The Countryman: Through the Seasons by Johnny Scott

Author:Johnny Scott [Scott, Johnny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781846893056
Publisher: Quiller Publishing
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Autumn

The Wheel Turns

The wheel of the seasons turns from summer to autumn in September. Daylight hours are inexorably shortening and in the cool early mornings mist hangs in the valley bottoms, grass is sodden with dew and every spider’s web glistens with tiny droplets of moisture. There is a massive drop in insect activity during the first weeks of the month, except among bees searching for the last available nectar, and wasps. Wasps spend all summer assiduously hunting smaller insects for their queen’s larvae, which, in return, provide a sugar-rich saliva on which the adults feed. Now that the breeding cycle is over, they search for any food containing sugar and, until cold weather kills them off, become an unpopular kitchen pest.

Insects die off and the familiar screeching and twittering of the previous four months suddenly ceases as swallows and house-martins depart on the long journey back to Africa. This cheery summer song is replaced by the yapping of geese flying in high skeins as they migrate to their winter feeding grounds. There is no more thrilling sound than that of the ‘Gabriel Hounds’ flying by moonlight above our farm in the Borders, on the last leg of their route from Svalbard to the Solway.

September is a magical month for sportsmen; wildfowl and partridge come into season on the 1st and salmon move into their upper beats, providing exciting back-end fishing. As the month progresses, most plants die back to their roots or turn to seed – thistles and rosebay willowherb, for example – leaving a few hardy specimens such as yellow toadflax, fleabane and bird’s-foot trefoil to add a little colour to hedgerows and damp places, while purple loosestrife, wild angelica and the invasive Himalayan balsam still flourish along river banks. The leaves of deciduous trees now become tinged with yellow, the winged seeds of sycamore, field maple and ash helicopter through the air, whilst acorns, beech mast and conkers in their spiky green shells litter the ground under oak, beech or horse chestnut trees.

Autumn’s bounty fills the hedgerows: with blackberries, rose hips, sloes, elderberries, crab apples and hazelnuts, which once were an important source of winter protein. From medieval times until the early nineteenth century, Holy Cross Day, 14th September, was traditionally Nutting Day, a festival when whole communities would disappear into the woods to harvest the nuts. Nutting Day was an opportunity for teenagers to escape the watchful eye of their parents and among the many myths and legends associated with this event, was the superstition that ‘the Devil goes a-nutting on Holyrood Day’. Apparently he was often disguised as an irresistibly charming gentleman, and was entirely to blame for ‘the Devil’s babies’, born the following June.

Nothing is more synonymous with autumn than the mushrooms, toadstools and other fungi that appear in woodland or old pasture during September, sprouting up among leaf litter, decaying stumps, the trunks of trees or simply emerging as jelly, oozing out of the ground. These prehistoric, parasitic growths, lacking the ability to

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