The Rover's Almanac: June

Scottish sunshine, summer solstice and skylarks

Jun 01, 2024

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 seventh 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.

Inspiration comes from many sources and I have listed some of these below.

Here we look ahead to the month of June in the year 2024.

Calendar

Saturday 1 June - Meteorological Summer
Sunday 16 June - Father’s Day
Thursday 20 June - Summer Solstice (Astronomical Summer)
Thursday 20 June - Midsummer’s Day
Friday 21 June - Litha
Friday 21 June - Cancer Season

Moon Calendar

Thursday 6 June - New Moon (1.37pm)
Friday 14 June - First Quarter (6.18am)
Saturday 22 June - Full Moon (2.07am) Rose Moon, Flower Moon, Dyad Moon
Friday 28 June - Last Quarter (10.53pm)

Sky Calendar

Friday 7 June - Thousands of daylight meteors in the sky, known as the Daytime Arietids. Largely invisible unfortunately!

The Rover’s Almanac: June 2024

Cast your mind back. Remember winter. The end of December last year. The dark days and long nights of the solstice.

Come back now. Return to the light. It’s June, and we are heading into winter’s true opposite, summer solstice: a growth pinnacle, the natural world in total manifestation.

The trees are in full leaf and blossom, herbs, flowers and vegetables are flourishing and the fruit and grain are beginning to swell. Everywhere there is a sense of completeness and abundance.1

June heralds the arrival of two summers: the meteorological (1st) and the astronomical (20th).

The Anglo-Saxons called it sera monath, the dry month, and the pre-Christian Old English folk knew it as Ærra-Liða-monaþ,2 the first travelling month. This begs the question, where were they travelling?

In his book Shaman, a portrayal of tribal life thirty-thousand-years ago, author Kim Stanley Robinson offers a possible answer.

His young palaeolithic protagonist, going by the name of Loon, packs up and leaves the main camp, together with the rest of his tribe, in pursuit of the great herds of roving caribou.

On the seventh day of the seventh month they began their summer trek, walking up Upper Valley and over its head onto the moor to the north, then over three low divides into the valley of the Lir. Everyone carried a sack on their back; some of these were lashed to wooden frames strapped over their shoulders, to take on heavier loads and the new kids too small to have a name.

When they track the caribou down, a trap is set and twenty beasts are snared. They are killed, broken apart, cooked and eaten with boisterous bloodlust. There is feasting, dancing and fucking through the night in an orgy of carnal revelry.

Any plans yourself this month?

During the second half of June we celebrate summer solstice and midsummer. The nomenclature is used interchangeably, but they refer to different things.

The solstice is the beginning of the astronomical summer that has been celebrated since ancient times as the longest day of the year, whereas midsummer now refers to numerous celebrations that are held over the solstice period, between June 19 and June 24, with both Pagan and Christian origins.3

Weather-wise, some folks (especially farmers) recognise the days around the solstice as the height, or middle, of summer. In the past, crops were well under way and looking promising, so growers celebrated their anticipated harvest at midsummer festivals.

On Midsummer’s Eve people stayed up all night to watch the sunrise and celebrate the longest day. Bonfires of oak wood were lit on the hilltops and aromatic herbs thrown into them. Cattle and the sick were passed through the smoke for healing and good health. People leaped the fires to rid themselves of misfortune and to assure abundance in love and the fertility of the land.
Cartwheels swathed in straw were lit and rolled down the hillsides. They were called fate wheels and the abundance of the harvest depended on how well and how far these blazed.4

Overlaying the solstice is litha, which also marks the beginning of summer. The word is perhaps related to liþa which translates to gentle or calm. It’s derived from Old English and has its origins in the Anglo-Saxon calendar but its recent reappearance is a result of the modern pagan and Wiccan communities’ yearning to reclaim and revive ancient traditions and festivals.

Although we’ve been disappointed many times before and will never learn, we anticipate warm weather and sunshine in June. The sort of summer vibration resonating in the poem Adlestrop by Edward Thomas.

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

How is it round your way? Are your haycocks dry? Because in Scotland, where I am, it’s cold. When the sun comes out, it can be intensely hot, searing even, for short periods of time, but once the clouds pull the curtain over the window of the sky, the temperature drops and there’s a nip in the air. As I write this the cool breeze is chilling my fingers.

Perhaps I’m simply a southern softie.

A younger man I worked with earlier in the year, part of a gang of four Scottish lads, gave me an insight into their relationship with the sun. We were on a forestry plantation planting trees on the Isle of Mull and it was looking like rain. He and his friends were all smoking fags during a break from the work. As an arrogant Englishman, I took it upon myself to remark on this, explaining that it is not so common in England to see younger people smoking cigarettes. They were surprised to hear this, and mulled it over for a few moments. One of them, a mischievous rogue with a sparkle in his eye, said:

‘Aye, well, we don’t get as much sun as you in England.’ He took another deep drag, turned and exhaled the smoke and said, ‘we need the vitamin D’.

As I wake on the final day of May, there is cloud cover. Blue peeks through here and there. A light breeze rustles tree branches in the farm-campsite and the air is cool enough to warrant my down-filled jacket.

The dawn chorus is gentle, relaxed. Birds will be singing less over the next few weeks, spending more of their energy searching for food for their young chicks. Corvus caws. There’s a warning call from blackbird.

I walk through the farm. Half a field was ploughed last night. The freshly turned earth is deep brown. There’s a smell of soil. Seagulls scavenge.

Elder, birch, and Rowan (I think)5, shimmer their flowers and droop their catkins as I pass, promising fruit.

A bright and breezy good-morning flyby from oystercatcher as I turn and take the path up to the woods. Clumps of mown grass underfoot.

The leaves of the storm-damaged white poplar whisper to me on the wind, so I stop and listen, making room for benign, bucolic, rustic words, but they don’t come. I don’t know what this tree has seen, standing sentinel, through storm and strain, but its tone is reproachful and weary instead. As I walk away, the sound is more insistent. Then it dies away.

A single red campion hides in the copse as I pass through. Upon reaching the top of the hill buzzard rewards me with its distinctive mew. I wade through an overgrown field thick with thistles and great stinging nettles. There are buttercups in the gaps. Skylark is up.

That sprinkling lark jerked upward in the blue
Will daze to nowhere but leave himself in true
Translation - hear his song cascading through
His disappearance.6

Little clusters of green helicopters are hiding under the big three-pronged leaves of the sycamore tree. I watch a chaffinch hopping from branch to branch in the beech. Its warning call is soft and subversive. Crunch, go the beech nuts under my feet. A pair of young poppies huddle by the side of the path.

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I hope to see more thrift and sheep’s-bit, which will be flowering on seaside clifftops. A few days back, during a 5am wander, I walked on a carpet of delicate pink sea-thrift under the waning gibbous moon.

The full moon is on Saturday 22nd at two in the morning, so best viewed on the Friday evening before. This is the month of the shortest, lightest and warmest nights. In the daytime the sun is high in the sky, and this means that the full moon, which must be opposite it in our sky in order to be full, stays lower and has a more golden tinge. We now view it through a greater slice of our atmosphere than we did at midwinter, and so it is softer and less bright until it climbs to its highest. The medieval name for this month’s moon is Rose Moon, reflecting the dog roses that are scrambling over hedgerows, their simple, pale pink petals catching the moonlight, as well as the abundance of roses wafting fragrantly from midnight gardens.7

Elsewhere I imagine yellowhammers, corn buntings, linnets, goldfinches and green-finches will be frequenting farmland.

For big livestock farms, sheep shearing is the predominant job in June. The calves born this spring will have their horns removed.

It’s an important month for crop farmers: silaging continues, and farmers will start haymaking around this time. The hay will be used to feed livestock in the winter. Potatoes will be irrigated, or watered, to encourage growth.

On Sunday 16th we celebrate Father’s Day, which took root here during World War Two when American soldiers stationed in Britain introduced it to the locals.

How intelligent he looks!
on his back
both feet caught in my one hand
his glance set sideways,
on a giant poster of Geronimo
with a Sharp's repeating rifle by his knee.
I open, wipe, he doesn't even notice
nor do I.
Baby legs and knees
toes like little peas
little wrinkles, good-to-eat,
eyes bright, shiny ears,
chest swelling drawing air,
No trouble, friend,
you and me and Geronimo
are men.8

Finally, we might also take a moment to acknowledge the inevitable return of the darkness, following the solstice.

As June warms up, it’s worth remembering that in the skirmishes of the human soul, darkness is a necessary part of making things whole, bringing everything home, and finding balance.

Having said that, in the summertime, when the weather is fine, a wink or subtle nod of the head toward the shadows, is all that’s needed right now.

Meanwhile, you can stretch right up and touch the sky.9

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