (a poker) in salt laid there. This is to bless the hearth and avert ill luck.

• The old fire must always be carefully cleaned away before the new one is laid, as this shows respect.

• Once the fire is lit, it must be carefully tended. As a liminal place it has the capacity both to heal and harm, so precautions must be taken. For example, it is seen as unlucky for the fire to be poked by anyone other than a family member or longstanding friend.

• If flames leap up the chimney there will be an argument in the house or a storm outside.

• Sparks at the back of the chimney indicate important news on its way.

• A fall of soot means bad luck, although lots of soot suddenly falling is a sign of money coming to a member of the household.

• If the fire catches quickly without any help, unexpected visitors will soon arrive.

• If it draws badly, expect rain.

• If it burns to one side, a wedding is in the offing.

• A fire that crackles is a sign of frost on the way.

• Placing the poker crosswise across the fire’s grate-bars will help draw up a stubborn fire, and at the same time keep away any malign spirits.

• Always wash your hands before attending to the fire, as dirty hands are an insult and disrespectful, and the fire will go out.

• When retiring to bed for the night, the fire must be banked up and another + made in the ashes or an iron horseshoe placed there. This will avert any harm coming to the household and stop anything unwanted from coming down the chimney in the night.

• One from Gemma Gary in Traditional Witchcraft: a Cornish Book of Ways - a bunch of dried bladderwrack tied with red thread and kept inside the chimney will protect the household from fire.

When I was very small my family lived in what was then a modern suburban semi, but even so, its only heating came in the form of an open fire with a back burner for hot water. The banking up of the fire would have happened after my 6pm bedtime (following The Magic Roundabout - who remembers that??) but I have vivid memories of the daily early morning routine when my Dad would poke the embers back into life, saying ‘Wake up fire!’ and then, in the grumpy, croaky voice of the fire, ‘I don’t want to wake up’. Whether or not he was conscious of it, he was personifying the hearth and crediting it with agency. And perhaps even that is telling in its own way.

Woodshed happiness, 2 October 2024

NIMBLE AS TWIGS IN THE BREEZE

That you’re walking uphill is all the more obvious when you’re hot and there’s no shade and you’re carrying everything on your back. 

‘I think we turn at the next clump of trees.’ But no, it’s not that one. ‘It must be the turn we can see up ahead then'. Oh yes. With relief we hoist our backpacks a little higher and set our course. Now we are following a narrow green track. It’s single file only and we’re glad we chose to wear long trousers despite the sunshine. Brambles and nettles guard the edges while hogweed and blackthorn cast the kind of flickering shade that, while welcome, disarms any attempt to read the path ahead. 

Then the green hedge turns into something else. Still green, but not part of the hedge. Tucked so far in that you might be forgiven for believing it had rooted there. A caravan. A tiny one, similar to the one I lived in in my front yard for a year and a half. This caravan, though, looks abandoned. Outside it are so many piled-up objects that I barely register what they actually are. All I know is that everything has seen better days. Cracked and algae plastic, rotting wood, rusty metal.

I lift my eye along the hedge line and see that the caravan is not alone. Beyond it, a disintegrating van and then an enormously long red truck. Perhaps it was once a removal lorry but now it’s gently removing itself from existence, seeming simultaneously to both melt into the earth and disappear into the hedge. 

But not quite. Although they have surely long since been abandoned, the three vehicles exude presence. My first thought is gypsies. But would they leave their vehicles to be reclaimed by the green like this? Before I can think again, a woman steps out from a gap in the hedge on the right, just beyond the caravan. She must have popped behind the hedge, I think, just as I often do. Probably she regrets the timing. 

Then I see washing lines strung between the trees, bridging the gap but set right into the hedge line so that, if anyone were to glance along the track, they would be completely invisible. On the lines are pegged thick clothes, a rug and a blanket.

The woman smiles and greets us. Slightly built with long grey hair, she is wearing a blue plaid dressing gown. To start with I imagine that her lifestyle means there is no real reason to get dressed in conventional clothing if she doesn’t feel like it that day. But during the conversation that ensues, everything becomes clear.

She has, we learn, lived at the side of this particular track for 20 years, and travelled around before that for many more, especially in Ireland and Scotland. But Norfolk suits her. The locals are happy for her to be there, perhaps seeing her as an antidote to the many incomers to the area with money to throw around, who may spend only a couple of weeks a year in their second homes. This woman could not be more different. With her nut-brown skin she is almost part of the hedge herself now, knowing, no doubt, every hazel bush and blackberry thicket. 

We never discover her name, nor does she know ours, yet that short conversation has come into my mind many times since. We often refer to it. There are lessons everywhere, and its easy to feel that an exchange like this is arranged by the gods and spirits for exactly that reason. Perhaps the woman will remember talking with us, too, and a tiny part of the web will be forever altered. 

Originally, the woman tells us, she was one of four people who settled beside the track together, but one by one the other three shed their ideals and threw in the towel. All except this woman, sole survivor of the dream, who refused to take the offered way out and has stuck steadfastly to her beliefs. One of those who drew back was her own partner; the huge truck was his. But she is inseparable from the landscape now, her feet sunk into the mud of the track, her fingers nimble as twigs in the breeze. She doesn’t feel that the outer world is her place, that world of capitalism and war and greed and competition. And it surely isn’t. 

It can’t be a soft life, the one that she’s living. We did not ask the woman about winter. What can it be like when the north wind blows in from the sea, all the windows freeze, and water - every drop of which has to be carried from the tap in the cemetery at the bottom of the lane - needs its ice breaking before making the first cup of tea or having a splash of a wash? You can cook up a feast on a single gas ring, I know that first hand, but how does she find or buy food? Where does her money come from? However simple her life she surely has to buy gas canisters, batteries, tea and food. It dawns on us that she is wearing the dressing gown because she has washed the garment that she would otherwise be wearing. It’s a fine drying day, and laundry must take a lot of coordinating. 

We talk about attitudes to nature; people cutting hedges whenever they choose to even when it disturbs nesting birds. ‘Birds were here long before us’, she says, looking birdlike herself. ‘They were here with the dinosaurs, they evolved from dinosaurs.’ Her voice is tender, and you just know how much it means to her to live in the hedge with the chaffinches and dunnocks.

She impresses upon us the need to have plenty of water with us, tells us to keep drinking as much as we can in this hot sunny weather with our enormously heavy packs on our backs. She tells us about the cemetery tap that she uses and says that nearly every church has a water supply around the back. Collecting water is an integral part of every single day for her, so no wonder it’s a serious topic. The stony track must seem even longer with a heavy water canister in each hand. 

The woman speaks of her relief at choosing not to have children, even though most people she knows who have opted for a similar lifestyle have also opted to have a child even if they are single. It’s insurance, she says. Someone to look after you as you get older. She sighs a little wistfully but then says, strongly, ’It wouldn’t seem right to bring a child into a world like this, that’s why I never wanted to have children. I would have a huge sense of guilt. It’s better to live out my own days in the best way that I can.’ 

She doesn’t say ‘the purest’, but that’s how it seems to me - that she is living life’s truest essence with all its pain and exquisite joys. She’s living outside the system, or at least is doing so to the closest extent that I think either of us have ever witnessed. Could I live like that? Would I want to? Does she have a fire with foraged wood? There is nothing to show that she does. No fire pit or stacked wood or smell of woodsmoke. 

As we leave, the woman begins heading for her ex’s truck. It’s truly a giant among lorries and gives the impression that even hauling yourself onto the back of it would take a lot out of you. She carries an armful of blankets fresh, I think, from the washing line, and explains that every so often she decamps from her caravan to spend some days sleeping in the truck. It’s more comfortable to sleep in, she says, but far less convenient when you need to get up in the night for a wee. ‘Quite an effort’, she says - as I’d suspected - ‘to get on and off the back of it. Not like nipping out of the caravan door.’

Oh, I know what nipping out of the caravan door is like. 

The purpose of her occasional holiday in the truck, she says, is to provide an opportunity to empty and clean out all the caravan cupboards, to clean the windows, to sweep through and to change all the bedding. Which, of course, explains the hedgerow wash day we stumbled upon. The caravan looks so feral that I am quite surprised at this. But perhaps because the overall condition of her home is gradually deteriorating, and because she has no way of removing the build up of broken and defunct objects outside (which I would find terribly distracting if I lived there), then having the means to open the windows and sweep through now and again would make you feel more settled, more at home. 

Yet, neither of us feel that she is sad or that she yearns for a different life, despite having been left to sink or swim below the radar of society. Perhaps we detect a little uncertainty about the future: she speaks of the possibility of a room in someone’s house, and then seems to shudder at the impossibility of being caged in that way. 

And yes, for her it would be a cage, that hedgerow bird fluttering from sunrise to sunset to sunrise, the rhythm of rain on the roof and the call of muntjac and fox the soundtrack to a life lived as close to the edge as you can imagine. Literally on the tracks - but who is to say whether on the wrong or the right side of them?  

Maybe as close as I get - wild hedgerow jelly I made this year from crabapples, haws, hips, blackberries and sloes, 29 September 2024

BAKED OCTOBER APPLES

Every year at this time, my neighbours opposite set out a pallet with straw and start offering their pumpkins for sale. The splash of fiery orange across the lane is always a joyful herald of the true season of autumn for me. This year the pumpkins have been joined by £1 trays of beautiful plump cooking apples, so of course I could not resist.

Here is a recipe for baked apples which gives this autumn desert a tasty twist (and which I have adapted to be vegan). As a child I found baked apples a very disappointing sweet when they turned up on the table, seeming too healthy and fruity somehow to really qualify as pudding. As an adult, though, I’ve changed my mind. Served hot with a little coconut yogurt or ice cream they are a true taste of the season.

50ml apple juice, orange juice, or a spirit like gin, rum or calvados

2 large Bramley or other cooking apples, cored

2 dried apricots (optional)

30g sultanas

30g ground almonds

2 tbsp oats

Half tsp almond extract

50g coconut sugar

drizzle of olive oil

maple syrup and vegan vanilla ice cream or coconut yogurt (optional)

Oven 190C, Gas Mark 5. Pour the baking liquid into a small ovenproof dish that the apples fit into snugly. Place the apples on top. Combine sultanas, ground almonds, oats, almond extract and half the sugar in a bowl and pack into the centre of the apples. I like to push a dried apricot into the bottom of each apple to keep the filling in place (when I was a child it was a glacé cherry). Drizzle with olive oil (or dot with butter if not vegan) and scatter the remaining sugar over the top. Cover with dampened and scrunched up baking parchment or with foil, tucking it around the apples so that they steam. Bake for 35 minutes, then uncover for another 5 to 10 minutes so that the top caramelises. Allow to cool just a little before serving with the juices poured over, and some maple syrup, coconut yogurt or vegan ice cream.

Enjoy the taste of October!

Until next time.

With love, Imogen x

October joys: apples and pumpkins just across the lane