First in a series on nitrogen fixing legume plants.
Legumes are a group of plants that ‘fix’ nitrogen gas from the air to make proteins that are essential for growth and survival. When legume tissue dies, the nitrogen (N) is returned to the soil.
Legumes have many uses to people as food, medicinals and dyes. They also support insects that in turn carry out ecological functions such as scavenging and pollination.
Here we begin a short series on wild N-fixers. First are those that live by the eastern shores of Angus.
The east coast of Angus (middle image) is rich in wild legumes. Those shown here live just above the beach or on top of the cliffs, where the vegetation is short and there are no bigger plants to out-shade them. Top left is a patch of purple milk-vetch Astragalus danicus and white clover Trifolium repens behind, top right kidney vetch Anthyllis vulneraria with litter, and ( bottom) flowering heads of kidney vetch (left) and purple milk vetch.
Nearby were patches of meadow vetchling Lathyrus pratensis, bird’s-foot-trefoils Lotus species, and on the cliff-tops bush vetch Vicia septum, gorse or whin Ulex europaeus, broom Cytisus scoparius and the introduced laburnum Laburnum anagyroides.
One reason for the presence of legumes here is an unfarmed habitat, low in nitrogen. Fixation by the legumes is one of the main routes by which the plants and soils get their essential nitrogen.
Most of these wild legumes have been tried over the last few thousand years as crops or forages. Some such as kidney vetch have been well-know medicinals (a vulnerary is a herb for treating wounds). Few have remained useful to agriculture, perhaps the best known being white clover, still cultivated today to enrich grass fields with fixed nitrogen.
Legumes are of the pea family Fabaceae, previous known as Leguminosae.
This recipe is an adaptation from the booklet ‘Barony Mills – Bere Meal Recipes’ from Birsay, Orkney.
Ingredients
100 g beremeal
60 g self-raising flour
40 g rolled oats
2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
250 ml milk
What to do
Mix all the dry ingredients together then add enough milk to make a soft dough. Turn out onto a board coated with beremeal/oat. Flatten by hand until about 1 cm thick, then make rounds using a pastry cutter (7 cm). Bake in the centre of the oven at 170/180 degrees C for about 10 minutes, then turn the bannocks and bake for 5 minutes. Alternatively, bake on a dry griddle or pan on the top of the cooker for about 5 minutes each side. This makes a batch of about 8 bannocks. Alternatively, shape into a large round, mark out 8 segments and bake for about the same time.
Notes
The original recipe was used by the Creel Restaurant, St Margaret’s Hope. In addition to the beremeal, it used 100 g plain flour and no rolled oats. I have substituted this with 60 g self raising flour which gives a bit more ‘lift’ to the product. The rolled oats also seems to make the bannocks lighter, almost a cross between bread and a scone!
The crucial thing in baking bannocks is to get the proportions right – proportions of the dry constituents with the right amount of raising agent, in this case baking powder.
Barony Mills is Orkney’s only remaining working mill – and a water-powered one at that. It produces traditional Orcadian beremeal, a speciality flour with a nutty brown colour and a distinctive flavour, which has been used in this recipe.
Dave Roberts very kindly donated to the Garden this chain saw sculpture of a dragonfly. The sculpture was carefully installed in the meadow on 28 May 2015.
Dragonfly by Dave Roberts installed in the Garden 28 May 2015 (Living Field)
Images above were taken late evening on 28 May, looking north. And then squally showers … and a rainbow.
Dragonfly sculpture by Dave Roberts 28 May 2015 (Living Field)
His Facebook page at Dervish Carving shows some photographs of the work in progress.
A Living Field exhibit at Open Farm Sunday this year on 7 June 2015 10 am to 4 pm at the James Hutton Institute, Invergowrie, Dundee.
Plant to plate: see and touch corn (cereal) plants, ancient and modern; have a go at threshing; try hand-grinding grain; see bread, biscuits and bannocks made from bere (an old Scottish barley landrace), rye, spelt and oat.
Images above show (top) ripening ‘ears’ of emmer wheat grown in the Living Field garden, a bag of oat grain and the Living Field’s rotary quern for grinding grain into meal
As if to presage our various web-entries on natural fibres, oils, medicinals and culinary spices, the notes below, from the Advertiser, of 1 May 1840, reproduced in the book ‘The Trade and Shipping of Dundee 1780-1850 by Jackson & Kinnear [1], confirm Dundee’s desire to trade globally in natural products in the mid-1800s.
[Images to be added]
Arrival of the Selma at Dundee
The time (1840) was transitional for Dundee and its hinterland. It was at the beginning of a phase of international trade that gave the area status as a port and manufacturing centre. Jackson & Kinnear relate that the barque Selma arrived on that day from Calcutta … the first with cargo directly for Dundee.
Selma contained, among other things, over 1000 bales of jute, many sacks of unseed [2] and linseed, 300 bags of sugar, more than 1100 bags of rice, coir fibre from coconut and almost 2000 whole coconuts, and teak planks and bamboo; also buffalo horns; spices and condiments – preserved and dry ginger, canisters of arrowroot, tea, black pepper, cloves, nutmegs, mustard seed, castor oil, chillies and cubebs [3]; hogsheads of wine; and then borax and camphor; samples of hemp Cannabis sativa, presumably for fibre. This is an amazingly varied cargo of plant, animal and mineral goods coming into Dundee, on one ship, 175 years ago.
Half-forgotten plants and natural products
Many items in the Selma’s cargo are still in common usage today, but others may be less familiar. Are you kitchen-cupboard-ready?
Arrowroot a starch from tuberous parts of the roots of some tropical species, e.g. cassava Manihot esculenta, used as a thickening agent in cooking and to make arrowroot biscuits – biscuits your granny gave you, proper, decent, thin, no chocolate, no sugar, could be dunked in tea without falling to bits and dropping in – just biscuits.
Castor oil (beavers love it) from the castor-oil plant Ricinus communis, among other things, used as a laxative: pinch the nose, open the mouth and in with the spoon! Castor oil has many legitimate medicinal and industrial uses, but its laxative, and thereby dehydrative, properties have been used as a means of systematic punishment and torture [4]. The seed-oil is extracted by complex methods; the seeds also contain the highly poisonous ricin.
Borax (not a superhero but) a white crystalline substance made from a salty deposit when lakes in some parts of the world such as Tibet evaporate. Borax is used as a mild disinfectant and cleaner. It was put on children and other humans to cure infections like athlete’s foot and dabbed on mouth ulcers (it stings!).
Camphor. A strongly aromatic extract from some tropical trees, also found in the plant rosemary. Went into mothballs, made old drawers smell funny. Camphorated oil got rubbed onto childrens’ skin to do it good.
Cubebs from Piper cubeba a bit like black pepper corns but with a short stalk (‘pepper with a tail’), mainly grown in Indonesia, and traded for many centuries in that region; employed as an aphrodisiac in Goa as reported by the traveller Linschoten in the 1580s (Q: how did these explorers and ethnobotanists get to know such things – did they experiment?), stimulant and antiseptic, and a tonic for ‘every disease that flesh is heir to’ [3] ….. and much more.
What were they like!
The question you have to ask is what Dundee folk were up to in those days 175 years ago, at least those few that could afford all these exotic imports. Hemp, cubebs, cloves, hogsheads of wine … the ingredients of wild days and nights, and then they came down to earth with borax, camphor, castor oil and coir shirts. And what about the buffalo horns – what were they used for?
Sources and notes
Jackson G, Kinnear K. 1991 The trade and shipping of Dundee 1780-1850. Publication 31, Abertay Historical Society, Dundee. Scanned 2010 and available online http://www.abertay.org.uk. The list of commodities carried on the Selma is given at page 20 and Ch 3 note 32.
Unseed – this had the Living Field in a stir. Even Burkhill’s 2400 pages did not list it [see note 3]. But thanks to an online note found from an internet entity named ‘cyberpedant’, we are reassured that the original was likely ‘Linseed’ and that when documents are scanned, the shape ‘Li’ is commonly read as ‘U’. Relief! Otherwise we’d be scanning the world for unseed seed and never finding it.
Cubebs. Notes above taken from Burkhill IH, 1966, A Dictionary of the economic products of the Malay Peninsular. Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives, Malaysia (2400+ pages). On the aforesaid properties, Burkhill cites Jan Huyghen van Linschoten’s Historical Voyages, published in English 1610.
Castor oil. The author Umberto Eco, in the Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna (2004), relates in Ch 12 a story of a journalist in fascist Italy being forced to swallow a bottle of castor oil as punishment. But after the first two purgings, he regained enough presence of body and mind to bottle and seal the next expulsion of oil and faeces. The bottled contents, sealed from the atmosphere, were kept in hope that the fascist tide would turn, and when it did, the means were found to trace the original perpetrator and pour the 21-year-old vintage down his throat. A delicious passage!
Kirstin Buchholz & Michael Munson (photographer) visited Iceland in February 2015. Here are some of their impressions and images of the places on the route.
In Vatnajökull National Park, Iceland (Michael Munson/Kirsten Buchholz)
Their visit took place during the Holuhraun volcanic eruption (click link for events in February 2015) which began on 31 August 2014. to the north of Vatnajökull glacier.
Kirsten writes: “When we started off in Reykjavik, it was chilly with 4°C and clear sky. When we reached the Golden Circle, it got colder, windier and we even had snow. Down south, it was about 0°C, windier and lots of broken icebergs from the glacier Vatnajökull in Jokulsarlon. The south and east coast of Iceland reminded us about Scotland’s west coast. The rocks, the maritime climate, the wind, the rain, the seagulls and the snow covered hills, apart from the black sand beach in Vik! …….. “
On the road in Iceland, February 2015 (Michael Munson/Kirsten Buchholz)
“The canyon Jokulsargljufur on our way north to Iceland was impressive – also the weather changed dramatically. The temperature dropped down to -10°C with snow, sleet, hail and rain and very high wind – sometimes all simultaneously! The cloud cover changed by the minute so the chances of seeing the Northern Lights were slim. There were loads of farms, cattle and horses around the south, east and north of Iceland. There are also reindeer, mostly on the east coast.”
Vatnajökull
The Vatnajökull glacier and its surrounds is a National Park, the largest in Europe, notable for its sub-glacial lakes and volcanos concealed under the ice cap. The last eruption was in 1996. It broke through the surface of the ice, emitting an ash cloud 10 km high. The subsequent spectacular release of meltwater caused great damage but increased the land area of the country by 7 square kilometres. There’s more on Vatnajökull at Iceland on the Web.
At Vatnajökull (Michael Munson / Kirsten Buchholz)
Mývatn
… the name of a lake in northern Iceland, which like Scotland was covered in ice during the last glaciation. The region experienced several major volcanic eruptions in recent millennia. One that happened 2300 years ago – that’s the middle of the Iron Age in Britain and the founding of Ancient Messene in Greece – led to the formation of the lake.
The area around the lake is still geothermally active, the images below showing smoke and fumes rising from small craters and holes in the ground.
Geothermal landscape near Lake Mývatn (Michael Munson / Kirsten Buchholz)
Skógafoss and the southern agricultural plain
The farmland of Iceland experiences a form of the ‘northern cool summer’ effect in which the solar income is spread over the long days, encouraging crops and grass to produce a high output. The main farming activity is stock raising.
The southern agricultural plain from Skogafoss (Michael Munson / Kirsten Buckholz)
The waterfall, Skógafoss, is a major attraction of the southern region of Iceland. The fall is seen to the lower right of the top right image above. Note the red roofs in the left centre of that image – they are seen again at the right centre of the image to the left, which then shows the river flowing from the waterfall through pasture continuing down to the sea in the distance. The lower image taken from Skógafoss shows the strip of coastal grazing land, between hills and sea.
Þingvellir
And we end with this scene in fading light from Þingvellir. The Þingvellir (or Thingvellir) National Park was designated by law in 1928 and protected as a national shrine.
Þingvellir (Michael Munson / Kirsten Buchholz)
A general assembly (parliament?) began here about 930 and continued until 1798.
Thingvellir is one of the partner sites in the Thing Project – a move to coordinate the documentation and history of viking or norse ‘assembly’ sites – Thing sites – in North West Europe. Partners in Britain include organisations and sites in Shetland, Orkney and Highland Region at Dingwall.
Notes, credits
All images copyright of Michael Munson and Kirsten Buchholz. Additional material by GS.
The Icelandic Met Office give a month-by-month account of the Holuhraun eruption at en.vedur.is. The eruption was declared to have ended in early March 2015.
Tay Estuary Forum’s Annual Conference, this year on Sustainable Coasts, is held in Dundee on 23 April 2015. The small poster above draws attention to work showing the way different forms of land management may affect the estuary (Marion Demade, James Hutton Institute)
Thoughts on a visit to the exhibition Roman Empire – Power and People McManus Dundee, on 14 March 2015.
This fine, informative display gave evidence of the Roman presence north of the Antonine Wall (between Forth and Clyde) around 2000 years ago. They set up marching camps and lines of communication, patrolled a long and complicated frontier, built great fortresses, then retreated. Yet few things remain to tell of their everyday life.
One was scale armour, known as lorica squamata [1], fragments found at the site of the fort at Carpow, near the junction of the rivers Tay and Earn in Perthshire. These small samples, linen cloth as backing, sown with 1-2 cm wide sheet-bronze scales, are stated to be the best preserved of this type of army gear in north-west Roman europe. They are rare intact because the linen cloth usually rots and disappears. Someone might have worn this armour to help protect them from a thrown stone or spear or a body blow from wood or metal. It is not known whether the fibre plant flax Linum usitatissimum used to make the linen was grown locally or even whether the cloth was made here [2]. There was a trade in linen throughout the empire.
Another was an amphora (a clay pot), reconstructed from pieces found at Carlungie, Angus, lying in one of the dwellings adjoining an earth-house or souterrain, used as an underground storage chamber. Amphora such as this were used to move wine, oil and other essentials round the empire. A note by the exhibit told the amphora was from Gaul (France) and contained French wine. Who brought it here is not known, but you can imagine the party.
The Tay from the bank opposite the site of the Roman legionary fortress of Inchtuthil looking west, a landscape probably little changed (Squire/Living Field)
Forts and fortresses along the northern frontier
These exhibits were some of the few fragments remaining in this area from the massive resourcing of the empire’s northern frontier. The Romans made Britain a province in 43 AD and by the 70s AD had established fortified lines and supply routes through (what are now) Perthshire, Angus, Aberdeenshire and Moray. They patrolled well north of the Antonine Wall, which itself is more than an hour’s car-drive north of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England.
They built and manned forts close to transport routes by land and water from the south and east, as at Carpow, and camps and signal towers along the Gask line that ran north of Stirling and continued north east along fertile Strathmore as far as the east coast near Stracathro, and from there, dog-legging north and north west across Aberdeenshire to Moray. A long way to march. A long way from home.
Surprising is the size of some of the garrisons. The one at Carpow, close to the Tay estuary and not far from the North Sea, and thought to be occupied between 180 and 220, was designed to hold 2000-3000 people. The massive base at Inchtuthil – a legionary fortress – by the Tay river west of Meigle (image above), commanded the way north from Perth and was estimated from its dimensions and excavated buildings to house 20,000 to 50,000. A small town! To do its job today, it would need to be sited a few miles farther west to command the A9 and railway from Perth to Inverness.
Roman Inchtuthil existed only for a few years in the AD 80s before it was purposely abandoned. Even if not fully occupied, these garrisons must have held thousands to tens of thousands of people, many of whom were soldiers with big appetites.
Across the Tay to the site of the Roman legionary fortress at Inchtuthil on the raised ground beyond the tall trees (Squire/Living Field)
How to feed thousands of soldiers
They all had to be fed. They would have brought and tended some of their own livestock and perhaps grown some crops and vegetables nearby, but the staple food would have been grain – wheat, barley or oat. (There was no maize, potato or turnips then.) Just think how many packets of porridge oats would be needed to feed all those men every morning [3], and that grain would have had to be transported over long distances from the south or else stolen or coerced as tribute, or tax, from local people.
The SCRAN entry states: “The Roman army was adept at self-sufficiency. At Inchtuthil the legionaries exploited local resources of wood, stone, gravel, and clay to build their fortress. They manufactured their own lime, bricks, and pottery on the spot. Food and other raw materials such as leather would have been obtained from the natives, probably in the form of tax. The massive granaries at Inchtuthil hint at the scale of such levies.” And these granaries, or grain stores, were big, as shown by the diagrams and aerial images made during archaeological digs (online references below).
The exhibition says that when the Romans came the area was populated by farming communities of native tribes, scattered and based around fortified hill tops. This was the late Iron Age, so agriculture would have been widespread, but even so it would have been very hard pressed to support tens of thousands of soldiers in addition to the existing people. Imagine working hard all year to grow crops and then when they were harvested, you had to give away a lot of the grain for the privilege of having the Romans living nearby. The invaders can’t have been popular and presumably that is why they had to build these lines of communication and massive fortresses.
Coppiced birch, last cut 20-30 years ago, near the site of a Roman signal tower in Strathmore (Squire/Living Field)
In conclusion
The Romans did not stay long. They arrived (in what is now Scotland) in the 70s (AD), which is about one thousand nine hundred and fifty years ago, but they were gone in less than 150 years. Their leaving is said to be the result of things happening elsewhere in the empire. Rome was too stretched – but (you have to ask) – was it the midge!
The iron age skills of growing crops and tending stock continued to the present time. So did working hard all year and giving away the harvest to those wealthier or more powerful. The Romans had no monopoly on oppression. It became endemic to northern agriculture.
Notes
[1] Squamata is the scientific name now given to reptiles that have scaly skin, the lizards and snakes.
[2] Flax is one of the oldest fibres plants, grown in Britain for several thousand years, see the Living Field’s page on Fibres.
[3] A packet of porridge oats weighing one kilogram contains 25 servings. To make 1000 servings would take 40 packets, and 10,000 servings 400 packets; and that would be just for one breakfast.
Ploughed land, line of trees through to stubble fields, near the site of the Roman fort of Cardean, Strathmore (Living Field)
On at the McManus Gallery & Museum until 10 May 2015, an exhibition of antiquities, from the British Museum and local collections. See the earthenware pot (amphora) found near an Angus earth-house, said to have held French wine, and the linen-backed, bronze scale armour from Carpow where Tay and Earn meet. Web link: Roman Empire: Power and People – a British Museum Tour.
