On Pendle Hill

What use is winter other than for firesides, mulled wine and stories?

On August 20 1612, ten people were hanged at Lancaster Castle for the murder by witchcraft of seventeen people. They are known the world over as the Pendle Witches.
What is not so well known is that Old Chattox (Anne Whittle), Old Demdike (Elizabeth Southerns) and her grandaughter Alizon were jolly keen gardeners……….and still are!

All Hallows Eve 2006 – Part One

Old Demdike smoothed out her black smock. Her ‘familiar’ Tibbs, (at sundry times a fox or a hare or a little boy with black and brown jerkin), lay, now in the form of a black labrador, curled up cozily in front of the big log fire in the drawing room of Malkin Tower.

Old Chattox stood by the west window gazing through the smokey leaded panes out onto the side of Pendle Hill where a procession of men, women and children carrying ridiculous looking brooms and lanterns snaked their way up the winding path to the summit. Alizon came over to stand and watch. The children, pinkfaced in the wind, jumped out at each other from the rocky outcrops hooting and wailing and letting out piercing screams of delicious fright.

‘All Hallows’, muttered old Demdike, dipping into the fireside cauldron for another glass of warm spiced wine, ‘tis the same every year now’. Alizon turned from the window to face her grandma. ‘Do they celebrate our deaths then….up there?’

‘Them?’ Old Chattox snorted derisively, ‘they celebrate nothing!’ ‘Look what they do at Yuletide; they see nothing; feel nothing. They care even less.’

‘True enough’, old Demdike sipped her wine and scratched behind Tibbs ear. ‘Whither tonight then – this All Hallows?’




A shower of sparks drifted up as burning logs shifted and resettled. Alizon came over to squat beside Tibbs and pull his silky black ears, which he loved. She watched the sparks rise and settle on the sides of the chimney creating patterns of glowing, dancing red spots on the sooty face of the bricks. She threw on another log to make more sparks rise. Tibbs transformed into his boy form, sitting up and squatting companionably at Alizon’s side to watch with her, his blond hair glowing red-gold in the firelight. ‘I want to go back to Lancaster’, he said, his hand creeping into Alizons lap to hold hers. ‘It’s been long enough’.

‘Tosh’, grumbled Chattox, turning from the window and forking her fingers, ‘long enough is not long enough. I can still feel the rope round me neck!’ She walked to the fireplace joining the others and fingered a not-forgotten tightness at her throat.

‘394 years’, said Tibbs, ‘you miss mortality so much, still?’

Demdike watched Chattox approach over her gently steaming wine glass.
‘The mortals were stupid then and they are stupid now…..the centuries do not change that’. She gestured to the lantern lit procession on the hill outside. ‘Perhaps no more stupid there than they are here’.

‘Aye’, Alizon agreed, squeezing Tibbs hand, ‘we cursed that city well enough ‘er we left and some are there now that have learned and not a few that can SEE.’ Tibbs smiled now, encouraged by Alizons support. ‘And’, added Tibbs, ‘owd Tom grows a fine big pumpkin’. He looked up at old Demdike with the question in his eyes for it was she who would decide.

Demdikes eyes were now fixed on the fireplace and she was silent. The flames glazed her eyes till she saw far beyond them. Presently she sighed, drained the last of her warm red wine, and putting the glass down said simply, ‘We’ll go then.’

Old Chattox said nothing. It was pointless to complain, and besides, she was curious to see the old place after all these years. She too had a soft spot for ‘owd Tom’ who was kind and generous and whose pumpkins did make the finest soup in Lancashire, east, west, north or south, and that was saying something.

Alizon stroked the witchwood of her broom and there came the sound as of a strong wind in a living tree and the ash and hazel twigs scratched together and quivvered in anticipation. ‘Do you follow?’ she said, turning to the still boy-formed Tibbs. ‘I will,’ said Tibbs. ‘With me then?’ Alizon asked. ‘No, I will fly,’ said Tibbs, reluctant to break his fireside reverie. Tibbs stirred, and as he rose, he transformed into a large raven who’s feathers seemed to absorb every last drop of the now dwindling firelight. His raven eye flicked from Alizon to Demdike to Chattox, now all mounted and ready. ‘Away then,’ he said, rising swiftly and soundlessly into the moonlight above Pendle hill, where below, the revellers now circled a blazing summit fire.

They saw nothing, as usual.

……........to be continued

'Ol Tom

I’d grown used to seeing him sat there between the shed and the greenhouse always gazing east across Hala beck and east again across the motorway that rumbles endlessly on, and east again across the Quernmore valley and then east again to who knows where? Not that gazing east is compulsory on our allotments, it’s just that if you’re prone to gazing, then that’s the direction to do it in. West would be boring….just a row of houses. North ditto. South…....a hedge. East has interest; a big sky; birds wheeling about above the beck; the felltops of Clougha and out over the Bowland forest to Amsterdam and beyond.

He sat on one of those old school chairs familiar thirty or more years ago; the ones with a tubular metal frame and a bit of moulded and varnished plywood to sit on and another bit to rest your back against. I remember dragging them stacked ten high, (to impress Susan Laker – who I fancied), across the school hall after assemblies or whatever. Remarkably, after all these years, his chair looks in good nick; not too much rust in the metal and the seat worn to a smooth, comfortable looking sheen after years of…....well, sitting.

No one seems to know for how many years he’s been sitting there soaking up the sun and the wind and the rain - though he’d drag the chair into the greenhouse if it came on too strong. Long enough anyway for the allotment to have cloaked itself round his being so he became the very soul of it and now he’s not there the soul seems to have gone out of it and the plot seems to be in mourning and is that possible?

His clothes wore him like the clay does its topsoil and so he blended into the plot and became indistinguishable from it so that some days you wouldn’t even register his presence at all till some small movement or other caught your attention: like scenery so familiar your brain filters the information and puts it into the ‘Take for Granted – Ignore Until Told Otherwise’ compartment of the brain wherever that is. I’m sure She Who Must Be Obeyed thinks I have a big one of those.

Whatever it is then, it must be serious to stop your easterly vigil so I will take it up for you then and wish you well. I hope you don’t miss the plot as much as the plot misses you. How bad can a dressing gown and slippers be? No, OK don't answer that.

Reasons to be Cheerful # 1

Scientists discover incontrovertible evidence of chaos theory and loop quantum gravity in the interior of a red cabbage on an allotment in Lancaster.

Er.............

Despite the forkast wind and rain over the weekend we spent hours and hours in bright sunshine pulling spent crops, digging over and manuring beds, emptying the compost bins and mulching the strawberry beds and picking seed pods so the mice in the shed could have a jolly good feed. Don't know why the met is getting the forcast so consistantly wrong at the moment but I'm not complaining.

The tomatoes just kept on coming this year and have been wonderful. For those who may be partial to a bit of tomato sauce, this is a great way to use up a glut.

12lb Ripe Toms sliced
1.5oz salt
pinch of cayenne
ditto of paprika
1lb granulated sugare
1pt spiced vinegar
4tbsp tarragon vinegar

Put the tomatoes in a pan and cook gently until the skins detach. Rub the pulp through a seive and return to the cleaned pan. Add the salt, cayenne and paprika and cook until the mix begins to thicken. Add the sugar and flavoured vinegars and cook gently until creamy. Pour the souce into warm, clean sauce bottles and cover. Makes about 3 pints.

It is quite unlike any of the crap off the shelf varieties and the spices give it a subtle but delicious kick rather than putting the boot in so it still goes well with any number of dishes.

Crab Apple Jelly

Every year you said it wasn't worth the trouble
you'd better things to do with your time
and it made you furious when the jars
were sold at the church fete
for less than the cost of the sugar.

And every year you drove into the lanes
around Calverton to search
for the wild trees whose apples
looked as red and as sweet as cherries,
and tasted sourer than gooseberries.

You cooked them in the wide copper pan
Grandma brought with her from Wigan,
smashing them against the sides
with a long wooden spoon to split
the skins, straining the pulp

through an old muslin nappy.
It hung for days, tied with string
to the kitchen steps, dripping
into a bowl on the floor
brown-stained, horrible,

a head in a bag, a pouch
of sourness, of all that went wrong
in that house of women. The last drops
you wrung out with your hands;
then, closing doors and windows

to shut out the clamouring wasps,
you boiled up the juice with sugar,
dribbling the syrup onto a cold plate
until it set to a glaze,
filling the heated jars.

When the jars were cool
you held one up to the light
to see if the jelly had cleared.
Oh Mummy, it was as clear and shining
as stained glass and the colour of fire.

Vicki Feaver

Ben on the Tracks

A picture from outside the shed looking inside the shed and then outside the shed again and looking behind the shed all at the same time. Photoshop can go swivel. Good job the kettles boiling after all that effort!
'Yak Yak blether blah blah blah ya de ya de yah da....if only dad would shut up gardening could be fun'.

On the tracks at the Brandywine crossing in BC.

External Auditors

The external auditors arrived on Saturday, (from Cobden Cobden & Cobden in Chesterfield), heavily disguised as Gravy Grandma and Grandad Beard. Ben worked really hard tidying up for the plot inspection in the hope of a glowing report or maybe rising up the allotment league tables a bit.

‘Wait’, you say, ‘they don’t have allotment league tables!’ ‘Ha’, sais Clodhopper, ‘just watch…..New Labour isn’t finished (quite) yet.’

Auditor 1 recoils nervously at her first sight of a Mangold. ‘Is that thing loaded’?

Auditor 2 swiftly whips out a 4 litre box of Cabernet Sauvignon…’We must stay tonight and eat this mangold to be on the safe side’.
‘To be on the safe side of what’?

The External Auditors are made to pick their own dinner….. spuds there beans there beets there leeks there and lettuce there getonwithit, whichtheydo. They then dissapear to go and watch Watford play Bolton (big mistake – Bolton win with a last minute penalty)……so we head on home to cook the pickings and drink the wine.


Cathy cooks THE most fabulous allotment meal and the Auditors visibly cheer up.

Then it is our turn to dissapear to play for a dance leaving the Auditors to read bedtime stories to Ben which they do nightnightsleeptight.

The roasted mangold is SO
delicious we wonder why it is only grown as a fodder crop….seems ridiculous but I bet no one has seen one in a shop….have you? Don’t take my word for it……can heartily recommend you grow some next season and try it out and not just for hurling either!

We get back from the dance after the witching hour and the auditors have become so cheerful they go to bed.

Love in the Mist

Love in the Mist snuggled up behind the greenhouse...as you do.


These Abysinnian Gladiators guard the greenhouse and deter all would be tomato thieves.

Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbours Onions

The hell I shalln't! Just look at those beauties. They make ours look like adolescent pimples.
Cathy's been collecting seeds to save from various crops and here she is filling a basket with main crop desire. I did a spring clean of the shed and contemplated my navel which is getting bigger than it should be really.

Moving Swiftly On

The achocha is very pretty but it's not produced a lot yet and a good puff of wind will have the whole lot over if we don't put a bit more support in.

These are grass peas from Italy, an experiment. You let them dry and treat like chick peas.

These are fingers from Scotland. You put them on a Celtic harp and they produce utter magic. But who's are they? The give away is below.

Fungus Talking

Autumns fingers creep over Clougha and finger the plot imatiently. Enough of early springs and late Summers 'it's my turn now'.

Gaze at our Big Brassica Bed. Doomed, all doomed. What a bummer!

A sniggering laugh from the shadows
'you bet they are'

In the gloom twixt shed and greenhouse a fleeting movement

'You're Clubroot aren't you, why don't you just fuck off and leave us alone'?

'That's not my real name', the shape drifts back.

'Oh, I know your real name and I know (spit) your pH and I almost saw you then'.

'Oh yeah! What do I look like then'?

'Sort of a cross between Alfred Hitchcock and that big eejit in Little Britain'.

Clubroot grunts, irritated now. 'Hmmphh, well I'm stopping anyway and this Globular Warming will help me nicely thank you....think I might just spread out a bit too'.

'It's Global Warming idiot and don't even think about it or I'll push your pH up to 8...maybe even 9 and starve you to death'.

'Globular Smobular whatever. I don't starve easily and where are you going to get your brassicas from then'?

'Sainsbury's'

'Oh, that'll be satisfying won't it', Clubroot sarcastic now.

A shed plank whacks Clubroot where it hurts.....'OUCH'!

'Thanks Shed'

'No Problem'

Twilight deepens and children gather to play hide and seek on the allotments, careless like the fairies from the bottom of yer garden.

Tangled Up In Red

The camera had not crossed the event horizon after all. It turned up down in the cellar in the side pocket of a rarely used rucksack. No one knows how it got there or no one is telling.

Because we did not pick out the side shoots the tomatoes are now in fall me down tangled up mode and we can't risk raising them coz the stems will just break. However incompetent it all looks it will give the other plotholders a good laugh and there will still be masses to harvest. The spare plants we had after filling the greenhouse were put outside and they too are very productive.

Big Brother

While we've been away the eejits at work have clearly been misbehaving as the powers that be have now limited network access to a variety of internet sites on the grounds that too many staff are wasting time and bandwidth and hampering legitimate work related net access. The list of sites blocked includes:-
Online auctions Online gaming Pet sites Sports sites Sites kids often waste time on Sites about and selling clothing Sites about going on holiday Webmail sites Big brother.

Clearly then allotmenteering is not one of those categories people 'waste' time on and I may possibly be the only one who looks at these sites. You may think well why aren't you working instead of reading the muppet or mildew or horticultural or whotever. Well quite. In my defense all I can say is that I'm often at work till 11 at night when other network users are either tucked up safely in bed or in the pub and a large part of my job involves waiting for mayhem or chaos to break out and then dealing with it when it does. If nothing happens then nothing happens and so I may kill some time on finding out what killed my garlic. On the downside of this new regime is that they have also blocked pictures displaying so all I can get is your words of wisdom but not browse the often beautiful photography that goes with it.

Oh yes and that brings me to another whinge for the day. I have turned the house upside down and my camera has just vanished into a black hole or has at least crossed the event horizon and it's beginning to look like it's gone forever. I will send a jar of our finest preserve to anyone that comes up with the correct wacky location for my errant camera.

Blighty

Back home now and the plot looks good but since I seem to have lost the camera d'oh I can't put a picture up. We didn't pick out the tomato side shoots enough and the weight of fruit is now pulling some of them over. Everything else seems to be doing OK so there must've been a fair bit of rain over the last fortnight while we we're galavanting in Portugal.

I notice BBC News Magazine are running an allotment article today.

The Festival was completely bonkers as ever with far far too many nights that stretched into mornings and a bunch of folk that really have to be seen to be believed. Instead of running dance workshops next year we are discussing running workshops on cricket and how to make a good cup of tea, both of which the Portuguese, despite being otherwise delightful, are completely clueless about.

Ovar & Out

Gotta leave the wide atlantic rollers of Ovar and head inland now to Carvalhais. Itś too steamy so we are going to be extravagant and take a taxi there which will set us back 80 euros but given the distance that aint too bad and it would be a complicated journey by public buses and mega exhausting in this heat. Feeling a bit stronger now and more up to playing 3 two hour long sets + workshops in between. May not have access to a computer there so this may be the last post for a week or so.

Ovar the Rainbow

We are in Ovar just south of Porto for a few days before heading inland to play at the Andancas festival for a week. If anything it is possibly a bit cooler here than it was in the UK but still pretty steamy. Not quite able to enjoy the moment though as stricken with a bout of bronchitis which is bad timing indeed. However it seems to be abating a little today and thank goodness I have four more days or so to get better before we have to play.

Reality Cheque

The night sky was full of the heat of the day and the promise of more with beautiful and indescribable colours, crimsons, violets, reds and others that have no name.

Peace is not a destination. A road map implies a destination and movement, both of which are false. Peace is like rain, it comes into being if the conditions are correct otherwise it cannot be. It never came from the barrel of a gun and never will. Peace also requires vulnerability and open hearts. This is why politicians and so called religious leaders can never bring it about. Both are enclosed within their unbreakable shells of opinion, ideology or faith. Their hearts are closed and hard. Children of any race or culture will play happily together; race, religion and political boundaries mean nothing to them at all. The conflict can never end until we have learned this lesson from them. It is not that they are bad teachers it is just that adults are too stupid for words.

Woke this morning to the sound of rain trickling and gurgling in the gutters and to fresher air and a cooling breeze so welcome after the last few days.

Carbon Dating

These are some of Ben's camping buddies.....they seem to be exploring the make-up potential of raw carbon.

They will go far.

Plum Duff

This plum tree is only a youngster and it flowered beautifully and set to fruit so heavily that we had to remove some to prevent the branches collapsing under their own weight.

Over the space of a month it has turned from a healthy specimin into the sorry state you see in the picture and the branches are dying from the bottom up. Anyone know what might be going on here?

Wildlife Garden

This is the wildlife garden and pond we have been working on at Ben's school. We ran a plant stall on Saturday during the school fete and Cathy worked up an activity which involved people walking round and identifying 10 of the plant species therein with plenty of clues to help them. A pleasing number of people took part also spending time reading the notices explaining what the wildlife garden was all about and looking at the childrens art work which we put up on posts round the pond. If they identified all the plants correctly they could choose a free plant from the stall.

The stall does not look so big in this pic but there were a fair few plants in there and the majority of them sold making the PTA about £75 which, if I have my way, they will spend on a half decent strimmer for the garden as the school does not possess one of it's own.




The pond viewing platform displayed some of the childrens artwork and other information.

I hope the display encourages the teachers to do some more work with the children in the wildlife area. It is a resource that more could be made of. Hopefully all the health and safety concerns have now all been met.

Can't blame the head really, it's a damnably litiginous world we live in now and they have to be careful coz if johnny gets post traumatic stress disorder from being croaked at by a frog, then someone is gonna have to Pay Compensation.


These blousy Livingstone Daisies did a good job attracting folk to the stall.

Such a hot weekend! And getting even hotter today. Spent all morning clodhopping; mostly hand weeding and ho hoeing. Stopped at noon and went home to cool off.

The white spider lilly Cathy sowed in the spring has flowered beautifully and now graces our bedroom windowsill. I needed to take it into the garden to get a decent shot of it. It leans out of it's pot at such a crazy angle that it is threatening to fall over.