The miller's tale
Sitting on the seat by the river with the sound of water tumbling over the sluice was so good. I had missed the open day of the Coultershaw Beam Pump Museum (see this week's walk). But there were compensations.
There were cars on the busy A285 behind me but I hardly heard them. I was just watching the dishwashers, and their bobbing tails. And they cut out all life's little problems. Their tails have a gentle rhythm, like a Chopin Nocturne. They curtsey to the water, looking at their reflection.
Who can blame their Narcissus admiration? They are perfect birds. Their long tails balance their long necks when they reach out to take a mayfly. For a second they stand still as they contemplate this Ephemeroptera whose own life has now become part of another, and equally graceful. Then the tail ululates, a kind of perpetual motion.
I wonder about the miller who once worked here, centuries ago. Did he watch Willy wagtail as he paused awhile amid the flour dust and the grinding wheel? This was a busy place then even without today's traffic. It was the confluence of the Rother, the old Rother Navigation, the Chichester Turnpike and even in latter days the trains at Petworth station just down the road where the river bends under the road.
Stage coaches, horsemen, the sparks in the dark from the tall Victorian chimneys black as the top hats of the travellers at the inn. The dishwashers have known it all. And they or at least their children are still here, just like us, enjoying the river.
There are several Rother bridges of course, all have old memories and modern ones too for you to take home and think about. Most will have a grey wagtail bobbing about underneath the arches, busy with a nest throughout the summer. They won't mind you playing Pooh sticks either. Wagtails like humans and their buildings.
After awhile, just as I was taking a bite out of my ham sandwich, I heard the 'tiz-ick' call of a pied wagtail. Looking left to the corrugated iron farm buildings I spied one of these dinky little black-and-white birds doing a kind of aerial ballet as it caught gnats in the sunlight. Both birds nest here.
I imagined the miller sitting with his pickled onion and wedge of cheese, slice of cottage loaf and tankard of ale at Noon, resting as the swallows swooped beneath him into their mud cups with feather linings and the wagtails swung in looping flight to their young in their dead-grass and horse-hair nests among the ivy of these Rother banks. Probably he watched kingfishers as well.
Several still breed in the sandy cliffs made by winter floods. Might a wagtail have nested around the railway station even on a train? Such a strange thing happened in 1878 after all, at Havant. A pair of pied wagtails made their nest on the chassis of a carriage that was pulled four times daily from Havant to Cosham and back. For two years running they reared their young successfully on this train. Another wagtail made her nest beneath a bucket thrown away on the beach at Eastbourne. Others rebuilt the nests of robins, blackbirds even, and a song thrush.
So when all this ancient industrial past is recreated at Coultershaw (Culdir scaga - a narrow strip of land with shaw or copse) the wagtails will be at home among the humans. And we and our descendants will be happy just to watch the dishwashers too.
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Weather for Chichester
Monday 28 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 13 C to 20 C
Wind Speed: 29 mph
Wind direction: West
Tomorrow
Sunny spells
Temperature: 12 C to 22 C
Wind Speed: 14 mph
Wind direction: West
