64. Grass, for the cows

The big, brown eyes looked directly at me over the hedge. The farmer has brought his cows into the neighbouring field to graze the rich, late-summer grass. They are plump, healthy-looking animals and it is a pleasure to watch them from the Garden.

Cows, of course, are sacred in India, and are also associated with Brigit - according to legend, St. Brigit had a magic cow that could be milked three times a day and always had enough milk for the whole community.

I thought about the strange fact that such large animals mainly eat grass - which we humans cannot digest - and turn it into milk and meat. It seems rather miraculous, almost like turning water into wine.

Indifferent to my musings, the big, shiny animals continue to graze happily in the afternoon sun. 

63. Oak, for the equinox

Today is the autumn equinox, the moment when we leave the light half of the year and move into the darker half.

On the equinoxes the whole world is momentarily in balance as we all experience equal night and day. They are the only days when the sun actually rises in the East and sets in the West, and as a result the tip of the shadow on the calendar sundial moves along a straight line. From now until mid-winter the shadow will lengthen a little every day and its path will curve as the sun rises ever further south. (The sundial has a clock for each month, allowing the viewer to estimate the date from the length of the shadow.)

I placed a sprig of green oak on the summer side of the equinox clock-line, and some brown, fallen leaves on the winter side. Working with the Celtic cycle has helped me to embrace the darkness rather than run away from it, but
today I feel reluctant to make the transition to the darker months. I am grateful for every gleam of warm sunshine that prolongs the sense of summer, not wanting to let go of that season.


The solution, as always, is to stay in touch with the changes in nature and sit with the wisdom of the cycle, as the wheel of the year turns once more.

62. Marigolds and tomatoes

Today was a golden September day, the early morning sun lighting up the thatch on the Roundhouse. It is harvest time, and the Garden is full of abundance and plenty.

As a child my favourite service in our English village church was the harvest festival when the altar and windowsills were piled high with loaves of bread, apples and plums, sheaves of wheat and barley, potatoes and cabbages. The Garden in September reminds me of that special sense of harvest.

Apples continue to ripen, and the vegetable beds are full of chard, beetroot, lettuce and fresh herbs. In the polytunnel marigolds jostle up against the tomatoes, protecting them from greenfly, in an exuberance of late summer scent and colour.


A time of harvest, a time of thanksgiving.

61. Hazel nuts

Autumn hazel with ripening nuts and yellowing leaves 

The first hazel nuts crunched under my feet as I walked the gravel path past the Samhain garden. The season is turning, and in the two weeks I have been away the summer spectrum of greens has shifted towards autumn golds.

On the ground, I found some old hazel shells split down the middle - evidence of squirrels having eaten the nuts. There are red squirrels are in the area and I live in hope of spotting one. Meanwhile, it is fun being a mammal detective: split nuts indicate squirrels, nuts with nibbled holes are evidence of field mice.

Evidence of red squirrels

In Celtic tree lore hazel is the tree of wisdom. The mythical hero Fionn Mac Cumhaill receives the wisdom of all things from the salmon of knowledge, who gained its wisdom from eating the hazel nuts that fell into a magical well.

A little wisdom would not go amiss, so I hold the ripening nuts in my hand.  They feel smooth, round, satisfying, rich. Of course wisdom is not so easily won, either under the hazel tree or, as Bhudda found, under the bhodi tree. But if the meaning in the mythology is that deep nature is the real source of wisdom, I am contented standing here, surrounded by the living trees. 

60. Grass cross, for Cuthman & Dicul

The idea for Brigit's Garden came to me one April morning in 1997, not in Ireland, but in this cottage on my family's farm on the Sussex coast, where I was on holiday. It used to be the dairy, and as a child I loved to come here to watch the cows being milked. I was amazed about a year later to find a Brigit connection with this exact spot.

In the 7th century, a young shepherd called Cuthman lived on our farm. He became a holy man and followed the call of God, taking his elderly mother in a hand-cart across the South Downs to a place
called Steyning where he founded a church.

Contemporary stained glass of St Cuthman in Chidham church

When medieval historian John Blair analysed the Life of St Cuthman he found it stood out from the Lives of other English saints as it was full of  'strikingly Celtic elements'. Stranger still, some of the stories are almost identical to those in the Life of St Brigit. Cuthman and Brigit both tended sheep and magically prevented them from straying, and they both hung items of clothing on sunbeams. Brigit saved a field of hay by sending away a storm, and Cuthman punished farmers who laughed at him by bringing down a storm on their hay.

Clearly, St Cuthman must have been educated in Celtic Christianity by Dicul and his Irish brothers across the creek (see post 59), and the stories passed on to him.

Sheep still graze in Cuthman's fields

Every time I think of the coincidence of a Brigit connection with my childhood home I feel a sense of awe, of wonder. It was the landscapes of Sussex - chalk downland, wheat fields, tidal estuary and  muddy shores - that inspired my love of nature, which combined with Celtic heritage to find expression in Brigit's Garden in the very different landscapes of Connemara. And yet they were connected by history.

In memory of St Cuthman and Dicul I fashioned a small Brigit's cross from grass and took it to the shore. I watched it float away on an ebb tide, a little Brigit boat, celebrating connection across the sea.

59. Sussex flint, for Dicul

Chichester Harbour on the Sussex coast

From where I am standing on the South coast of England, Ireland is only a few days' sail away down one of the great highways of history, the English Channel. Over the centuries, people here have watched the comings and goings of Roman galleys, Saxon invaders, continental traders, Viking longships and, in the seventh century, a small band of Irish monks who sailed up the estuary in a boat made of leather.

They landed at the small village of Bosham, just across the creek from my family's farm, where they founded the first Christian monastery in this part of England. Their leader was a man called Dicul, but little else is known about them.

Bosham Church, probable site of Dicul's monastery

On a silvery afternoon I paddled a kayak up the tide to Bosham, thinking of Dicul and his companions. They would have been perigrini, self-imposed exiles committed to wandering where God took them, part of the extraordinary expansion of Celtic Christianity from Ireland that took place in the 6th and 7th centuries. Why here, I wonder? Here, with its good soil, gentle climate and Romano-British culture, so different from the wild, harsh locations on rocky outcrops and remote Atlantic islands favoured by some of their contemporaries.

Local flints

I imagine them farming, fishing and praying; building their oratory and cells from wattle and daub, perhaps inset with flints. No Connemara granite or Burren limestone here, but a softer landscape of chalk and clay, with knobbly flints the only really hard material. I imagine Dicul weighing flints in his hand, thinking of the stony fields of his homeland across the sea and embracing his new life with humility and grace.

58. Yew twig

Yew tree in Kingley Vale, Sussex

About 5,000 years ago, an old yew tree - perhaps like this one - was growing in a forest in Co. Kerry. Gradually, bog formed and the trees died, but some of the wood was preserved in the brown, acidic bog-water. The wood lay undisturbed for millennia until people dug the bog for turf, exposing old stumps and trunks.

A particularly intricate root-section of the old yew tree found its way to the workshop of artist Ronnie Graham in Kinvara, who fitted it as the triangular back section of the bog-wood throne in the Bealtaine garden. And so the old yew tree has a new life in the Garden.

I am visiting my family home in England, and I thought of the old yew tree today as we walked in one of the great old yew forests of Europe, Kingley Vale in Sussex. It is an extraordinary place, and makes it easy to see why yew is such a venerated tree in mythology. Yew was sacred in Celtic culture and strongly associated with death and re-birth, perhaps because drooping branches that touch the ground can grow new trunks. Yew is often planted in churchyards and some yews are so old it is thought that they pre-date Christianity, so the churches were built next to the sacred trees rather than the other way around.

Standing under these venerable old trees I feel calm, rooted, and humble.

Ancient yew