Biesbosch

Where would we be in Holland's Biesbosch, with all its water, without a boat.

Well it so happens that we know some kind people who have one, a nice sailing yacht which can take us on a tour of this maze of waterways in safety and comfort. And since the main purpose of us visiting Holland in the first place was to meet these very people, our friends Theo and Anneke... well enough said.

This is a friendship that goes back long before this blog began, back, in fact, to the year 1988; recalling this date involves a consultation between all parties in our Dutch friends' house in Ramsdonksveer before we are finally all agreed. We met back then because our own family, stuffed into a small sailing boat and having sailed across the North Sea from England, closely matched in ages another young family stuffed into a similar boat, this one being called Tara, and our respective children met and played together easily despite not knowing each other's languages, just as children will do everywhere. Then and now we still enjoy each other's company, but this time we get to meet the children of those children who first played together all those years ago.

We now need a bigger boat!

The Biesbosch has just that, bigger boats, correctly known as ships, many of which whilst carrying cargoes from destinations further inland, are also family homes. This can be seen from the presence of the family car parked on deck outside. Well where else would you park it?

To our eyes these vessels have always appeared a little strange, lying so low as they do with very little freeboard, as we are used to seeing much taller sea-going cargo ships. But of course they are like this for a reason. They ply the riverways of Europe, many of which have bridges beneath which they must pass. Height would be an unnecessary impediment.

 

At the other end of the scale there are the Sunday fisherman, ever hopeful of the catch to brag about when they return home.

Many many miles of interconnected channels here with farmland protected by dykes, farmhouses raised up on mounds so the water can flow over onto the land when the rivers can no longer cope and little harm is caused. It is these rivers flowing from across Europe that provide the water which feeds the Biesbosch, and the people who live here will have little control over the volume of water that arrives to pass through their country, which in many ways explains the complex systems for management of the environment here.

Staying as guests with our friends for several days enables us to see their world through different eyes, an opportunity not to be missed. Their town has its own windmill, as you might expect, and beside it now live some deer peaceably alongside a herd of goats, animals placed there by the community for reasons unknown.

 As we walk about the town, stocking up with groceries at the local Lidl, we are again struck by the infrastructure designed primarily for people and their bicycles, cars taking second or third place. Guidance is provided by signage, much of which we find confusing, and being afraid to break the rules our behaviour must appear odd at times. We can only guess at the penalties that might be imposed here. 

Time for wildlife

City life clearly suits many, the majority of humankind perhaps, but our needs are different. Cities do have trees, and in Rotterdam we saw and admired some magnificent specimens, great thick trunks of considerable age beside a road or canal; oaks, willows and even ancient olives which seemed to be grown as status symbols outside the residents' front doors.

Cities also have their share of wild fauna. 

This small selection - mallard, stork and parakeet - seem to have become quite acquainted to the constant traffic noise, passing trains, even the odd helicopter and our duck friend was keen to show her attentive drakes that she could cadge food from campers better than most.

What can be missing from cities is the unmanaged, the unkempt, in short, the wild. Which sort of explains how we ended up in the Biesbosch just south of Rotterdam. Our tour guide having departed, after entertaining us for the evening whilst we fed her in our mobile home, we concluded that without her company our temporary city life should probably come to an end, the thrill quotient having naturally exhausted itself. We decided that Martin should transport us elsewhere.

We are still under the same high pressure system that brought us cloudless skies on our passage through England but the warm sunny days mean cold nights and we are glad to be able to snuggle up inside when the evening chill starts to bite. Fortunately this doesn't matter as we are completely self contained in our campervan and can live completely off grid for several days, longer perhaps should the need arise. All we need is a quiet place to park, some wilderness (this comes in different flavours) and the assurance that we will not be disturbed once we are tucked in for the night.

First impressions of the Biesbosch are not what I was expecting at all, my only reference being the British concept of a national park, rolling hills (often eaten bare of vegetation by grazing sheep) with dense wooded valleys through which flowed rushing streams and boulder strewn rivers. Now we all know that Holland is a flat country, which rules out the hills and valleys, but what really sets this country apart is how it was formed in the first place.

The land around our home in Scotland was formed by ice, earlier still by volcanoes, and the shapes and marks left behind by these natural events are visible everywhere today. One thing we learnt from our Rotterdam visit was that this part of Holland has almost no pre-history, a term generally used to describe pre-Roman or pre-recorded history. This is because the space it now occupies was largely beneath the sea, land emerging only between periodic inundations. In more recent times the land was gradually 'reclaimed' by the efforts of people who would eventually override the efforts of the sea to drown them and this process persists today as it will into the future. Holland, therefore, is entirely man made. It is a managed environment and will always be, through necessity.

Many years ago we travelled to Holland in our own boat, entering the country through a lock. In Britain, entering a sea lock will always take you to a higher body of water, a canal or a lake but in Holland the reverse is true, the sea lock will take you lower, to the level of the country's inland waterways.

Which brings us to the Biesbosch, a vast triangle of shallow water and land, much of it farm land, with pockets of naturalness in the form of trees, mostly willow, where beavers live alongside geese and other wild animals in a place created by human kind and now managed, at least partly, for their benefit. Wilderness here has its own unique flavour.

Rotterdam

We have been to Holland before, a good many years ago, but it has just occurred to us that we have never driven here. Every other visit here was by boat rather than ship and this technical distinction is actually quite important. It is largely about scale but not entirely. It is also about control of one's own destiny.

From the moment we drive on board (via a section of motorway built into the bow) we are entirely in the hands of others, most of whom we would never get to meet, who communicate via loudspeakers set into the ceiling above us or through leaflets in various languages left in our cabin. Navigation, a nautical term generally used to describe the process of getting from a to b without hitting any hard bits (often referred to as 'land') now means finding your way along impossibly long corridors, up and down staircases and riding in lifts. Martin was left alone to fend for himself amongst others of his kind somewhere below the waterline - we weren't allowed near him - while we were stored away up on the 10th floor.

Our allocated cabin was just that, a cabin, with different permutations of beds to try had we the energy left to do so but frankly once we were on board it was past 9pm and after the stress of blagging our way past customs and security (mirror on a stick to look for explosives(?) beneath the van) we wanted only sleep.

So here we are driving into a bustling city dancing with rush hour traffic on the wrong side of the road with the satnav lady telling us which of 12 lanes to follow and how many kilometers to go to our destination; all of which we managed quite successfully actually. This and a certain amount of pre-planning brought us  to a Stadscamping located in an oasis of trees surrounded by motorways and railways and within earshot of the city zoo. Great if you like sealions.

Living and working in Rotterdam is our Dutch daughter, as we like to refer to her, who we first met over 30 years ago and Maartje's offer to take us to her home where she would feed us was the reason we found ourselves walking back through the dark city later that evening. But this was only the start of her plans for us.

Our tour guide arrived early the next day to escort us to the hire shop where we were fitted out with our fiets, the Dutch word for some incredible pieces of machinery. They have two chunky wheels, a wide leather saddle, enormous handlebars and a rear carrier which would easily carry a week's shopping but it is the ride position that makes it so Dutch, leaning slightly backwards, in the least aerodynamic way imaginable, arms held far apart by the width of the bars. And these are heavy machines, needing a good push to get started. Once moving, however, they roll along easily and we are straight out into the street following the car free lanes that make the city, and the whole country, the most cycling friendly place on earth.

Everywhere you look there are people on bikes; the streets are littered with them. We were being taken on an amazing city tour - spectacular older buildings sitting beside modern architectural wonders, the full commentary explaining how the city had grown from the sea on reclaimed land, the wartime destruction and the imaginative new buildings still going up - it was both exhausting and fascinating.

Lunch saw us at a popular vegetarian restaurant (right up our street, a place where you were charged by the weight of the food on your plate, something we had never come across before) then it was off across various bridges to a secret garden full of peace and quiet. At each road junction cyclists have perfect priority, kept separate from the cars, whilst riding on their own smooth tarmac lanes. For a pair of country folk this was mind boggling, total brain overload but somehow at the same time endlessly interesting.

To fully understand our experience of Rotterdam requires a British viewpoint. Imagine a keen cyclist building a city from the ground up. Absolute priority would be given to bikes over any other form of transport so that there is no longer any fear of being flattened by cars, buses or lorries. You'd have your own set of roads, narrower perhaps but quite adequate to accommodate two way cycle traffic and overtaking, and at every junction the crossing points would be marked wth painted shapes on the ground to indicate where you might have to give way... to other cyclists. Cars always have to wait for you; the drivers know this and they respect this rule, without exception, as they have all been brought up to understand this. Children are carried on seats either in front or behind the rider or babies even, in long specialised cargo bikes. You are raised from birth to expect nothing else. This, then, is the city of Rotterdam. No different from any other Dutch city perhaps but sadly so many worlds away from anything the small island of Britain has ever produced.

We're back...and we're off!

Today we are leaving home, going on what for us is an adventure. The ferry to Holland was booked over two years ago when COVID 19 was just entering our vocabulary and when travel restrictions were only a figment of imagination but the kind ferry company allowed us to change the booking, twice in  fact, so it now comes at no extra cost. Many things have changed for us in those two years, not least of which is the vehicle in which we are travelling, but the spirit and the motivation is still there, as strong as ever.

But of course this does not confront the elephant in the room, does it. The previous entry to this blog is dated 28th March 2015, a full seven years ago. I can see the face of Angus the alpaca right now as I sit in front of my keyboard but although I might speculate on where he is now, the elephant who sits beside him will not be moving; we will not be moving him aside to write about what lies beneath his bottom. These ramblings have always been about the present and this is how they will continue. That is not to say, of course, that hints regarding the missing years will not emerge at some point.

There are some new characters in our lives who will be introduced as and when they appear. Ducky now spends her days roaming between Faversham in Kent and the Jura, a mountainous region in France, driven by our longtime friend, Richard and his partner Karen.

So let me start by introducing Martin who, you may notice, has a companion of the waterborne sort. She is called Eun na Mara.

This trip, however, is with Martin alone and the three of us will soon be loading ourselves onto a ferry for a sea passage to Holland to meet up again with our Dutch friends, absent from our lives for far too many years.

Leaving our home in Scotland so far behind us seems a strange thing to do but we are packed and prepared, suitably attired in warm clothes (it is still winter, technically) as we drive off in a blast of sunshine which persists all day, and the next, and the next. The season has suddenly shifted into spring and as we move south the cherry blossom appears along with black crows (in western Scotland they are bigger and have grey bodies, 'hoodies' we call them). It is an alien world we have driven into, and this is even before we have left what we now must refer to as the United Kingdom, 'UK' being the initials we must soon display on Martin's rear end.

For our final night on British soil we are alone in a field, the uncut grass almost up to Martin's bottom. It is quiet, how we like it. There's a pond, with ducks, a small farm shop at which we buy a large sweet potato, and an oak tree still bare of anything approaching a leaf. We had to take covid tests en route and achieved this only by setting off at first light from Penrith and only tomorrow, when we are told the results, will we know whether this particular adventure can start. If either of us tests positive then another adventure will begin. It is a strange uncertain world we now live in.

Angus the alpaca

Just spent a lovely afternoon walking with the alpacas.

Highly recommended.

Remembering

In this country it is during the month of November that we hold ceremonies during which we pause our lives to remember those whose lives were lost in conflict and we to try to understand the futility of war. We particularly focus on the lives of those lost in the last century, those whose relatives are still living with us. The passing of one hundred years since the outbreak of the First World War is a significant milestone and one of the remembrance events in Carradale took the form of a small exhibition where details of the lives of sixteen local men, fourteen of whom died during the 1914 – 18 conflict, were displayed. Information on each man’s life was gathered together, along with details of how and where they met their death. Rather poignantly, on the village memorial stone the men’s names are listed in the order of their having died, which brings home the horrible impact such losses would have had on this tiny community. There was a large turnout for the 2014 Memorial Service, after which most of us adjourned to the playpark, beside which sixteen young trees have been planted, one for every local life lost. Suitably protected from the rabbits and the deer, these trees, and the plaque beside them, will long stand as a reminder to those who come after us.

I find it difficult to comprehend the sense of duty that drove so many men to volunteer themselves for service rather than wait to be called up. Sadly though, although we may think that by remembering the pain of war it will change us all for ever, recent events in Paris show that there are some who are willing to start all over again.

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2015 is the fourth anniversary of the move Kate and I made to Scotland, to Kintyre and to the village of Carradale, something we could, and we might, choose to celebrate. Instead I find myself looking back at this blog to see what words came out at that time to describe our first moments here (Mostly Moss). I suppose I am trying to work out whether my own feelings have changed, whether I still experience the same excitement I felt on first exploring the land around us, how different it felt from the south of England, the sights, the smells and the colours. The first thing I notice is that I am still taking photographs of lichen, on the trees, on the rocks or in this case, a lichen-covered picnic table. 

The wood here has taken on the appearance of a barnacle-covered rock, and rendered the table unsuitable for use in the process. I still find myself fascinated by this strange combination of organisms just as I am by the low angled winter light and its effects.

Some of the pictures I have taken lately reflect this, although they hardly do justice to the landscape.

Four years on and Kate and I both still find joy in short walks around the village even though by now we have now explored each and every passage and footpath thoroughly more than once. The beach will never lose its charm. Empty though it often is, we never fail to wonder how it is that we came to choose a place to live where such an unspoilt piece of coastline could be within only a few minutes walk.

On the rare occasion when we do meet another human (or their dog) crossing the sand, even with the cold wind in their faces we can see immediately that they share our joy at being here. Carradale Bay has this miraculous effect on those that set foot there. Our remoteness guarantees that nobody is ever there by chance but only through choice or maybe occasionally because some magical force has pulled you there knowing that your soul needs to recharge itself.

Oh and it seems I am still taking selfies on the beach. So nothing changes after all!

On a wet Sunday when the horizontal rain lashes our windows for most of the daylight hours our biggest excitement comes when the ‘Men from BT’ arrive to plant a new phone pole in our garden.

As fast as they dig, the rain backfills the hole but they are equipped with a large ladle on a pole, an essential item in this climate, so they can bail even faster. Knowing just how rocky our garden becomes just below the turf we cannot help being impressed by the speed of their progress and by the depth of the hole their efforts are achieving and soon our shiny new pole is standing plum upright beside its elderly (and rather slanted) predecessor. No matter how good the clothing Scottish rain will find a way through sooner or later so it doesn’t surprise me when they conclude their day before transferring telephone wires from old to new. Beyond taking pity on them (and providing tea) there was little we could do to help, so we had no qualms about watching them work from the warmth of our house.

Four years has taught us that no matter how bad the weather, a brighter day will always follow along and it is knowing this that makes life here so good.

Home life

I sit around at home trying to commit to memory the words for my part in the Christmas pantomime, learning my prompts and wondering how much of it will be acting and how much just me. The humour in the part I play requires me to act a little stupid, so nothing difficult there then. (More than this I cannot disclose at this stage for fear of revealing the plot prematurely and spoiling the show for the paying audience.) Having little or no acting experience counted for nothing in getting me into what is, as it happens, my first starring role. There was no audition, no submission of a ‘cv’, instead it was merely a matter of knowing the right people and being around just at the moment the panto rehearsals were about to start. That, and upon being asked neglecting to say the word ‘No’. But I have lungs strong enough to make myself heard from the stage and I have little fear of embarrassment. Acting the part is really no more than not taking myself too seriously, something I don’t find difficult.

Kate is seated in another armchair with her computer perched on her lap. She has recently abandoned her ‘laptop’ computer, which had become so hideously slow that writing on papyrus would have been faster, and upgraded to a significantly faster tablet PC. This makes her smile as she types up a set of minutes taken at a meeting of the local Harbour Group or maybe it is the Village Hall committee or the management committee of the local Abbeyfields care home. By virtue of being rather good at documenting on paper proceedings at these events she has progressed to the role of Champion Secretariat in the village, a secretarial superwoman if you like.

Early one morning a lorry manoeuvres down to the end of our road to deliver some more timber joists and a handful of planks for the decking I am constructing around the concrete hard standing beneath the car port we know as the ‘Bus Shelter’. The rain is lashing down and the southerly gale is blowing the water beneath the canopy so it is rather wet out there. Ducky is away being serviced so I help Steve, the lorry driver, unload my planks and lay them flat on the ground before rushing back indoors to avoid the rain. We live in a wet climate, with local vegetation sometimes being described as ‘temperate rainforest’, and have experienced days of continuous precipitation on numerous occasions since we moved here. So today is not unusual. The landscape here is mountainous. The rivers have only a short distance to flow before reaching the sea, so water does not generally stay long on the land. The rivers swell, turn brown and churning, but water usually stays between the banks as it rushes towards the sea. On this occasion it has been raining heavily all night, the land is already saturated from last week's rain and the rate at which the stuff is now falling suggests that this just might be something a little out of the ordinary.

I have a dental appointment in Tarbert, 25 miles away to the north and in these conditions this is a major expedition. So I dress up in waterproof clothing, check the mobile phone is charged (not that a signal can ever be guaranteed around here), and set off to drive up the single track road that winds along the Kintyre coastline. In and out of pine forests, across countless small streams, past farms and remote cottages, rising high one minute and dropping to sea level the next, anything can happen in the next hour, the time the journey usually takes. There could be fallen trees, the road could be undermined by water runoff, lying water could splash into the engine and kill it dead, a skid on mud and leaves on the road could put me in a ditch, or else I could just make the journey safely, in which case I have to endure the dentist’s drill after all. The road is wetter than I have ever seen it. In many places the water pours off the steep hillsides and overwhelms the channels dug to carry the water away. I drive past ditches so full they carry water half a metre above the road surface. It all has to go somewhere and randomly and unexpectedly around a corner there is a flood which flows across the road washing gravel and small rocks down the hill on the other side. Water ejected into the air from under the tyres is blown across the windscreen by the gale but fortunately the engine is well protected and it doesn’t falter. It is important to keep both wheels on the thin band of tarmac as the ground is soft on both sides; to drop a tyre off the road is to risk sinking in and coming to a sudden halt. Care is required, speed is best kept low even if this means I am late for my appointment. But no, I have set off early and I arrive safely for my treatment, unfortunately.

It is raining in Tarbert, maybe not quite as heavily, but the high tide pushed even higher by the southerly wind brings the water in the harbour almost up to road level. I feel strangely uncomfortable walking next to this as it heaves gently and two swans paddle over, stretching their necks hopefully towards me in case I have something for them. The high water level gives them a view across the road into the shops opposite, something they don’t usually get to see. I wonder what they make of us featherless people strutting about in the rain.

Much later I have survived the return journey down the single track road and I splash past the village hall, a place Kate and I now have a stake in. Our newly gravelled car park is awash with runoff from the hill opposite which is normally culverted away beneath the road. Now the foaming flood is pouring across the road taking the easiest route towards Carradale Bay which, were it not for the still torrential rain, I would be able to see in the distance. I fear for the safety of the hall and can imagine the carpark surface being washed away downstream but can do nothing about it. What will happen will happen; it is too late now to intervene.

Local knowledge later tells me that this is nothing exceptional, it is not the biblical flood it might have seemed but is just one of those ‘rather wet periods’ we get from time to time. Although it continues to rain all the next night, the wind slapping the rain against our windows, by late morning the next day the sun is shining and the wind has gone. Likewise most of the water has flowed away too. I can hear the burn in the woods just below our garden but cannot see it, which means it still bubbles along happily within its banks.

The village hall car park is back  to normal, still with its coating of gravel and the sun warms me as I continue with my decking construction project in the garden. The ground is sodden, as you might expect, but other than this two days and nights of heavy rain has disappeared like magic.

Later in the day we sit in front of our log fire and contemplate how fortunate we are in our choice of house, that it can be so unaffected by weather extremes.

Favourite people and places

If ever I were asked for a list of my favourite places then Newton Bay is one that would be very close to the top. It is part of Northumberland’s North Sea coastline and is a place given natural shelter by a rocky reef, where the sand is soft, the sea is invariably cold and the light has a special quality about it.

Some years ago, with our young children on board and just as the daylight was fading (so rather later in the day than we might have liked) we can recall piloting our sailing boat into Newton Bay, following closely behind a friend in his shallow draft cruiser. Although we bumped our keel on the rocks which give the bay such fine protection from the North Sea swell, no harm was done and we were soon anchored safely. In those days there was rarely a sailing trip we made that was without some incident, some excitement, which raised the blood pressure for a short while. This being the early days of our family sailing we were learning steeply, each trip taught us a new lesson, this one being “Never assume it is safe to follow another boat”. Our keel was made of iron and suffered little from its encounter and the wound we made in the weed-covered rock no doubt also healed over quickly. Maybe we inadvertently dislodged a crab or two, for which I belatedly apologise, but the day was one of many memorable ones on board our tiny boat, ‘Noggin the Nog’.

Today the beach at Newton is just as it was then; there are the dunes which hide a small haven for wildlife, there is the same small collection of houses and there is the pub, closed to us then with our small children in tow and closed again as we revisit the place, it being mid morning. The ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle also still stand on their rock overlooking the sea, little changed in the thirty years since our last visit nor indeed since being abandoned back in the 16th Century, by which time the Scottish border was considered to be stable enough, England no longer feeling under threat from those north of the border. Today the position is reversed, of course.

We visit this familiar place not specifically on a jaunt down memory lane, however. It is simply that having travelled so widely around the coast of Britain we inevitably find ourselves revisiting old haunts, our exploring genes ensuring that we rarely pass by without broadening our experience inventory.

So it is that we find ourselves taking a selfie on the very highest point of St Abbs Head, which also juts out into the North Sea and overlooks the mouth of the Forth of Firth a place past which we sailed on more than a few occasions. We have crossed the border into Scotland now but the wind that we lean into blows mild air from the south giving the impression it has crossed a much warmer sea than the one stretched out before us. We are perched up here on the edge of Winter but the season itself has yet to arrive. There is, however, a battle going on in the sky above us, one that followed us south a week ago and which still rages as we make our way homewards. Back then we would be driving through torrential rain with the sun in our eyes then five minutes later on the dry road would be overshadowed by black rainbow-spewing clouds.

As we head west the rain lashes horizontally across the road, our campervan staggers to the gusts, while I pull at the steering wheel to keep us moving in a straight line. We are en route home now heading for our nearest branch of B&Q where we have a mission to accomplish. It is  a little over one hundred miles by road from where we live to this, our closest DIY superstore, so I have saved up a little list of things I need for my latest project, adding some wooden decking around Ducky’s carport (something we now affectionately call the ‘Bus Shelter’). Our mobile home now becomes a builder’s van as we load up with large pieces of wood, bags of cement and a few other bits that were not on the list. Once loaded, the extra weight on board means the gusty wind can barely affect us but the rain falls in great floods as we negotiate the final turns in the long and winding road back to Carradale.

In a little over a week we have completed a 1700 mile trip around Britain, visiting a sample of our scattered family and friends along the way. In Bristol we bumped into a rare coloured gorilla and met up with our youngest, Ben, just back from an American tour with his band, Frogbelly and Symphony, and still somewhat jet-lagged.

Having recently moved into this city, Ben has set himself the challenge of creating a new music scene there where  none currently exists, so watch out Bristolians! Down in Cornwall we dropped in on my sole surviving aunt, Jessie, who we would love to take back home with us but fear this might not sit well with the rest of her family. Instead, we gave her a gift of some Edinburgh rock and as much of our company as she could stand. In Worthing our eldest, Tony, took us for a walk along the shore to his favourite beach, a place where the flint pebbles look like old dinosaur bones, then in Yeovil, Kate’s brother, Peter, offered us a comfy bed for a few nights while his wife, Liz, fed us in style.

Back home now the season has definitely changed as brown leaves are stripped from the trees by the wind. Our stove is alight, ready for its first full winter trial, and if we run out of logs then we’ll just start on the furniture.