Guiting Power

Recently, with R's help, I've been trying to knock a few things off my worry list. For several weeks I'd been fretting (in a pretty low-key way, admittedly) about the ride-on mower, which we were told to run at intervals throughout the winter, but hadn't - and when it finally hit the top of my list last week, and I tried to start it, almost inevitably it turned out to have a flat battery. R then realised that his battery charger pre-dated our relationship (I'm sure there's a metaphor there somewhere, but perhaps fortunately I can't quite pin it down), so he went to Halfords and bought a new one. And happily, once its battery was recharged, the mower started - albeit a bit reluctantly. The other thing we'd been told to do was not to leave E10 fuel sitting unused in it for any length of time, though of course we'd done that as well - but I had at least remembered to run the tank down to nearly empty last autumn. Yesterday we topped it up with some fresh E5, at which point it started quite promptly and ran perfectly well, so before going off to the owl field I rattled round the top garden and did a high cut, and then patted myself metaphorically on the back and drew a red line through "mower" on my mental list.

This morning the top item on the list was "rose" - this being a Banksia rose that I found, many years ago, self-seeded into the gravel of the back yard, and which once I'd given it some soil to get its feet into turned out to have Putinesque ambitions of territorial expansion. This would surprise me more than it does if I hadn't seen one once in Stow-on-the-Wold, climbing across the roof of a cottage. Over the years we've made various attempts to contain the beast, but last summer it got completely away from us and almost killed a mature hawthorn by swamping it. As I've tried - and failed - a few times now to kill the odd unwelcome self-seeded hawthorn, I can attest to this being a near-impossibility, so I'm reluctantly admiring of the rose for having got so close. Anyway, I checked the hawthorn yesterday and found that it was budding, so this morning we set to work on the rose, and cut the whole thing back to about six feet. To be honest I hadn't thought that we'd get it all done in one session, but my little Stihl battery-powered chainsaw made light work of the stems, even though some of them were by now closer in size to small trunks. Ripping the shoots out through the hawthorn canopy was more challenging - especially as some of them were at least twelve feet long, and both rose and hawthorn are quite viciously thorned - but with R doing most of the heavy work, we managed it. 

R then went back to his Sisyphean task of digging brambles out of the flower beds, while I did a little bit of work in the wild garden, pruning the quince tree and cutting up a huge limb that came down off a Bhutan pine in one of the recent storms. After this we sat for a while over coffee and biscuits, chatting and feeling very self-righteous. And then I went owling - which was the point at which the day fell apart. To be fair, I couldn't really have predicted the dearth of bird movement up on the scarp - it was brighter today than yesterday, a tiny bit warmer, and (at least in theory) barely any windier. But in reality the wind was vicious, and as we know, the owls don't care for it, so they stayed tucked up in their tussocks, while the owling crew (who also don't care for it) stood around with gritted teeth, and a mounting feeling that this was going to be a Bad Day. The further the afternoon wore on, the more I wished that I'd stuck on yesterday's good owls, and not pushed my luck on a twist.

Driving home in the dusk with virtually nothing on the camera, I annoyed quite a few commuters by stopping at the roadside and leaping out of the car whenever a Red Kite hove into view, but they slipped away on the wind every time before I could get any decent shots, so I might as well have saved us all the aggravation. The last of these stops was on the hill above Guiting Power, where after missing a mini-murmuration I thought I'd better rattle off a few landscape frames. Guiting Power is a more interesting village than this image would lead you to believe; you can read about it here and here, if you'd care to. One day when the owl season is over I'll make the effort to find out the location of the nature reserve, and check it out.