The past

Tomorrow all my belongings in storage are coming to this house.  I feel quite sick about the memories each thing will bring.  I have two rooms, the largest is easily 20 feet in length.  The single bed that I bought for Paul so he could be in his own home in the last few days but which never happened.  The few books I had kept from the cull of a lot of my books to Oxfam,  Worrying this morning had I remembered to pack the old Chinese piano cloth with its marvellous embroidery of a dragon, or had I left in in the bottom drawer of the glass fronted book shelves. Would my old camera be there, these things haunt me.

We have cleared the room upstairs for all the spare small stuff furniture I picked out from the cottage, Jen at removals says they will arrive tomorrow afternoon, so tonight we will just do some of the work remaining.

So my mind went to quieter things, Old Sodbury Hillfort, lying on the Cotswold escarpment, one of quite a few Iron Age forts that lined this escarpment.

You could always approach this very large earthwork from the A46, over the field and there you were.  But one day I chose to walk to it from the opposite direction.  Parking the car next to a village school, Moss and I set out.  We followed a path along the lower part of the hill through fields, making our way gradually upwards.  We soon came to trees and a small lane.  We wandered along, but then were assaulted by at least two or three dogs, terriers I think.  They yapped around our feet furiously, Moss had no time for aggressive dogs and ignored them.  A man came up and shushed them.  Then he demanded where was I going it seemed I had strayed down a place where 'privacy' was required.  He was a gardener at a large house but we got talking and discussed the history of where I was going.

On our way ever upward, we came to a beautiful old farmhouse, and had to run across part of its lawn to reach the little wicker gate onto the fields.  The day was hot and Moss felt the heat, I have a photo of him lying down in the large interior of the earthworks.   We went through an opening between the banks, and there was this lovely perfume on the air.  Ladies Bedstraw lined the banks, it was quite heady and I can still remember the absolute sense of peace as I wandered around alone, once going to stand on the edge and look down on the farmland. The following old blog is what I found when tapping Old Sodbury into the search facility.

 Whilst out the other day I noted that meadowsweet, hemp agrimony and ladies bedstraw was plentiful on the verges, though the weather has been so dry, meadowsweet seems to thrive on the verges though in a raggedy state considering it loves damp, cool places.

Hemp agrimony is a favourite of mine, its pink fluffiness attracting a lot of insects including butterflies, it could almost be classified as a garden cottage plant, distributing its seed very generously and filling up the odd patch in the garden beautifully.

Ladies bedstraw (galium verum) I was so glad to see, it reminded me of Somerset, to gather it is to be reminded of summer and corn fields, for it has the sweet smell of hay when dried, one of its constituents is courmarin, which gives a smell of summer harvests, the other plant that carries the same scent is sweet woodruff.

Geoffrey Grigson says of ladies bedstraw, (the name carries its history of course) was that it was a strewing herb, also something you made a straw mattress out of - it was supposed to keep the fleas away and the devil of course.

And there is the Northern Europe biblical story that when Mary lay on the straw to give birth, the straw was made up of ladies bedstraw and bracken, bracken sadly did not acknowledge the baby and so as punishment has never flowered since!

Herbally it coagulated blood, and was also used as a rennet for turning milk into cheese all over Europe. The Highlanders also used the stems or roots for a red dye, very much like goosegrass or cleavers (galium aperene) which also gives a red dye from the stems and roots.

The interior of Old Sodbury