The Rover's Almanac: July
The spaces in between, John Barleycorn and the death of Caesar.
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 eighth 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 July in the year 2024.
Calendar
Thursday 4th July - General Election
Monday 15th July - St Swithin’s Day
Monday 22nd July - Leo Season
Moon Calendar
Friday 5th July - New Moon (23:57)
Saturday 13th July - First Quarter (23:49)
Sunday 21st July - Full Moon: Hay, Wyrt, Mead (11:17)
Sunday 28th July - Last Quarter (03:51)
Sky Calendar
Friday 5th July - Aphelion: the Earth is farther away from the sun than at any other time this year.
Tuesday 16th July - Wake up early before sunrise to see a close encounter between Mars and Uranus.
Monday 22nd July - Best evening to see Mercury.
Thursday 25th July - Keep watch after sunset to see a close encounter between Saturn and the waning gibbous moon.
Tuesday 30th July - Wake up early before sunrise to see a close encounter between Mars and the waning crescent moon.
The Rover’s Almanac: July 2024
In cultivated arable fields keenly disturbed by labouring men and machines, where tilling, ploughing, and harrowing precede planting, germination, and sprouting, there is now the thickening, swelling and unfolding so emblematic of Anglo-Saxon Hey-monath, the month of making hay and, much to the chagrin of the farmer, Weodmonath, the month of weeds.
With each exchange of showers and sunshine comes more surging, rising, fleshing out and beefing up.
A multiplication of parts, a spread. Life is perpetuating and proliferating, anticipating the festival of harvest, a sumptuous foretaste of the feast to come.
Speaking of which.
The best of the fattened spring-born lambs are being chosen for the table.1
I’ve seen them in the surrounding fields, more sheep than lamb now: plump and forlorn.
Their mothers were moved weeks ago and since then the vibration of the field has changed. In spring there was gaiety and gambol. Now it is quiet and subdued. Separating mothers from their young will do that I suppose.
But come now, this won’t do, I’m anthropomorphising.
Serve me up a big plate of charred, juicy, lamb skewers. Alternate with pieces of onion. Accompany with a greek salad: tomatoes, olives and feta. Roll it all up in warm wraps, with a drizzle of natural yogurt. Add cumin and mint.
Say blessings on the food. Pass the salt.
I’m working on putting these words together with some skill and flair, to provide a moment of quality in a world awash in mediocrity. In return, you slip me some cash 👇🏻
On the farm-campsite on the last day of June they’re making hay while the sun shines. The proverb dates from the mid 16th century when medieval farmers would spend days cutting, gathering, and drying hay to be stored. It was important to do this during dry conditions otherwise moisture would ruin the crop.
Sun-dried grass gives its name to the full moon in July: the Hay Moon comes around on the third Sunday this month.
It’s also known as the Mead Moon as this is the time beekeepers take their first honey of the year, and so the making of mead can begin. Medieval folk called it the Wyrt Moon: wyrt is an Old English word meaning herbs, reflecting the fact that while little has ripened, greenery and herbs are plentiful.2
I’ve watched a good deal of satisfying wuffling over the past few days: the rotary tedder quarters the field, rustling with its spinning forks to aerate or wuffle the hay and speed up drying.
On a dry evening with the promise of rain the next day, the farm folk arrived with the big machinery to commence work.
The first tractor sets off to arrange the hay into evenly-spread pleasing windrows and another follows to make perfectly rolled round hay bales: a round bale is typically used for cattle while square bales are usually to feed horses. We watched with gratification as they laboured.
Once the hay had been transformed into what must have been more than one-hundred-and-fifty bales, the engines were switched off, and time was made for a clesh-ma-clash.3
July is also the beginning of the combine season for cereal crops like barley and maize. We hope to catch some harvesters at work.
John Barleycorn is still green in the fields I’ve seen and won’t be harvested till autumn, at which point, men with scythes so sharp4 will come for him.
There came three men, out of the west
Their fortunes for to try
And they did make a solemn oath
John Barleycorn must die.5
Until then he builds his strength and resilience: feasting on sunshine, drinking down rainwater and drawing sustenance from the soil.
The sultry suns of Summer came,
And he grew thick and strong,
His head weel arm'd wi' pointed spears,
That no one should him wrong.6
John Barleycorn represents the crop of barley harvested each autumn and the beer and whiskey made from it. In the traditional folksong he endures all kinds of indignities, most of which correspond to the cyclic nature of planting, growing, harvesting, and then death.
What you’re reading here is my meaningful work, done for wages.
You can pay my wages here 👇🏻
On the edges of this carefully-cultivated land, exists a different, rather-more unruly world. In between the fields, by the sides of tracks and nestled in corners, the hedgerows, verges and field margins are flourishing.
Walking the track between two fields of barley early one morning I witness lush, wild, abundant growth, where it’s permitted.
Not being skilled in the identification of plants, I have to look each one up.7
It’s pleasing when the name for the plant is familiar, something like hogweed for example, and I can gaze appreciatively at this thing-that-is-essentially-hogweed and wonder at its unique hogweed nature.
In my 1975 copy of Richard Mabey’s Food for Free A guide to the edible wild plants of Britain, it says the young shoots of hogweed are ‘marvellously fleshy’.
I understand common hogweed bears a striking resemblance to its much nastier relative giant hogweed (as well as the often-confused cow parsley), which should be given a wide berth owing to the possibility of painful, burning blisters and resulting purple-black scars.
When I stop and look closer, everything comes toward me.
Lark alerts me to the white campion and rises up over the tall oat grass which is dancing in the cool breeze.
Bees are gathering around the pinks and purples of the creeping thistle and the hedge woundwort. The leaves of the latter give off a fetid smell when I crush them between my fingers.
Another annual grass, common soft brome has loosely clustered flower heads with compact spikelets and bristles at their tips.
Deep-rooted, tenacious, survivalist, orchard grass or cocksfoot grass is making a grab for the middle of the track.
Docks have grown in Britain since three ice ages ago. Remains of dock have been found on ancient Celt farmland. It’s been used as food and medicine for centuries. The leaves have a tart, lemon-taste.
The great stinging nettles further on are strong wildlife attractors: caterpillars of the small tortoiseshell and peacock butterflies eat them; ladybirds feast on the aphids that shelter among them; and seed-eating birds enjoy their autumn spoils.
Here are the burdocks, whose roots can be roasted like parsnip, sliced finely and stir fried or made into a puree.
I can identify a dandelion but I didn’t realise there are two common species: the red-seeded and the common dandelion. And here is a red-seeded fellow, in the strip right next to the burdock.
Yet more red in the powdery petals of the poppy standing on solitary stalks.
Green alkananet is blue, and part of its name means ‘always alive’ or ‘evergreen’. It’s a cousin of the forget-me-not.
Wild camomile carpets this part of the trail. The sweet scent is intoxicating. Crouch down.
Equally strong-smelling clusters of white, flat-topped, yellow-centred yarrow flowers are in there too.
The daisy-like, yellow flower heads of common ragwort are harmful to livestock if eaten, but it’s beneficial for many insects, particularly the black-and-red cinnabar moth, the black-and yellow-barred caterpillars of which can totally strip the leaves.
Sitting out in the open, iridescent, is a bright green cucumber spider: bulbous, with an obvious red spot just above the spinnerets. It’s waiting to pounce on any prey caught in its web.
Bountiful growth, a web of wildlife, bouquets of flowers and a perfumery of scents, all confined to the margins, restrained in the strip, thriving in what is left over, after the agriculture.
In this hinterland, the part somehow contains the whole. The riot of plants and insects seems to be both ordered and chaotic at the same time. Its complexity goes on forever and yet has definite limits. It is paradoxical.
I craft words to delight you.
You, filled to the brim, send money by way of thanks 👇🏻
July offers another enigma as it is the month in which the most crop circles appear. Crop-circle activity is concentrated in our old home-county of Wiltshire.
Stems trampled, bent or otherwise transformed into beautiful geometric patterns within golden fields. The earliest known report of a crop circle was in 1678 in Hertfordshire, but it was the 1970s that saw the start of a resurgence of circles that has now become a boom, with 40–50 appearing every summer, and sometimes more.8
In a matter of days we’ll have a new Prime Minister after the general election on the first Thursday of the month. Which side gets in it matters not, since there is little difference between the left and the right,9 and only marginal adjustments will be made to the system which pursues its own agenda anyway.
Whatever the result of this latest political contest, we might look back a few thousand years for inspiration about how to deal with the power-hungry elite.
In 44 B.C a mob of murderous Roman senators assassinated dictator Julius Caesar en masse with twenty-three knife thrusts to his body on the Ides of March. They had become fearful of his unprecedented concentration of power which was undermining the Roman Republic.
They renamed Quintilis, their fifth month and the year of Caesar’s, in honour of the leader they had so savagely dispatched.
He was resurrected as July, and is still with us today.
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If you’ve got something bubbling, consider leaving me a message. I will read and respond to every comment (eventually) and because I’m an adult and not a child I like to engage with opposing ideas, criticism and questions. Having said that, being arrogant and egotistic, I also like compliments.
Two For Joy by Adam Henson.
The Almanac: A Seasonal Guide to 2020 by Lia Leendertz.
Scots: Idle talk, gossip.
John Barleycorn by Steeleye Span.
John Barleycorn by Sam Lee, from his 2020 album Old Wow.
John Barleycorn: A Ballad by Robert Burns.
Seek: my mum told me about this app, you know where to find them.
The Almanac: A Seasonal Guide to 2018 by Lia Leendertz
The Political Spectrum by Darren Allen, 2017