Introduction
At the beginning of each month I like to locate myself, metaphorically, within what is happening around me: the annual cycles, the celebrations and festivals of the calendar, the arc of the stars, the waxing and waning of the moon and the passage of nature whispered on the wind.
This is the ninth instalment of a regular monthly almanac I write to share with you. It is, in the main, a figurative contemplation, seasoned with some of the more prosaic anchor points and markers that I personally cherish.
Here we look ahead to the month of August in the year 2024.
Calendar
Thursday 1st August - Lammas / Lughnasadh
Monday 5th August - Summer Bank Holiday: Scotland
Thursday 22nd August - Virgo Season
Monday 26th August - Summer Bank Holiday: England, Wales, Northern Ireland
Moon Calendar
Sunday 4th August - New Moon 12:13
Monday 12th August - Moon (First Quarter) 16:18
Monday 19th August - Full Moon: Grain / Lynx 19:25
Monday 26th August - Moon (Last Quarter) 10:25
Sky Calendar
Thursday 15th August - Keep watch after sunset to see a close encounter between Mars and Jupiter.
Wednesday 21st August - Sometime after dawn the waning gibbous moon will pass in front of Saturn in what is known as an occultation.
Friday 30th August - Wake up early before sunrise to see a close encounter between Pollux and the waning crescent moon.
The Rover’s Almanac: August 2024
Sunrise on the first day of August: Hopeman Beach. It’s high summer but the breeze is cool. Soft salty water washes on shore. An orange fire distorted by cloud breaches the horizon and is reflected in the wet glassy sand. I listen to the gulls sharing stories on the beach, crows call from the dunes, sandwich terns scrape and grate.
On the rise to the right is Braemou Well, fed by a natural spring, whose waters will ward off the evil eye. An abandoned kite lies grounded.
Yesterday the sea welcomed me into its buoyant body. I’ve been a stranger this summer so I resisted the invitation to go deeper, but when I walked out of the water I knew at once that had I stayed in for longer, I would have been richly rewarded.
It’s harvest month. My farmer friend says the gathering of crops will be delayed for weeks up here in north-east Scotland because of the wet summer.
Nowadays we associate this month with holidays and time off, but August has always been a busy time for harvesting food.
North, my youngest son, is keenly anticipating the arrival of the combine harvesters1.
At the end of those arduous days out in the fields, I like to imagine there was enough energy left for merrymaking: feasting and fornicating through the long summer nights.
They were counting their blessings, thankful for successful crops that would see them through the cold winter months and as far into spring’s hungry gap as possible, but I imagine there was always uncertainty as to whether the stores would last.
Not all harvests are plentiful; a meagre year would have been a worrisome time for our kinfolk, the lack of food leading to bouts of hunger and even starvation until the game returned.
When the ducks came back the hunger months would be over, but that was usually late in the fifth month, sometimes the sixth. Until then they would be doling out their food by the mouthful, and feeling a little pinch in the gut all the time.2
Modern-day farming: a herbicide-pesticide, diesel-guzzling monoculture, run through with petrochemicals and poisons, is easy to criticise but we might note that hunger is no longer widespread throughout these lands.
The quality of what we’re eating is another matter. Highly developed industrial agriculture spoils waterways, leaches the land and contaminates the very food it creates.
There’s nothing quite like the burnt red hue of a dead and dying field which has been doused in the glyphosate-rich weedkiller Roundup3, first manufactured by notorious American chemical company Monsanto.4
Working farmers may be the ones putting the chemicals on the plants but they are, it seems, caught between a rock and a hard place. The pressure comes from above: large profit-driven industrial chemical companies and food buyers like supermarkets, not to mention legislative authorities, as well as from below: cash-strapped consumers who demand ever lower prices.
Many agricultural workers make huge sacrifices to bring in the harvest we take for granted and devalue at the checkout. Some of them are working themselves into an early grave and accelerating the process with regular exposure to toxins.
I’ve heard anecdotes telling of early deaths brought on by decades of driving through clouds of chemicals in open tractor cabs, and farmers who have lost a lung but still continue to spray the fields.5
Although they may be beneficiaries of the inheritance class sitting on land-wealth fortunes, financial uncertainty is rife. Some make money, some don’t. All need to think constantly about what’s coming down the line, never resting on their laurels, and during the bad years, the mental and emotional strain must be enormous. Often, it’ll be better next year is all they’ve got left.
Which is why this time of year is such a celebration when the harvest is plentiful. It is one of the few occasions to sit down with a jug of beer to quench the thirst of summer labour and look over what has been gathered. A moment of reflection before next year’s preparations are considered: ploughing and cultivation for the next batch of cereal crop.
Without the farm-folk we would quickly go hungry, or thirsty: much of the barley crop in the UK is malted to make beer, gin and whisky, not turned into food.
One might argue for a more pared down approach, less centralised, less enslaved to the market and economies of scale, more collaborative, local, embracing the inner peasant-farmer, but not many people are going to go for that, me included.
There may or may not have been a nomadic golden-age of peace and human fulfilment before agriculture catalysed warfare6, but it’s long gone now. We separated from our foraging, gathering and hunting origins some twelve-thousand years ago during the Agricultural Revolution (less of a revolution, more of an enslavement7) and if we want to continue to eat in the style we have become accustomed to, modern agriculture is the only option. Turn away and try different methods and expect a radically different diet.
I myself do not want to work the land. The level of toil is pure man-made misery and I would rather not submit to the back-breaking drudgery imposed by the cultivation of crops. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.8
Whether for good or ill, agriculture, particularly the harvest, has been ritually celebrated for generations and the ceremonies of Lammas and Lughnasadh at the beginning of August evoke our collective history as cultivators of arable land.
Lammas is a Saxon word meaning loaf-mass and the festival celebrates the gathering in of the grain harvest: once it is cut, threshed, stored and stacked, the feasting begins.
Lughnasadh9 is Irish Gaelic: Lugh or Lug was a Celtic god, a sun king who, according to the myth, dies now with the waning year. He is John Barleycorn whose energy has gone into the grain, is cut down and sacrificed back to the land.10
Both celebrate the grain mother, while acknowledging the death and transformation of father sun. They are festivals of first fruits, gathering in and a time to take stock.
We will take part by baking bread around the fire. We’ll make dough, roll it into lengths, and wind it around sticks to make plaits. When it bakes over the embers it swells into itself and turns golden brown, like the barley in the fields. When it’s hot and fresh we will break it open, watch the steam rise, and scoop up great dollops of Nutella.
If there are a few spare stalks of barley lying around after the combine harvesters have been through I might attempt to make a corn dolly.
Cutting the corn seems to be a general term for all cereal crops, whether they are wheat, barley, rye or oats. There were many customs and rituals throughout Europe to honour the first and the last sheaf of corn to be cut.
In Scotland the young maid was made out of the last stalks cut, and kept. The old wife was made out of the first stalks cut and was passed on to the nearest farm that had not finished bringing in the corn. This was then passed round until it ended up at the last farm to be cut.11
The grain full-moon appears on the third Monday this month. The first signs of seasonal change are visible in the fields. In time, summer will fade and the start of autumn will show a selection of gold, red and brown colours as the flowers and trees change.
I confess to feeling a moment of dread at the prospect of preparing to turn in and hole up through the winter again. To survive up here you have to be able to keep your end up, stoke the inner fire, remain chipper, and maintain your optimism in the face of dark days.
This year, at the end of the summer, we are contemplating chasing the sun south through Europe. I wonder what this might do to our internal seasonal cycles and whether it might disorientate us.
I found the first summer blackberry. It was a hot afternoon and I was walking home to the campsite, sweating because I had been chopping wood all morning. It was an idle meander, with frequent stops to look at flowers in the hedgerow. That’s when I spotted it, nestling down low underneath some greenery; a purple-black jewel surrounded by its junior siblings who were still wearing red. This one was hanging lusciously off the bramble branch, looking for sunshine to sweeten its flesh. I left it to ripen fully.
Bilberries will be ready to pick this month and heathland heathers are staining hillsides purple. I hope to see more meadow brown butterflies, large white butterflies and painted ladies.
Heartbreakingly, most swifts fly south this month. I only encountered them once this year, screaming over Riverside Park in Nairn. Their cousins the swallows have been more prolific, with their chattering clicks and beeps. I have seen them often.
In August, young swallows take their first flights from their nests, but soon alight on any convenient twig. They flap their wings and cry loudly to be fed, and never seem to be satisfied with the flies that are brought to them by their parents.
The swifts, which are circling over the river preparatory to their autumn migration, are slightly larger than the swallows and quite black. As they fly they screech to one another, excited at the prospect of their long journey. Many swifts have already gone by the end of July; they are the first of the swallow-like birds to leaves these shores.12
I love their presence and don’t want them to leave, but wish them well on their journey.
God speed thee, pretty bird; may thy small nest
With little ones all in good time be blest.
I love thee much;
For well thou managest that life of thine,
While I — oh, ask not what I do with mine!
Would I were such!13
Would I were such; would I were such.
The first combine harvester, requiring twenty horses to pull it, was built and patented in the United States by Hiram Moore in 1835. This pioneering machine could do the three jobs of reaping, threshing, and winnowing, all at once.
Shaman: A novel of the Ice Age by Kim Stanley Robinson
So what if glyphosate gets into our food? Watch this.
Before it was acquired by German giant Bayer in 2018, Monsanto was responsible for a range of noxious chemical products such as the insecticide DDT* (banned in 1972), carcinogenic PCBs used in consumer products (banned in 1976), herbicidal warfare defoliant Agent Orange which caused various kinds of cancer in Vietnamese people and U.S. military veterans exposed to it (banned in 1971) and recombinant bovine growth hormone which, when injected into cows to increase milk yields, caused severe and unnecessary pain, suffering and distress (banned in 1990).
*The widespread and indiscriminate death of wildlife linked to the use of DDT lead Rachel Carson to write Silent Spring in 1962 which drew attention to the industry spreading not only poisonous chemicals but also disinformation. The book also highlighted the unquestioning acceptance of the industry’s marketing claims by public officials.
Mind you, smoking didn’t help in this particular case.
Scholars once proclaimed that the agricultural revolution was a great leap forward for humanity. They told a tale of progress fuelled by human brain power. Evolution gradually produced ever more intelligent people. Eventually, people were so smart that they were able to decipher nature’s secrets, enabling them to tame sheep and cultivate wheat. As soon as this happened, they cheerfully abandoned the gruelling, dangerous and often spartan life of hunter-gatherers, settling down to enjoy the pleasant, satiated life of farmers. That tale is a fantasy. There is no evidence that people became more intelligent with time. Foragers knew the secrets of nature long before the Agricultural Revolution, since their survival depended on an intimate knowledge of the animals they hunted and the plants they gathered. Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (2011)
Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Its hunger even impelled Sapiens to collect animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (2011)
Pronounced Loo-nas-ah
From Sacred Earth Celebrations (Second Edition) by Glennie Kindred (2014)
Again: Sacred Earth Celebrations (Second Edition) by Glennie Kindred (2014)
What To Look For In Summer: A Ladybird Book
To a Swallow Building Under Our Eves by Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801-1866)