Summer

by Melissa Harrison

  There is no way of knowing when they will be back again, so I spent a good while watching them. They are fantastic in flight and very quick, darting about catching food and disappearing into their tunnel nest in the sand wall of the quarry. They have a clever trick, too. When they catch a bee, they rub its backside on a branch to get rid of the sting. They catch other insects too, including butterflies and I even got a photo of a bee-eater with a dragonfly in its mouth.

  Summer any year is fantastic but I will always think of this day when you say summer. It was an incredible experience from start to finish, and a day I will remember for ever.

  Zach Haynes, 2016

  The Aestival Season begins about St. Swithin’s day, July 15th, and continues till Michaelmas. It is on the whole the hottest season of the year, but the heat gradually declines, and towards the close of the period the nights begin to get cold, and the daily temperature to be much diminished. It is in this season, and particularly in August, that the most beautiful and picturesque skies are seen, and that small meteors most abound; the landscapes too have a peculiar softness of colouring not seen at any other time. As the Solstitial Period is called the early summer, so this season is called the late summer. If it set in with showery weather the chances are that the greater part of the period will be showery, and hence the popular proverb which ascribes forty days’ rain to St. Swithin. When the weather is fair in this season the mornings often become gradually more and more obscured by the stratus of the foregoing night.

  One remarkable circumstance in this season is the silence of the grove, nearly every bird ceasing to sing, and continuing mute till near the close of the season, when they begin to sing a little again. Many birds now begin by degrees to congregate, and to form large flocks ranging the corn fields together. Starlings are flocked by the end of July, and Linnets by the middle of September; the Swifts leave us about the festival of the Assumption, Aug. 15th, and nothing but an accidental straggler is to be seen left behind.

  The fruits of the Aestival Period are delicious. Currants and Gooseberries get quite ripe about the beginning of July, and the various summer Pears, Apricots, Plums, Peaches, Nectarines, and Melons follow; it is indeed the season of fruits, and at no time does Pomona make a greater show than in this season, which before it closes exhibits the orchard in its perfection. In our climate the Vine is not yet productive of ripe Grapes, but in the south of Europe they are gathered early in September.

  The aestival Flora cannot be mentioned as the most beautiful of the year, though if well managed a great display of colours may be produced in the garden; the Dahlias, China Asters, French and African Marigolds, Chrysanthemums, Sunflowers, and a great variety of other syngenecious plants flower during this period, and many of them continue till late in autumn. In the fields the flowering of the yellow autumnal Dandelion Apargia autumnalis, gives to certain meadows the appearance of a second spring.

  Thomas Furly Forster, The Pocket Encyclopaedia

  of Natural Phenomena, published 1827

  In winter the castle is cold and grey, an empty memento of monarchs long gone. In spring the colours begin to soften and spread as trickles of visitors and occasional wedding parties bring back life and warmth and flowers start to bloom. By summer St Mawes is transformed as tourists and tour groups invade; but they are not the only visitors taking advantage of English Heritage’s hospitality. Pause the audio guide and look up. Blue iridescent streaks fly overhead, aerodynamic shapes darting from archway to nest and back again without a second thought for the people below: swallows, the returning kings of the castle.

  They are a brazen bunch. They do not respectfully hide out of sight or revere Henry VIII’s architecture; instead they make it their own and stretch their wings in the grounds, hunting insects by the amber illuminations that wash over their home, this beacon on the coastline. Campaigners for hirundines like swallows and martins will quickly tell you that the reason we see fewer and fewer of them these days is a lack of appropriate housing. In St Mawes the swallows highlight this fact by temporarily occupying one of the oldest, grandest buildings available, certainly grander than any property that a second-home owner could hope to find beside Falmouth Bay. It is the ideal place to raise their young because of the architecture, but also because of the insect life.

  It’s when they search for food that they treat St Mawes to the best views of themselves, and they go all out to give everyone a good show, skimming close to the ferries on the river, darting through the sheep field and dancing in the sky as they weave around chimneys and other birds. The odd hovering kestrel is encouraged to move on by a daring individual while other hungry mouths swoop overhead. You see, while the swallows may be the kings of the castle, there is also a different colony nearby that is drawn to this waterside location for its ideal accommodation, great views and tasty local produce – that of house martins. Walk from the harbour to the castle on a sunny July evening and you will be greeted by them first, calling and feasting around the cottages. Eventually the swallows appear and the sky becomes truly alive with noise and activity as the two species weave between each other with speed and dexterity. Naturally, some of the humans below simply point up and say ‘Oh, look at the swallows,’ blind to the differences – such a shame for the handsome little bird that may not have its cousin’s colours and sleek shape but is arguably more attractive. And what about the swift? If the glimpse of a blue sheen and forked tail is the sight of summer’s arrival, then the scream of a swift has to be the sound. Then there is their shape and speed, the long boomerang that lets them glide high above the village fields, away from the drama at the castle, and always brings them swooping back around again.

  All summer the swallow chicks are growing and the evening flights are a common occurrence. By August the noise and frenzy are slowly dying down and the tourists have grown used to sharing the space, but they have yet to master the art of capturing these birds on film. Just as you think you have one coming into view and in focus, it tricks you and changes direction. As the village and its summer visitors gather on sea walls and in fields to marvel at the annual display of the Red Arrows over Falmouth Docks, they are treated to a warm-up act of avian acrobatics, only this display of speed and agility has become so frequent that just a handful of us still stop to look up and admire it.

  Just as soon as we have got used to their presence, they are thinking about departing. Juveniles move from the nest and adults, a job well done, embark on a solitary journey, seemingly abandoning the brood to fend for themselves. It is an ongoing pattern of Cornwall to Africa, back and forth, this year only momentarily broken by an evening catching insects over a ‘Colorado saloon’, the humans having been drawn into the castle grounds by the travelling theatre and the moths by the theatre’s lighting. If you are lucky, in those final weeks you can see a bemused fledgling perched nearby, a little downy feather here or there, looking at its enormous summer residence and contemplating the even longer journey ahead. Up the hill adults linger in long lines on telephone wires, finally providing that ideal photographic opportunity for those who have had the patience to wait for it.

  Before we know it the last of the swallows will have gone, the skies around St Mawes Castle will become quiet again and the tide of visitors will ebb away. We will head into the autumn of occasional sunny weekends and history field trips for the new school classes, then back into the emptiness of winter, when the castle, for ever imposing against the south-west skyline, silently awaits the return of its avian kings next summer.

  Dawn Bradley, 2016

  Here

  Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows

  And traffic all night north; swerving through fields

  Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,

  And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields

  Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude

  Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,

  And the widening river’s slow presence,

 
The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,

  Gathers to the surprise of a large town:

  Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster

  Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,

  And residents from raw estates, brought down

  The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,

  Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires -

  Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,

  Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers –

  A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling

  Where only salesmen and relations come

  Within a terminate and fishy-smelling

  Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,

  Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;

  And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges

  Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges,

  Isolate villages, where removed lives

  Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands

  Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,

  Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,

  Luminously-peopled air ascends;

  And past the poppies bluish neutral distance

  Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach

  Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:

  Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

  Philip Larkin, 1964

  The coast has a special place in Britain’s natural history. We celebrate our coasts as part of our maritime history and culture, but they are also one of the last places where we can truly experience wild nature, from the phenomenal sea states our winter storms serve up to the pleasure of experiencing a warm moment on a sheltered cliff-side in early spring, where the year’s first brimstone butterfly might appear. Summer at the coast, though, has the power to dazzle us, to knock us down with its beauty, to inspire us and fill us with life.

  In 1989 – a glorious, hot, dry summer, with day after day of endless sunshine – I was in the West Country, and as part of my Masters degree I was searching for a very obscure and rare plant: the shore dock, a woody member of the dock family which could only be found, more or less, on the beaches of Devon and Cornwall. Visually unbecoming, but fascinating in its ecological lunacy, it is very long-lived, requires a constant supply of fresh water, but its seeds depend on the tide and the sea itself to disperse. It germinates on bare ground created by storm or stream, ground that inevitably disappears as other plants colonise it. The shore dock is therefore forced to adopt the lifestyle of a marine wanderer, appearing in one place for a few years, then being scoured out by a winter storm and popping up elsewhere.

  I spent that glorious summer living in a static caravan. As the weeks of sun sped past, and holidaymakers came and went, I was a small, fixed point amid their comings and goings. Each day my quest took me up, down, and along cliff paths, following fishermen’s tracks that disappeared into the bracken, taking precipitous drops down to little-visited coves and beaches dotted along the coast. There were bucket-and-spade seaside beaches along which I strode purposefully, clipboard in hand, followed by curious and quizzical children with plastic buckets and spades. Many beaches had been rendered inhospitable to the shore dock: those where streams were culverted, or where cliffs of slumping clay had been tamed, revetted, or clothed in concrete. I discovered that it was beaches which were hardest to reach, with the steepest, slippiest paths, where shore dock survived best. Some, not entirely coincidentally, were also nudist beaches, and as I clambered around with my camera and binoculars I would studiously try to avoid eye contact.

  While searching for this obscure plant I found myself, almost by osmosis, learning the other plants of cliffs and beach, of oozing flush and strandline. I grew to appreciate the tenacity of the common reed, which could, with its spreading carpet of roots, create a stable soil from the flotsam washed up and deposited on the beach in winter storms. It was always a pleasure to find the diminutive brookweed, which seemed to relish the challenge of finding the thinnest ledge of a tide-washed rock-face on which to grow. There seemed some affinity between the brookweed and the shore dock, as discovering the small white-flowered brookweed seemed to presage discovering a new population of dock – or at least that’s how it seemed at the time. Perhaps I had found a totem, a floral talisman, which would help me with my search.

  My search took me into another world: the world of plants and their communities, one which I have never, since then, quite left. From time to time I still pay a visit, and give my respects to the wild places where the shore dock lives. I’ll continue to do that as long as my knees allow me to descend those vertiginous fishermen’s paths.

  Miles King, 2016

  I was on my way into town when I first saw them stumbling out of a hedge onto the street. It was a sunny morning, still and close and about to become hot later. There had been days of this: an uncharacteristically hot and clammy July, not like recent British monsoon summers, although there was a shower last week. Nothing unusual on the street: some morning shoppers buying veg from under the Guildhall, cakes from the baker’s, queuing outside the butcher’s, fetching newspapers; a few visitors taking photographs, walking dogs; swifts gangling over the bell tower, jackdaws in churchyard trees and the yaffle, a green woodpecker, shouting at sheep in fields beyond the priory. The town was behaving normally for a sunny Saturday morning, oblivious to the metropolis about to spill out from under its hedges and pavements. All I needed from the ironmonger’s was some 13 amp fuses, perhaps symbolic of an electrifying moment about to spark up. I rushed back to check my own back garden. They were there too, the pismires: piss because their colonies drenched in formic acid smell like urine and more from the Latin name for ant. They were flying ants.

  This was the moment, at least a moment, when quite separate ant colonies synchronised their nuptial flight. In this case, the distance between my garden colony and the one I’d seen under the hedge in town was about 100 yards. There would be others scattered around too, perhaps in other towns, other counties, doing the same thing. At the edge of our garden path, under a fringe of red deadnettle, the black ants were pouring out of the nest. At first they were all piling on top of each other as if in panic, a scrabbling, chaotic, mass. It appeared haphazard at first but it soon became obvious that it was organised and purposeful. Tiny worker ants were running protectively around the perimeter while many others seemed to be coaxing the alates – the winged offspring – into the light. First came the drones – the tiny winged males – then the gynes or virgin queens emerged, twice the size of the drones. They all appeared to blunder around drunkenly together until they got the idea of climbing up the plant stems. There was no hanky-panky before take-off, perhaps an obvious strategy to prevent interbreeding, but how these things are determined is a mystery known only to the swarm mind.

  The theory is that nuptial flights are triggered by weather fronts creating warm, still flying conditions a few days after rain has softened the earth for queens to burrow into and start new colonies. This is certainly true this year: it is still, warm and humid. In recent years the idea of Flying Ant Day – when all the black ants swarm at once – has been extended into several days in July and August perhaps because the kinds of weather fronts the ants need have been disrupted by other fronts bringing rain. In 2012, a survey carried out by the Society of Biology listed 6,000 reports of flying ants over a two-week period in Britain. In the hot but sporadic summer of 2013, there were four separate flying ant days, the first in June and the last in September. This summer it seems the ants ‘know’ there is better weather and what’s more they’ve been preparing for it.

  Each nuptial flight involves many colonies and many millions of individuals. How they all perceive ideal weather conditions and act upon it together on the same day suggests communication and planning. A black ant colony can contain 15,000 workers, although smaller colonies of 4,000–7,000 are more co
mmon. This Shropshire market town has a population of around 3,000 people in an area of a few hectares. If there was only one black ant nest for each of the 1,400 households, it would mean, at a very conservative estimate, a population of 5,600,000 ants occupying the same space as the people. In reality the total black ant population would be many millions more and, until the nuptial flight, coexist almost invisibly with the human inhabitants. Natural phenomena can still arouse fierce passions. Confronted by something they don’t understand and which strikes them as weird, disgusting and on their doorstep, a common response is for people to reach for the Ant Doom – destroy complete ant colonies without trace . . . discrete and easy to use – or pour a kettle of boiling water over the seething insects. Catering for this impulse to annihilate the other population of our town, the ironmonger sells a large selection of weapons of mass destruction: smoke bombs, electrocution devices, poison pens, sprays, powders, granules, swats.

  I find swarms fascinating, a collective consciousness, like watching a mind thinking. My wife Nancy and I were walking on Wenlock Edge, trying to decide whether to buy a house here when we jokingly agreed we would make the decision based on a sign. Within half an hour we were engulfed in the roar of a thousand wings as a swarm of bees passed overhead and gathered in the branches of a beech tree. We walked right through the swarm; it was electrifying and strangely humbling. We bought the house. Of course I’ve been stung many times by wasps, occasionally by bees and once had a painful run-in with a swarm of white-faced hornets in America. I have watched murmurations of starlings and clouds of bats in awe. I sympathise with poor farmers enduring a locust migration of biblical proportions but see in the plague a savage beauty. Even more terrifying, I have seen colonies of bacteria swarm into infection or disease proportions under a microscope but feel oddly inspired by them. I don’t think this is necessarily a perverse reaction yet it does run counter to the revulsion of the swarm shared by many in Western society. However, human social attitudes, particularly to social insects, are ambiguous.