I have made this area available to my old friend and mentor, Bartlebury. A hardened hillsman with many decades of experience behind him, he has agreed to share his wisdom with us, and I am sure we cannot fail to come away from reading his words without feeling in some way improved.
His contributions will be published as I receive them and I will notify them as updates. I will try to keep them in some sort of order, preferably alphabetical, but he is very much his own man, so may not always succeed.
Please be aware that the views expressed herein are Bartlebury's own and do not necessarily represent those of WhysWhys.
WhysWhys December 2014
Animals
Cows
The walker, particularly on the lower slopes, is sure to notice numerous ungainly mammals with little better to do than eat grass. These are Cows. Listen for their call: ‘Moo’. Do not be alarmed. They are usually docile. Grass requires very little hunting down and is easy to subdue, so cows have little need of aggression.
Cows belong to the earliest phase of evolution. We know this because of Name and Noise. When names were allocated, obviously the simple ones were used up first. ‘Cow', being a simple monosyllable, would have been one of the very first to go. By the same principle, the cow’s noise, or call, is basic, just a vocalised exhalation. Dog (‘wuff’) and owl (‘ooo’) are shown by Name and Noise to have appeared on the planet at roughly the same time as the cow. And we know, for instance, that whippoorwill (‘whip poor Will’) and hippopotamus came at a very late stage in evolution when simple solutions had long been used up. (The principle can be applied to places too. The earliest city we know of is ‘Ur’. I expect people there just went around grunting.)
Detail
Why do cows have their tails on their bums instead of their heads, where the flies are most irritating? It has been suggested that this is probably a remnant of an early stage in cows’ evolution, when they lived in trees and needed tails for balance. Clearly, for reasons I need not spell out, when humans started to walk among the trees this behaviour became unacceptable so they were told to get down.
Grooming - the nostril
Whence comes our symbiotic relationship with the cow? It appears that an early man, seeing one of these creatures ruminating quietly in a clearing, decided that, rather than stun it with a log and eat it, he would see what happens when you tug at them dangly things below it. Stuff squirted out. He thought, ‘I’ll drink that.’ Counter intuitively, it didn't kill him. And the rest is history.
There is a story told west of the Urals that, encouraged by this, another tribesman went out to do the same, but tried it with a cow that had only one 'dangly thing'. His remains were found some distance away with some puzzling injuries.
It is suggested by some researchers that this behaviour indicates that alcohol was invented before the discovery of milk.
The cow’s lifestyle is an elegant example of sustainability. The cow eats grass; after making use of it, it poos; the poo nourishes the growth of new grass; the cow eats the new grass. And so on. I was once invited to join an experimental commune based on this principle. I declined.
Cows seem to have an instinctive knowledge of the correct distribution of poo around a given field: any surplus they save up and deposit in the corner of the field where the stile is, during one of their many social gatherings there.
Cows
The walker, particularly on the lower slopes, is sure to notice numerous ungainly mammals with little better to do than eat grass. These are Cows. Listen for their call: ‘Moo’. Do not be alarmed. They are usually docile. Grass requires very little hunting down and is easy to subdue, so cows have little need of aggression.Cows belong to the earliest phase of evolution. We know this because of Name and Noise. When names were allocated, obviously the simple ones were used up first. ‘Cow', being a simple monosyllable, would have been one of the very first to go. By the same principle, the cow’s noise, or call, is basic, just a vocalised exhalation. Dog (‘wuff’) and owl (‘ooo’) are shown by Name and Noise to have appeared on the planet at roughly the same time as the cow. And we know, for instance, that whippoorwill (‘whip poor Will’) and hippopotamus came at a very late stage in evolution when simple solutions had long been used up. (The principle can be applied to places too. The earliest city we know of is ‘Ur’. I expect people there just went around grunting.)
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| Detail |
Why do cows have their tails on their bums instead of their heads, where the flies are most irritating? It has been suggested that this is probably a remnant of an early stage in cows’ evolution, when they lived in trees and needed tails for balance. Clearly, for reasons I need not spell out, when humans started to walk among the trees this behaviour became unacceptable so they were told to get down.
|
| Grooming - the nostril |
Whence comes our symbiotic relationship with the cow? It appears that an early man, seeing one of these creatures ruminating quietly in a clearing, decided that, rather than stun it with a log and eat it, he would see what happens when you tug at them dangly things below it. Stuff squirted out. He thought, ‘I’ll drink that.’ Counter intuitively, it didn't kill him. And the rest is history.
There is a story told west of the Urals that, encouraged by this, another tribesman went out to do the same, but tried it with a cow that had only one 'dangly thing'. His remains were found some distance away with some puzzling injuries.
It is suggested by some researchers that this behaviour indicates that alcohol was invented before the discovery of milk.
The cow’s lifestyle is an elegant example of sustainability. The cow eats grass; after making use of it, it poos; the poo nourishes the growth of new grass; the cow eats the new grass. And so on. I was once invited to join an experimental commune based on this principle. I declined.
Cows seem to have an instinctive knowledge of the correct distribution of poo around a given field: any surplus they save up and deposit in the corner of the field where the stile is, during one of their many social gatherings there.
Dogs
A dog once ate my baguette on Coniston Old Man.
Sheep
The sheep had become
stuck in a narrow stile. I was attempting to rescue it. Grasping it
firmly from behind and pushing and pulling was the most effective way
of going about it.
Smeet
For a feature that is
intended to keep things inside an enclosure, dry stone walls do seem
to have rather a lot of gaps and holes in them. Well of course the
reason for this is selectivity. By making a gap in the wall of a
certain size the farmer could, for instance, keep cows in, while
letting the sheep, being somewhat smaller, pass through.
From time to time you
may come across a small squareish hole at the base of a wall. This
is a smoot hole. As intimated above, larger animals, in this
case cows and sheep, would be kept inside the enclosure by the wall.
But the diminutive smoot with its need to forage more widely,
could roam the hillside.
Sadly, smeet had been
hunted to extinction by the middle of the nineteenth century.
A Smoot
Hole
A Smoot
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