Nettle Beer

The hop was introduced to this country in around the 1520s and before then many other things were used to flavour beer.  Nettles were one of them.  Have a go at making your own nettle beer and you may be surprised at how refreshing its earthy citrus flavour is.  I should think it must be good for you too.  This recipe is taken from Roger Phillips's 'Wild Foods', which I think is a lovely book.  If I were you I would half the quantities as two and a half gallons is a lot to drink if you don't like it.  Also, pick your nettles at this time of year when they are young as older nettles are full of an acid that irritates the kidneys. 

100 nettle stalks [with leaves]
2 1/2 gallons water
3lb sugar
2oz cream of tartar
1/2 oz yeast

Boil nettles with the water for 15 minutes.  Strain, and add the sugar and the cream of tartar.  Heat and stir until dissolved.  Wait until tepid, then add the yeast and stir well.  Cover with muslin and leave for 24 hours.  Remove the scum and decant without disturbing the sediment.  Bottle, cork and tie down.

I [Richard not Roger] would use champagne yeast, or the very least a good wine yeast, but please don't use bread yeast or the beer will be yuk!  I also use old plastic lemonade bottles which are far more convenient than glass, cork and string.

A little nettle - don't use big ones.

Roger Phillips mentions several hedgerow plants that were brought over by the Romans, who grew them as vegetables.  Over the years we have forgotten about them and now see them as weeds.  Alexanders is the most notable of these plants.  It was grown extensively in medieval monastery gardens and was very popular in the vegetable garden up until the 17th-century.  It's a Mediterranean plant and is very good to eat and Roger describes it as a 'most exciting vegetable'.  Quite peculiar how we have been obsessed with all food and drink from the Med' for the last forty years and have almost forgotten about a delicious Med' veg' that has grown here in abundance for the last 2,000 years.

Last year's cider is a resounding success.  It appears to have gained a soft, rounded quality that the previous year's batch certainly did not have.  This is apparently due to a second fermentation called the malo-lactic fermentation.  The sour lactic acid turns into softer malic acid and makes the drink far more palatable.  Thank goodness.

The buds are coming out in the hedgerows and soon we won't be able to see the lichen.  It will be great to see the hedgerows in all their splendour again, but the lichen has provided some enthralling bits of colour over the winter months. 

Spring Snap

After a long, bleak winter it is fantastic to see some bright spring colours out and about.

Daffodils on Rack Isle

Rack Isle is the area of boggy ground which lies in the middle of the village, immediately in front of Arlington Row.  In the Middle Ages as part of the fulling process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulling they hung the wool on racks on the isle, hence the name 'Rack Isle'.  It is actually an isle too as it is completely surrounded by water. 

The racks have long since gone and the isle is now owned and managed by the National Trust, who endeavour to maintain it as a protected wildlife area.  Looking at old photos of the isle it appears to have been treated like any other field and stocked quite heavily as the grass is grazed into well trimmed neatness.  And I'm told that there used to a fun fair held there as recently as the 1960s. 

I had a chat with the NT warden the other day who said that he disapproved of the daffodils that have sprung up on the edge of the isle.  They have no doubt been planted over the years by people living in Arlington Row.  The warden viewed them as a suburban intrusion into a wild landscape.  I thought this a little excessive as we are after all in the middle of a village and not an uninhabited wilderness.  Each to his own, but I think the daffs look rather jolly.

Sumer is icumen in

Life may well have been short, nasty and brutish in the thirteenth century, but they appreciated spring as much as we do.  I love this thirteenth century poem and [perhaps rather sadly] can't stop reciting it in my head at this time of year:

Sing! cuccu, nu.  Sing! cuccu.
Sing! cuccu. Sing! cuccu, nu.

Sumer is icumen in -
Lhude sing! cuccu.
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springth the wude nu -
Sing! cuccu.

Awe bleteth after lomb,
Lhouth after calve cu,
Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth,
Murie sing! cuccu.
Cuccu, cuccu,
Well singes thu, cuccu -
Ne swik thu naver nu!

[Sing! now, cuckoo. Spring has come in - sing loud! cuckoo.  The seed grows and the meadow flowers, and now the wood is in leaf.  Sing!  Cuckoo.  The ewe bleats for her lamb, the cow lows for her calf, the bullock leaps and the buck farts.  Sing, tunefully! Cuckoo, cuckoo, you sing well - now don't ever stop!]

The only problem is I've yet to hear a cuckoo this year, nor for that matter a deer break wind.

More About Voles..........

A water vole expert came into the shop this week and shared some fascinating facts about them......

1.  Males have a territory of around 100m up the river bank, and females of around 60m.
2.  They have a gestation period of two weeks and breed up to five times a year.
3.  From a litter of eight babies only one is expected to reach maturity.
4.  They love apples.

Water vole spotters continue to visit the village in surprisingly large numbers.  Thankfully the mink population has now been all but eradicated on the Coln and the water voles are making a comeback.  One problem now is that the swans are killing them.  Feeding the ducks and swans makes them very aggressive apparently and so they attack the voles as they see them as competition.

I've had an absence of a couple of months from this lark, mainly because I've been distracted by expansionist plans.  Hopefully, they will come to fruition next week and I will be able to focus on the blog once more [if anyone is interested that is].

Ravens

During the Christmas holidays, when the snow was still on the ground, I heard the the deep, resonant call of a raven overhead.  Two of these massive birds were flying high over the snow covered valley.  I don't know what it is about the raven, but they do send a shiver of excitement down my spine. 

They really are a huge bird having a wingspan of around 4 to 5 foot and standing around 2 foot tall.  The pair I saw are said to be nesting in woods near Quenington and the Cotswolds must be on the western extremes of the raven's coverage as they are apparently not to be found in the east of England.  The call is unmistakable and always reminds me of Lady Macbeth:

The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry "Hold, hold!"

Cripes!  She really wasn't WI material, was she?
 

The Village Hall

The village hall is one of those vital buildings that make a village a community rather than just a collection of houses.  Our village hall is very well run and hosts a wide range of events from rug sales to birthday parties.  One week in December it hosted the 100th birthday party of a local gentlemen on the Tuesday and the 5th birthday party of a local boy on the Saturday, so it really is used across the community.

The hall was originally built as a reading room with a cottage either side in 1878 and was funded by Earl Sherborne.  Apparently reading rooms were funded by philanthropists at that time to encourage agricultural labourers to stay out of the pub.  I suspect the sensible labourer would have gone to both the pub and the reading room, especially as the latter has very big, stone fireplaces and must have been warm and well lit.  It was probably a welcome refuge from home which was probably a one up, one down smokey cottage with several noisy children within.  Maybe they went to the pub first and then for a good read in the reading room; I could think of worse ways to spend a few hours on a winter's evening even today.