Events in Time

On the river’s edge to the North of the Egg at 50º47’31.19″ N + 1º 24’19.58″ W, a plaque invites remembrance of a moment in time seventy years ago. Exbury House (designated HMS Mastadon) was the centre for training the crews of the … Continue reading →

The tamarisk trees on the outer bank are beginning to blossom and as with other plants on the foreshore, I am collecting a small sample to ‘preserve’ in alcohol. The pink blossom, red of the stem and fresh green foliage … Continue reading →

The decayed wooden hulk of the supply boat @ 50º47’54.53″ N & 1º24’33.35″ W, dates from the later days of the second world war and it is slowly returning to the (soggy) earth from which its timbers originally sprang. Every … Continue reading →

On the morning of April 30th at 6am, the whole of the Eggdom was shrouded in a dense vaporous mist. It resisted the weak warmth of the sun for several hours.

The well eroded branch of a riverine oak beside the river at Exbury is a swirling eddying ocean of currents which echo the wider pattern of the world’s oceans imaged from data captured by NASA satellites circling the earth between … Continue reading →

The crescent of a waning moon reached out to Venus with open arms this morning, lit bright in light from a sun still lingering below the horizon and reflected in the calm water of a falling tide. The ‘two-horned queen … Continue reading →

I spent all morning studying Andricus Kollari, the tiny parasitic wasp whose eggs cause the marble oak galls on both scrubby oaks growing beside my own Egg. The life cycle of the wasp requires the presence of a Turkey oak which … Continue reading →

The blackthorn thicket is filled with thousands of tiny buds which will soon produce cascades of bright flowers to whiten the wintery greyness surrounding the Egg. These blooms are thought to symbolise both life and death together, as they appear … Continue reading →

A discarded bucket caught my eye when it was lit up in the light of the setting sun this evening; a yellow plastic counterpoint to the warmth of the sun against my exposed face and hands. For the first time … Continue reading →

A handful of gorse flowers were painfully picked from the parish bush, then washed and dried. Rehydrating a few flowers with boiling water made a tea for breakfast. It has a bitter aftertaste with some sweet notes, but I could … Continue reading →

The moon became full at midnight last night as the Environment Agency issued 24 severe flood warnings across the country. A high tide of 3.5m was predicted for 22.30 (it stays high for about three hours here). However, river levels … Continue reading →

The upper limit of the tide was defined by a rippling line of thin clear ice, where the saline water, fingering the same flat marshy river bank for three hours of slack water, froze at its extremities. A weak morning sun … Continue reading →

On January 23rd, I glimpsed Orion in the southern sky above the Isle of Wight, maybe hunting with an owl who was calling from somewhere close by. Since then however, he has mostly been hidden from sight above a succession … Continue reading →

Following on from my previous posting, I can report that the search for orris root (an ingredient in the purification of Exbury Sea salt in the eighteenth century) has quickly proved fruitful. On a walk today with friends and with … Continue reading →

I am living on the edge of an eighteenth century salt making landscape. Its many parallel banks and channels are like the teeth of a marshy comb, protected by the curving contours of the Outer Bank which was raised by … Continue reading →

A Guillemot perished on the western edge of my parish during the recent stormy weather. Spending most of its life at sea, it would only have chosen the land as a place to breed.

Source: http-//www.thenewforest.co.uk/discover/pigs.aspx

Mould is becoming a problem. The riverside location, almost daily heavy rain for a month and a lack of ventilation are all contributing to the creation of the humid conditions required. It crept up on me somewhat, by taking over … Continue reading →