Introducing our correspondent…
I was born in Holland, but have lived on various locations in the countryside in Wales, England and Scotland since 1987. I studied history in Cardiff, Durham and Edinburgh, where I gained my PhD in medieval history. I have since taught in Edinburgh and Glasgow and am the senior research supervisor for ecclesiastical history at the Maryvale Institute.
Maryvale is located on the edge of Birmingham and is a Catholic long-distance learning institute that was once the home of Britain’s newest saint, Blessed John Cardinal Newman. I contribute regularly to the Catholic press in Britain, Holland and the US.
Like so many, my family has left the land in the last half-century. One of my great-grandfathers was a small-holder and carter, another worked as a farrier, as did my maternal grandfather. I grew up in a mixed world of urban shopkeepers, military people and those still working the land, a world now vanished.
With my wife, small son and daughter I now live on a small farm in Perthshire, there where the Lowlands and Highlands meet. Our world consists of some fields, ancient woodland, larch plantation and a small loch, and is filled with wildlife and chickens. Harry Schnitker
Harry writes...
Even in the most severe winter they may be seen, bleached-white and pyramidal-shaped, drifting on the waters of the small loch, three-hundred yards to the south of our house.
As they re-emerge from feeding in the depths they resume their shape, the familiar long necks and huge wings of mute swans. Few birds are as impressive as mute swans. They are the largest birds in our part of the world, and can weigh anything between 25 to 35 pounds. This makes them the largest flying birds in the world. Long-lived – they can reach 25, but rarely do so – swans are quite literally the stuff of legends.
An old Norse tale relates how they came to be white, a most unusual colour in the wild. Two swans drank from the holy well in Asgard, the home of the gods.
The water was so pure, that the birds turned white. This, of course, is an early attempt to explain the curious whiteness of swans. Most white animals spend at least some of their days in snow-covered landscapes, but these tend to change colour, as do the ptarmigan and snow hares on our hills.
It is, perhaps, the fact that they have no real natural enemies that allowed the white gene to dominate. It has to be recalled that cygnets are born grey.
In these islands they are known as the Queen’s birds, and shooting them is strictly prohibited. This ban contains an echo of the old Finnish legend contained in the Kalevala cycle, that relates of the Swan of Tuoni, which swam on the river to the underworld. To kill it would invite instant death.
The ‘muteness’ of mute swans is another legend. The Greeks told how they would sing only as death approached, the origins of our ‘swan song’, but this is simply not true and perhaps a reflection of how early on some people lost touch with nature; the Greek myth dates to the third century B.C.! Mute swans make a strange, hoarse whistling sound, frequently accompanied by a strong flapping of the wings on the water. Human noise can block this out, but out here it is a sound that carries long distances. One can also hear them whistle as they fly over the house, which is a sight of real wildness.
Seeing these magnificent birds in Scotland conjures up the great Irish myth of the Children of Lir. They were the daughter and three sons of Lir, whose stepmother cast a spell that condemned them to live as swans for 900 years. Three hundred years they spent on the sea lochs and lochs of Scotland. As long as our four swans stay on the loch, which is rather wild and fringed on three sides by great reed beds that make it almost impossible to get to, one can believe that they are, indeed, the Children of Lir.
Seeing them together with the black-and-white tufted ducks and mallards that have joined them on the loch this year is to get a glimpse of the landscape that spawned the myths of the past.
Unfortunately for the romantic in me, our swans are two breeding couples and the sex-ratio is wrong for them to be Lir’s children. At least one of the males falls rather short of the heroic qualities of the sons of Lir, for he has none of the famous territoriality of the mute swan. The illusion is completely lost when they waddle onto the shore, and come to graze in the field behind the steading. This has not had sheep in it yet, and is, relatively green. The swans love to come here, but look plodding and lost when they do. Still, they spend most time on the loch, and when the mists hang over the reed beds, and the thin crust of ice is rumpled by the wind blowing over the hills, and they give their hoarse call and turn the water into diamonds with their great wings, they are still amazing birds.
Find more from this correspondent by clicking on 'related articles' at the top of the page.
No comments have been made.