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Two castles in one day . . .

The weather during June and July was appalling, very wet and cool. However, summer returned temporarily mid-July so we grabbed that rare opportunity to visit two castles in North Yorkshire, around 62 miles south from home.

Richmond Castle (founded in the 1070s) and 12th century Middleham Castle (just 10 miles south of Richmond) in Swaledale and Wensleydale respectively, are among the most important castles in the north of England, perhaps in the country as a whole. They simply exude history! The former was at the heart of one of the largest post-Norman Conquest estates; the other was the boyhood home and later power base of one of England’s most notorious kings.

I have to admit to being a little disappointed initially with Richmond Castle. Until viewed from the south (which we did as we headed to Middleham, but could not stop because of parking restrictions), it’s not easy at ground level to appreciate just how magnificent it must have been in its heyday. 

Richmond Castle from the south, with the residential accommodation on the right, and the later Keep behind.

Richmond Castle from the air, clearly showing the size of the enclosure which must have been full of other ‘temporary’ buildings when the castle was originally occupied. The residential accommodation is in the top right corner, with the Cockpit Garden beyond.

The original castle was built by Alan Rufus (a cousin of William I, the Conqueror) after 1071 but it wasn’t until the 12th century that the magnificent Keep was added.

An artist’s impression of how the castle must have looked not longer after its foundation in the late 11th century.

By the middle of the 16th century the castle had become derelict, but was revived centuries later and a barracks was built along the western wall in the 19th century, as well as a cell block adjoining the keep. In fact the castle was occupied during the Great War (1914-18) and housed conscientious objectors, with some kept as prisoners in the cell block.

I’m not going to describe in detail the history of Richmond Castle here. There is much more information on the English Heritage website, where you can also find a detailed site plan.

From the roof of the Keep there are magnificent views over the castle enclosure and to all points of the compass around Swaledale and the town of Richmond itself. The castle stands to one side of the market place.

The residential block (Scolland’s Hall), on the southeast corner of the enclosure is contemporaneous with the late 11th century curtain wall, but service buildings were added around 1300.

To the east of this area lies the Cockpit Garden (mainly yew shrubs and lawn) surrounded by walls built in the 12th century and some of uncertain age. English Heritage has developed an ornamental section on the north side.

On the eastern wall there is a small chapel, dedicated to St Nicholas and dating from the late 11th century.

The 19th century barracks block has long since been demolished, but a cell block adjoining the Keep, also from the 19th century still stands, and via steps on to its roof provide easier access to the first floor of the Keep rather than the very narrow and steep spiral staircase in the southwest corner of the ground floor.

There is an excellent exhibition on the floor above the visitor entrance and shop. I wish I’d taken more time to look at the various posters, especially those dealing with the incarceration of conscientious objectors in WW1. Read all about their fate on the English Heritage website. 

But we’d already decided to move on to Middleham Castle, and having enjoyed a picnic lunch beside the River Swale (reportedly one of the fastest-flowing rivers in England), that’s precisely what we did, crossing over the bridge that replaced an original medieval one.

Middleham Castle is much more impressive, and it’s remarkable how much has survived the ravages of the centuries.

Middleham Castle from the southwest, probably from the site of William’s Hill where an original fortification was constructed shortly after the Norman Conquest.

From the moment you walk through the impressive gatehouse, it’s impossible to ignore the grandeur of this castle, which was more a palatial residence than a fortification.

Close by the castle are the remains of an early castle, probably constructed after the Norman Conquest in 1066. Known as William’s Hill, it can easily be seen from the top of Middleham’s south-east turret as the cluster of trees on the skyline in the image below.

Construction of the stone castle began in the later 12th century, and was extended over several centuries. In 1260, the castle passed into the Neville family, one of the most powerful in the kingdom. Richard Neville (1428-1471), the 16th Earl of Warwick and 6th Earl of Salisbury came to be known as ‘Warwick the Kingmaker’ given the power and influence he wielded.

Middleham’s central keep was one of the largest of any castle in the country, and the oldest part of the castle. There are extensive basements with kitchens, above which were the main hall and family apartments. Surrounding the keep is a curtain wall, with several towers, only one of which is round, the Prince’s Tower on the southwest corner.

English Heritage has a detailed ground plan of the castle on its website. There is also a comprehensive historical account here and illustrations of how the castle must have looked in its heyday. It certainly has the feel of a family residence, a show of wealth and opulence. One feature that English Heritage highlights in its introduction and on ground plan is the large number of latrines, with some dedicated latrine towers. It seems that no-one was ever caught short at Middleham.

The original entrance to the castle was on the east side, but this was changed around 1400 to a gatehouse on the north wall. The entrance to the keep is via a modern stairway to the first floor. As I ascended those stairs I imagined what it must have been like all those centuries ago as guests arrived at the castle and were escorted to their rooms. And ascending to the top of the south-east turret gives a wonderful view over the ruins and the wider landscape of Wensleydale.

The gatehouse.
The modern staircase leading to the Great Hall.
The gatehouse from the entrance to the Great Hall.
The gatehouse from the south-east turret.
The remains of the chapel tower from the entrance to the Great Hall.
The east basement.
The Great Hall, looking north.
The west basement.
The west basement.
The view southeast over Wensleydale from the south-east turret.

Surrounding the central keep on the north, west and south sides, are a series of chambers that must have once been accommodation for staff.

One interesting feature inside the south wall is a large circular ‘trough’, and a raised circular platform next to it. While the left hand feature in the image below is described as ‘ovens’ on the ground plan, there is no description for the trough. 

The ovens and ‘trough’ from the south-east turret.

Both date from the 16th century when, apparently, the local folk were allowed into the castle to use the ovens and the trough. I had to ask, and the best guess is that the trough was a cider press, perhaps as shown in this illustration.

Richard, Duke of Gloucester (1452-1485) was the youngest brother of Edward IV, who spent his boyhood at Middleham (along his elder brother George, who was created Duke of Clarence). The Kingmaker’s two daughters Isabel and Anne grew up at Middleham. Isabel married Clarence, and Anne married Gloucester.

Middleham became Gloucester’s northern stronghold, a base from which to gain power and eventually the crown, becoming King Richard III in June 1483. There is a commemorative statue of Richard just inside the castle.

He was defeated by Henry Tudor (who would become King Henry VII) at the Battle of Bosworth Field (the last significant battle of the Wars of the Roses) in August 1485, where he was killed. And disappeared from history so to speak until his body was discovered beneath a car park in Leicester in 2012-13.

Two castles in one day. Being just a few miles apart it was an easy excursion for us from North Tyneside, and well worth the journey south. A highly recommended day out!

Neither castle has dedicated parking. In Richmond we chose the Fosse Car Park just below the castle. I think it was £3 for 4 hours. There is parking available in the Market Place beside the castle, but I believe it’s more time limited. In Middleham, we parked in Back Street just outside the castle, where there was space for just a handful of vehicles. Parking would be trickier, I guess, on a busier day.

Photo album for Richmond Castle

Photo album for Middleham Castle

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Conflict on the border

9 September 1513. A momentous day. Henry VIII’s reign hung in the balance.

King James IV of Scotland (right) who was Henry’s brother-in-law, had crossed the border with an army of some 30,000 aiming to draw Henry’s troops northwards, thereby cementing his commitment to the Auld Alliance with France where Henry was busy campaigning.

The Scots faced a smaller English army of around 20,000 under the command of the Earl of Surrey who had outflanked the Scots, taking his troops east and north hoping to cut off an escape route. Well, that was the plan.

The two armies met near the village of Branxton in north Northumberland just south of the River Tweed, the effective border between the two kingdoms.

The Scots were arrayed on Braxton Hill south of the English line on the opposite hill, and with their superior number of troops and heavy artillery (although rather slow to reload), victory seemed a certainty.

But defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory. Just like at Agincourt almost a century earlier, where the French found themselves mired in boggy ground and at the mercy of English archers, so the Scots encountered marshy ground when they descended Branxton Hill to engage the English army. Their long pikes were ineffective in the ensuing melee and no match for the English billhooks.

It is estimated that 10,000 Scots were killed and many more wounded, while the English lost only 4000. Among the Scots dead was James IV.

The Battle of Flodden Field as it came to be known was the last major battle between the English and Scots.

Earlier this past week (a glorious summer’s day, one of the best this year), Steph and I headed north (a round trip of 138 miles) to visit the battlefield and a couple of nearby castles at Etal and Norham (both now owned by English Heritage) that were briefly captured by the Scots before their defeat at Flodden.

And in the course of our journey, we travelled back almost 5000 years to a stone circle at Duddo.

Standing beside the Flodden monument (erected in 1913) and looking over the battlefield, it was hard to imagine that for a brief period 511 years ago this was the site of bloody carnage. Sown to wheat and barley today (and almost ready for harvest) this landscape was incredibly beautiful and tranquil, and with views miles over the border into Scotland.

Before leaving Branxton we visited the Flodden Visitor Centre in the village: a converted telephone kiosk!

Coat of Arms of the Manners family

Etal Castle, just under 5 miles from Flodden, was the family home of the Manners family. It dates from the 12th century, and finally abandoned in the late 16th century. You can read all about its history here.

Still standing today are the Tower House (built before 1341), parts of the Curtain Wall, and the impressive Gatehouse.

After the Battle of Flodden Field, the Scottish heavy artillery was sent to Etal Castle. An opening was made in the wall of the Tower House to store the guns in the basement. And the blocked-up opening can still be seen in the rearranged stonework outside, and in the basement.

Norham Castle, stands on the bank of the River Tweed, and commands a view of one of the fords across the river. It dates from the 12th century and was finally allowed to fall into ruin by the end of the 16th century when there was no longer a threat from the Scots from across the border.

Surprisingly perhaps, the castle was founded by Ranulph Flambard, Bishop of Durham from 1099 until 1128. Durham is known as the Land of the Prince Bishops, who wielded extraordinary power in the north of England in return for defending the border. Norham came under attack frequently and occupied over the centuries, including during the Scottish incursion in 1513. English Heritage provides a comprehensive history of the castle on its website.

The Great Tower is the part of the castle still standing, although derelict. Its height was increased several times, and this can be seen in the differences in stone color.

Some of the outer defences are still standing, as is the West Gate. Parts of the site are closed off to visitors.

And although it has been ruined for four centuries, it’s not hard to imagine just how magnificent and threatening the castle would have been in its heyday.

Almost equidistant between Etal and Norham, along a footpath in the middle of wheat fields, and about 1 mile northwest from the village of Duddo, the Duddo Stone Circle stands on a hillock overlooking the Northumberland landscape. Talk about wide open skies!

Dating from about 2000 BCE, the Stone Circle comprises five standing stones, with remains of others just showing above the surface of the soil. There is also evidence of burials there around 1700 BCE.

Two of the stones stand more than 6 feet.

Click on the image below to read more about access to the Stone Circle across private land, and the history of the stones.

This was certainly one of our more enjoyable excursions since moving to the northeast almost for years ago. This was the second time we’d toured this area of north Northumberland (the first time in 1998). And it won’t be our last.

I have posted all the photographs in an online album. Just click on the image below to view those.

 

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What’s on your birding bucket list?

Ever since I was a small boy, I’ve been a birder. Not perhaps as enthusiastic as many, but it’s a hobby I’ve enjoyed for almost seven decades. I’ll be 76 in November.

I guess my ‘golden years’ were those I spent between 1976 and 1980 in Costa Rica in Central America, where the bird life was out of this world. The years I spent in the Philippines between 1991 and 2010 were disappointing from a birding point of view. I’d been spoilt by Costa Rica. But if I had taken the effort, like my close friend and colleague Graham McLaren did, there were plenty of exotic species to find in the fields and forests close to our home in Los Baños, south of Manila.

Since I retired in 2010, and especially since we moved to the northeast of England four years ago, I’ve taken to birding once again, and enjoy walking the waggonways that criss-cross North Tyneside, and where the bird life is quite exceptional.

But yesterday, I fulfilled a birding dream that has taken me all my life to achieve.

With the weather set reasonably fair, Steph and I decided to head north to the Hauxley Wildlife Discovery Centre and Nature Reserve (just south of Amble), one of the best bird-watching sites on the Northumberland coast, next to the beach at the north end of Druridge Bay. It’s somewhere we have visited several times since moving north, and a walk around the lake never disappoints. There are several hides from which to quietly observe all the birds around the site.

I guess we left home around 10:15, and arrived to the Centre just before 11:00. First stop: the café for a welcome Americano (and a ‘comfort stop’, of course).

We’d just sat down to enjoy our coffees when a lady at the next table beside the window suddenly stood up, binoculars to her eyes, and exclaimed ‘blue!’.

Male kingfisher (source: RSPB).

Did I hear correctly? It could only mean one bird that I have waited all my life to see: the iconic common kingfisher (Alcedo atthis). Grabbing my binoculars, I scanned the vegetation on the other side of the lake, and finally had a male  kingfisher in view.

It’s an elusive, shy bird. Many people only ever see a flash of metallic blue-green feathers along a watercourse. But we were in luck.

Over the next 20 minutes or so we had magnificent views of this beautiful bird. This boy was fishing, choosing between two perches some 10 meters apart and just above the water. So we were able to see him diving and returning to his perch to enjoy his catch.

And those iridescent wing and dorsal feathers which we saw in their full glory as he emerged from the water, desperately flapping his wings to gain height and return to his perch, just like in this video (from YouTube).

What a start to the day, and probably one of the best for birds we’ve enjoyed at Hauxley, observing almost 30 species including a pair of Egyptian geese and a dozen herons.

I’ve seen a number of different kingfisher species in Costa Rica, in the Philippines, and Australia. But there’s no doubt about it. That sighting of a lone common kingfisher yesterday was a brilliant moment that’s now etched in my memory.

 

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Ken Brown – a life well lived

Just yesterday, I heard that an old friend of almost 50 years (who was a colleague of mine—supervisor, actually—at the International Potato Center in Lima, Peru) had died recently, just shy of his 96th birthday.

Ken Brown with potato researchers in East Africa, discussing diffuse light storage of seed tubers.

Ken Brown and I first met in February 1976 when he joined the center (known by its Spanish acronym CIP) as Coordinator for Regional Research and Training in the Outreach Program (shortly afterwards renamed Regional Research and Training).

I had returned to Peru at the end of December 1975, having just been awarded my PhD at the University of Birmingham, and was waiting for an assignment as a postdoc in Outreach (moving to Costa Rica in April 1976). My wife Steph and I were living in CIP’s guesthouse in La Molina, and as far as I can recall we were the only residents apart from the ‘wardens’, Professor Norman Thompson and his wife Shona, who were at CIP on a one-year sabbatical from a university in the USA (Michigan State I believe).

Until, one morning when we went into breakfast, and the Browns (Ken, his wife Geraldine, and five sons: Sean, James, Donal, and twins Ronan and Aidan) were already at the table, having arrived during the night.

L-R: Geraldine Brown, Steph, Josianne and Roger Cortbaoui (who joined CIP after the Browns had arrived), and Ken with Aidan on his knee.

Ken and I hit it off immediately. He had a wicked sense of humour. Throughout the years I worked alongside him, he was extremely supportive of all his staff, managing them and his program on a ‘loose rein’, never second-guessing or micro-managing. I learnt a lot about program and staff management from Ken. The Spanish term simpático sums up Ken to a tee.

Originally a cotton specialist (in plant physiology if my memory serves me correct), Ken had worked in Africa (where he met Geraldine), and immediately prior to joining CIP had been based at Lyallpur (now Faisalabad) in the Punjab region of Pakistan. He had an undergraduate degree from the University in Reading, and was awarded a PhD in 1969 after being persuaded by Professor Hugh Bunting (who held the chair in agricultural botany) to submit his publications for the degree.

In 1976 the head of the Outreach Program was American Richard ‘Dick’ Wurster. After he left CIP in 1978, Ken stepped up to become head of Regional Research. It was then that I also became CIP’s Regional Representative for Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean (Region II) after the previous regional leader, Ing. Oscar Hidalgo (who passed away under a month ago) left his position in Mexico to pursue PhD studies at the North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

In April 1978, Ken was a member of the team that launched a major regional program in Central America and the Caribbean, perhaps the first consortium among the centers of the CGIAR (the organization that supports a network of international agricultural centers around the world, including CIP).

Known as PRECODEPA, the program was funded by the Swiss government, and the launch meeting was held in Guatemala City.

At the launch meeting of PRECODEPA in Guatemala City. L-R around the table: Ken Brown, me, CIP Director General Richard Sawyer, CIP senior consultant John Niederhauser, Ing. Carlos Crisostomo (Guatemala), and a representative from Honduras.

In the first months at CIP, the Browns remained in the CIP guesthouse until they found a house to rent or purchase, so I got to know them very well. It was on one of our trips to one of CIP’s research stations at San Ramon that Ken and I had many hours travel to discuss a whole slew of topics.

Ken learning, for the first time, about late blight of potatoes in the field at San Ramon from plant pathologist Ing. Liliam Gutarra.

Not long after Ken arrived to Lima, there was a party at the home of CIP’s Director General, Richard Sawyer, to celebrate his birthday. Richard’s wife Norma had chosen a Roman theme for the party. And even though we were staying in the guesthouse, without easy access to costume accessories, Ken and I did our best to look the part, seen in this photo chatting (in Latin?) with Norm Thompson.

Ken remained at CIP until his retirement around 1993 when he published a short memoir: Roots and Tubers Galore: The Story of CIP’s Global Research Program and the People Who Shaped It.

In a postscript, Ken wrote: I wrote this short account of the Regional [Research] Program not just to record part of CIP’s history, but also to provide some diversion from the usual round of reports and technical publications that are always dropping on your desks. Working with the Regions is enjoyable, and I hope that those of you who did participate during the early years will find these notes of interest. As all who know me are aware, I enjoy the humorous side of life as well as the serious aspects, so if I have been too free with my memories please accept my apologies. To all of you who are part of this story I want to say thank you and wish you every success in the coming years.

I am proud to have been part of that story, and to count Ken among my friends.

However, he was perhaps too free with one memory, about an incident that happened before he even joined CIP, and of which I have no recollection whatsoever. It seems that it forms part of the CIP history.

Between 1973 and 1975, I was an Associate Taxonomist, while also completing the research for my PhD.

But as I read this, I can’t deny that it is something I would be inclined to have done. I wouldn’t put it past me.

After retiring from CIP Ken and Geraldine set up home in Devon. Geraldine sadly passed away a few years back and Ken moved to Cheltenham to live with one of the twins, Aidan and his family.

After I heard that Ken had died, I contacted Donal who I had met several times during the course of our respective careers in international agricultural development. He told me that his father had “lived life to the full until the end and while his body got weaker his mind stayed very alert. He had a very happy and fulfilling life and final years and the end was quick, peaceful and painless – what more could one ask for.”

Indeed it was a life well lived.

Thanks for everything, Ken.

Ken’s funeral was held in Salisbury, Wiltshire on Tuesday 30 July at 3 pm, where he had moved into a retirement home a year or so back.

I attended his funeral online, and asked Donal for a copy of the Order of Service, which he has given me permission to post here. Click on the image to open a copy.

Ken’s coffin was carried into the crematorium chapel by his five sons to the strains of El Condor Pasa, a very fitting choice given Ken’s many years at the helm of Regional Research and Training at CIP in Peru.

One thing I learned about Ken that I hadn’t known before was his enthusiasm for reggae music, particularly by Bob Marley and The Wailers.

The funeral service concluded with the playing of Three Little Birds by Bob Marley as everyone left the chapel.

Don’t worry about a thing
‘Cause every little thing is gonna be alright

 

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Let the Force be with you . . .

Since moving to the northeast of England almost four years ago, Steph and I have grabbed every opportunity (weather permitting, of course) to explore Northumberland north of the River Tyne, and the Durham coast south of the river.

What we hadn’t done, until last week, was explore the hills southwest of Newcastle in the North Pennines National Landscape (NPNL, formerly known as the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, or AONB). Within the counties of Northumberland, Durham, Cumbria, and North Yorkshire, the NPNL covers an area of approximately 770 square miles (2000 km2), and the landscape encompasses heather moors, deep valleys or dales, and several of its villages are the legacy of a rich mining history. Click here to explore an interactive map.

Specifically, we were headed to High Force Waterfall in Upper Teesdale, about 55 miles from home on the circuitous (and rather tedious) route that my satnav chose skirting around Durham before heading southwest. Tedious that is until we reached Teesdale itself and a glorious landscape opened up before us, as you can will appreciate from this video (the blue route on the map below).

High Force Waterfall is one of the most impressive in the country, with the River Tees tumbling around 70 ft (>21 m) to a splash pool below.

And the reason for this spectacular waterfall lies in its geology, comprising three different layers (which you can be seen in the image above): two relatively soft (of limestone and sandstone) overlain by the hard volcanic Whin Sill, explained in the next image (click to expand). And like Niagara Falls, High Force is slowly (very slowly) migrating upstream as the Tees erodes the rock millimeter by millimeter.

It certainly is impressive, and for an attraction in the middle of nowhere, remarkably accessible, albeit through privately-owned land with an entrance fee of £3.50 per adult. There’s also a minimum car park fee of £3 for three hours. The Pennine Way footpath follows the south bank of the River Tees, and passes the top of the waterfall with perhaps even more impressive views.

The path from the car park to the waterfall is just under half a mile, gently sloping suitable even for wheelchairs. There’s a return route through the woodland, but there are several very steep sections, which we didn’t attempt. Beside the splash pool, a small viewing platform (down some very steep steps) provides excellent views of the river tumbling over the precipice.

High Force waterfall on the River Tees

I was quite unaware of the waterfall’s existence until fairly recently, when I read a crime novel by Northumberland-born author LJ Ross, in which it featured.

After a picnic lunch back at the car park, we continued our journey to Cow Green Reservoir, and an altitude of around 1600 feet (±500 m) at the car park just above the reservoir.

This area of Upper Teesdale is rather special botanically, and has an assemblage of plant species that are found in few other places in the British Isles. They are relics from the last Ice Age, and some, like the Spring Gentian (Gentiana verna L.) that is featured on the cover of this book by Margaret Bradshaw, are otherwise found for example in the mountains of Central Europe.

The importance of the so-called Teesdale Assemblage (* see footnote image) came to the fore in the 1960s with the proposed construction of a reservoir to meet the increased water demand from heavy industry on Teesside. Despite strong and sustained opposition, Cow Green Reservoir was built, but the area is now one of the country’s largest nature reserves.

Botanist Margaret Bradshaw published her book about the Teesdale flora (after seven decades of study, and often seen out and about on her sturdy pony) when she was 97! She has been a fierce campaigner to save this unique landscape and its rare species. Her book is one of the most comprehensive (and authoritative) monographs that I have come across. A delight for the wealth of detail that she has compiled, and certainly makes us want to visit Upper Teesdale again next year, in the Spring and early Summer when many of these botanical rarities are in flower.

Leaving Cow Green, we headed north and a long and steep descent into Weardale, and from there over the moors towards the valley of the River Tyne. These routes are shown in red and green on the map above, and feature in the next two videos.

What a magnificent day excursion, and one we hope to repeat before too long.

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History in the writing . . .

There’s nothing I enjoy more nowadays (apart from an exhilarating walk on a fine day, which have been few and far between in recent months) than to settle down with a good book and some music in the background (from Radio Paradise, Classic FM, or maybe a choice on Spotify).

My reading habits have changed over the years. Having studied English Literature in high school, I’m afraid I didn’t pick up a book for several years afterwards. Apart from one or two texts (such as the poetry of William Butler Yeats) I found the constant analysis just took all the joy out of reading.

But, with time on my hands, so to speak, when we lived in Costa Rica between 1976 and 1980, and didn’t have a television, I needed something to occupy the dark evenings. And there’s only so much beer or whisky one can safely consume.

In the capital city, San José, there was an English language bookshop selling an impressive range of books. Because they were so expensive, I didn’t want to invest in ‘cheap’ novels that I’d read once perhaps and then discard.

I was encouraged (by the wife of a visiting colleague at the agricultural institute where we lived in Turrialba, who was a professor of English Literature at Cornell University) to tackle the novels of Victorian author, Anthony Trollope (1815-1882).

So, without further ado, I launched into Trollope’s six Palliser novels: Can You Forgive Her? (1864), Phineas Finn (1869), The Eustace Diamonds (1873), Phineas Redux (1874), The Prime Minister (1876), and The Duke’s Children (1879). The novels (as described in the Wikipedia page) . . . encompass several literary genres including: family saga, bildungsroman, picaresque, as well as satire and parody of Victorian (or English) life, and criticism of the British government’s predilection for attracting corrupt and corruptible people to power.

I then followed up with Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire series of novels: The Warden (1855), Barchester Towers (1857), Doctor Thorne (1858), Framley Parsonage (1860), The Small House at Allington (1862). and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867). These six novels (according to the Wikipedia write-up) . . . concern the dealings of the clergy and the gentry, and the political, amatory, and social manoeuvrings among them.

I also decided to delve into the Wessex novels of Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). At the time (in the 1970s), I really did enjoy them, particularly Far from the Madding Crowd and The Mayor of Casterbridge, published in 1874 and 1886, respectively. About five years ago, I decided to return to these novels, but for whatever reason, I just didn’t take to them as I had 40 years earlier.

In 2017, I spent almost a whole year reading the novels of Charles Dickens, perhaps one of the greatest of the Victorian novelists.

And what an enjoyable experience that was, considering I’d been turned off Dickens as a schoolboy. It’s hard to say which novel I enjoyed the most but, if pushed, I’d have to choose The Pickwick Papers, Dickens’ first novel.

For many years, all I read were biographies or histories – the Greeks, the Romans, medieval England, 18th century wars and early 19th (Napoleon!), and the American Civil War, among many.

But I have taken a fancy to historical novels, some executed better than others. A year or so back, when it was all the rage on TV, I tackled Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, which cover the period between 1500 and 1535 in Tudor England, and the rise and dramatic fall of Thomas Cromwell, one time chief minister to King Henry VIII.

And I’ve just finished 21 novels in the Sharpe series by British author Bernard Cornwell.

1799 | 1803 | 1803

1805 | 1807 | 1809

1809 | 1809 | 1810

1811 | 1811 | 1811

1812 | 1812 | 1812

1813 | 1813 | 1814

1814 | 1815 | 1820-1821

The novels, published between 1981 and 2024 (although I haven’t read the two published in 2023 and 2024, Sharpe’s Command and Sharpe’s Storm, respectively), follow the career of Richard Sharpe from his enlistment in the army in the 1790s and his deployment in India, through the Peninsula War in Portugal and Spain, and the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 (and beyond).

Sergeant Richard Sharpe, the bastard son of a London whore, saves the life of the British commander of the British forces, Major General Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington), at the Battle of Assaye in India in 1803, and receives a battlefield commission as an Ensign.

So why the interest in the Sharpe novels? I hadn’t come across the early ones in the 1980s while I was still living in the UK. And it wasn’t until I returned to the UK in 2010 that I came across repeat showings of a TV series of 16 episodes broadcast between 1993 and 1997, and 2006 and 2008). Not all episodes were based on one of the novels, nor necessarily followed exactly the sequence of events or characters described in the novels.

The novels relate Sharpe’s exploits with the 95th Rifles and the South Essex Regiment, his relationships with his ‘chosen men’ in particular Sergeant Patrick Harper, an Irishman from Co. Donegal, and the continual disdain, contempt even, he experiences from fellow officers who bought their commissions, and consider Sharpe an uneducated upstart. Which he is. And his persecution by his arch nemesis, Obadiah Hakeswill, played in the TV series by the late, great Pete Postlethwaite. The series starred Sean Bean as Richard Sharpe, and Daragh O’Malley as Patrick Harper. The casting of Sean Bean was an interesting choice. Why? In the novels, Sharpe is a Cockney, with dark hair. Bean has blond hair and is from Yorkshire, and portrayed Sharpe as a Yorkshireman.

L-R: Sean Bean as Major Richard Sharpe, Daragh O’Malley as Sergeant Patrick Harper, and Pete Postlethwaite as Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill.

Through the novels, Sharpe follows Wellesley through Portugal and Spain, earning notoriety and fame for his heroic exploits, particularly the capture (with Sergeant Harper) of a French eagle at the Battle of Talavera in 1809.

By Waterloo, Sharpe has risen through the ranks and has become a Lieutenant Colonel.

Anyway, having enjoyed the TV programs, I thought it would be interesting to see how faithfully they had followed the novels. So I decided to read them in chronological order, not publication order. I haven’t yet come across those published over the past couple of years that encompass events much earlier in the chronology.

The novels are full of details of the various battles that Wellington fought. Cornwell visited a number of the battlefields, and clearly has an impressive knowledge of military history and equipment. He’s always explaining the contrast between the slow-loading, but very much more accurate Baker rifle with a longer range used by the Rifles, and the muskets used by most recruits. This level of detail certainly lends a veracity to the narratives.

The Napoleonic Wars have long been an interest of mine, and working my way through the Sharpe novels has given a another dimension to that period of conflict in the early 19th century.

 

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Celebrating the humble spud . . .

Not so humble really. The potato is an incredibly important crop worldwide (the fourth, after maize, rice, and wheat), with a production of 376 million metric tonnes in 2021. China is the leading producer, with 95.5 million metric tonnes, followed by India, Ukraine, Russia, and the USA.

Native to and a staple food in the Andean countries of South America, the potato spread to Spain in the 16th century [1, 2] and the rest of the world afterwards.

It’s no wonder that Peru championed the International Day of the Potato (decreed by the United Nations in December 2023 [3]) which is being celebrated today.

I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to reflect on my own journey with potatoes over 20 years in the 1970s and 1980s.

Fifty years ago (in May 1974) I had just returned to Lima after collecting potatoes for three weeks in the north of Peru (Department of Cajamarca), accompanied by my driver, Octavio.

A farmer in Cajamarca discusses his potato varieties with me, while my driver Octavio writes a collecting number on each tuber and a paper bag with a permanent marker pen.

A few months earlier, at the beginning of February, I’d travelled to Cuyo Cuyo (Department of Puno in southern Peru) to make a study of potato varieties in farmers’ fields on the ancient terraces there (below).

So what was I doing in Peru?

I’d joined the International Potato Center (CIP) in Lima the previous year, in January 1973 [4] as an Associate Taxonomist while continuing with my PhD research. And I found myself, a few months later—in May—travelling with with my colleague Zosimo Huamán (right) to the northern departments of Ancash and La Libertad where, over almost a month, we collected many indigenous potato varieties—the real treasure of the Incas— that were added to CIP’s growing germplasm collection. Here are just a few examples of the incredible diversity of Andean potato varieties in that collection. Maybe I collected some of these.

Source: International Potato Center (CIP)

In October 1975, I successfully defended my PhD thesis (The evolutionary significance of the triploid cultivated potato, Solanum x chaucha Juz. et Buk.) at the University of Birmingham, where my co-supervisor, potato taxonomist and germplasm pioneer Professor Jack Hawkes (right) was head of the Department of Botany.

During my time in Lima, Dr Roger Rowe (left, then head of CIP’s Breeding and Genetics Department) was my local supervisor.

Fifty years after I first met Roger in Peru, we had a reunion on the banks of the Mississippi in Wisconsin last year.

After the University of Birmingham congregation on 12 December 1975, with Jack Hawkes on my right, and Professor Trevor Williams (who supervised my MSc dissertation in 1971) on my left.

I published three papers from my thesis. Click on any title image below (and most others throughout this post) to read the full paper.

There’s an interesting story behind the publication of this third paper from my thesis.

I originally sent a manuscript to Economic Botany, probably not long after I’d submitted the others to Euphytica.

I received an acknowledgment from Economic Botany, but then it went very quiet for at least a year.

Anyway, towards the end of 1978 or early 1979 I received—quite out of the blue—a letter from the then editor-in-chief of Euphytica, Professor AC Zeven. He told me he’d read my thesis, a copy of which had been acquired apparently by the Wageningen University library. He liked the chapter I’d written about an ethnobotanical study in Cuyo-Cuyo, and if I hadn’t submitted a paper elsewhere, he would welcome one from me.

It was about that same time I also received a further communication from the incoming editor of Economic Botany, who had found papers submitted to the journal up to 20 years previously and still waiting publication, and was I still interested in continuing with the Economic Botany submission, since he was unable to say when or if my manuscript might be considered for publication. I immediately withdrew the manuscript and, after some small revisions to fit the Euphytica style and focus, sent the manuscript to Professor Zeven. It was published in February 1980.

I returned to Lima just before the New Year 1976, knowing that CIP’s Director General, Dr Richard Sawyer (right), had already approved my transfer to CIP’s Outreach Program (later renamed Regional Research). I relocated to Costa Rica in Central America in April 1976 (living and working at the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center, CATIE in Turrialba), establishing a program to adapt potatoes to the warm humid tropics. I became leader of CIP’s regional program (or Regional Representative) in late 1977.

However, the tropical adaptation objective per se didn’t exactly endure. The potato trials were almost immediately attacked by bacterial wilt (caused by Ralstonia solaneacearum, formerly known as Pseudomonas solanacearum) even though no susceptible crops such as tomatoes had been planted on the CATIE experiment station in recent years. We subsequently discovered that the bacterium survived in a number of non-solanaceous weed hosts.

Screening for bacterial wilt resistance in CATIE’s experiment station.

I’ve posted earlier about our research on bacterial wilt and finding tolerance to the disease in a potato clone (not quite a commercial variety) known simply as Cruza 148.

Plant pathologist Professor Luis Carlos Gonzalez (right, from the University of Costa Rica in San José) and I also studied how to control the disease through a combination of tolerant varieties and soil and weed management.

We published these two papers, the first in the international journal Phytopathology, and the second in the Costarrican journal Fitopatologia.

During the late 1970s, CIP launched an initiative aimed at optimising potato productivity, jointly led by Chilean agronomist Dr Primo Accatino and US agricultural economist Dr Doug Horton. Contributing to this initiative in Costa Rica, I worked with potato farmers to reduce the excessive use of fertilizers, and fungicides to control the late blight pathogen, Phytophthora infestans. It was then (and probably remains) a common misconception among farmers that more input of fertilizer or fungicide, the better would be the outcome in terms of yield or disease control. What a fallacy! Our small project on fertilizer use was published in Agronomía Costarricense.

During the five years I spent in Costa Rica, my colleagues in the Ministerio de Agricultura y Ganadería (MAG) and I screened germplasm sent to us by CIP breeders in Lima for resistance to late blight, and common potato viruses like PVX, PVY, PLRV.

Ing. Jorge Esquivel (MAG) and me screening potatoes for virus resistance in a field trial on the slopes of the Irazú volcano in Costa Rica, while my assistants Jorge Aguilar and Moisés Pereira check plants nearby.

In 1977, Dr John Niederhauser (right, an eminent plant pathologist who had worked on late blight in Mexico for the Rockefeller Foundation before becoming an international consultant to CIP) and I worked together to develop and implement (from April 1978) a cooperative regional potato program, PRECODEPA, in six countries: Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. Funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, SDC (and for the next 25 years or so, and expanded to more countries in the region), the network was a model for regional collaboration, with members contributing research based on their particular scientific strengths.

Clean seed tubers are one of the most important components for successful potato production, and technologies to scale up the multiplication of clean seed were contributed by CIP to PRECODEPA. My colleague from Lima, Jim Bryan (an Idaho-born seed production specialist) joined me in Costa Rica in 1979 for one year, and together we successfully developed several rapid multiplication techniques, including stem cuttings and leaf node cuttings, and producing a technical bulletin (published also in Spanish).

And we showed that it was possible to produce one tonne in a year from a single tuber. Read all about that effort here.

I can’t finish this section about my time at CIP without mentioning Dr Ken Brown (left), who was head of Regional Research.

Ken, a cotton physiologist, joined CIP in January 1976 as head of Regional Research, just at the time Steph and I returned to Lima after I’d completed my PhD. He was one of the best program managers I have worked for, keeping everything on track, but never micro-managing. I learnt a great deal from Ken about managing staff, and getting the best out of them.

At the end of November 1980, I returned to Lima expecting to be posted to the Philippines. Instead, in March 1981, I resigned from CIP and accepted a lectureship in plant biology at the University of Birmingham, continuing potato research there, as well as working on several legume species.

I look back on those formative CIP years with great appreciation: for all that I learned about potatoes and potato production, the incredible scientists from around the world I met and worked with, and the many friendships I made.

Jack Hawkes retired from the university in September 1982, having left behind his large collection of wild potatoes accumulated during several expeditions to the Americas, and a legacy of potato research on which I endeavoured to build.

You can read all about Jack’s many expeditions, view many original photos, and watch several videos dating back to 1939 by clicking on the image below.

I soon realised there were few opportunities to continue research with Jack’s collection. It was almost impossible to secure funding. But I could offer short-term projects for MSc and PhD students.

Dave Downing was the technician managing the potato collection at Birmingham.

One MSc student, Susan Juned, studied the diversity in Solanum chacoense Bitt., a wild potato species from Argentina and Paraguay, in relation to in situ conservation opportunities.

Two MSc students from Uganda, Beatrice Male-Kayiwa and Nelson Wanyera evaluated resistance to potato cyst nematode (Globodera pallida) in wild potatoes from Bolivia. We asked Jack Hawkes to advise on the choice of germplasm to include, since he had made the collections in that country in the 1970s. Beatrice and Nelson worked at Rothamsted Experiment Station (now Rothamsted Research) in Hertfordshire with the late Dr Alan Stone.

Two PhD students, Lynne Woodwards and Ian Gubb, studied the lack of enzymic browning (potatoes turn brown when they are cut) in wild potatoes, Series Longipedicellata Buk., and one tetraploid (2n=4x=48 chromosomes) species from Mexico in particular, Solanum hjertingii Hawkes, and their crossability with cultivated potatoes. Ian’s studentship (co-supervised at Birmingham by Professor Jim Callow) involved a collaboration with the Institute of Food Research (now Quadram Institute Bioscience) in Norwich, where his co-supervisor was Dr JC Hughes.

Gene editing has recently successfully produced non-browning potatoes. Wide crossing is probably no longer needed.

I had two PhD students from Peru, René Chavez and Carlos Arbizu, who carried out their research at CIP (like I had in the early 1970s) and only came back to Birmingham to complete their residency requirements and defend their theses, although I visited them in Lima several times during their research.

René evaluated the breeding potential of wild species of potato for resistance to potato cyst nematodes and tuber moth, publishing three excellent papers from his thesis The use of wide crosses in potato breeding, submitted in 1984.

Carlos submitted his thesis, The use of Solanum acaule as a source of resistance to potato spindle tuber viroid (PSTV) and potato leaf roll virus (PLRV), in 1990. He never published any papers from his research, returning to Lima to work at CIP for a few years on Andean minor tuber crops, before setting himself up as a major avocado producer in Peru.

Denise Clugston (co-supervised by Professor Brian Ford-Lloyd) defended her thesis, Embryo culture and protoplast fusion for the introduction of Mexican wild species germplasm into the cultivated potato in 1988. She left biology almost immediately, and regrettably never did write any papers, although she did present this work at a conference held in Cambridge.

Another PhD student, Elizabeth Newton, worked on sexually-transmitted potato viruses of quarantine significance in the UK, in collaboration with one of my former colleagues at CIP, Dr Roger Jones who had returned to the UK and was working for the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) at the Harpenden Laboratory. In 1989 she successfully submitted her thesis, Studies towards the control of viruses transmitted through true potato seed but never published any papers, only presenting this one at a conference in Warwick in 1986.

Because of the quarantine restrictions imposed on the Hawkes collection, I took the decision (with Jack’s blessing) to donate it to the Commonwealth Potato Collection in Dundee. Once the collection was gone, we had other opportunities for potato research at Birmingham.

In the late 1980s, my colleague Brian Ford-Lloyd (right) and I ran a project, funded by KP Agriculture (and managed by my former CIP colleague, Dr John Vessey) to generate somaclonal lines resistant to low temperature sweetening of the crisping var. Record .

My former MSc student Susan Juned (right) was hired as a Research Associate.

We began the project with a batch of 170 Record tubers, uniquely numbering each one and keeping the identity of all somaclones derived from each tuber. And there were some interesting results (and an unexpected response from the media [5]).

Did the project meet its objectives? Well, this is what John later told us:

The project was successful in that it produced Record somaclones with lower reducing sugars in the tubers, but unsuccessful in that none entered commercial production . . . Shortly after the end of the project, Record was replaced by a superior variety, Saturna. 

The project very clearly showed the potential of somaclones but also emphasised that it needs to be combined with conventional breeding . . . Other important aspects were the demonstration that the commercial seed potato lines available were not genetically identical, as previously thought, and that regeneration of clones from single cells had to be as rapid as possible to avoid unwanted somaclonal variation. 

The majority of somaclones were derived from just a few of the 170 tubers, each potentially (and quite unexpectedly) a different Record clone. We suggested that the differential regeneration ability was due to genetic differences between tubers as it was found to be maintained in subsequent tuber generations. Furthermore, this would have major implications for seed potato production specifically and, more generally, for in vitro genetic conservation of vegetatively-propagated species.

Sue completed her PhD, Somaclonal variation in the potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) cultivar Record with particular reference to the reducing sugar variation after cold storage in 1994 after I’d already left Birmingham for the Philippines.

After leaving the university, Sue became a very successful local politician, even running in one General Election as a Liberal Democrat candidate for Parliament. Sue is now Leader of Stratford-on-Avon District Council.

From 1984, I had a project to work on true potato seed (or TPS) in collaboration with CIP, funded by the Overseas Development Administration (ODA, a UK government agency that eventually became the Department for International Development or DfID, but now fully subsumed into the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office).

For many reasons, this project was not a success. Let me explain.

At the end of the 1970s CIP launched a project to use TPS as an alternative production approach to seed potatoes (i.e., tubers). But the use of TPS is not without its challenges.

Potato genetics are complex because most cultivated potatoes are polyploid, actually tetraploid with 48 chromosomes. And although self compatible, and producing copious quantities of TPS through self pollination, the progeny are highly variable. My approach was to produce uniform or homozygous diploid (with 24 chromosomes) inbred lines. The only obstacle being that diploid potatoes are self incompatible. We aimed to overcome that obstacle. There were precedents, albeit from a species in a totally unrelated plant family but with a similar incompatibility genetic base.

One of my colleagues at Birmingham, geneticist Dr Mike Lawrence spent many years working on field poppy (Papaver rhoeas) and, through persistent selfing, had manage to break its strong self incompatibility. We believed that a similar approach using single seed descent might yield dividends in diploid potatoes. Well, at least ODA felt it was worth a try, and the project had CIP’s backing (although not enthusiastically from the leading breeder there at the time). However, in the light of subsequent research, I think we have been vindicated in taking this particular approach.

Because of quarantine restrictions at Birmingham that I already mentioned, we negotiated an agreement with the Plant Breeding Institute (PBI) in Cambridge to base the project there, building a bespoke glasshouse for the research. My counterpart at PBI was the head of potato breeding, Dr Alan J Thomson. We hired a postdoc, recently graduated with a PhD from the University of St Andrews, who came with glowing references.

We set out our perspectives on inbreeding at a CIP planning conference in Lima.

I further elaborated on these perspectives in a book chapter (published in 1987) based on a paper I presented at a joint meeting of EAPR and EUCARPIA at King’s College, Cambridge, in December 1985.

Ultimately the project did not meet its main objective. We encountered three problems, even though making progress in the first three years:

  1. By year five, we really did hit a ‘biological brick wall’, and couldn’t break the self incompatibility. We decided to pull the plug, so-to-speak, one year before the end of the project. It was a hard decision to make, but I think we were being honest rather than consuming the remaining financial resources for the sake of completing the project cycle.
  2. We lost momentum in the project after three years when Margaret Thatcher’s government privatised the PBI, and we had to relocate the project to the university campus in Birmingham (having disposed of the wild potato collection to the CPC as I mentioned earlier). And then build new glasshouse facilities to support the project.
  3. As the lead investigator, I was not successful in encouraging our postdoc to communicate more readily and openly. That lack of open communication did not help us make the best strategic decisions. And I take responsibility for that. However, on reflection, I think that her appointment to this pioneering project was not the best decision that Alan and I made.

Looking at the progress in diploid breeding since, it’s quite ironic really because several breeders published a call in 2016 to reinvent the potato as a diploid inbred line-based crop, just as we proposed in the 1980s. Our publications have been consistently overlooked.

Inbreeding in diploids became possible because of the discovery of a self compatibility gene, Sli, in the wild species Solanum chacoense after selfing over seven generations. With that breakthrough, such an inbreeding approach had become a reality. Pity that we were not able to break self incompatibility in cultivated diploid potatoes ourselves. And there’s no doubt that advances in molecular genetics and genomics since the 1980s have significantly opened up and advanced this particular breeding strategy.

Around 1988, I was invited by CIP to join three other team members (a program manager, an agronomist, and an economist) to review a seed production project, funded by the SDC [6], in Peru. I believe Ken Brown had suggested me as the seed production technical expert.

L-R: Peruvian agronomist, me, Cesar Vittorelli (CIP review manager), Swiss economist, and Carlos Valverde (program manager and team leader).

I flew to Lima, and we spent the next three weeks visiting sites in La Molina (next to CIP headquarters), in Huancayo in the central Andes, Cuzco in the south of Peru, and Cajamarca in the north.

That consultancy taught me a lot about program reviews and would stand me in good stead later on in my career. Once we had submitted our report, I returned to the UK, and a couple of weeks later spent a few days in Bern at the headquarters of the SDC for a debriefing session.

We found the project had been remarkably successful, making an impact in its operational areas, and we recommended a second phase, which the SDC accepted. Unfortunately, events in Peru overtook the project, as the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) guerrilla movement was on the ascendancy and it became too dangerous to move around the country.

After Jack Hawkes retired in 1982, he and I would meet up for lunch and a beer at least once a week to chat about our common interests in genetic resources conservation, and potatoes in particular. Out of those discussions came a couple of theoretical papers.

The Endosperm Balance Number (or EBN) hypothesis had been proposed to explain the crossability between tuber-bearing Solanum species (there are over 150 wild species of potato). We wrote this paper to combine the taxonomic classification of the different species and their EBNs.

In 1987, Jack asked me to contribute a paper to a symposium he was organizing with Professor David Harris of the Institute of Archaeology at University College London to celebrate the centenary of one of my scientific heroes, Russian geneticist and acclaimed as the Father of Plant Genetic Resources, Nikolai Vavilov. I conceptualized how Vavilov’s Law of Homologous Series could be applied to potatoes.

By the end of the 1990s, I was already looking for scientific pastures new – in rice! And in early 1991, I accepted a position at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, and my research focus moved from potatoes to rice.

What surprises me is that some of my potato work endures, and I regularly receive citations of several of my papers, the last of which was published more than 30 years ago.

With the announcement of the International Day of the Potato, it certainly has brought back many memories of the couple of decades I enjoyed working on this fascinating crop.

[1] Hawkes, JG  and J Francisco-Ortega (1992). The potato in Spain during the Late 16th Century. Economic Botany 46: 86-97.

[2] Hawkes, JG and J Francisco-Ortega (1993). The early history of the potato in Europe. Euphytica 70: 1-7.

[3] The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) today welcomed the UN’s decision to designate 30 May as International Day of Potato, an opportunity to raise awareness of a crop regularly consumed by billions of people and of global importance for food security and nutrition.

The annual observance was championed by Peru, which submitted a proposal for adoption to the UN General Assembly based on an FAO Conference Resolution of July 7, 2023. The impetus for the Day, which builds upon the International Year of Potato that was observed in 2008, originates from the need to emphasize the significant role of the potato in tackling prevalent global issues, such as food insecurity, poverty and environmental threats.

[4] Steph joined me in Lima in July 1973 and we were married there in October. John Vessey and his wife Marian were our witnesses.

In November 1972, a couple of months after she had graduated with an MSc in genetic resources conservation from the University of Birmingham (where we met), Steph joined the Scottish Plant Breeding Station in Edinburgh as Assistant Curator of the Commonwealth Potato Collection. At CIP, she was an Associate Geneticist responsible for the day-to-day management of the institute’s potato germplasm collection.

Steph in one of CIP’s screenhouses at La Molina.

[5] In 1987, we wrote a piece about the somaclone project for the University of Birmingham internal research bulletin. This was picked up by several media, including the BBC and I was invited to appear on a breakfast TV show. Until, that is, the producer realised that the project was a serious piece of research.

One of the tabloid newspapers, The Sun, was less forgiving, and ran a brief paragraph on page 3 (Crunch time for boffins) alongside the daily well-endowed young lady. Click on the image to enlarge.

[6] The seed project was my second contact with the SDC (after PRECODEPA). After I joined IRRI in 1991, the SDC funded a five year project from 1995 to rescue rice biodiversity, among other objectives. I have written about that project here.

 

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USA 2024 (2) – On the road again

Well, after our road trip in 2019 I ‘promised’ myself that would be the last one. And although enjoyable, maybe I pushed myself a little too much; I found it rather tiring.

Tuesday 14 May. And here we were preparing to jet off to Las Vegas to begin another trip, this time across Utah and Colorado over the next seven days.

It was an early start to the airport for the 07:00 flight to LAS.

As I mentioned in my recent post, I already had a route planned and all our hotels booked. But the route was always subject to change, and that’s precisely what happened once we were on the road and could see the progress we made each day.

Now back in Minnesota I’ve been editing >1100 images and have placed them in photo albums at the end of this post.

I also used my dashcam throughout the whole trip, so I’m busy editing >222 GB of footage into short videos, some of which are included in the narrative below.

When I was planning this trip, and in touch with my old friend and former colleague, Roger Rowe, he suggested I should play Willie Nelson’s On the Road Again as a background theme to our travels.

Well, I’m not a particular Willie Nelson fan, but his words certainly resonated each morning as we set out on each leg of the trip, that I’ve documented here with maps and descriptions of the many interesting places we visited along the way, over more than 1600 miles. And, my British readers will be surprised to learn, at a gasoline cost of only £0.06 (6p) per mile.

Day 1: 14 May – Las Vegas, NV to St George-Washington, UT via the Hoover Dam (185 miles)
After a three hour flight from Minneapolis-St Paul (MSP) we landed in Las Vegas on time just after 08:00 and, having only hand luggage, were quickly out of the terminal, catching the shuttle bus to the car rental center south of the airport. Which was a good location for us as we were headed southeast to the Hoover Dam.

I’d booked an intermediate SUV through Alamo, and the pickup in LAS was quick and efficient. Choosing a VW Tiguan (with California plates) among several options on offer, we must have been on the road just after 09:00, heading for a supermarket en route to pick up supplies of drinking water, fruit, and other snacks for the trip.

Construction of the Hoover Dam, straddling the Nevada-Arizona state line, began over 90 years ago, and it was commissioned in 1935. What a magnificent example of engineering expertise of the time. Walking across the dam, and taking in its art deco features, you can’t help wonder at the sheer scale of its construction. And the Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, which opened in 2010, is the second highest in the USA and carries Interstate 11 and US Route 93 over the Colorado River. You can really appreciate the scale of this bridge in this video.

We arrived late morning, parked in the covered car park (worth it, at $10 a time, since the temperature was approaching 100°F). Later on we drove across the dam to the Arizona side (and a different time zone) to eat our lunch overlooking Lake Mead, and noting just how low the water level had become.

Hoover Dam
Hoover Dam

Then it was time to head north for our first stop of the trip in St George-Washington just over the Arizona-Utah state line.

The route we took passed through the Lake Mead National Recreational Area, offering great views of the lake and the mountains in the distance, before joining Interstate 15 for the final 70 miles.

Day 2: 15 May – St George-Washington to Bryce Canyon City via Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon N.P. (207 miles)

First stop of the day was Kolob Canyons, part of Zion National Park, some 30 miles north of St George-Washington.

There’s just a 5 mile road from the Visitor Center to an overlook point over the canyons to the east. This was our first introduction to ‘canyon country’ on this trip (we’d visited the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley in 2011).

Then, retracing our steps a few miles, we took Utah Scenic Highway 9 through Zion National Park eastwards to Carmel Junction.

Zion was heaving with tourists and this wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination the peak season. All campgrounds were full, and there was no parking available at the Visitor Center.

Zion NP
Zion NP
Zion NP

It was never our intention to take the shuttle into the canyon itself, but just drive through. And what a drive it was with magnificent red sandstone cliffs rising all around.

Even though we took our time to drive through the park, we realised that we would reach Bryce Canyon by mid-afternoon. And, rather than delay that visit until the following morning, decided to enter the park there and then, and actually benefitted by seeing some of the more iconic landscapes in the late afternoon sun. Landscapes to make your heart sing. As the park brochures states: Red rocks, pink cliffs, and endless vistas! The sandstone pillars reminded me of China’s Terracotta Army.

Bryce Canyon NP
Bryce Canyon NP

Day 3: 16 May – Bryce Canyon City to Moab, UT via Grand Staircase – Escalante National Monument (290 miles)
We set out early on Day 3, knowing we had one of the longest drives of the trip to reach Moab. As we had originally planned to tour Bryce Canyon that morning, I had chosen a route to Moab taking in the major roads, knowing it was likely to be faster. But with the whole day to reach Moab, and discovering that the route across the desert, Scenic Byway Route 12 (SR-12), through the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, is also designated as an All-American Road, and not as remote as I had imagined just looking at a highways map.

What an experience, and definitely a must-travel route if you are ever in that area.

Look out for the ‘Hogback’, where the road has sheer drops on both sides, just after 18 minutes in the video below.

Reaching I-70 by mid-afternoon, we made good progress to Moab as the speed limit on this interstate was 80 mph. A mostly boring drive, but with one spectacular section.

Day 4: 17 May – Moab to Grand Junction, CO via Arches N.P. and Canyonlands N.P. (231 miles)

Arches National Park is just a few miles north of Moab, and beyond the park entrance, there’s an impressive climb along the cliff face to enter the park proper. Admission to the park is by timed tickets, and I’d reserved a slot for 08:00 as soon as they became available in early April.

Arches is a ‘closed’ park, with entrance and exit the same, with a drive of about 18 miles to the furthest point, the Devil’s Garden Trailhead. I was quite surprised how fast and determined many drivers seemed to be heading there, until we also arrived there about three hours later and found there were no parking spaces at all.

But that didn’t bother us, as we were more than happy to potter along, stopping wherever we could and just taking in the most incredible scenery, and views of the La Salle Mountains to the southeast.

Arches NP
Arches NP

We spent most time walking up to the Two Windows arches and Turret Arch (I guess a little over a mile in total), where there were wonderful views over the park.

Arches NP

We saw the free-standing Delicate Arch from a lower viewpoint. The walk to the arch, about a mile, up a steep cliff face, and in the blistering heat was beyond our capabilities by that point.

After a picnic lunch at Panorama Point, we headed out of the park north to where UT 313 peels west from US191, towards the entrance gate to Canyonlands National Park. It’s a 34 mile drive southwest to the furthest point at Grand View Point.

Canyonlands is the Grand Canyon on a smaller scale, overlooking the Colorado and Green Rivers and their confluence to the south. It’s so vast it was hard to take it all in.

Canyonlands NP
Canyonlands NP

Late afternoon, and we headed north again to re-join I-70 for the remaining 81 miles to Grand Junction, CO and our next hotel stop.

Day 5: 18 May – Grand Junction to Durango via the ‘Million Dollar Highway’ and Mesa Verde N.P. (291 miles)
This was always going to be the most challenging day of driving, crossing several passes in the San Juan Mountains, on the ‘Million Dollar Highway’ between Ouray and Silverton.

I’d already done my research about the ‘Million Dollar Highway, read reports, and watched various videos on YouTube. Almost all said the highway was not for the faint-hearted, because of the gradients, sharp curves, and steep and deep drop-offs with no guard rails. Had it been raining heavily (we only had a short shower as we left Ouray), foggy, or icy I probably would have chosen another route to Durango.

However, looking back on this section of our trip, it was not as challenging as others would have you believe. We went slowly, and I used semi-automatic use of low gears whenever necessary. Frightening? No, it was exhilarating, crossing three passes at over 10,000 feet, the highest being Red Mountain Pass at 11,013 feet (or 3358 m).

There were few places to stop to take photos, although I was able to capture stills from the video footage.

Ouray and the start of the Million Dollar Highway
The Million Dollar Highway
The Million Dollar Highway

Having left Grand Junction by 08:00, and even taking into consideration the slower traverse of the mountains, we arrived in Durango by early afternoon, so decided to continue on to Mesa Verde National Park, about 35 miles west, rather than leaving the visit for the following morning.

The park is a World Heritage Site, where communities of Ancestral Pueblo people lived for over 700 years, building dwellings on the mesa and cliffs. It’s hard to imagine what drove these Ancestral Puebloans to choose such sites for their houses and temples half way up sheer cliff faces. Caught in the late afternoon sunshine they were indeed impressive.

Mesa Verde NP
Mesa Verde NP

One location we stopped at was the Montezuma Valley Overlook (map). In July 1958, while leading an expedition to collect wild potato species in the USA, Mexico, and Central America, my PhD supervisor and mentor, Professor Jack Hawkes, stopped here and took the photo on the left below. Here I am at the same spot almost 66 years later.

Then it was back into Durango for the night, just in time to catch one of the best grass-fed beef burgers I’ve tasted in a long while.

Day 6: 19 May – Durango to Cañon City, CO via Chimney Rock National Monument (272 miles)
I’d chosen Cañon City as our next destination as I wanted to view the Royal Gorge Bridge (‘America’s Bridge’, and the highest in the country) standing 955 feet (or 291 m) above the Arkansas River.

This was just a travel day, with no scheduled stops. That is until we saw a sign, about 29 miles east of Durango, that the Chimney Rock National Monument was just 26 miles ahead. Well I’d never heard of this location, nor had spotted it on the maps I had prepared for the trip.

Anyway, at the turn-off, we noted that the monument was just a handful of miles south from the main road US-160E. What a find!

Chimney Rock National Monument is an Ancestral Puebloan site, with an impressive kiva on the summit of the mesa, and just a stone’s throw from the twin peaks, Chimney Rock and Companion Rock, that give the site its name. Fortunately there’s a dirt road almost to the summit of the mesa, and from there to the buildings is a quarter mile walk, and 200 foot ascent (which I did very carefully).

But what a view from the summit, all the way into New Mexico.

Chimney Rock National Monument

At Chimney Rock, we’d hardly dented our journey to Cañon City, and having spent just under two hours there, with more than 200 miles more to travel (and over several mountain ranges), we didn’t reach our destination until around 19:00. And we were lucky to find somewhere to dine, as it was a Sunday evening.

This next video shows the ascent into the mountains on US-160 beyond Pagosa Springs, crossing Wolf Creek Pass summit at 10,856 feet, and descending towards South Fork.

Day 7: 20 May – Cañon City to Denver via Royal Gorge Bridge and the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument (184 miles)
Built in just six months in 1929, the Royal Gorge Bridge used to carry a road over the gorge, but is now closed to traffic. It stands within a resort and theme park, and pedestrians are allowed to cross – if they dare! It wouldn’t suit me; I suffer from vertigo.

I failed to find an unofficial viewpoint that would have given us a great view down the deep gorge, so had to make do with those from the resort car park.

Then it was off to the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, just under 50 miles north, one of the richest and most diverse fossil deposits in the world. Petrified redwood stumps up to 14 feet wide and thousands of detailed fossils of insects and plants reveal the story of a very different, prehistoric Colorado.

Even though off the beaten track, so to speak, we were somewhat surprised how many other visitors showed up shortly after we arrived a few minutes after the opening time of 10:00.

The fossilised redwood trees are indeed impressive, buried in a volcanic mudflow or lahar 34 million years ago, as was the revelation that the monument is probably one of the fossil hotspots in the world. Here’s a film from the National Parks Service about the site.

We took the Petrified Forest Trail (about 1½ miles), viewing some of the redwoods, including Big Stump.

Then, we headed to Denver for our last night on the road, at a hotel near the airport, just as a major storm hit town with hailstones the size of marbles. In fact the last 60 miles after we joined US-285 and then I-70 once again, with several lanes of fast moving traffic, were quite a shock to the system after driving along relatively deserted rural roads for the previous week.

But we reached Denver safely, enjoyed a good night’s sleep before departing for the car rental center around 08.15, in order to catch our flight back to Minnesota at 11:15.

It’s quite illuminating to compare the landscapes around Denver (big agriculture, and very flat with the Rockies to the far west of Denver) with the arrival into leafy Minneapolis-St Paul.

What a wonderful trip! It’s quite hard to choose the highlights, but from a landscape point of view I’d have to choose Bryce Canyon, and the ‘Million Dollar Highway’ and other routes over the Rockies.

Hotels were variable. We always choose a budget or mid-range chain. All we want is a clean room, bed, and bathroom before moving on the next day. What we did notice, however, is how much more expensive hospitality and accommodation has become in the US.

So that’s that for 2024, abroad at least. We are having a week away in East Anglia in the UK during September.

Will we make another US road trip in 2025? Maybe, but currently we’re more inclined towards a three day break in New Orleans, a city we’ve wanted to visit for a long time.

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USA 2024 (1) – Jetting there

Well, we booked our flights way back at the beginning of January. And here we are, five months later, in St Paul, Minnesota for a month-long vacation with our elder daughter Hannah and her family.

Our trip started very early last Thursday (9 May). I’d booked a local taxi for 03:30 to take us to Newcastle International Airport (NCL) for the flight to Amsterdam (AMS), so had the alarm set for 02:30. Just ten minutes before the scheduled pick-up time, I received a message on a phone app with the name of the driver, make and registration of the car, and when he would arrive. Imminently!

The roads were quiet at that time of the morning, as expected, and the 11 mile drive to the airport took less than 20 minutes.

All went smoothly at the KLM check-in; there was no-one in the queue ahead of us. Unlike last year when it was mayhem at NCL.

We quickly cleared security but then had to wait until 05:30 for the gate to open.

Once on board, the captain announced there would be a delay for about 1 hour due to fog at Schipol. Groans all round! But then, just five minutes later, he announced the good news that the weather had improved in AMS, and our flight had been given clearance to depart.

KLM operated a Boeing 737-800 (registration PH-BGC) on this sector.

Source: Planespotters.net © Günter Reichwein

It was bright and sunny, warm even, when we landed in AMS, around 08:20, but there was a very long taxi (around 15 minutes) to Gate D44.

Our connecting Delta flight (DL161) to MSP left from Gate E3 at 10:15. Schipol is a huge airport, and even with walkways it can take many minutes to walk from one gate to another. But as we’d arrived on time, we ‘enjoyed’ a leisurely stroll to our gate. Unlike last year when our arrival into AMS was delayed by more than 1 hour and we had to rush, arriving at the departure gate just as the flight was boarding. And as I’m still having some mobility issues, I was relieved we had the extra minutes this year.

Delta operated an Airbus A330-300 (registration N821NW) on this route. As with previous years we booked Delta Comfort+ seats. We enjoy the slightly bigger space and seat recline (and dedicated overhead bin space). And in the 2-4-2 seat configuration, window and aisle seats are a good choice for us. On the return journey last year, from Detroit (DTW) to AMS, I used airmiles to upgrade to Premium Economy. Not worth it!

Source: Planespotters.net © Erwin Scholz

The flight was almost completely full, yet despite that boarding proceeded smoothly and we actually departed about 10 minutes ahead of schedule.

This was one of the smoothest flights I’ve had over the North Atlantic, and although I never can sleep well on any flight, I must have snatched some, helped by a couple of these with my lunch, and another with a snack later on.

On arrival at MSP (Gate G2), at 11:40 (about 40 minutes ahead of schedule), there was quite a long walk from the plane to Immigration. With just a couple of passengers ahead of us in the queue, we sailed through, and both our bags arrived within 10 minutes. Hannah and Michael were waiting for us, and since they live just 4 miles (and around 9 minutes) from MSP, we were home by about 12:30 and soon enjoying a refreshing cup of tea.

In 2023 we visited the US for the first time since 2019 and made just a short road trip overnight to meet up with old friends Norma and Roger Rowe in La Crosse, Wisconsin. It was in September  2019 that we made our last long road trip, and I ‘vowed’ it would be our last. Until we agreed to make another trip this year. Who knows what’s in store in 2025?

Anyway, we’re flying out to Las Vegas (LAS) next Tuesday to begin a road trip of around 1800 miles across Utah and Colorado, visiting several national parks along the way: Kolob Canyon, Zion, Bryce, Arches, and Canyonlands in Utah, and Mesa Verde and Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado. I’ve chosen some exciting (challenging, even) routes through the Rockies, taking in the ‘Million Dollar Highway’, weather permitting. And stopping off at the Hoover Dam in Nevada on the first day.

This is our planned route that will be subject to changes depending on road conditions at the time. But we do have all our overnight stops booked, so that much remains fixed.

Then, a week later, we’ll fly back to MSP from Denver (DEN).

Yesterday, we visited the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge (just 6 miles from Hannah’s house) to purchase an America the Beautiful National Parks and Federal Recreation Lands annual pass. At US$80 (=£64.29) this is great value, saving probably half of what we would pay for all the individual visits on our trip, and permits entrance to all the national parks and facilities of several other federal agencies.

We also enjoyed a short walk around one of the trails near the Visitor Center, and within just a few minutes of arrival saw an incredible array of bird species. We will be returning there and to several of the other trail sites along the Minnesota River.

So look out for more posts in the coming weeks because I’ll be writing about each day’s adventures, posting lots of photographs and dashcam footage as we wend our way through the various canyons and over the mountain passes.

 

 

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Before potatoes and rice, there were pulses

Although I spent most of my career working on potatoes and rice, my first interest was pulse crops or grain legumes. In fact the first pulse that I studied was the lentil (Lens culinaris Medik.) when I was an MSc student at the University of Birmingham from 1970-1971.

So why the interest in pulses?

It was surely the influence of one of my mentors, Dr Joe Smartt (right) at the University of Southampton where I was awarded my BSc in Environmental Botany and Geography in 1970. A geneticist who had studied groundnuts in Africa and at Southampton was working on Phaseolus beans, Joe taught a second year genetics course, and two in the third or final year, on plant breeding and plant speciation.

He published two seminal texts on pulses in 1976 and 1990.

It was Joe who ignited my interest in plant genetic resources, and encouraged me to apply for a place on the one year MSc course at Birmingham on Conservation and Utilization of Plant Genetic Resources (CUPGR). The course had been launched by the head of the Department of Botany, potato expert, and genetic resources pioneer, Professor Jack Hawkes, with the first intake of students commencing their studies in September 1969. I landed in Birmingham a year later.

My three year undergraduate course at Southampton was a stroll in the park compared to the intensity of that one year MSc course. We had eight months of lectures and practical classes, followed by written examinations at the end of May. Each student also had to complete a piece of independent but supervised research, and present a dissertation for examination in September. In order to take full advantage of the summer months, planning and some initial research began much earlier. First of all for most of us, we had to decide on a topic that was feasible and doable in the allotted time, and assemble the necessary seed samples ready for planting at the most appropriate date.

Almost immediately I decided on three points. First, I wanted to run a project with a taxonomy/natural variation theme. Second, I wanted—if feasible—to work on a pulse species. And finally (which I decided quite quickly after arriving in Birmingham) I wanted to work with Dr Trevor Williams (right) who delivered a brilliant series of lectures on variation in natural populations, among others.

Trevor and I thumbed our way through the Leguminosae (now Fabaceae) section of Flora Europaea, until we came upon the entry for Lens, and the topic for my project leapt off the page: Lens culinaris Medik. Lentil. Origin unknown.

My project had two components:

  • An analysis of variation in the then five species of lentil (one cultivated, the others wild species; the taxonomy has changed subsequently) from herbarium specimens borrowed from several herbaria in Europe. I also spent a week in the Herbarium at Kew Gardens in London taking measurements from their complete set of lentil specimens.
  • A study of variation in Lens culinaris from living plants, with seeds obtained from Russia (the Vavilov Institute in St Petersburg), from the (then) East German genebank in Gatersleben, and from the agricultural research institute in Madrid.

With the guidance of another member of the Botany department staff, Dr Herb Kordan, I made chromosome preparations and counts of all the Lens culinaris samples I’d obtained, confirming they were all diploid with 2n=2x=14 chromosomes. In the process, we developed a simple but effective technique for making chromosome squash preparations, and this led to my first ever publication in 1972. Just click on the title below (and others in this post) to read the full text.

In September 1971, I submitted my dissertation, Studies in the genus Lens Miller with special reference to Lens culinaris Medik. (which was examined by Professor Norman Simmonds who was the course External Examiner), and the degree was awarded.

I proposed that the wild progenitor of the cultivated lentil was Lens orientalis (Boiss.) Hand.-Mazz., a conclusion reached independently by Israeli botanist Daniel Zohary in a paper published the following year.

In 1971-1972, Carmen Kilner (née Sánchez) continued with the lentil studies at Birmingham, leading to a publication in SABRAO Journal in 1974. Our paper added further evidence to confirm the status of Lens orientalis.

When I began my lentil project, I had ideas to extend it to a PhD were the funding available. However, in February 1971 Jack Hawkes had just returned from a potato collecting mission to Bolivia, and told me about an exciting opportunity to spend a year in Peru at the newly-founded International Potato Center (CIP), from September that same year. My departure to Peru was delayed until January 1973, so I began a PhD on potatoes with Jack in the meantime. And with that move to potatoes, I assumed that any future work with pulses was more or less ruled out. However, from April 1981 I was appointed Lecturer in Plant Biology at Birmingham, and needed to develop a number of research areas. Would pulses figure in those plans?

While I wanted to continue projects on potatoes at Birmingham, I also decided to return partially to my first interest: pulses. And while I never had major grants in this area, I did supervise graduate students for MSc and PhD degrees who worked on a range of grain and forage legume/pulse species. Here I highlight the work of three students. There may have been more who worked on pulses, but after four decades I can’t remember those details.

Almost immediately after returning to Birmingham, I discovered (by looking through Flora Europaea once again) that the origin of the grasspea, Lathyrus sativus, was unknown. The grasspea is a distant relative of the ornamental sweetpea, Lathyrus odoratus, one of my favorite flowers since I was a small boy. My grandfather used to grow a multitude of sweetpeas in his cottage garden in Derbyshire. Anyway, I set about assembling a large collection of seed samples (or accessions) of grasspea and wild Lathyrus species from agricultural centers and botanic gardens worldwide.

The academic year September 1981-September 1982 was my first full year at Birmingham. Among the CUPGR intake was a Malaysian student, Abdul bin Ghani Yunus (right), who asked me to supervise his MSc research project. I persuaded him to tackle a study of variation in the grasspea and its wild relatives, much along the lines I had approached lentil a decade earlier.

We published this paper in 1984, and I guess it heralded what would become, a several decades later, an international collaborative effort to improve the grasspea and make it safer for human consumption.

Ghani returned to Malaysia, and I didn’t hear from him for several years. Then, in 1987, he contacted me to say he’d secured a Malaysian government grant to study for his PhD and would like to return to Birmingham. But to work on a tropical species, the name of which I cannot remember.

I persuaded him that would not really be feasible in Birmingham as we didn’t have the glasshouse space available, and it would be hit or miss whether we would be able to grow it successfully. I suggested it would be better to carry on his Lathyrus work from where he left off. And that’s what he did, successfully submitting his thesis in 1990 from which these papers were published.

Among the 1986 CUPGR intake was a student from Mexico, José Andrade-Aguilar (right) who was keen to attempt a pre-breeding study in Phaseolus beans, specifically trying to cross the tepary bean, Phaseolus acutifolius A. Gray with the common bean, Phaseolus vulgaris L.

José published two papers from his dissertation.

This next paper (for which I no longer have a copy) described how pollinations in Phaseolus species could be made more successful.

Then, in 1987, a student from Spain, Javier Francisco-Ortega (right, actually from Tenerife in the Canary Islands) joined the course, and he and I worked closely on his MSc and PhD projects until I left Birmingham to join IRRI in the Philippines in July 1991.

Javier was an extraordinary student: hard-working, focused, and very productive. After completing his PhD in 1992, he took two postdoctoral fellowships in the USA (at Ohio State University and the University of Texas at Austin) before joining the faculty of the Department of Biological Sciences at Florida International University in 1999, where he has been Professor in Plant Molecular Systematics since 2012.

For his 1988 MSc dissertation, Javier studied the variation in Lathyrus pratensis L., using multivariate analysis, and publishing this paper some years later.

Then, having successfully completed his MSc, and being awarded a second Spanish government scholarship, Javier began a PhD project to study the ecogeographical variation in an endemic forage legume from the Canary Islands, Chamaecytisus proliferus (L. fil.) Link., known locally as tagasaste or escobón, depending whether it is cultivated or a purely wild type.

With a special grant from the International Board for Plant Genetic Resources (IBPGR, now Bioversity International) in Rome, Javier returned to the Canary Islands in the summer of 1989 to survey populations and collect seeds from as many provenances as possible across all the islands, and I joined him there for several weeks.

Collecting escobón (Chamaecytisus proliferus) in Tenerife in 1989

After I left Birmingham, my colleague Professor Brian Ford-Lloyd took over supervision of Javier’s research, seeing it through to completion in 1992.

Together we published these papers from his research on tagasaste and escobón.

Once I was in the Philippines, I forgot completely about legume species, apart from contributing to any of the papers that were published after I’d left Birmingham.

One aspect that is particularly gratifying however is seeing the work Ghani Yunus and I did on Lathyrus still being cited in the literature as efforts are scaled up to improve grasspea lines.

 

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Belsay redux . . .

The relentless wet weather these past weeks has been a bit of a theme in my recent blog posts. Such that we haven’t been able to get out and about as much as we’d like. But when the forecast promises better days—even a few hours on some days—we grab those opportunities with enthusiasm. And so it was last Tuesday: sunny intervals although there was a cold wind blowing from the north.

Just after 09:30 we headed out to Belsay Hall, Castle, and Gardens, which is about 19 miles west from home on the route we took, on the A696 past Newcastle International airport and through Ponteland.

We first visited Belsay in 2009 while I was still working in the Philippines and we were back in this country on home leave. Since we moved to the northeast in 2020 we been back a handful of times, the last apparently in May 2022 (according to my photographic records) although I really did think we’d visited since then.

Belsay has been home to the Middleton family since the 13th century, living (until the early 19th century) in a castle and manor house some distance from the large hall that stands there today.

Sir Charles Monck (1779-1867)

To some eyes, Belsay Hall must appear rather austere, built between 1810 and 1817 for Sir Charles Monck, the 6th baronet (according to his own design – he was enthusiastic for the Greek classical style). It’s exactly square, 100 feet (30 m more or less) on all sides.

So why Monck? In order to inherit his maternal grandfather’s estates in Lincolnshire, Sir Charles he changed his surname from Middleton to Monck. His grandson, Arthur (the 7th baronet) inherited Belsay in 1867, and changed his name back to Middleton almost a decade later.

The Middleton baronetcy was created in 1662, but became extinct in 1999 on the death of the 10th baronet. However, the Middleton family still live on the Belsay estate, but not in the hall. That is an empty shell, and remains so under terms of its guardianship agreement from 1980. But that doesn’t mean that the interiors cannot be used for other purposes, as we saw last week. But more of that later on.

Belsay has been through a renaissance, receiving a huge investment to make the hall watertight by replacing its roof.

Two years ago Belsay was completely encased in scaffolding and English Heritage offered timed visits to see the repair work on the roof, which we just missed on our last visit.

A tubular slide was erected from the top of the building, which Steph and I could not resist trying out.

Now the scaffolding has been removed and you can once again appreciate Belsay in all its classical glory.

And English Heritage has not stopped there. Some of the estate buildings have been refurbished, such as the new café and toilets close to the castle. A new, and much larger car park has been opened close to the hall.

The gardens (which were always attractive) have received a lot of loving attention from staff gardeners and volunteers. We were told by one volunteer that during the Covid lockdown, there were only two gardeners working on the estate, and between them they planted more than 30,000 plants. On our visit the gardens were looking in excellent condition. It appeared that paths had been repaired, lots of new signs had been placed around explaining details about and the history of Belsay, and enhancing the visitor experience.

The Quarry Garden is a special place, and was waking up, with even some rhododendrons in full bloom. Having arrived just after 10 am, and after a welcome cup of americano in the café, we strolled through the gardens to the castle, and more or less had the whole garden to ourselves. So very peaceful.

The Belsay ‘wild man’.

On our walk around Belsay, there were many references to the ‘wild man‘, a medieval mythical figure —perhaps a Northumberland version of the ‘Green Man‘—adopted as a symbol of the Middleton family from the fifteenth century . . . and appear[ing] as a crest on the family’s coat of arms, in wall paintings, [and] as a carved stone statue. And in the ground floor hall of the castle, his story was told in an animation projected on the wall.

We also like to find the carved faces. Have you ever seen them?

Then it was back into the hall for the first time since 2021. As I mentioned earlier, all the rooms are bare, the wood panelling having been removed after World War II due to dry rot. And the leaky roof until recently didn’t help the situation one iota. Here’s an album of photos taken in 2021.

Since we became members of the National Trust and English Heritage in 2011 and 2015, respectively, I have become slightly obsessed with vintage wallpapers in their properties. And these have featured in several of my posts.

Belsay has some impressive wallpapers in several of the bedrooms on the first floor, although badly damaged in some rooms through damp and silverfish.

Wall paper at Belsay Hall (English Heritage)

Having no furniture to display, Belsay Hall has become an excellent venue for art exhibitions, such as the Lucky Spot by Stella McCartney made from thousands of Swarovski crystals suspended from the ceiling of the Great Hall of the Castle, which we viewed in July 2009.

And there was another exhibition, by Ingrid Pollard MBE, on display last week, which will continue until mid-July.

Ingrid Pollard’s exhibition covers the ground floor Pillar Hall, library, and dining room, and three first floor bedrooms, as well as several strategically placed polished steel mirrors in the Quarry Garden.

On the whole, I’m afraid I didn’t find her pieces too inspiring, apart from the mirrors in the Quarry Garden (Fissures in Reflection), and the sandstone rock suspended from the Pillar Hall balcony by ropes.

However, I do applaud English Heritage for taking every opportunity of exhibiting (and even commissioning, I believe) works of art to be displayed amongst Belsay’s impressive architecture.

 

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Once one of the greatest monasteries in England

At breakfast earlier last week, Steph and I were comparing this past winter to the other three we have experienced since moving to the northeast in October 2020. It’s not that it has been particularly cold. Far from it. But, has it been wet!

It feels as though it hasn’t stopped raining since the beginning of the year. The ground is sodden. And as for getting out and about that we enjoy so much, there have been few days. Apart, that is, from local walks when it hasn’t been raining cats and dogs.

So, with a promising weather forecast for last Friday we made plans for an excursion, heading south around 70 miles into North Yorkshire to visit Byland Abbey, built by a Cistercian community in the 12th century, below the escarpment of the North York Moors.

It’s 12th Cistercian neighbours—less ruined, and arguably more famous—Rievaulx Abbey and Fountains Abbey, stand just 4 miles north as the crow flies and 18 miles southwest, respectively from Byland Abbey.

We decided to take in a couple of other sites on our way south, stopping off at Mount Grace Priory for a welcome cup of coffee and a wander round the gardens, and then—just a few miles further on—the small 12/13th century church of St Mary the Virgin, beside the A19 trunk road that we have passed numerous times, but never taken the opportunity to visit.

St Mary’s was once the parish church of a medieval village, Leake, now disappeared. Nowadays it serves the communities of Borrowby and Knayton. The tower is the earliest remaining structure, and the church has been added to over the centuries (floor plan).

There is a very large graveyard, still in use today, clearly shown in this drone footage.

Then it was on to Byland, taking the cross country route from the A19. And along the way, I saw my first ever hare (and nearly killed, which you’ll see at 02’22 ” in the video below). This route takes you through the delightful village of Coxwold.

Byland Abbey is mightily impressive, even though it’s a shell compared to Rievaulx, for example. But I had the impression that it was much larger than Rievaulx, and it must have been magnificent in its heyday. Its foundation was far from straightforward, and it took the monks more than 40 years before settling on the site at Byland.

Its west entrance is simply a wall, with the remains of what must have once been an incredible rose window. We saw a note on the English Heritage hut (closed on our visit) that there was a template for the window on the inside of the West Wall, but we couldn’t find it.

And from the entrance there is a view straight down the length of the church towards the North and South Transepts and the High Altar. Just the north wall is still standing, mostly. And when I look at ruins like Byland, I am just in awe of the craftsmanship that it took to build a church like this, with such beautifully dressed stone. I wonder how big a workforce was needed for the construction over the 25+ years it is estimated it took to complete the abbey?

At various locations around the ruins, and especially around the site of the high altar, ceramic floor tiles uncovered during excavations are currently not on view, but protected by tarpaulins.

Like all the other religious houses across the nation, Byland was closed during the Suppression of the Monasteries by King Henry VIII in 1538 and rapidly became a ruin. You can read an excellent history of the abbey on the English Heritage website.

You can view my photo album of Byland Abbey images (and from St Mary’s, Leake) here.

Leaving Byland Abbey, we headed up the escarpment on Wass Bank, stopped off to view the Kilburn White Horse again before heading down the precipitous 1:4 (25%) incline that is the infamous Sutton Bank.

The Kilburn White Horse can be seen for miles around, primarily from the southwest. It was supposedly constructed by a local schoolmaster, John Hodgson and his pupils in 1857. It covers an area of 6475 m² (or 1.6 acres). We had only seen it previously from a distance, or from the car park immediately below. This time we took the footpath at the top of the cliff, emerging near the horse’s ears. The walk from where we parked the car (alongside the glider field) took less than 10 minutes.

And although there wasn’t a good view of the horse per se from the path, the view south over the Vale of York was magnificent. We could see for at least 30 miles over a 200° panorama.

That’s the horse’s eye in the foreground.

 

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“You don’t stumble upon your heritage. It’s there, just waiting to be explored and shared.” Robbie Robertson

Steph and I are enthusiastic members of the National Trust (NT, since 2011) and English Heritage (EH, since 2015). And we have now visited 145 National Trust properties, and 43 from English Heritage. As well as a smattering of others owned by the National Trust for Scotland, Historic Environment Scotland, and the Welsh heritage organization, Cadw, as well as some not affiliated with any of these organizations.

On this map, I have included all of these properties. You can also expand the map to full screen by clicking on this icon [ ] in the top right corner of the map. Just zoom in to explore in more detail, and click on each icon for more information.  They are also listed by region as well on this page.

Until three years ago, we lived in north Worcestershire, and visited many (almost all?) of the NT and EH properties within a 50 mile radius. Since 2020, we have lived in North Tyneside and have been exploring what the northeast has to offer. The NT has fewer properties close to home here in the northeast, although it does manage some spectacular stretches of coastline (as elsewhere in the country).

As you can see from the map, there are several regions of the country that we have yet to explore in any detail. We’ve still to visit the Lake District where the NT is well represented. English Heritage has more properties here in the northeast, but we’ve hardly scratched the surface yet.

Later this year we will spend a week in Norfolk and Suffolk, and have already planned which NT and EH properties to make a beeline for.

It’s hard to choose which have been my favorite visits over the past 13 years. Nevertheless, here are a few choices according to some rather arbitrary categories. The web links will take you to the stories I posted on this blog after each visit or to albums of my own photos.

Our heritage organizations are custodians of many fine properties, which frequently reflect the history of wealth accumulation over the centuries by the families that built and lived in them. As the National Trust is increasingly showing (and rightly so in my opinion, although it’s an approach not unanimously appreciated) how such wealth was accumulated, often off the back of nefarious activities like slavery. Also, even since we became members of the National Trust, visitors now have much more access than before, and photography (without flash) is now widely permitted. And that has made my visits all the more enjoyable.

So, here goes . . .

If I had to choose one property for its ostentation, it would have to be Waddesdon Manor, the former family home of the Rothschild family, near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. We visited in August 2014.

The North Front and main entrance
Waddesdon Manor, home of the Rothschilds
The Parterre from the first floor

What a treasure trove! Magnificent! It’s quite easy to be overwhelmed.

However, coming close behind must surely be Kingston Lacy in Dorset, Belton House in Lincolnshire, and Mount Stewart in Northern Ireland. And, of course, there’s Penrhyn Castle outside Bangor in North Wales that we visited for the first time last September.

Many of the houses have quite spectacular interiors, and I’ve taken quite an interest in those architectural features and furnishings. In 2016, we took a trip south from Bromsgrove to Claydon House in Buckinghamshire.

On arrival I discovered that, due to copyright considerations (the Verney family still live in one part of the property and own many of the furnishings), photography is not permitted inside the house. However, after a chat with the National Trust house manager, and explaining my blog and interest in design features of the house, I was given permission to photograph these and never published any photo until I’d been given clearance.

The carvings throughout the house are some of the finest in the country and work of 18th century carver and stonemason Luke Lightfoot (1722-1789).

In terms of carved woodwork, examples of the exquisite craftsmanship of Grinling Gibbons (1648-1721) can be seen at Petworth in West Sussex, Lyme in Cheshire, Belton House, and Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire.

Many properties have significant collections of paintings. There’s one that has particularly attracted my attention. It’s the enclosed courtyard at Wallington, where bright Pre-Raphaelite murals by Victorian painter William Bell Scott, several depicting local scenes and personalities, cover the walls. They are simply exquisite.

Over the many visits we’ve made, I’ve taken an interest in wallpapers, particularly those designed by William Morris. I guess one of the best examples has to be Wightwick Manor near Wolverhampton, which we visited in 2014.

I don’t have any photos from there since photography inside the house was not permitted. But here are some examples from Standen House in West Sussex.

During our visit to Northern Ireland in 2017, we spent a week visiting as many National Trust properties as possible. And there’s no doubt about it. Castle Ward, overlooking Strangford Lough, must be the most architecturally quirky anywhere across the nation.

Built in the 1760s by the 1st Viscount Bangor, he and his good lady wife were unable to agree on architectural style. So the southwest face is Classical Georgian while the northeast is Gothic. And this is repeated throughout the house. Quite extraordinary.

If I had to choose any others, it would be for the eclectic possessions accumulated by their owners and never discarded, at Erddig near Wrexham and Calke Abbey in Derbyshire. Or the active collecting of Charles Paget Wade at Snowshill Manor in the Cotswolds (below).

All of these heritage properties have claim to historic fame in one way or another. Where history was written. On reflection I have given that accolade to Chartwell, near Sevenoaks in Kent, the home of former Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill. What a life lived!

I wasn’t sure quite what to expect, but was quite overwhelmed at the access visitors had to all areas of the house, to a huge number of Sir Winston’s possessions, and those of his wife Lady Clementine. Even Sir Winston’s huge collection of paintings. It was quite overwhelming.

Being a scientist, I’d always wanted to visit two properties in particular: Down House in Kent, the home of Charles Darwin; and Woolsthorpe Manor near Grantham in Lincolnshire, the birthplace of 17/18th century polymath, Sir Isaac Newton.

I was a little disappointed with the Down House visit. I felt that English Heritage hadn’t made as much of presenting the property as they might have.

And, due to Darwin family restrictions, photography was not permitted inside. Nevertheless, as a student of evolution, it was a privilege to wander around the house and gardens, knowing this was where Darwin formulated his theory of the origin of species.

The legacy of 18th century landscape architect Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (right) can be seen at multiple properties across the country. He was born in Kirkharle, Northumberland, just over 19 miles (30 km) northwest of where we now live.

For me, there are two standout landscapes that Brown designed, one of them—at Croome Court in Worcestershire—being among his earliest commissions. The other is at Stowe in Buckinghamshire.

The parkland at Croome has the Croome River that was hand dug over several years, against the backdrop of the Malvern Hills. Quite spectacular, and being one of our ‘local’ heritage sites, Croome became a favorite of ours when we lived in Bromsgrove.

Looking east along the ha-ha to the Church of St Magdalene

We visited Stowe just the once, but there’s no doubt that it is one of the finest examples of so-called ‘natural’ gardening that flourished under Capability’s supervision.

The view from in front of the East Lake Pavilion across the Octagon Lake to Stowe House
Looking west down the Grecian Valley from the Fane of Pastoral Poetry
The Temple of Concord and Victory
The Palladian Bridge from the west
The Palladian Bridge
The Temple of Ancient Virtue taken from in front of the Temple of British Worthies

Steph is a very keen gardener, so our garden visits are always a pleasure. I guess Sissinghurst in Kent, designed by Vita Sackville-West and her husband, would be at the top of our list.

A close second has to be the Arts and Craft garden at Hidcote Manor on the northern edge of the Cotswolds, the inspiration of Lawrence Johnston. Since there are so many fine heritage gardens it almost seems unfair to choose just a couple.

Cragside, near Rothbury in Northumberland was the first house to be powered by hydroelectricity. Home of William, 1st Baron Armstrong (a wealthy engineer and industrialist, eminent scientist, inventor and philanthropist), Cragside has many other innovations throughout the house. And equally impressive, 150 years later, is the estate of trees from around the world that have now matured into such magnificent specimens.

National Trust Cragside
Cragside
Cragside

And while I’m on the topic of technology, I guess anyone has to be impressed by the industrial technology that led to the construction of the bridge across the River Severn at Ironbridge in Shropshire in 1779.

Also Thomas Telford’s suspension bridges at Conwy (below) and over the Menai Strait, both completed in 1826.

Over the years, I’ve become quite an aficionado of parterres that were popular design features at many country houses. My favorite is the one at Hanbury Hall in Worcestershire, which was the heritage property closest to our home when we lived in Bromsgrove, just seven miles. We’d often pop over to Hanbury for a walk in the parkland, and take a look at the parterre in all seasons. It certainly is a credit to the garden staff and volunteers who keep it in such fine shape.

A number of properties have literary links, and a couple were the homes of Nobel Literature Laureates. Of course, I’m referring to Rudyard Kipling at Bateman’s and Sir Winston Churchill at Chartwell.

The front door and garden (7)
The House (6) from the Rose Garden (12)
The Hall

Rudyard Kipling was named after the village of Rudyard in North Staffordshire, just a few miles from my home town of Leek. Kipling’s parents had met there.

Bateman’s is an elegant Jacobean mansion in the East Sussex countryside, acquired by Kipling in 1902 and remained the family home until his death in 1936. Our visit to Bateman’s in May 2019 inspired me to reach into Kipling’s novels, which I hadn’t before, and subsequently enjoyed.

I found visits to a couple of National Trust properties quite emotional, sufficient to bring tears to my eyes. In November 2018 I celebrated my 70th birthday, and Steph and I spent a long weekend in Liverpool, taking in The Beatles Childhood Homes of John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

When I was inside John Lennon’s home at ‘Mendips’, 251 Menlove Avenue in the Woolton suburb, I was suddenly overcome with a powerful emotion. Hard to explain, but I felt myself welling up. As a teenager in the 1960s, The Beatles were very much part of my formative years.

The other place where this has happened was at The Firs, the birthplace of that great English composer Sir Edward Elgar. We’d toured the cottage, looked round the small garden, then headed back to the fascinating museum. It was when we were watching a short documentary film about Elgar to the accompaniment of one of his most memorable compositions, Variation IX commonly known as Nimrod from the Enigma Variations, that I once again felt tears coming. Music can be such a powerful stimulus.

I wrote recently about a successful birding walk around the parkland and woods at Wallington in Northumberland. But there’s one site where the birding opportunities are out of this world. In the Farne Islands just off the Northumberland coast.

Puffins, with guillemots closer to the cliff edge.

Steph and I visited there in 1998, and have plans to revisit again this year. The islands have been closed to visits for the past couple of years because of bird flu that had seriously depleted some of the colonies. We also look forward to birding on the Suffolk coast at Orford Ness later this year.

All the heritage charities maintain an impressive portfolio of castles, some more complete than others. The northeast is particularly rich in castles. Many were reduced to ruins, or slighted, centuries ago following conflicts.

But if I had to choose a couple to put at the top of my list, they would be Caernarfon Castle, owned by Cadw, and which we visited last September during an enjoyable week’s holiday exploring North Wales, and Dover Castle, owned by English Heritage.

Caernarfon (below) is one of four castles built by King Edward I in the late 13th century.

Of the four (the others being Conwy, Beaumaris, and Harlech), Caernarfon is the most complete, and Cadw allows access to much of the castle. Although it was a grey day when we visited, there were relatively few other tourists and we easily had access to all parts.

Speaking of access, English Heritage has innovatively opened up Kenilworth Castle and Hardwick Old Hall (below) by constructing internal stairways and viewing platforms that just expand one’s appreciation of these buildings.

The Derbyshire landscape west of Hardwick Old Hall.
Looking down six floors in the Old Hall. And the magnificent plasterwork on the walls.

Of the many ruined abbeys and priories we have visited, Rievaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire stands out for me (closely followed by Fountains Abbey and Whitby Abbey). I guess it must be to do with Rievaulx’s location in the valley of the River Rye. The monks knew just where to build!

View of the Abbey from Rievaulx Terrace
View of the Abbey from Rievaulx Terrace
The Day Room
The Day Room
Tiers of gothic windows
Rievaulx Abbey

However, there is one church where worship is still celebrated today, and is quite outstanding. That has to be St Mary’s Church in the village of Kempley in Gloucestershire. The interior walls are decorated with beautiful frescoes.

St Michael and the Virgin.
The north wall with its paintings of the Wheel of Life, and those of St Anthony of Egypt and St Michael and the Virgin, either side of window.
Six of the 12 apostles on the north wall of the chancel., St Mary’s Kempley

The British landscape is blessed with the remains of ancient cultures going back thousands of years, from various standing stones (like Stonehenge and the Avebury Ring), ancient villages (Chysauster in Cornwall), and Iron Age settlements and hill forts.

Impressive as Stonehenge and Avebury are, there’s something about the Calanais Stones in the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. I first came across these standing stones in the summer of 1967, and Steph and I visited them during our tour of Scotland in 2015.

Of all the Roman remains throughout these islands, Hadrian’s Wall (and all its associated forts and watchtowers) has to the number one attraction. And it’s on our doorstep.

Housesteads from the air (Source: English Heritage)
Hadrian’s Wall, near Housesteads fort
Underfloor heating at Chester’s Roman Fort (English Heritage)
Underfloor heating

In February 2022, on a bright but sunny day, we decided to walk a short length of the Wall, from Steel Rigg Car Park to Sycamore Gap (below). And we saw the iconic tree before it was maliciously felled in 2023.

Undoubtedly there are so many more properties to choose from, and I’m sure my choices won’t be to everyone’s taste. But the heritage is out there to explore and enjoy, and that’s what Steph and I will continue to do, come rain or shine.

 

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Birding at Wallington

Over the past 12 months I have been afflicted by a bad back that has also affected my legs and mobility (finally—after an MRI scan last August—diagnosed as spinal stenosis). Consequently, I’ve not been walking quite as regularly as I used to. Well, not as far on each walk as I had enjoyed up until about March last year, and I’m still using a stick for support.

However, with medication and exercises, my condition has improved thank goodness, and I enjoy getting out and about again, trying for about 2 miles each time. But, when I’m feeling up to it, and the weather looks promising, it’s always a pleasure to enjoy a longer walk.

And that’s precisely why Steph and I headed out into Northumberland last Monday to the National Trust’s Wallington, just under 23 miles northwest from home, a drive of around 40 minutes depending on route and traffic. Even though the temperature was only around 6°C, it was bright and sunny, a gentle breeze, and there was some early Spring warmth in the sunshine.

Leaving home around 09:45, we arrived at Wallington before 10:30 and headed immediately to the café for a welcome cup of Americano. It was our intention to complete the River Walk through the grounds of Wallington (around 45 hectares or 111 acres) and along the upper reaches of the River Wansbeck (which rises 5 miles or so further west above Sweethope Lough).

The walk around the Wallington estate has been shut temporarily on several occasions in the past few years. Intense named storms have become a feature of our winters in recent years, and have brought down trees. The National Trust had to close paths until the fallen timber could be made safe.

The stepping stones over the Wansbeck were closed as one of the stones had been washed away, so we had to by-pass that section of the walk. The last time we tried to take the River Walk (in December 2020) we couldn’t cross because the river was in spate.

The walk was a little over three miles. Click on the special symbols in the map to see some of the birds seen at those points on the walk, or other landscape features we came across. And because Monday was such a fine day, I decided to take my binoculars in the hope of seeing some of the birdlife so common through Wallington’s woods and on its ponds.

Quite often I’ll leave my binoculars at home, and regret doing so after we catch sight of something interesting.

Along the path beside the Garden Pond, there’s a newly installed sculpture of an owl, carved from one of the downed trees, standing in open woodland (mainly of beech) but with lots of understorey bushes.

I had wondered if—and hoped—we’d see nuthatches (below) scurrying along the branches and picking out insects above our heads,

It’s a bird I’ve seen on only a few occasions, but that particular habitat was just right for nuthatches.

Then, a very small bird alighted on the branch just a few meters in front of me, and in full sunlight. I was fortunate to bring my binoculars to bear on this little bird, and I had a brief view before it flew off.

My immediate reaction was that it was a goldcrest, the smallest bird in the UK. But as it turned its head towards me, and the sun caught the feathers on its head, they appeared a much deeper reddish-orange rather than yellow. And its cheeks seemed whiter than I’d seen in a goldcrest. A firecrest was my next reaction.

I checked my bird books and online photographs when we arrived home. Although it seems that firecrests are quite uncommon in Northumberland, I’m now convinced—more than ever, and having compared images of a goldcrest and a firecrest side by side—that I saw a firecrest. Here are two images sent to me by my Northamptonshire friend, Barry Boswell (whose beautiful bird images I have used in other blog posts).

Goldcrest (L) and firecrest (R)

On the Garden Pond there was a small group of little grebes or dabchicks, several moorhens, and a flock of about 30 mallard ducks.

We walked through the walled garden, and enjoyed the crocus lawns at their best on the upper terrace, before heading through the gate that led to the River Walk path.

As I mentioned, we couldn’t cross the Wansbeck at the Stepping Stones, so had to walk along the road until we came to the fine 18th century hump-backed bridge, and then took the path alongside the river on its southern/western bank. Having left the road, we had a fine view of the bridge behind us.

Given the state of the river, with tranquil stretches interspersed with shallow rapids, I was hopeful that we might see a dipper or two.

And we weren’t disappointed. Just as we approached the footbridge, there was a solitary dipper sitting on a stone in mid-stream, preening itself. And taking no notice of us whatsoever, we had a great view for at least five minutes, before we crossed over the footbridge close by.

On the opposite bank there is an interesting piece of bespoke artwork depicting wolves, Nothing Exists Alone, which you can only appreciate fully from the right angle.

Click on this next image to read the description more easily.

Then we took the path away from the river and climbed towards the thick woodland on the brow of the hill (with a great view of a wren at the side of the path), ending up at the wildlife hide.

Wren

There was a range of bird feeders there, attracting a range of tit species (great, blue, coal, and long-tailed) and some chaffinches.

Making our way back to the house, we saw another nuthatch in one of the large trees, and a pair of beautiful teal ducks on the Middle Pond.

Then, as we were making our way back to the car park, we saw a large flock of chaffinches on the bird feeders close to the entrance drive, one of the largest flocks I’ve seen in a long while.

Of course these weren’t the only birds that caught our attention as we wandered round the River Walk. There were numerous blackbirds and robins, as well as crows and jackdaws in the fields.

But this Wallington walk will be remembered for that flash of reddish-orange early on. I wonder if others have spotted a firecrest there as well?

 

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The wonder of Cambodia’s temples

You’ve probably never heard of Jayavarman VII (right).

Born around 1122/25, he is widely regarded as one of the most powerful of Khmer monarchs, and ruled the vast Khmer Empire between 1181 and 1218. He was the first Khmer king to fully embrace Buddhism (earlier kings had been Hindu).

The empire was founded at the beginning of the 9th century, and at its zenith in the 12th century had subjugated much of Southeast Asia. By the middle of the 15th century however it had disappeared. All the temples and surrounding buildings were reclaimed by the jungle, and not uncovered again until the 19th century, mainly by French archaeologists. Archaeology is thriving in Cambodia today, and new discoveries are being made.

Southeast Asia circa 900 CE, showing the Khmer Empire in red.

At the heart of the empire was the capital, Angkor, with its principal temple Angkor Wat, now one of the most visited heritage sites worldwide. Angkor Wat features on the national flag of Cambodia.

Steph and I (with our younger daughter Philippa) had the privilege of visiting Angkor Wat in December 2000.

Angkor Wat was actually built by Suryavarman II (ruled 1113– c.1150) as a Hindu temple, and took almost 30 years to construct. Under Jayavarman II, it gradually became a Buddhist one. The king was also responsible for one of the most beautiful temples, Bayon (below), at Angkor.

And he established an impressive network of more than 100 hospitals throughout his empire, and other temples and cities that are now only being intensively studied in the northwest of Cambodia close to the frontier with Thailand.

Last Saturday Steph and I watched (on Channel 4) the third and final part of Lost Temples of Cambodia, fronted by British archaeologist Pauline Carroll (about whom I can find no information other than she worked on the dig in Leicester that discovered the remains of King Richard III in 2012). Click on the image below to access each of the programs.

Filmed at Angkor Wat and other close-by sites, the programs also explored newly-discovered sites to the north west close to the frontier with Thailand. And, as with Angkor Wat, the temples at Banteay Chhmar (and another recently-discovered a short distance away at Banteay Toap) are revealing much about the king who built them.

As we watched the programs, it was hard not to pinch ourselves that we had been so lucky to have visited Angkor Wat before it became overrun with tourists. We had flown to Siem Reap from the Philippines (where I was working at the International Rice Research Institute) via Singapore on Silk Air, and spent three nights there. Which gave us two full days to explore the many Angkor sites and take a boat ride on the large lake nearby, the Tonlé Sap.

Just click on each of the icons on the Angkor map below to explore a photo album for each, and zoom out to see the location of other sites in the northwest of Cambodia that were featured in the Channel 4 programs.

We didn’t join any tour to explore Angkor. Through one of my IRRI colleagues based in Phnom Penh we arranged for a driver to pick us up at the airport, and then stay with us over the next two and a half days. Once we had toured one of the sites, the driver quickly whisked us off to the next, finding the best locations to start from. Such as at Banteay Kdei (photo album), where he dropped us at one entrance, and picking us up on the far side of the site once we had walked through at our own pace, and not one dictated by any tour guide.

Even at Angkor Wat itself it’s quite remarkable how many photos I was able to take with only a smattering (if any) of other tourists (photo album).

As we watched the TV programs, it brought back to us how beautiful are the many bas-reliefs and stone carvings in general through the Angkor complex. Absolutely exquisite! And to some extent, those at Banteay Chhmar and Banteay Toap (more recent than Angkor Wat although constructed by Jayavarman II) are even finer.

Here is just a small selection of those we saw.

Taking the Angkor complex in total (and the many other sites across Cambodia) the construction of temples and other buildings would have required millions of tons of sandstone that had to be quarried some distance away and transported to the sites.

The stone came from Phnom Kulen, a range of hills to the northeast of Angkor Wat by about 30 miles. A series of canals was constructed to float the millions of stone blocks to the construction sites, on rafts pulled by elephants. Evidence for the canals was first gleaned from satellite images, and verified at ground level.

The construction must have involved a very large population. It has been estimated that perhaps as many 1 million people lived at Angkor, making it one of the largest cities in the ancient world. And they would have to be fed. But on what? Rice, of course, and that crop remains the staple in Cambodia today, thriving in the hot humid lowland climate, even in seasonally deep-water sites.

Eventually the Khmer Empire declined. Was it due to overpopulation, climate change affecting agricultural productivity, or warfare both internal and foreign? Certainly the Khmer faced threats and invasion from Thailand and Vietnam. Probably it was a combination of many factors.

But as new sites are discovered and recovered from the jungle, the history of this once thriving empire is being revealed in ever more detail.

There were a few things that caught my attention in the three program series on Channel 4.

I mentioned that Pauline Carroll was an unknown entity before now. And yet, she didn’t ‘front’ the series in quite the way you might expect in such programs. There was a background narrative, from restaurateur and presenter of The Great British Bake Off, Prue Leith. What a strange choice as narrator! Instead, Pauline Carroll was left to wander around the various sites, ask a few questions of local archaeologists, and occasionally speak to camera.

Second, as with many documentary programs nowadays, considerable use was made of drones to capture aerial shots, which certainly enhanced appreciation of the scope and scale of Angkor Wat and the other sites. In the past, such aerial photography would have required helicopters, but even low-cost drones can provide high quality output, and reaching areas inaccessible to helicopters.

And the final point I would like to make is about the healthy state, it seems, of Cambodian archaeology. Pauline Carroll met and spoke with several knowledgeable Cambodian archaeologists who have taken on the role of revealing their nation’s cultural history. And this is even more remarkable and encouraging considering it’s not that many decades since the appalling Cambodian genocide perpetrated by the murderous regime of Pol Pot in the 1970s, when millions of lives were sacrificed, particularly from the intelligentsia.

 

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Landmarks across the northeast

Across Tyneside, there are several impressive landmarks that no visitor to the region—by land, sea, or air—can fail to miss. All are just a few miles from where we are now living in North Tyneside (since October 2020).

Perhaps the most visible is the River Tyne itself, along whose banks the settlements of Newcastle upon Tyne (on the north) and Gateshead on the south were founded. Actually the River Tyne is two rivers. The North Tyne rises in the hills on the Scottish border, whereas the source of the South Tyne is in Cumbria. The two branches come together near Hexham, 20 miles due west from Newcastle city center.

Newcastle and Gateshead rise steeply away from the Tyne, and are connected by several road and rail bridges, including the iconic Tyne Bridge, opened in 1928 and undergoing a much-needed renovation, hopefully in time for its centenary in 2028.

There is a much more recent footbridge, the Gateshead Millennium Bridge, opened in 2001. Further east, the A19 trunk road crosses under the Tyne in the Tyne Tunnel between Wallsend and Jarrow.

There has been a long history of settlement along the river’s banks. The Romans built a garrison and supply base, Arbeia, near the mouth of the river on its south bank. Hadrian’s Wall begins its journey westwards from Wallsend, at Segedunum fort, just a few miles upstream from Arbeia, but on the north bank.

Arbeia, a Roman fort and supply base, built around 129 AD.

There was a long history of heavy industry along the Tyne, with the port developed for the export of coal from the many collieries in the area, as well as shipbuilding. Indeed, Newcastle was one of the leading shipbuilding cities in the country. All now long closed down.

Of course the mouth of the River Tyne looks very different now than when the Romans arrived. Today, there are piers on both sides of the river mouth. The north or Tynemouth pier (shown below, with a lighthouse at the seaward end), 900 m long (and open to the public during clement weather), took 40 years to build. The south pier is longer, and also took around 40 years to build.

Tynemouth Lighthouse and the entrance to the River Tyne from Tynemouth Priory.

If you fly into Newcastle International Airport, and the wind is blowing from the west, the usual flight path takes aircraft over the mouth of the River Tyne, before banking north. If you are lucky, there are some great views of the city and river.

Just beyond the Tyne, on the left, is St Mary’s Lighthouse (decommissioned since 1984) on its island, just south of Seaton Sluice. Just north of the lighthouse, aircraft then bank left and line up for landing at the airport nine miles west-southwest from the coast.

The view of St Mary’s Lighthouse from Old Hartley.

Just inside the mouth of the Tyne, and standing on the north bank below Tynemouth castle and priory, is the magnificent memorial statue of Vice Admiral of the Red, Lord Cuthbert Collingwood (1748-1810) whose flagship HMS Royal Sovereign was the first British ship to engage with the combined French and Spanish fleets at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. The statue of Collingwood is 23 feet or 7 m tall. The four canons either side of the steps come from HMS Royal Sovereign.

It must be seen many miles out to sea. And although we had seen it from Tynemouth castle and priory on previous visits to the town, it wasn’t until Monday afternoon past that we got to see it up close.

The mouth of the River Tyne, with the Collingwood Monument on the right.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cuthbert_Collingwood,_Baron_Collingwood_by_Henry_Howard.jpg

We took the path west along the river towards North Shields Fish Quay (about 1 mile), and came across a rather lovely statue (in steel), the Fiddler’s Green Sculpture by Ray Lonsdale from County Durham, that was erected in 2017. It is is a memorial to North Shields fishermen lost at sea. It was based on a photograph of a local fisherman.

Below the statue is a plaque that reads:

To the fishermen lost in the cold North Sea,
and the ones who will be so,
I’ll be seeing you all on Fiddler’s Green,
be steady as you go.

For Fiddler’s Green is a place I’ve heard tell,
though no one really knows,
where the fishermen go if they don’t go to hell,
and no Arctic wind will blow.

Fiddler’s Green is an imaginary paradise to which sailors are conveyed after death, traditionally a place of wine, women, and song. And here is the 19th century Irish song (and the lyrics), performed by The Dubliners.

Arriving to Tyneside from the south by road, on the A1, a huge sculpture suddenly comes into view on the outskirts of Gateshead. This is the iconic Angel of the North, by Sir Antony Gormley, which was erected in 1998.

We took a close look at it in November 2018, but have not been back since we moved to the northeast.

My final landmark is Grey’s Monument in Newcastle city center. If you travel there by Metro, you are immediately confronted by the 133 foot (41 m) column as you emerge from Monument station.

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey

It was erected in 1831 in recognition of Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey, [of supposed Earl Grey tea fame] Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1830 to 1834. In particular, it celebrates the passing of the Great Reform Act of 1832, one of Grey’s most important legislative achievements. The act reorganised the system of parliamentary constituencies and increased the number of those eligible to vote.

It certainly dominates the Newcastle skyline. Open to visitors, there are 164 steps to climb to the viewing platform. The views south from the top must be spectacular over Newcastle’s impressive Georgian architecture on Grey Street and Grainger Street, but that’s not something I’m likely to challenge.

Tyneside and so much of the surrounding region has so much to offer any visitor. English Heritage and the National Trust own a number of properties close by, and further out there is the magnificent coastline of Northumberland and County Durham, as well as the moors and hills stretching westwards to the Scottish border and into Cumbria.

 

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Klaus Lampe, IRRI’s fifth Director General, passes away at 92

Dr Klaus J Lampe was the Director General of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, serving one term from 1988 to 1995. He succeeded Professor MS Swaminathan as Director General.

Yesterday we heard the sad news that he had passed away in hospital in Germany on 6 February, aged 92.

Born in Freiburg in 1931, Klaus Lampe grew up in Nazi Germany, and he once described to me the horror of escaping the fire storm following Allied bombing.

He was an agricultural engineer, spending time in Afghanistan from 1965 to 1968, and thereafter he held various agricultural development aid positions back home in West Germany.

His appointment at IRRI in 1988 was the beginning of the institute’s renewal. Just shy of its 30th anniversary the institute was beginning to show its age. Its infrastructure was in dire need of refurbishment and enlargement to allow the institute to address several new research challenges, particularly in the areas of biotechnology and molecular biology.

And with a mandate to revitalise IRRI’s research strategy and program, Klaus adopted a matrix management system (alluded to in this post) with five research programs setting the specific research agenda on one side of the matrix and divisions (the organizational units where research was carried out) on the other.

He encouraged several long-term staff to retire or seek pastures new, and set about recruiting a new (and younger) cohort of staff. I was part of that recruitment, as head of the newly-formed Genetic Resources Center (GRC), with special responsibility for the genebank.

Meeting Dr Lampe and his wife, Annemarie, at an IRRI reception shortly after my arrival at IRRI in July 1991.

In addition to the innovative management that brought focus to IRRI’s research and refurbishment of the institute’s buildings, Klaus’s other achievements included his sincere engagement (not always successful) with suspicious NGOs in the Philippines and more widely across Asia as IRRI developed its biotechnology agenda (supported by the Rockefeller Foundation), and the adoption of new rice breeding objectives, particularly the so-called New Plant Type and hybrid rice. Certainly IRRI began to feel like a re-energised institute.

Klaus Lampe with US Ambassador to the Philippines, Frank G Wisner, Gurdev Khush, principal plant breeder, and agronomist Ken Cassman, discussing the ‘New Plant Type’.

When I interviewed for the GRC position (in January 1991), Klaus and I had a long discussion about the changes that he felt were needed to upgrade the genebank, known then as the International Rice Germplasm Center (IRGC), and how to integrate the operations of the International Network for Genetic Evaluation of Rice (INGER) and the Seed Health Unit into GRC. By the time of my arrival in Los Baños, it had been decided to retain the Seed Health Unit as an independent entity outside GRC.

I explained how important research on germplasm conservation and use was, and that I expected, if appointed, to add a research string to the activities of GRC. That had not been envisaged when IRRI advertised the GRC position in September 1990.

Once in post, Klaus supported my research plans for the genebank. I also pushed enthusiastically that the genebank should benefit substantially from the investment being made in the refurbishment around the institute. After all, I chided him, if the genebank was the jewel in IRRI’s crown, so to speak, it was only fair that management and Board of Trustees approved that investment. And he agreed.

We made major changes, adding a bespoke seed drying room, and reconfiguring many of the genebank facilities to increase the efficiency of genebank operations and bring them up to international standards. I was permitted to increase the number of staff to tackle the significant backlog of processing seeds for long-term conservation. And the majority of the staff positions were upgraded to reflect their increased responsibilities.

With Klaus’s support and commitment I was able to significantly enhance the genebank operations such that, in an external review around 1994, the genebank was described as a model for others to emulate. And for that I will remain forever grateful to him.

I had first come across Klaus Lampe in the summer of 1989 (maybe 1990). I was lecturing at the University of Birmingham, and had no intention then (or inkling even) of leaving, or that Klaus would  soon be my boss.

I was visiting Dr Jaap Hardon, head of the Dutch genebank (Centre for Genetic Resources, the Netherlands or CGN) in Wageningen. He invited me to attend a special university seminar one afternoon with guest speakers from two centers of the Consultative Group on International Agriculture or CGIAR: the Director General (I don’t remember his name) of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, DC, and Dr Klaus Lampe from IRRI.

Klaus was not a tall man, but he certainly stood out in a crowd, with his long flowing grey hair. Which reminds me of a story that former Chair of IRRI’s Board of Trustees, Dr Walter ‘Wally’ P Falcon recounted during his last report to the institute’s staff before he stepped down from the Board in the early 1990s.

Klaus and Wally Falcon at a meeting of IRRI’s Board of Trustees.

Although a member of the Board of Trustees when Klaus was appointed as Director General, Wally was not a member of the appointment committee, and did not meet Klaus until the next Board meeting. As Wally told it, he saw this man walking towards him, hair standing out, and he immediately thought, My God, they’ve appointed Beethoven!

Klaus, always supported by Annemarie (who predeceased him a few years back) encouraged visitors to IRRI, especially VIPs, and he was never short of a few words to say at the frequent receptions held at the IRRI Guest House.

Klaus and Annemarie at the despedida for Dr Ernie Nunn, IRRI’s Director for Operations and his wife (next to Annemarie).

One of the first VIP visitors I had to show around the genebank was Princess Sirindhorn of Thailand, in 1991, not long after I arrived in Los Baños.


One of my colleagues, Dr Bob Zeigler, a plant pathologist from CIAT in Colombia was appointed Program Leader for Rainfed Lowland Rice at the end of 1991. Bob became IRRI’s 9th Director General in 2005.

DG5 and DG9 together in 1991.

Klaus was a complex man. Exceedingly kind on the one hand, but he could be quite ruthless, and a number of staff fell foul of his displeasure, me included. So when he left IRRI in 1995, we didn’t exactly part the best of friends, although for much of the time we worked together, I had an excellent relationship with him.

I didn’t meet him again until early 2010 when he returned to IRRI to attend some of the institute’s 50th anniversary celebrations. I can’t say I was particularly keen to meet him again. But we did, and during one reception he approached me, taking me by the arm and steering me to a quiet corner of the room. Whereupon he apologized for how he had behaved towards me 15 years previously. We parted on good terms, and that’s exactly how I will remember him.

My former colleague Gene Hettel interviewed Klaus for his series of Pioneer Interviews, who spoke at length on the challenges he saw IRRI facing. Here’s a snippet from that interview.

Gene has also today published this obituary on the IRRI website.

 

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Let the mystery be . . .

Until quite recently, I’d never heard of American singer-songwriter Iris DeMent. I’ve since become quite obsessed with her music. She has quite an extraordinary voice, and a rare song-writing talent.

One evening, Steph and I were watching a compilation of programs from Transatlantic Sessions (on BBC Scotland via the BBC IPlayer), and Iris DeMent was featured from Series 1, Program 3, first broadcast in 1995.

Singing one of her own compositions, Let the Mystery Be, she was accompanied by members of the Transatlantic Sessions house band: American fiddle player Jay Ungar (composer of the well-known Ashokan Farewell), guitarist Russ Barenberg, mandola player Dónal Lunny, and accordionist Phil Cunningham. I believe the female bassist was Molly Mason.

She appeared on Transatlantic Sessions in the very first program (and the first featured performance) accompanying Emmylou Harris (whose music I came to appreciate in her collaboration with Mark Knopfler on the 2006 album, All the Roadrunning) on Wheels of Love, along with Irish singer Mary Black.

DeMent was born in 1961 in Paragould in northeast Arkansas, the youngest of 14 children, and now lives in rural southeast Iowa. Her music is a blend of folk, country, and gospel, often with a political theme. She has often dueted with folk-country singer-songwriter John Prine.

In Transatlantic Sessions Series 1, Program 4 DeMent sang one of her best compositions, Our Town, about one of her enduring themes: small-town America. Shetland fiddle virtuoso Aly Bain also figures in this version, as does a young dobro player Jerry Douglas (who would go on to co-host Transatlantic Sessions with Aly Bain in Series 2 to 6 between 1998 and 2013).

Here is another great song from Series 1, Program 6.

I did wonder whether DeMent had ever appeared on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, from the Fitzgerald Theater in St Paul, Minnesota, believing that her music was just the genre to feature in the show. I found this reference to an appearance from 2 November 2002. You can hear her singing at 14′:22″ and another composition, Mama’s Opry, at 51′:42″. Garrison Keillor said that DeMent was one of his favorite singers, whose songs he had performed many times.

Here is DeMent singing Mama’s Opry with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Matraca Berg (performed at the Grand Ole Opry?)

So what about Transatlantic Sessions? In my opinion, it was one of the best series to be broadcast from BBC Scotland. And as Aly Bain says by way of introduction, it brought together ‘. . . some of the best musicians from both sides of the Atlantic. No audience. Just the music‘.

We came late to the series, seeing Series 5 and 6 in 2011 and 2013 respectively, the previous four having been broadcast while we were living in the Philippines during the 1990s and 2000s. But since then, BBC Scotland has rebroadcast some compilations, hosted by North Uist singer Julie Fowlis and Irish singer Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh.

What a delight the programs were, and such talent on display – the best of Scottish, Irish and American music. Here’s a link to many of the videos from all six series. Enjoy!

 

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“One must be willing to release one’s mind and soul from one’s body to achieve ecstasy through music” (Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan)

As I wrote way back in February 2012 not long after I launched this blog, I have broad tastes in music: rock, pop, folk, country & western, classical (particularly Baroque and Chopin). There’s always music in our house, all hours of the day. And my listening experience has improved since I added an Echo Dot 5th generation to my office at Christmas.

Anyway, I was looking through my CD collection the other day (yes, I still hold on to more than 200 CDs although I play them much less frequently now since having access to streaming services like Spotify), and came across one that that took me right back to the 1980s.

I don’t remember why I happened to be home alone on that particular weekend afternoon. I’d switched on the TV and was surfing the small number of channels available then. I came across a program on the BBC aimed at its Asian audience. It was a concert by qawwali virtuoso Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan from Pakistan.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (1948-1997)

And only intending to check what was on each channel, I became immediately mesmerised by his performance with his backing singers, and watched the whole program.

One song in particular, Yeh Jo Halka Halka, caught my attention. It lasted over 18 minutes!

Here is that song, recorded in Birmingham in 1985:

And this is the version from the CD:

This is the English translation. Just click on the image for an enlarged version.

It made quite an impression on me, and I find myself returning to it from time-to-time.

Suffering from ill health (he weighed over 300 pounds or 137 kg) he travelled to London for treatment in August 1997, but suffered cardiac arrest just after arriving in the country.

His legacy is continued by family members.

 

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I’m a ‘glass half-full’ sort of person, but . . .

I’m an optimist. I like to keep a positive perspective and get on with my life with a sunny disposition.

But as we approach the end of January, the level in my glass has started to fall. Notwithstanding the appalling situations in Ukraine and the Middle East and the real possibility of a serious escalation of conflict, closer to home there’s definitely a feeling of malaise in the UK right now.

After 14 years of Conservative government, I think Shakespeare’s  ‘something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4) sums it up appropriately. Something has gone wrong very badly.

Just compare how Labour left the nation in 2010 when David Cameron led the Tories to victory in the General Election (propped up by the Liberal Democrats in coalition), to what the situation is currently under Rishi Sunak, or as I prefer to refer to him as ‘Rish! Pipsqueak‘ (the fifth Prime Minister since 2010).

Prime Ministers since 2010, clockwise from top left: Cameron, May, Johnson, Sunak, and Truss.

It began with an austerity package from which we have yet to recover, and from what I read just a few days ago, the justification for austerity measures was based on a flawed paper by two economists.

British mathematician Professor Hannah Fry spoke about this on her Instagram account, fryrsquared, and wrote: Just after the financial crisis, an influential paper called “Growth in a time of debt” was published, in which two Harvard profs used data to show that high levels of debt hurt a nations economic growth. The paper was cited at the G20, referenced by George Osborne and Paul Ryan and used as a justification for the global austerity movement. Except the conclusions were based on a pretty important spreadsheet error.

Then, the outright Conservative win in the 2015 General Election gave David Cameron the opportunity to hold the Brexit Referendum, and the country has been on the downward path ever since. Just see what the UK has lost as a result [1].

Theresa May replaced Cameron after he lost the Brexit referendum, and she in turn was ousted by clown Boris Johnson. Liz Truss lasted just 50 days (the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history) after Johnson departed in ignominy, when she almost crashed the economy with her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng.

When Rishi Sunak  (the first Prime Minister of Asian origin) replaced Truss (he had been Johnson’s Chancellor) I was not hopeful of much improvement in how the Tories governed, but at least he wasn’t Johnson or Truss.

But what a thin-skinned petty individual he has turned out to be. As vacuous as the rest of his party. I’m tempted to throw something at the TV the next time he says that what the government is doing is ‘the will of the British people’. He says there’s no appetite right now for a General Election (even though one must be held by the end of the year) yet the polls indicate otherwise. And the polls also show a majority (at around 60%) in favour of re-joining the European Union.

Then there’s the government handling of the immigration and its flawed Rwanda asylum plan to relocate those seeking to settle in the UK but cross the English Channel (La Manche) in small boats. Taxes are at their highest levels, the high cost of living has driven even more people into poverty, and Covid-19 inquiry that is revealing incompetence at the highest levels of government, corruption even, during the pandemic, and the appalling Post Office scandal that has blighted the lives of hundreds of sub-postmasters and postmistresses.

With Labour leading in the polls with a comfortable margin over the Tories, let’s hope that the General Election (whenever it’s called) brings the result so many desire. Oust the Tories and bring in a government that cares about this nation’s citizens, not just the privileged. Let’s wipe them out.

The prospect of Sir Keir Starmer (leader of the Labour Party) as the next Prime Minister doesn’t excite me particularly, but he will be a damn sight better than anyone the Conservative Party can offer up. But he does have, as far as I can tell, some competent colleagues around him. At least they’re not Tories.

What fills me with trepidation, however, is the real possibility that Donald Trump will regain the White House in November.

Once a cockwomble, always a cockwomble, as I wrote in June 2020.

I know we have more than enough shyster politicians here in the UK, but Trump takes the biscuit. Indicted 91 times, found guilty of rape, defamation, ordered to pay millions, and more trials pending, it’s hard to understand just why his MAGA following worships him. I’m sure he has absolutely no regard for those folks whatsoever.

And many of those around him in the Republican party have seemingly offered up their souls on the altar of Trump. Extraordinary!

A second Trump presidency does not bode well for the future, not for the USA where he’s already stated that he’ll be out for revenge, nor for the rest of the world.

I believe that Biden will win the popular vote, but could well lose the Electoral College. It could well be the same handful of states that push Trump over the line with EC votes. But if he loses – again – no doubt there will be more unrest as he once again claims fraud. He’s already laying the grounds for that eventuality.

The divisions in US society are going to be hard to heal. And does Trump care? Not one jot, as long as he benefits. What have we come to?

I can only wish/hope that he simply disappears off the scene.

[1] Edwin Hayward, author (of Slaying Brexit Unicorns) and political commentator, just published on his X feed (@edwinhayward) a list of 88 examples that Brexit has taken from us all, and which he states we might stand to gain again if we were to ever re-join the EU, subject of course to the agreement of existing members.

It makes depressing reading.

  • Full unfettered access to the largest trading bloc in the world. Not merely no tariffs, but no non-tariff barriers either. Bristol, Berlin or Barcelona all equally accessible. Sling your goods into a van, and go. No queues, no reams of paperwork.
  • Free trade deals with over 70 countries around the world, including Japan, Canada, South Korea, New Zealand and soon the Mercosur bloc in South America.
  • Frictionless borders (no more nasty queues) allowing for just-in-time manufacturing, and supporting millions of jobs in the auto industry, aerospace etc.
  • Wide open borders between Northern Ireland and Ireland, and between NI and GB, with no customs checks or extra paperwork needed.
  • Support for the Good Friday Agreement and the Irish peace process (NI benefitted from over 1.5 billion euro of PEACE funding from the EU between 1995 and 2020).
  • A stronger united front against the dangers of the modern world, such as a resurgent Russia. (Friends don’t tend to fight friends; this striving for peace was one of the founding impulses behind the precursor to the EU.)
  • Freedom for UK citizens to travel, work, study and retire anywhere in the EU. No more long queues at airports and ports. No more worries about keeping track of 90 days in every 180. No more worries around business travel. (Also solves the problems bands and musicians are experiencing when trying to tour since Brexit.)
  • Freedom for EU citizens to travel, work, study and retire in the UK.
  • Participation in the EU Single Energy Market, enhancing the resilience of our energy supply.
  • Intense scientific and academic collaboration, including access to grants, and knowledge pooling. Participation in Horizon 2020’s successor programme (Horizon 2020 was the world’s largest multinational research programme, and provided funding and assistance for over 10,000 collaborative research projects in the UK.)
  • Collaborative space exploration, and participation in the Galileo GPS satellite cluster, including access to its high quality military signal.
  • Driving licenses valid all over the EU. No need for international driving permits, or to carry an insurance green card. Car insurance valid all over the EU.
  • Multi-year pet passports which make travel with pets easy and cheap.
  • A simple, generous system of fixed compensation for flight delays and cancellations thanks to EU passenger rights.
  • European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) that grants access to healthcare in the EU free or at reduced cost, plus prescriptions at local rates.
  • EU-wide roaming (voice, texts and data) at home rates. No surcharges like the majority of mobile carriers have imposed since Brexit.
  • Access to your home content on streaming services (Netflix, Amazon Video, Spotify etc.) wherever you travel in the EU.
  • Participation in Erasmus student exchange programme, involving more than 4000 universities across 31 countries. In the past, more than 15,000 UK students a year took advantage of this.
  • Study in EU universities at cheaper local rates.
  • Enhanced consumer protections, including protections on cross-border shopping (i.e. ordering online from the EU and/or EU customers ordering from the UK).
  • Simplified VAT filing for firms selling to EU customers.
  • Cross-border tax collaboration, aimed at holding massive firms like Amazon and Facebook to account more than any one country acting alone could hope to.
  • Training courses for the unemployed, funded from the European Social Fund.
  • Disaster relief funding, such as the 60 million euro the UK received for flood relief in 2017.
  • Access to a court of last resort (the ECJ) that provides EU citizens with a means of holding their government to account.
  • Significant environmental protections (which act as a floor rather than a ceiling, i.e. individual EU members can’t diverge below EU standards, but can enhance them further).
  • Quicker access to safe/new medicines, thanks to a one-stop pan-EU medical testing regime.
  • A single system of chemical regulation (REACH) to improve human, animal and environmental safety around chemicals. (Since Brexit, firms have to register chemicals in parallel with both REACH and UK REACH if they want to sell to the UK and EU markets, adding cost and complexity to the process.)
  • Cooperation on security issues, and access to shared crime and terrorism databases.
  • Participation in the European arrest warrant, allowing for the speedy capture and extradition of criminals.
  • Participation in the EURATOM programme to ensure the ongoing availability of vital medical isotopes, including very short half-life radiologicals.
  • Financial support for rural areas (too long ignored by successive UK governments).
  • Better food labelling regulations, including from April 2020 the requirement to identify the country of origin of the primary ingredient in processed food, as well as the country of manufacture of the finished product.
  • EU funding to support the British film industry, theatre and music.
  • Free movement for musicians and instruments, bands and equipment, artists and materials etc., enabling a flourishing European culture scene.
  • Participation in the European Capital of Culture programme, which has previously given a boost to cities such as Glasgow and Liverpool.
  • The ability for service providers (e.g. freelance translators) to offer their services all over the EU on the same basis as to UK clients.
  • EU citizenship. It’s a real thing, separate to UK citizenship, and conveys certain additional rights and protections. All citizens of individual EU countries are also EU citizens, by virtue of their citizenship of an EU member state.
  • No additional VAT or duty payable on goods imported from the EU (so no unpleasant surprises when receiving packages purchased online).
  • Substantial venture capital funding, and access to start-up loans.
  • Legal protection of minority languages (e.g. Welsh).
  • Mutual recognition of academic and many professional qualifications, meaning anyone qualified in the UK or in an EU country can rely on their qualification anywhere within the EU.
  • EU-wide protection of foods of geographic origin (e.g. Melton Mowbray pork pies can only be made in Melton Mowbray). Since Brexit, a dual regime operates, so producers have to seek protection in the UK and separately in the EU, introducing new cost and complexity to the process.
  • No surcharges on credit card and debit card transactions (illegal under EU law). Since Brexit, UK customers have been subject to additional charges when purchasing from the EU (May be hidden by vendors, but still act to drive costs up).
  • EU structural funding (e.g. Liverpool received £2 billion for regeneration in the past) including the requirement to raise matched funds in order to boost effectiveness further.
  • Support for and encouragement of democracy in post-Communist countries.
  • A bigger presence on the world stage when facing economic giants such as the USA and China (the EU as a whole is a worthy third opponent in that triangular fight, and would be more so were the UK to ever re-join).
  • Products made or grown in the UK can be sold in over 30 countries without needing type approval, phytosanitary certificates or other costly red tape. (These are some of the processes UK exporters have faced since Brexit, driving up costs and extending delivery times.)
  • Strong legally enforced food hygiene standards, including prohibitions on chlorinated chicken, hormone-raddled beef, and GM crops. (Like the EU’s environmental protections, these are a floor not a ceiling. Individual EU states can go further. They just can’t erode their own standards below the EU minimum.)
  • Objective 1 funding for deprived areas and regions.
  • Financial passporting, allowing firms in the City of London to service clients all over the EU without having a local presence.
  • A legally enforced 14-day cooling off period on new timeshare agreements.
  • Mandatory minimum 2-year warranty period against goods being faulty.
  • Consular protection in countries outside the EU available from any EU embassy or consulate (if there’s no UK embassy present in the country).
  • Protection against discriminatory treatment when working in other EU countries: all EU staff from across the EU must be treated the same as local staff.
  • A secure baseline of worker protections, including limits on maximum hours worked, maternity leave periods etc. (We’re free to improve on them as much as we like, we just can’t erode local conditions below the EU minimums. Indeed, in many cases the UK has already gone further than EU law required. But there would be no danger of losing rights conferred by the EU, no matter what the UK government of the day decided.)
  • Minimum of 4 weeks of paid leave a year (introduced by EU in 1993, taken up by UK in 1998, and later extended to 28 days in 2009).
  • Right to land fish in any EU port (EU countries used to buy more than half of all fish caught by UK fishermen before Brexit), along with an easy process for declaring catches.
  • Access to a willing seasonal workforce to pick our fruit and vegetables (rather than heart-breaking scenes of millions of pounds of crops rotting in British fields during the cost of living crisis).
  • Guaranteed supply of medicines (we import over 30 million packs a month from the EU).
  • A major say in the running of the EU, with MEPs representing the UK in the European Parliament, British judges on the ECJ panel, etc. And of course the right to propose and amend new EU legislation.
  • A say in the setting of the multi-year EU budget, and on steering the EU’s priorities and its focus.
  • More influence on environmental issues, since EU law governs the behaviour of 27 countries.
  • Cleaner air, backed by the EU Air Quality Directive. In the past, the EU has successfully taken the UK Government to court for failing to meet its obligations. (The system’s not perfect, but it provides a lot more protection than our post-Brexit homegrown one claims to.)
  • Strong pan-EU intellectual property protection, including potential participation in the upcoming unified patent system which will enable firms to obtain a single patent valid across 24 (at first) EU countries.
  • Some of the highest toy safety standards in the world.
  • Protection of 500 bird species under legislation dating back to 1979, and enhanced in 2009.
  • Cleaner beaches, with stronger penalties for untreated sewage discharges than the toothless post-Brexit system.
  • Pan-EU regulators (food, chemicals etc.) that offer simplified testing regimes, since a single test is valid for all EU countries. Since Brexit, the UK has had to duplicate these functions locally, adding cost and complexity.
  • A more powerful presence on the world stage, thanks to 27 countries acting in unison. Not all the time or on all matters. But when it counted most, EU countries have shown a willingness to set aside differences and band together.
  • The right to vote (and stand as a candidate) in local and European elections in any EU country you happen to live in, under the same conditions as local candidates and local electors.
  • Right to communicate with EU institutions in any of 24 official languages.
  • The right to petition the European Parliament, either singly or jointly with others, on any matter within the EU’s fields of activity. This right extends to companies headquartered in EU countries, as well as to individuals.
  • Support for people with disabilities, including the European accessibility act (which mandates the accessibility requirements of various products and services) and the EU parking card.
  • The right to purchase services (e.g. hotel bookings, car rentals) online from anywhere in the EU at the same price as local buyers. Firms cannot discriminate their pricing by geography.
  • Ability to bring home anything you buy in another EU country without a customs declaration, so long as it is for your own personal use. (Think booze cruises, for one.)
  • Right to cancel and return the order of any product bought outside of a shop (e.g. online or by telephone) within 14 days, for any reason.
  • Strong data protection laws such as GDPR, that protect personal data maintained in any format (online, on paper, etc.) Include right to withdraw your consent for the processing of your data, and right to object to receiving direct marketing. Even firms based outside of the EU must abide by GDPR rules when processing the information of EU citizens.
  • Right to know what personal data a firm holds on you, within a month of requesting it. Info should be free of charge and in accessible format.
  • Strong right to be forgotten, obliging organisations to delete the personal data they have stored about you upon request.
  • Banks must charge the same for payments in euro across the EU as they do for the equivalent national transactions.
  • Insurance firms can sell their products all across the EU, without having to be established in every EU country they service.
  • EU citizens and firms can register .eu domain names (over 300,000 were lost to UK entities as a result of Brexit).
  • Enhanced human rights protection (especially against the State) through the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.
  • Broadcasters can obtain a single broadcasting licence that is valid across the whole of the EU, negating the need for TV networks to obtain licences country by country.
  • Regulation and reporting of CO2 emissions in new vans and lorries, with a monitoring and enforcement system that includes fines for manufacturers that fail to meet the specified targets.
  • Participation in the EU emissions trading scheme, which establishes total caps on emissions while allowing individual companies to buy and sell their emission allowances to meet changing requirements. This is more flexible than the post-Brexit system where there’s an EU trading scheme and a separate scheme for the UK market only.
  • Participation in the EU pandemic Early Warning and Response system (EWRS) that ties together governments and key agencies to combat cross-border health threats.
Hayward concludes his long thread with these final observations:
  • As a political entity, the EU is NOT perfect. No sensible commentator has ever claimed it was. But it operates to try and maximise the long-term interests of 27 member countries, rather than to further the electability of whatever political party happens to be in power in one.
  • This means that, all other things being equal, the decisions it takes end up being less damaging to fewer people than those taken by uncaring national governments (does that scenario sound familiar?)
  • Like it or loathe it, we are trapped by geography. Grab any globe, and you’ll see the UK hovering just off the EU mainland. EU countries are always going to be our nearest neighbours. So it makes all the sense in the world to try to take full advantage of that proximity.
  • Unfortunately, politicians of all stripes seem singularly lacking in sense right now. Let’s hope that will change.
  • And, beyond mere hope, let’s strive to see that it does.