Roots do not hold you down (Hedge wisdom)

JOURNAL ENTRY

2^nd September, Saturday

“At the edgings of the day.
A delinquent V of geese
Transect a sinking sun.
As they reappear
Another flight has joined them.
They continue in a loose straggle
North.

A cool whisper of air
As we round the base of the hill.
Distant voices float across the water.
As the sun sinks below the west
The chant of jackdaws.”

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

August's blue moon is now on the wane and rises fat and low in the east. The day slowly bloomed into summer and has left us with a tropical polished sky of deepening inky blues. This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into the darkness of a still September night to you wherever you are.

I am so glad you have come and are here to share such a beautiful star-full night. The kettle is on, the welcome is warm. Step aboard and make yourself at home. Welcome aboard.

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS  

It appears that summer has returned – for a few days at least. Today was bathed in sunshine and heat and the forecast promises a few more days of it to come and that the temperatures are set to raise even higher. It is good to feel the soapy warmth of sunshine on your shoulders – even if schools are going back and the calendar’s divisions clicks from summer to autumn (at least as far as the Meteorological calendar is concerned).  

September, as our old friend Miles Hadfield writes:

[READING]

I couldn’t have put it better myself, Miles. The hedgerows here along the towpath are brimming and bustling. Still for the most part full and green, but now lit by black and scarlet lanterns. The heavy snowy drifts of hawthorn blossom have been transformed into dense and heavy cluster of red haw berries (or ‘thorn haws’ as Miles Hadfield describes them). A little further down the canal, where we were tied up last week, the branches were so thick and heavy with fruit they were hanging low. Blackberries and sloe, on the other hand, seem rather patchy – particularly sloe (around here at least).  

On the boat the last couple of weeks has been taken up with grabbing the opportunity offered by a few days of dry and pressing on with the jobs we were hoping to have completed by July. The main one has been de-rusting, preparing and re-painting the gas locker. It’s outside and so very dependent of the weather. It’s a horrible job. I would go so far as to say, if you are like us and do not own a macerator toilet, that it is THE worst job on the boat – repainting the engine bay being a very close second!

The gas locker is where we carry our Calor gas containers which supply our oven and hob. Although not always the case, most narrowboats have them fitted right at the very front in the bow of the boat. It makes sense as that is where you want the weight to be – partly to offset the weight of the engine at the back (the stern) – and which makes the boat far easier to handle. The locker is accessed through a hinged hatch at the top and for some reason the hatch is nearly always only just wide enough to lower a 13kg bottle of Calor gas through. When full, they are HEAVY! Again, like most boats, we carry two of these containers – one for use, one for spare. This makes taking out a used bottle and replacing it with a new one a real pain! One of the stipulations is that the gas locker, unsurprisingly needs to be free of rust. However, in a boat subject to all the extremes of weather, rusting is almost inevitable.

What is really horrible about the job is that unless you are a double-jointed, contortionist, acrobat it is the sheer inaccessibility of it. It wouldn’t be too bad if you could crawl inside it, but the opening of our locking is just too small for me to fit my shoulders through – even at a diagonal. I also am finding that the older I get the more claustrophobic I am becoming. When I was a lad, I used to love squeezing through the tightest spaces. At some point, I was given by an uncle – whose relatives were coal miners and real-life 100% genuine hard-lever miner’s helmet. I used to clamp it to my head with the help of the industrial strength elastic that mum used for mending my school shorts. I had Sellotaped an old bicycle lamp to the front that tended to make it front heavy. And so fitted with batteries purloined from various toys I would embark on the most tortuously confined adventures. My major claim of fame was to be able to traverse the entire length and breadth of the underside of my bed without touching the floor – which might not seem like much of an achievement if you had not seen how much stuff I could stuff under my bed! However, unfortunately those days are long gone and tight spaces begin to make me itch and feel uncomfortable.

This means that the only way to work on the locker is from hanging in upside-down in through the locker opening. Even then, there are still crooks and crannies just out of reach. Donna’s ingenious solution of fixing a paintbrush to a broom handle with elastic bands made short work of them. Nevertheless, we both have aches where aches weren’t even designed for, but now – barring a further coat on the base – easier to reach – for added reinforcement, that job is done. We still have some more jobs that we want to get done while the weather holds – the universal truth of boat maintenance is that the list of jobs to be done is inversely proportional to the number of jobs you complete. But at least those are all under cover and so it is not such a problem if we do get rain.  

All this reminds me of something that I have been thinking about for the last couple of weeks. I am aware that in the earlier episodes of this podcast I would often get questions about living on a boat or – actually more generally – about the canals (can you turn round on a canal or do you have to go right to the end, how deep is a canal, those sort of questions). I am aware that since then we have many more new listeners and it strikes me that you might have some questions you would like to ask. From time to time, I also get asked questions from listeners who are either thinking about moving from bricks to water or who are planning on booking a holiday on the UK canals. I sort of miss that close interaction, therefore, in a couple of weeks’ time I am planning to do an episode that is based around any questions that you want to ask.

Your questions can be on life aboard, the canals in general, or questions about the podcast and/or specific episodes or themes I have covered. If there are enough, I might spread them out and split them into two different episodes one on boat-life and the canals and one on the podcast.   

So, if you have a question then drop me a line on nighttimeonstillwaters@gmail.com or got to the noswpod.com website and click on the contact form or record a voice mail by clicking on the microphone icon. Alternatively you can leave a comment or message me via Facebook page, Instagram, Mastadon (@nosw@mastodon.world), or X (formerly Twitter) – all the details are in the programme notes below. I have also hyperlinked the transcript.

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

ROOTS DO NOT HOLD YOU DOWN (HEDGE WSDOM)

I have left the horses behind, contented in their grazing. The vegetation is still dew-wet. My boots glisten, turning into small silos of brown seed heads that stick to the leather uppers. The bottoms of my trousers cling to my ankles. Damp leaches up to my knees. I can see what those who made this trail cannot; the fields around, the flash of light glancing off the canal through the screen of trees and shrubbery, the line of hedge wallowing down in the shallows and the other one, cresting the skyline. Hawthorn thick and bushy. The old grandmother tree, mishappen, ragged, her old oak-like profile has been long ago eroded and dissolved by the waters of time. Up a bit from her, the first of the convocation – young still (in oak years), vigorous. The poster boy of oaks. The kind of oak you will find illustrating the Ladybird Book of Trees.    

It’s the hedge that always draws my eye. The scraggy bolster of hawthorn, ash and oak. Along the canal length, heap a rolling boisterous tangle of bramble, falling over itself in its uncontainable enthusiasm for life – sprung arms of thickly-thorned limbs hugging itself. It is interspersed with nettle and reed, flag and loosestrife. Thrown perfect yellow stars of St John’s wort, decorate a hummock just out of its reach. The hedge borders me on three sides. In winter it follows the contours of the field, but the touch of Spring brings magic and it bursts upward, billowing skyward, cut loose from the laws of geography and geology. It paints the skyline with new contours of its own. Spring and summer can do that – remind us that we are not simply earthbound creatures. We belong to the sky too. Roots do not hold us down.

Hedges bristle with song. Goldcrests chattering like troops of monkeys, wagtails strut and wag, dunnocks and sparrows bustle, and of course the wren’s disconcertingly loud call. Young corvids scrabble from branch to branch, blackbird and thrush balance on the top, surfing the motionless green cresting wave of vegetation.

As much as fields can be fun, it’s the hedges that is where things happen. Perhaps that is why hedges increasingly draw me. Although it is also something about that they are edge-lands – margins, liminal spaces. The sort of places I feel most comfortable in. Spaces where identities merge. Spaces where labels and badges have no place.

 If you want to see action in the countryside, counsels Tristan Gooley, look to the hedges and edge-lands. In Wild Signs and Star Paths he writes:

[READING]

It's good advice. Good advice for spotting wildlife, but it also good advice for finding wisdom. A stream of wisdom that flows outside the mainstream, a non-canonical wisdom. To use neuroscientist, psychologist, and writer Sharon Blackie’s description; “It’s a wild, loamy wisdom, unbound but deeply rooted.”  

I love what she writes about hedges and ‘hedge wisdom’ in her book The Enchanted Life.

[READING]

 Hedge wisdom – I love that. It neatly maps onto John Moriarty’s notion of bog-soul.

In his later life, it was always one of Moriarty’s driving ambitions to set up – or more accurately, to re-establish – the hedge school. It was something that I had not come across before and initially thought that it was something conceived in John’s ever inventive mind. However, I went on to find out that hedge schools had a long history in rural Ireland (Blackie also mentions them). They arose as the result of the suppression of education and schooling in Ireland under the Protestant English rule. This saw the legislating of schooling to be open only to those of Protestant faith. Secret and illegal hedge schools (sometimes also referred to as dissenting schools) began to form, first under Cromwell, but then which saw a flowering of them in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. These were schools that were literally held under hedges.

One of the earliest accounts is provided by the Irish writer William Carleton who in 1830 published ‘The hedge school’ as part of his three volume work Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry.

[READING]

 It was under the sheltering cover of hedges that Catholic children and those too poor to attend schools were educated. Freely, abundantly, and subversively. Reading about these little groups and now standing here beside this hedge so vibrant with the fiery cherry reds of haw and hip, the image seems so apt. I too find myself wishing that education was a little more like this – not the cruelty or suppression, the fear and the discomfort, but something open, free, abundant and rooted in the soil. I find myself wanting to bring in this clayey-soil into the classrooms and lecture theatre on the souls of my boots – but realise the housekeeping department will not love me for it. To talk to the students not just about tropes of seeding growth in ancient literature, but to teach them the different ways that they can plant their food and see it grow in front of them. A few years ago, for Green Week someone from the estates team made hundreds of little wooden planters from old palettes. Compost soil and hundreds of packets of seeds were provided and anyone who wanted to do so could plant their own herb garden. There were a lot of takers, but it was startling to learn for how many that this was the first time that they had ever planted seeds. One young woman, very carefully made a little hole in the soil with which she had filled her planter, and then tipped the entire packet of parsley into the hole. I find myself restless. Yes, we are in desperate need a bit of hedge in our education. 

It is easy to romanticise about these schools – reports on them vary, their effectiveness, the quality of teaching they provided. And Carleton appears to be unabashed in his praise for them – something particularly surprising given his general anti-Catholic stance. He even goes so far as to contend:

[READING]

Even Carleton had to concede that the general perception of such schools was pretty poor and even morally suspect, hence, in part, for his writing of such a eulogetic apology for them.

 Nonetheless, there are lots of contemporary accounts of men and women, facing prison if they were found, selflessly sharing their education, their knowledge, and importantly their wisdom on to the next generation.  John Moriarty’s biographer, Mary McGillicuddy, notes that John’s grandmother was educated through this wild and informal school and that her family had long associations with it.

These hedge schools (the actual term first emerges in the early 18^th century) were in fact just a newer form of older system; the Bardic schools. These arose from an earlier crisis of oppression and occupation – some arguing that they go as far back as the druidic period and served a way of keeping old wisdom and lore alive under Roman occupation. Later these evolved into places committed to the retention and development of Irish language, Gaelic literature, keeping alive their sense and perspective of history, and, importantly Brehon law. Liminal, dissenting. Systems of education that ran outside (sometimes even counter to) the main thoroughfares – liminal, untameable, exhibiting the characteristics of those that dwell within the hedge-ways.  

Education has and will always be a slippery political snake to handle – as anyone in education can tell you! Education like hedges contain both light and shade; you live with both with care!

But it has always been there, this wisdom of the byways and hedges, handed down in informal ways, often by word of mouth, rhyme and story. A wisdom that shows the pathways on how to live in this world. Not according to the received wisdom of those who have lost their way and no longer can remember the taste of dew on their lips or the haunting depth of the robin’s song – but which, like these desire-paths I have been following – is untamed, wild, spontaneous in its deep knowledge and experience of the land. That knows how to hug low across the landscape’s riding contours, but also bursts upward, free, able to create honey-scented new lines, new skylines. Creative, uncontained. 

SIGNING OFF

This is the narrowboat Erica signing off for the night and wishing you a very restful and peaceful night. Good night.

WEATHER LOG