Parking Restored for 2023

Posted on March 9, 2023March 9, 2023 by admin

All parking at Shingle Street is permissive parking on residents’ land. An area of this parking at the southern end of the hamlet, providing c10 parking spaces, was damaged during the dry summer of 2022 and visitors’ cars were becoming stuck in the shingle, requiring the spaces to be closed.

A Sustainable Development Fund grant from the Suffolk Coasts and Heath AoNB has supported residents to repair the damaged area and reopen the land to parking again.

The work was undertaken by 8 volunteer residents and involved: digging to prepare the ground, the supply and manual raking out of 18 tonnes of aggregate material and, finally, car-rolling to bind the material. It was a good workout for all involved, young and old alike, and, once finished (!), all said they enjoyed completing a great job together.

With our thanks to:

Background: Shingle Street receives in the order of c30,000 – 70,000 visitors every year yet it is one of the most fragile and sensitive areas for biodiversity within the Suffolk Coast and Heaths AoNB. Visitors highly value their experiences at Shingle Street which provides significant wellbeing and tourist public value. Most visits (anecdotal >c95%) are made by car which are only possible thanks to parking areas provided by the residents’ community.

Village Voices Nature Note: Trees of Character

Posted on March 7, 2023 by admin

Birdwatchers often talk of identifying a bird at a distance just by its ‘jizz’, its characteristic outline and behaviour. We can all do this with people, too – you can recognise a friend or family member a long way off, just by their profile and the way they walk. Most trees have a very distinctive outline as well. When I was a child my parents tried to distract me on what then seemed to me interminable car journeys by playing a game of counting the different trees we could identify on the way. Once you got your eye in it was easier than you might think and we’d usually get quite a good tally in the ten miles or so before I asked, ‘Are we nearly there yet?’. Try it next time you drive children to Woodbridge or Ipswich, as a green alternative to electronic toys.

Anyway, once you know the common trees any strangers start to stand out and I’ve seen some unusual tree species this month. One was in a scruffy churchyard with some Yews and Ash and it flummoxed me at first. But when I got close I could see some of last year’s leaves and shrivelled brown fruits on the ground and I noticed the smooth trunk was peeling away in chequered plates. Ah, Chequers, the old country name for a fine but now rare native British tree, the Wild Service.

We also visited the Gainsborough Gallery in Sudbury last month, which has a charming little garden at the back, once a herb garden or a domestic orchard, I guess. They have a trio there of ancient trees of great distinction – a large spreading Mulberry, propping itself up with twisted limbs bent down to the ground like elbows; a quince, famous in classical times for its ‘golden apples’, which make superb quince jelly (perfect with cheeses); and thirdly a Medlar, the fruit that famously goes rotten almost before it is ripe, but is delicious if you can catch it just right. None of these three is native to Britain, but they are now long-established residents and add great character to our treescapes.

My final encounter was the best, though. I unexpectedly came across a magnificent tree standing almost alone in a field near Butley. And this time I did recognise it straightaway. It had a very characteristic tilt to it and deep corrugations in the corky bark. A Black Poplar, once common in East Anglia and a familiar sight in Constable’s paintings, but now endangered following the drainage of our water meadows for ‘development’. I couldn’t resist it. I gave it a hug.

Jeremy Mynott
4 March 2023

Village Voices Nature Note: a Confusion of Seasons

Posted on March 1, 2023March 1, 2023 by admin

The exciting thing about this time of year is that one keeps seeing the ‘first’ of various things for the year: the first butterfly (usually a floppy yellow brimstone butterfly gliding along a hedge), the first chiffchaff (freshly in from Africa), the first frog spawn (in your garden pond – you should have one if you don’t already), the first bumblebees, the first shoots of green on the hawthorn, the first cowslips in the banks, and so on. I still feel a jolt of adrenaline when each of these appears again, a reassurance, as the poet Ted Hughes put it, ‘that the world’s still working’. More than just a reassurance, though. It’s a joyful sense that the dark days of winter are soon to be replaced by light, warmth and growth. A feeling of abundance and renewal. Who wouldn’t feel the emotional sap rising at such a time?

But it’s getting more complicated, like the rest of life. This ‘spring’ we had the first sticky buds on the chestnuts in January, and the first aconites out in December; there’s been a chiffchaff flitting around all winter; and I’ve just seen my first brimstone, like a floating piece of detached sunlight. Isn’t this good news? It can’t be bad to enjoy the pleasures of spring a month or two earlier, can it? But suppose we are losing the familiar distinctions between the seasons altogether? These are deeply ingrained in our history and culture, and give us our bearings in the natural world. I wouldn’t want a bland, uniform climate in which the cycles of growth and rebirth had been flattened out, even if it was a bit more comfortable.

We’ve got used to this kind of thing in our eating habits, of course. You can now eat fresh raspberries all the year round. And you can buy exotic fruits like avocados at any supermarket or corner store. I don’t suppose I had ever eaten an avocado until I was 30, and if you had asked me as a boy what the word ‘Avocado’ meant I might have guessed at some sort of Church prayer or Mexican board game; but at this rate we may one day see avocados growing in our own back-gardens.

Perpetual spring would actually mean no spring at all. No autumn either, perhaps the loveliest of seasons with its bitter-sweet associations. It was once all so simple in Genesis. ‘While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.’ But if you read it carefully, that was both a promise and a warning.

Jeremy Mynott
8 February 2023

Village Voices Nature Note: Songs of Love

Posted on January 25, 2023January 25, 2023 by admin

It was Chaucer who gave St Valentine’s Day its romantic associations. In his poem, The Parliament of Fowles, he imagines all the birds coming together on February the 14th to declare their passions and choose their mates. Florists and card manufacturers have been grateful ever since. But hang on, why mid-February? Wouldn’t you expect the mating season to begin in Spring? Well, like all the best-loved British traditions the history is rather murky. Chaucer actually wrote his poem to celebrate a royal wedding on 3 May 1381 between Richard II and Anne of Bohemia and he borrowed the name of a minor Italian saint called Valentine whose feast was by chance celebrated on that day. It was only much later that all the lovey-dovey stuff was cheerfully transferred to the February date, which was itself originally an ancient Roman fertility festival that happened to coincide on the calendar with the death of a quite different saint also called Valentine.

Never mind, there is truth even in literal error. The birds really have started to sing in the early mornings now and for just the reasons Chaucer supposed. Two of the easiest songs to recognise in the February dawn chorus are those of the great tit and song thrush, each of which relies on repeating a few basic phrases loudly and often. The main great tit song is a ringing double note, which is usually represented as teacher-teacher, though they do also have a large repertoire of different calls (up to 80 variants have been separately counted). The song thrush, on the other hand, tends to sing in longer phrases like did-he-do-it, did-he-do-it; too-true, too-true. Or as another poet, Robert Browning, puts it:

That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over
Lest you should think he could never recapture
The first fine careless rapture!

Bird songs are in fact getting both earlier and louder, for reasons Chaucer could never have foreseen over 600 years ago. Earlier, because of climate change, which has advanced the breeding season by some weeks for many birds. And louder, for the sad reason that traffic and other urban noise has now reached levels where courting great tits, for example, have to turn up the volume to press their suit if they live in towns rather than in the countryside. Moreover, some birds with softer and less penetrating voices are now quite unable to hold territories and nest successfully by motorways, even though there are suitable nesting-sites in all those bushes on the verges, because they simply cannot make themselves heard to prospective mates. Now that really is a fable for our time.

Jeremy Mynott
4 January 2023

Village Voices Nature Note: a Good Start to the Year

Posted on November 28, 2022November 28, 2022 by admin

What better way to start the New Year than a walk along the coastal path at Shingle Street. You might start something else new. You might start a hare. Since parts of the beach grassed over in the recent years we’ve been blessed with regular visits from these lovely loping creatures. They were always common in the fields at the back but you can often now put one up near the front of the houses and watch it streaking away in a trademark mazy run, zigzagging to confuse any potential pursuer. You can forget about any pursuit yourself, though. The scientific name of the hare is Lepus, which comes from the Latin Levipes meaning ‘light-footed’. And so they are. They have a top speed of about 50 mph and can jump ten feet in one bound. Unlike rabbits, they live their whole lives above ground, usually on open fields, so they depend on their rapid acceleration to escape natural predators like foxes and stoats. They also have eyes set so far back in their heads that they have almost 360-degree vision and can spot trouble a long way off. They’re about twice the size of rabbits and have those distinctive long ears, black at the tips and pink velvet inside.

What with climate change you may soon be seeing mad March hares dashing about in January, and you might even catch sight of a couple of them ‘boxing’. This isn’t, as you might suppose, an all-male event, but is more likely a female fending off an amorous male. They’ve long had a reputation for lechery. In classical times the hare was sacred to Aphrodite, goddess of erotic love, and the Roman author Pliny tells us that eating a hare could enhance your sexual attractiveness for nine days. Only nine days? Well, it’s another kind of start, I suppose. Anyway, there is some truth in the old folklore because hares are certainly very fertile. They have up to four litters a year and the females can even get pregnant again while they are still pregnant the first time around. But there’s a reason for that, too. The young leverets are born fully furred and with open eyes, but they are still very exposed and vulnerable at first and to avoid advertising their exact whereabouts the mother (the ‘jill’) only visits them once a day to feed them milk, usually in the evening. They remain easy prey, however, and there’s a very high mortality rate.

We used to be enjoined to ‘go to work on an egg’. I think ‘start a hare to start the year’ is as good a slogan.

Jeremy Mynott
25 November 2022

Village Voices Nature Note: remember, remember…

Posted on November 8, 2022November 8, 2022 by admin

I’m writing this on the fifth of November, having just got in from a long ramble. It’s been a dull, misty day and it was already dusk by 4pm. I was reminded of a gloomy poem by Thomas Hood called ‘November’. You have to read it out loud in an Eeyore voice to get the full, dismal effect:

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member –
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds –
November

Very evocative – except that it’s all wrong now. You need to remember that poor old Thomas Hood, who died at the age of just 45, wrote this in London in 1844 at a time when the city was often choked with thick smog and winters were much colder than now. None of his examples really apply today. We’ve just had some of the warmest autumn days ever, and I seem to have plenty of feeling left in the members that matter. Moreover, there are still green leaves on the trees. And I had to cut my lawn again last week – unthinkable even 50 years ago, let alone in Hood’s time. I also saw and heard quite a few birds today. Robins, wrens and a song thrush were all singing and the hedgerows were laden with autumn fruits for foraging winter migrants. Amazingly, I even saw a butterfly on the wing, too – a showy red admiral, nectaring on the late-flowering ivy. Indeed, some of last summer’s roses are still in flower, as well as next year’s daphne. It’s all topsy-turvy.

You might think it’s nice to see some life and colour so late in the year, but in truth we know it’s a terrible warning, a disturbance to the natural order that is already a crisis in some parts of the world and is rapidly heading our way. The political news is full of trivial distractions – think no further than the MP for West Suffolk – but there is just one subject that should preoccupy us. It’s the one government leaders are discussing at COP 27 in Egypt as I write. Call it the Environment, Biodiversity, Sustainable Growth or what you wish, but I like the older and richer idea of Nature. No one ever wrote a poem to Biodiversity, but our literature, arts, traditions and whole culture are all saturated with references to Nature as the source of some of our deepest emotions. Not surprising, really, since we are ourselves a part of nature.

So, remember, remember the fifth of November, and put a bomb under the government – just metaphorically, of course.

Jeremy Mynott
5 November 2022

Village Voices Nature Note: Web Sights

Posted on October 8, 2022 by admin

When you see a spider do you go Oh, Ugh or Aaaaaaaaarh? Wherever you are on that ladder of reaction, let me try and talk you down to a rung where you might just say Hi oreven Wow! Fear of spiders (arachnophobia) is quite common. It could be a primitive instinct evolved when our distant ancestors lived in caves in Africa and might have trodden on seriously poisonous spiders. Or maybe we learn it as children from nursery rhymes like the one about Little Miss Muffet, who was put her off her curds and whey by an abseiling spider. But relax. None of the common spiders in the UK are dangerous to humans. Certainly not those big house spiders that can appear overnight in the bath or dash across the living room floor at an impressive top speed of half a metre a second; nor the Daddy Longlegs that get into odd corners of rooms and twizzle rapidly in their untidy webs; nor all those tiny spiders that balloon around on invisible filiaments of silk – on the contrary, these are the ‘money spiders’ that are supposed to bring you good luck.

Orb web spider — Orb Web Spider. Photo: Laurie Forsyth

Most of the UK’s 650 species of spider – bet you didn’t realise there were so many – live outside anyway. Among the wonders of autumn are those soft , misty mornings when you go out into the garden and see a perfect spider’s web outlined with beads of dew. The architecture of these silvery webs is breath-takingly beautiful. The spider first puts in the spokes to establish the structure and tether it securely to its moorings, then adds the complex spiral strands with a special sticky kind of silk that will trap unwary insects. The spider herself has anti-stick feet – all eight of them – to navigate the web. As a construction material the silk has extraordinary properties. It’s five times stronger than steel, weight for weight, but so light in density that a strand of spider’s silk stretched right round the earth would still only weigh the same as a bag of sugar. You can make bullet-proof vests from spider’s silk. It has medical uses, too, as a gentle anti-septic for binding wounds. Miss Muffet may in real life have been the daughter of the famous sixteenth-century naturalist, Dr Thomas Muffet, who discovered this property. Shakespeare knew about it anyway. In his Midsummer Night’s Dream he refers to the curative powers of one of Titania’s attendant fairies called Cobweb (‘Cob’ is the old name for spider). And we honour spiders, at least metaphorically, by naming one of the most important modern inventions after their magical creations – the World Wide Web.

Jeremy Mynott
7 October 022

Village Voices Nature Notes: Moth Matters

Posted on September 8, 2022October 8, 2022 by admin

I’ve had some big game in the garden at night recently – two elephants, three tigers and a leopard for starters. Also a menagerie of smaller creatures, including: a fox, puss, kitten, mouse, some tabbies, several hummingbirds and peacocks, lots of pugs and even a shark, though I’m still hoping for my first lobster and goat. No, this isn’t some radical Shingle Street rewilding exercise; these are just a few of the weird and wonderful names of the moths that grace our gardens every night and lurk unseen in them by day. Mention moths and most people immediately think of clothes moths. These are the moths referred to in the Bible, where we are advised not to lay up our treasures on earth ‘where moth and rust doth corrupt’. But there are only two kinds of clothes moths in the UK – really tiny ones, and in any case it’s their larvae (caterpillars) that cause the problem. You might be amazed just how many other kinds of moths there are out there – some 2,500 kinds in the UK as a whole. And with the expert help of Nick Mason, our local moth-er (don’t forget the hyphen), I’ve found a remarkable tally of over 350 different species just in my own back garden. Most moth species were first identified and named by naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and they bequeathed to us this wonderful lexicon of names, not just the animal ones mentioned above but a whole treasure-house of footmen, quakers, wainscots, rustics, lutestrings, carpets, fanfoots, tussocks, darts and daggers. There are also some wittily intriguing ones like the Uncertain, the Suspected and the Confused. How splendid to know that we have living amongst us a Setaceous Hebrew Character, a Pebble Prominent and the lovely Merveille du Jour.

Moths matter. They’re an index of the health of our environment. Readers of my generation will remember the ‘moth snowstorms’ we used to get years ago on our car windscreens. Not anymore. Despite the captivating diversity I mention above, moth abundance has declined dramatically in recent years. Disastrously too, since moths are a key part of the larger eco-system: they pollinate plants, and their caterpillars are a crucial food-source for birds, just as the adults themselves are for bats and for birds like our heathland nightjars. Hence the elaborate camouflages they adopt – as in the featured Peppered Moth blending perfectly with the blotches on my paving.

Moths are also beautiful when you see them close-up. Take a look at the ones on the Shingle Street website under Gallery.

Heretical to say it, but they make the gaudier butterflies look almost vulgar.

Jeremy Mynott
August 2022

Village Voices Nature Note: Survival Tactics

Posted on July 5, 2022August 4, 2022 by admin

You have to be tough to survive at Shingle Street – if you’re a plant on the shingle banks, that is. Just imagine. You’re regularly doused with salt spray, exposed to constant winds and parched by the sun; there’s no fresh water and almost no soil; while the shingle itself is unstable and constantly shifting. It’s an extreme environment, a desert of stones. Yet there is a community of plants out there that have evolved specialised tactics to cope with those harsh conditions:

Lie flat to shelter from the winds (orache and sea-pea)
Have very deep roots to suck up moisture (sea-kale, whose roots can go two metres deep)
Have shiny leaves to reduce water loss (sea-beet) or hairy ones (yellow-horned poppy)
Grow in matted clumps to bind you firmly to the shingle (sea-pea, stonecrops and sea-campion)

We are blessed by our thriving shingle bank colony of these rare and beautiful plants. It’s one of the most important in Britain, which is why Shingle Street is designated an SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest). We therefore inspect the plants regularly to check on their condition and a dedicated team of local volunteers has just completed the latest detailed survey, whose results will appear in due course on the Shingle Street website.

We did observe several changes. The sea kale is now very abundant, popping up everywhere like huge cauliflowers. The sea pea has spread too and there are large drifts of it in new areas. Its clustered purple flowers fade to blue later and are then succeeded by succulent seed pods, which are said to have once staved off starvation on the Suffolk coast during a famine in the seventeenth century (but they can cause paralysis if eaten in quantity, just in case you were tempted). Scattered amongst these are other shingle specialists like orache (much scarcer this year), sea beet, sea-campion, curly dock, viper’s bugloss, buckshorn plantain, stonecrop and the striking yellow-horned poppies (beautiful, but classified as a toxic weed in North America, and containing hallucinogens).

The most striking change, however, is in the expansion of the grasses that now cover the shingle ridges nearer the houses. That is evidence that the banks have accumulated depositions of soil and have to that degree stabilised – with the further benefit that hares and skylarks are now exploiting this new emergent habitat, along with various butterflies, moths and bush-crickets. That’s all the more reason to ask visitors to help us conserve this precious environment. For there is one other tactic these vulnerable plants need to survive, this one more under our control than theirs:

Don’t get trampled on.

Thank you.

Jeremy Mynott
5 July 2022

Village Voices Nature Note: Time to Fly

Posted on June 7, 2022August 4, 2022 by admin

I hardly left Suffolk during lockdown – well, why would you? But this May I finally ventured out as far as another lovely county, Dorset, to try and catch up with a local celebrity there. I went to Giant Hill above Cerne Abbas, where a huge naked male figure (very naked, very male) is inscribed into the chalk hillside. That area is now fenced off, I was told, because women had taken to sleeping within the outline of the mighty male member hoping thereby to get pregnant. But I was in any case more interested in the lower slopes, where one of Britain’s rarest butterflies, the Duke of Burgundy, might be performing its own mating rituals. The Duke was never common in Britain, but in the nineteenth century it could still be found in several ancient Suffolk woodlands, like those at Reydon, Bentley and Bradfield. The last confirmed Suffolk sighting was in 1973, since when nothing. It’s hanging on at Giant Hill, though, breeding in very small numbers on the scrubby grassland where its favourite foodplants, primroses and cowslips, flourish in glorious yellow profusion. The Dukes are tiny but very beautiful, just thumbnail size with orange-and-brown chequered wings. They are the only European representatives of the Metalmark family, so called because of the distinctive glittering spots on the underwings.

You have to be at just the right place and time to see a Duke of Burgundy nowadays. The time is a short window in mid-May, and this is one of the few places. You have to be in the right posture, too, which is on your hands and knees, peering around to catch sight of the male perched on a stem, from which it sallies forth in short bouncy flights, to drive other males off its little kingdom. Just think, you have the whole of southern Britain to choose from and you have to defend to the death your minute patch (maybe a parable coming on here). The weather wasn’t great. Butterflies need it to be at least 14° C to warm their bodies sufficiently to fly and it was a cool, blustery day, threatening rain. But the clouds parted briefly and there was a sudden pulse of warmth from the sun. Almost immediately butterflies appeared, as if from nowhere: peacocks, tortoiseshells, red admirals, small brown jobs like grizzled and dingy skippers, and at last … yes, a freshly minted Duke, clinging to a buttercup.

The vision lasted only a few minutes. The clouds closed in and the rain came. But as the great Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore said, ‘The butterfly counts not in months but moments, and has time enough’.

Jeremy Mynott
7 June 2022