Liquid gold and love birds

O h, weary on the barley bree, that brings baith skaith (reproach) and scorn;/ It maks us tyne (lose) oor peace o’ min, and wish we’d ne’er been born.

The chorus of the traditional bothy ballad, The Barley Bree, reminds us what an important crop barley, the bearded barley, is – and always has been – to Scottish farmers. It’s a mainstay in baking, cooking, health products, animal feed and is the constituent ingredient of malt used in brewing beer and, most importantly perhaps to farmers in the north-east, in the distilling of the cratur, the auld kirk.

The hairst is in full swing and fields of golden barley tousled with the wind I saw one day have been combined the next. Sixty years ago harvesting was very different. Farms were generally smaller, fields were smaller and machinery was smaller.

Combine harvesters were unusual in the east of Scotland then and the corn was mostly cut with a reaper and binder pulled by a grey Fergie tractor.

Before the tractor and binder could get in, a strip of corn all round the edge of the field was cut by hand with a scythe so that none of the valuable crop was lost.

The cut corn was bound into sheaves with sisal twine round the middle. The sheaves fell on to a moving canvas platform and were tossed on to the ground for building into stooks to let the corn dry in the sun and wind for subsequent threshing.

I can remember being put to work picking up the sheaves and helping the men build the stooks. Eight or 10 sheaves were placed head to head in an A-shaped tunnel.

In these pre-myxomatosis days, farms were overrun with rabbits and lots of them took cover in the corn.

When it was nearly all cut, and just a square in the middle of the field was left, the rabbits hiding in it bolted for new cover.

Reaper binders were as much a sensation in their day as the introduction of the combine harvester was in its. In half a century mechanisation has changed farming from labour intensive to a near solitary occupation.

The modern juggernauts, with just a driver, cut and thresh the grain in one process and the straw, spewed out like a plump sausage, is baled for feed or bedding for livestock.

With the maltster’s magic, the distiller’s cunning and the blender’s imagination, the barley will be transformed into liquid gold. The very thought of it would have near brought tears to my old father’s eyes. He saw it as a patriotic duty to support his national drink.

I remember him causing mayhem at our wedding reception at my parents-in-law’s Bradford home, scandalising the Doyenne’s Yorkshire mother by refusing to drink the sherry and wine and loudly demanding whisky.

My newly-acquired brother-inlaw was sent post-haste, muttering ungracious things under his breath about Scotsmen in kilts, to the nearest shop to buy a bottle.

A cogie o’ yill, an’ a pickle ait meal,/ An’ a dainty weedrappie o’ whisky,/ wis oor forefaithers’ dose, to sweel doon their brose,/ an’keep them aye cheerie an’ frisky.

Says it all really.

“

I called to the Doyenne to come and watch a pair on the garden fence, billing and cooing and twining their necks round each other

Wood pigeons’ main breeding period is between April and October but they have been recorded breeding in every month of the year.

I called to the Doyenne to come and watch a pair on the back garden fence, billing and cooing and twining their necks round each other – they were surely engaging in a courtship display. Sure enough the male mounted the female with a fluttering of wings. Their union was brief. Nature will continue its ineluctable course and two white eggs will be laid. Incubation is about 17 days.

In the first few days after hatching the squabs, as the chicks are known, are fed pigeon’s milk by both parent birds – a milky substance regurgitated from their crops – until the squabs are weaned on to clover and wild fruits and seeds.

They leave the nest after three weeks.

Courting ritual: Two wood pigeons make their intentions known as they rendezvous on the fence in Angus’s garden.