Tag: Kestrel

The ruins of Brambletye

Daniel Greenwood1 Comment

Ashdown Forest in the Sussex Weald, East Sussex, June 2024

It’s time to unearth another Sussex gem from 2024 with a walk to the mysterious Brambletye Ruins. It was an after-work jaunt, starting in the village of Forest Row in East Sussex.

We didn’t stop, clocking up 6.5 miles in 2 hours which is unusually fast for me. There are a couple of B-roads to engage with so take care on those as people can be quite careless with their speed on rural roads. There are no streetlights so you may want to bring a hi-vis and a torch to make yourself visible in lower light.

East Sussex County Council is promoting a shorter version of our walk (3 miles compared with out 6.5) along the Forest Way which you can view here. The Forest Way is the route of the old railway line that used to run between East Grinstead and Forest Row. This line was closed by the infamous Dr. Beeching, and there’s some interesting information about that:

The Forest Row railway station opened in 1866. Although a busy commuter line, it was axed with the Beeching cuts in 1966. Ironically, Dr Beeching lived near Forest Row and regularly travelled up to London on the line when he was Chairman of British Rail.

https://forestrow.co/forest-way/

Kill your darlings, as the creative writing teachers say.

This blog is a comprehensive account of the history of Brambletye (which doesn’t have a Wikipedia page!) from a local. If you want to see Brambletye in this blog you’ll have to get to the end as we left the highlight to the final stretch of the walk.

Woodcut showing a depcition of Brambletye Manor before its destruction ( From ‘Brambletye House’, The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. 279, (1827; Project Gutenberg, 2005), pp. 265-267. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1594)

BBC Sussex recently published an article about Brambletye and a Secret Sussex podcast episode. This is an interview with Garen Ewing, a local illustrator who seems to be ‘the Brambletye Guy’. His website has a trove of information about the history of the house with a lot of interesting old images, which I wish were larger. The whole reason we did this walk was after a suggestion from my friend Edwin, who had learned about Brambletye from Garen’s crowdfunder for The Brambletye Box:

You can read more about Garen’s fundraiser on his Patreon page.

The photos in my post are a blend of mirrorless camera and phone, with the odd illustration and historical photograph where I could find some.

I parked in Forest Row in the village centre, where there are some typically oaky timber construction to be admired. This is an old entrance to the Chequers Inn Hotel. This is not the only reference to oak doors in this post.

The walk leaves Forest Row by crossing a golf course, which I still find quite weird because of the tiny white eggs flying around trying to kill you. Follow the ESCC footpath signs through here.

The view across the greens into the Weald was splendid. It was such a still evening, we could see a hot-air balloon beyond the birch trees in the distance.

Surviving the golf course, you enter into the heathy woodlands so typical of the Ashdown Forest area. This is something you can see along old footways, a mature beech tree with its roots exposed. It’s a nice indicator of how close to the surface tree roots can be. The root has adapted to life above ground and become more like a branch. It looks like there are some bricks or stones under the roots, so perhaps the tree grew on top of a wall.

We passed one stream which is typical of those in the Ashdown Forest. This stream had the brown-orange hue of a Wealden ghyll, caused by the iron ore discolouration that made the area so attractive for the famous iron works of centuries past.

The woods were a tangle of birch and honeysuckle. I’m never sure if these are truly ancient woodlands or recently wooded heathland, but the sighting of the plant below is helpful.

Common cow wheat is an ancient woodland indicator and is far from common. I’ve found it in ancient woodlands around the western side of the High Weald. It used to be found in south London’s oak woodlands but has been lost since the 1980s. Plant diversity declining before our very eyes. It’s in the figwort family, along with yellow rattle and foxglove, of which more later.

June can be a month of mushrooms, so I wasn’t hugely surprised to find this tawny grisette. For more mushrooms have a look at my Fungi Friday blog. After this we left the woodlands.

These heathlands are very birchy, brackeny, oaky and rushy, much like the New Forest.

I was intrigued by this wonderful pond, one of a network of three running east-west. It’s so large and, looking at the map, is clearly part of an historically wet landscape. The placenames nearby include Alder Moors (alder is a tree of wetlands), Hollow Shaw (hollow probably a place where water pools), Mudbrooks House, and Spring Hill Farm.

When the walk turns north out of the woods you pick up the Greenwich Meridian Trail. My parents used to take me and my sister to Greenwich Park most Sundays when we were kids, when it felt more like a south London park than a mass-tourist attraction. It’s nice to feel that connection. The Meridian Line runs through nearby East Court at East Grinstead, which this walk will take you to.

This is a phone pic looking back at the woodland we passed through, a large pond at the bottom of the slope.

On higher ground you have view towards Mid Sussex. For some reason the trunk of a dead oak rested up there on the snooker table grassland, presumably where it fell.

This fine living oak is passed along the way, with signs of cattle gathering underneath its branches for shelter. That’s what causes erosion to the roots, but I don’t know if this is harmful to the tree, or if it’s something they have evolved to cope with over millions of years shared with wild cattle and the like. I have read that the pocking caused by hooves may allow air to reach the roots move effectively than the flat compaction caused by modern human footwear and tyres, etc..

The shelter of the oak is too great to turn down. One oak’s ancient pagan names was ‘dur’, which ‘door’ derives from. This is probably because some oaks had cavities so large you could enter inside them. Also interesting that doors (as per the first image on the post) were once more commonly made from oak.

Nearby was an outcrop of rock! That’s exciting here because we don’t really have much in the way of rocky outcrops in the south-east, compared with the Dales, Dartmoor or the Lakes. This is probably the stone used to build Brambletye House, what I presume is a type of sandstone but I’m no geologist. You wonder if this little section has been quarried over the years.

This is our fine oak with the rocky outcrop seen to the other side.

This is a view north towards Weir Wood Reservoir. There’s a church on the horizon and a helicopter high in the sky. Dramatic clouds were developing but we escaped a downpour.

Let’s appreciate this lichen-touched public footpath stone, with its helpful update pointing us in the right direction.

A snapshot of the hedge and oak boundary we passed through on our way to Brambletye.

I was taken aback by this magnificent display of foxgloves. June is the peak for this wonderful flower, also a member of the figwort family along with common cow wheat as mentioned earlier!

As we neared the famous ruins, we passed over a little stone bridge, what is probably quarried from the same stone seen earlier. It amazes me that this is in fact a bridge over the River Medway, that mighty Kentish river of Dickens and my mate Pete. In fact, by writing this blog I’ve learned that the Medway rises nearby in Turners Hill.

The Medway and its tributaries are known as ‘Wealden Rivers’ – rising from springs across the High Weald where the sand meets impermeable clay.

https://www.southeastriverstrust.org/medway/

We arrived behind the fence at Brambletye just as the sun began to set, the orange light clipping the tops of each remaining tower. According to Garen Ewing, each tower would have had a minaret similar to that of the western tower. This image is looking south with the towers running east-west.

1892 – 1933, C G Harper Collection via Historic England

This old illustration shows two of the towers ivy-clad, and a far more open landscape surrounding them. Now the clump of trees on the western side hides a tennis court, such is the wealth of the current landowner.

It was commissioned by Sir Henry Compton, a prominent landowner and political figure, and would have been one of the most impressive residences in Sussex at the time. However, the Compton family’s time at the manor was short-lived as by the late 17th Century they had left the property – for reasons unknown.

BBC

On the central tower you can see the date of Brambletye’s construction, 1681. Also note the bricked-up windows and what I am guessing is the family crest below. I was using my 24-200mm lens so could zoom in for some nice detail.

The eastern tower had yet more bricked-up windows – perhaps to avoid the window tax, introduced in 1696 in England, 16 years after Brambletye was built.

Western tower aglow in the setting sun, an architectural melange.

Me and Edwin are both bird nerds, and we were pleased to see a kestrel perched on the only complete tower. Kestrels love habitat like this, and the lack of suitable buildings to nest in has probably contributed to their decline in the UK.

Thanks for reading.

The Sussex Weald

Macro 📷: City Nature Challenge 2021 (in the South Downs…)

Daniel Greenwood5 Comments

In recent months I’ve become somewhat addicted to iNaturalist. It’s a website or app which collects species records but has AI which can identify a species from a photograph. It can be used by anyone and even has an auxiliary app called Seek which can scan plants, animals, fungi and other animals and identify in real time. It’s the way ecological monitoring is going. Nature conservation is dominated by too small a cohort of people and needs to find ways to open its doors to more people. I will never forget hearing of a lifelong species recorder who wouldn’t provide their sightings to science, and that they would rather be buried with them than share them.

It’s lamby time

Onto more inclusive ways of thinking, over this bank holiday weekend it’s the City Nature Challenge (CNC) where people the world over submit species records to iNaturalist and into the project. As of 10pm on Sunday 2nd May there have been 631,418 sightings submitted. Amazing!

I went to a part of the South Downs that was just about included in the Brighton CNC catchment. I used my zoom lens rather than a dedicated macro because I was doing general ‘work’ with creatures great and small. I used an Olympus 12-45mm lens which can still do macro to a degree (in normal camera terms it’s 24-90mm because I was using a Micro Four Thirds camera, which has a cropped sensor). It worked like a dream.

Xanthoria parietina, a sunburst lichen

I photographed each species once, rather than everything, which would never work – can you imagine? I’d still be there now. I really noticed how, even though I probably recorded about 100 species on the South Downs Way, it was dominated by a small number of species. Ground ivy was very common, as was hogweed, white deadnettle and nettles.

Another Xanthoria sunburst lichen

The most dominant species were nitrogen-loving, just like this golden shield lichen above which is able to deal with fertiliser and other agricultural pollutants. I wonder how different things might have been before the Second World War’s agricultural boom. The Downs is known to have lost a vast area of chalk grassland in the 20th century, one of the rarest and richest habitats in Britain.

Two ravens (centre) and a red kite

I will save you all the generic images of flower-less plants. I did manage to capture record shots of ravens mobbing a red kite, of which there were several. I love ravens, they are such intelligent and characterful birds. They are also not quite common enough to feel as familiar as crows or jackdaws.

A heath snail

One of my favourite encounters was with this heath snail which was curled up (so to speak) in the flower head of a dandelion or hawkbit. I instantly saw this and started talking to myself dangerously loudly about what a nice image it was. I hope you agree!

Hawthorn trees with the Arun Valley in the background

I inspected some old hawthorns that were dotted on the edges of the grasslands. I’ve heard they’re good places in the South Downs to find lichens. Though I found nothing outrageous, there were some beautiful species growing on the branches.

These are possibly the beard lichen Ramalina farinacea. iNaturalist has a weird name of farinose cartilage lichen. Farinose seems to mean mealy or floury. That’s a new one for me.

A small parcel of woodland atop the Downs

On this section of the South Downs Way there is a sudden square of woodland which the path cuts through. I had always thought this was perhaps planted or some recent woodland that had grown up on fallow land. But I found something that makes me think very differently about it.

Town hall clock

This is the first time I’ve seen town hall clock or moschatel. I was amazed to find it. It’s an ancient woodland indicator, which suggests that the woodland is far older than I had realised.

Cowslips flowering en masse

It was nice to witness the typical downland spread of cowslips. Last year we got locked down before this began, and now I’m just getting back here at the point that they’re peaking.

The view towards Amberley

The weather started behaving like something you’d expect in the Yorkshire Dales which cut my species recording short, bar a few desperate snaps in the cold and wet march back to the start.

I managed to capture this footage of a hunting kestrel, hardly macro, but worth sharing.

Thanks for reading.

More macro

Photography: Kestrel

Daniel Greenwood1 Comment

Kestrel

Kestrel, St. Peter’s Church, London, June 2015

There is a church spire in south London where, most years, a pair of kestrels rear chicks. This year four chicks fledged and provided onlookers with great entertainment. These birds depend on a mixture of habitats, breeding in a Victorian manmade structure, learning to hunt from the roof of a neighbouring cricket pavilion and sustaining themselves on small mammals captured from the rough edges of woods, allotments and playing fields. The urban environment can support amazing wildlife.

This photo is for Sarah Robinson who has given so much time and attention to these animals.

Gawping at the Chilterns

Daniel GreenwoodLeave a comment

I am a countryside gawper. I like to watch the flow of valleys, hills and pasture seen from an English train window. As a student I remember travelling to and from Liverpool on the Euston line, experiencing a sense of nostalgia for the things whizzing by without the chance to grasp them. And this was before the trains had been improved to a mere two-hour journey between North and South. I recall the yellow of rapeseed and turnip flowers which bloomed in April fields, like a paintbrush passed across the glass. There were the peculiar farmhouses and barns, the horses drinking from streams which I deemed to be wild, and the black silhouettes of hawthorn and oak which had been moulded by the gusts and gales, all crooked and splayed. I remember the train slowing one evening in the gloaming, a brook taking on a glassy sheen in the near dark.

Now I stare out of the window in search of my post-London rations: skylarks, buzzards and such. These are not readily available in London, though they are in rural spots of Croydon and Bromley. This journey in particular was a trip to Birmingham for a flat-warming, promising (and delivering) a different kind of wildlife. The daytime train ride offered a snapshot of a new landscape to me, the Chilterns, designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and a part of the Green Belt. This is an area which has been earmarked for the High Speed Rail 2 which will see trains passing through the region every two minutes at speeds of 250-miles-an-hour. The service, some argue, will make use of the region but will offer it nothing in return. The closest stop will be Heathrow airport.

I was not thirty-minutes from leaving Marylebone when I glimpsed a trio of buzzards wafting in the grey ceiling. I saw jackdaws bothering the chimneys of small-town folk, and those magical inhabitants of plough tracks, the birds which had treated the silence between rounds at the disastrous battle of the Somme – skylarks. Their stiff, sharp wings rang the bell, as the train careered past on the raised track. The larks, three of them, descended upon a hedgerow in perfect accord.

I had recently read a book by Mark Cocker entitled Crow Country, where the author describes waking at 3am to watch rooks in Norfolk, amongst other revelatory birding experiences. The sections on Corvus corone, the carrion crow, had stayed with me. I could not help but observe these clever brutes patrolling green spaces in London. It should be pointed out that this is to the chagrin of some bird lovers who cite the cradle-snatching antics of the corvids as a reason to cull them, and to enhance supposedly falling fledge-rates of songbirds. Cocker’s writing on crows drew me to take greater notice of how they behaved. One thing I had witnessed a number of times in the autumn was crows bothered by kestrels, the big black creature barking, immensely uncomfortable in the presence of the cheeky falcon. Falcons like kestrels and hobbies sometimes go for old crow’s nests, so perhaps this was a question of ownership.

From my seat on the train I witnessed a trail of crows flying from over the roof of the carriage. The sound was killed by the glass but the conga-line of corvids pointed to something else. The line came to an abrupt end and a stretch of thin air opened up. And, some moments later, the giant wingspan of a red kite appeared in their wake. Its flight was smooth, a single beat of its wings expressing its power over the fleeing crows. The kite’s wingtips were like fingers. The forked tail was the motif that defined it, the whitish head and large white patches against the dark wings. This is not to mention the rufous shade which separates it from its continental cousin, the black kite. This is a bird which preys on crows, hence the sense of uniform panic amongst the fleeing black feathers.

Red kites were on the brink in the UK until a breeding programme in Cumbria re-established populations which have now spread eastwards into England. It is now said to be approaching students eating their lunch at Reading University, where a research programme is underway to discover how far the birds are spreading, with reports of the birds feeding in gardens. This is a monster which ate offal from the streets of London in the 1500s, when butchers threw them their scraps, but declined after centuries of persecution. For all of our dwindling species, there are some which are returning to dominate again. They’re screening in a train window near you.

— Photo by Ian Knight