The Easter Cold
Easter has gone. The cold has not. The sky carries no warmth, the lambs are unsteady in the fields, and underneath the cold the year is already several weeks ahead of itself. This week: a drowned bell still answering the church above it, why the chalk heath runs two weeks ahead of the calendar, wild garlic at its sharpest, and a walk through the lambing fields with something very slow-growing to find on the way back.
On the Horizon
The cold has not finished with April. Sharp blue one moment, racing grey cloud the next, the light bright but bringing no warmth with it. Frost lingers in the hollows through the morning, the grass stiff and pale where the sun has not yet reached. Willow warblers are arriving in the hedgerows now, their descending song unmistakable once you know it – seven or eight notes falling away down the scale, repeated for as long as the bird is in the bush.
In the fields, new lambs are unsteady on their feet, their mothers keeping themselves between the lamb and anyone on the path. Hot cross buns were made at the weekend, the scent of nutmeg still just detectable from kitchen windows. Easter has just gone, the oldest moving feast in the English calendar, earlier than usual this year, and the cold that arrived with it shows no sign of leaving.
The Sky This Week
Sunrise 6.20am · Sunset 8.02pm
Moon Waning gibbous, three-quarters lit, rising after nine.
Harwich tides High 4.44am and 5.00pm · Low 10.17am and 10.50pm.
If you have a clear evening this week, half an hour at dusk will show you Jupiter and Mars without binoculars. Jupiter sits in the western sky after sunset, bright enough to find before the sky fully darkens. Mars is further east, distinctly red if you catch it before it drops. The Lyrid meteor shower is building toward its peak on the night of 21–22 April – not here yet, but worth knowing for next week. The radiant rises high enough after midnight to give you a decent view, and they need no equipment.
Sources: timeanddate.com (Baldock) · Moon: Royal Observatory Greenwich · Tides: UKHO EasyTide
The Curious Instance of the Buried Bell of Bosham
Down on the Sussex coast, where the cold this week is doing the same thing it is doing in Hertfordshire, there is a village built on a tidal creek with a Norman church at its edge and the sea coming in twice a day. Bosham. The church of Holy Trinity appears in the Bayeux Tapestry – Harold entering to pray before his 1064 voyage to Normandy – and it carries an unusual weight of local legend. Most of that weight is underwater.
The bell story runs like this. Danish raiders, sometime in the ninth or tenth century, came up the creek and stripped the church of anything worth taking, including one of its bells. They loaded it onto their longship and rowed out to sea. As they left, the remaining bells in the tower began to ring. The stolen bell rang back from the ship. It pulled loose from the deck, or they threw it, and it went to the bottom of the harbour.
When the bells ring at Holy Trinity, watchers on the bank have claimed for centuries to hear a faint answering toll from beneath the water. Irregular, slightly late, as though arriving from a distance. The creek is shallow enough at low tide in summer that you would expect to find something if you looked. Several attempts have been made over the years, none successful.
There is a second story under the floor of the same church. In 1865, workmen digging in the nave found a small stone coffin. Inside were the bones of a child, complete and very old, believed to be a daughter of King Canute who drowned in a millstream near the village around 1020. The bones were reinterred, the slab replaced. The congregation has been walking over a king's daughter ever since.
Bosham is about an hour and a half from London by train and ten minutes from Chichester. The church is open most days, the small museum nearby holds the local archive, and the harbour wall is the place to stand at low tide if you want to listen for the bell. The road from Bosham village to Shore Road is partly tidal – signs warn that cars left there at high tide are liable to be reclaimed by the creek, and several are every year.
Further reading: Holy Trinity Church, Bosham · Bayeux Tapestry: bayeuxmuseum.com · Sussex Archaeological Collections: sussexpast.co.uk
The Heath
The Easter Heath
The cold doing its work on Bosham harbour is also doing its work on the chalk downland around Baldock and the Chiltern fringe – but here it is doing something quite different. Chalk responds to cold differently from clay. Clay holds moisture and stays chilled for weeks; chalk drains fast and dries fast and can warm in a single bright afternoon, then loses that heat just as quickly overnight. Which is why the Easter heath, even in a cold April, feels different from the field next to it.
The indicator is not the flowers, but what precedes them. On the chalk in early April, even when the air temperature is still technically winter, the ground-level microclimate runs two or three weeks ahead of the calendar. In the sheltered south-facing hollows, the old drove roads banked on both sides, the bottom of any earthwork, small bees are already flying. Not honeybees, but the early mining bees – Andrena species – emerging from their single burrows in sandy chalk banks when the soil temperature alone is warm enough. The air can be cold enough for frost and they are flying regardless.
The plants respond the same way. Cowslips on chalk open earlier on south-facing slopes than north-facing ones, sometimes by two full weeks across a single field. Ground ivy has been spreading along the base of the earthworks since February, its purple flowers sitting low and vivid in the cold grass. Edward Salisbury, writing in The Living Garden (1935), recorded the same pattern on the Hertfordshire chalk that you can read this week if you know where to walk.
Most of what is happening on the Easter heath is small. The orchids, the adonis blue butterflies, the full chorus of singing birds are still six weeks away. What is here now is the preparation. If you want to see the year arrive ahead of itself, walk a south-facing chalk bank in the second week of April and watch what is already moving.
The Garden Plot
Weather Watch
The same cold that is suiting the chalk so well is testing the kitchen garden. Daytime temperatures are sitting around 13°C and dropping back toward 5°C overnight, lower than that on exposed ground when the westerly picks up. High pressure to the northwest is keeping rain away from Hertfordshire for now, which means bright fast-moving light rather than settled warmth. Soil at 10cm depth is still below the 7°C threshold for reliable germination. Test before you sow.
For the longer game
Easter is the traditional moment to sow hardy annuals outside – cornflowers, nigella, ammi, larkspur. But check the forecast first. A cold snap after sowing can set things back by two weeks, and a sowing washed off in a heavy April shower will not come back. If in doubt, wait until after the 15th. The ground will not be any colder, and the seeds will not be any older.
For this week
Spring cabbage that overwintered is hearting up now. Cut the heads while they are still tight and leave the stalks in the ground; most varieties will throw a second crop of small loose heads from the cut stem within three weeks. Two harvests from one planting, which is the kind of arithmetic the kitchen garden is built on. The Larder this issue is built around it.
The chore
Weeds are moving faster than they look right now. Hoe on a dry day when the seedlings are small and the job takes ten minutes. Leave it another week and you are pulling established plants for an hour.
The Larder
Spring cabbage is hearting up in the kitchen garden right now, and the Larder this week is built around it. Three ways in: where it came from, what to do with it tonight, and how to make it last.
Spring cabbage – the loose-headed variety sown in late summer to overwinter – was the working English household's first fresh green of the year, eaten through the lean weeks between the end of stored roots and the start of summer veg. Dorothy Hartley, in Food in England (1954), describes it boiled briefly in salted water and finished with butter, the cooking liquor saved for stock. The richer kitchens of Yorkshire and the West Country added bacon. The poorer ones added the bacon water. Either way, the principle is the same: a green that has come through the winter is treated with respect.
Spring cabbage with anchoïade
Anchoïade is a creamy sauce made by slowly cooking garlic in milk to mellow its flavour, then mixing with oil, anchovies and vinegar.
Ingredients
For the anchoïade
- 2 bulbs garlic, cloves separated and peeled
- 215ml whole milk
- 15 anchovy fillets from a jar
- 1 tsp white wine vinegar
- 1 tsp lemon juice
- 40ml vegetable oil
For the cabbage
- 1 large or 2 small pointed spring cabbages
- 1½ tbsp olive oil, plus extra to serve
- ¼ tsp chilli flakes
- A small handful of chives, finely chopped
- A handful of ciabatta croutons, roughly chopped
- Flaky salt and black pepper
Method
- Put the garlic, milk and 175ml water in a small saucepan over a low heat. Simmer very gently for thirty minutes. Mash the softened garlic against the side of the pan with the back of a fork, then turn the heat up and cook for a further fifteen minutes, stirring, until it reduces to a thick paste. Leave to cool.
- Tip the cooled garlic into a small food processor with the anchovies, vinegar and lemon juice. Whizz to a paste. With the motor running, add the vegetable oil in a slow stream. Loosen with a splash of water if needed — the consistency should be that of ketchup.
- Remove and discard the large outer leaves from the cabbages. Cut the heads lengthways into wedges. Set a colander over a pan of simmering water, cover with a lid, and steam the wedges for six minutes — they should yield at the edges but hold their bite at the core. Pat them dry on kitchen paper.
- Heat a large frying pan over a high heat. Brush the flat sides of each wedge with olive oil. Cook in two batches, two to three minutes on each cut face, until well charred. Transfer to a platter and season.
- Spoon the anchoïade over the charred cabbage. Scatter with chilli flakes, chives and croutons. Serve at once.
The anchoïade also goes on toast, alongside boiled new potatoes, or stirred through warm cannellini beans. It keeps five days in the fridge.
Spring cabbage does not store well as a whole head – it is bred to be eaten fresh – but it ferments beautifully. Shred it, salt it at two per cent of its weight, pack it into a clean jar, weight it down, and leave it at room temperature for a week to ten days. The result is a sharp, lively kraut that holds its texture longer than autumn cabbage and goes on improving for a month in the fridge. By the time you have used the jar, the summer crops are coming in.
Source: Dorothy Hartley, Food in England (1954)
The Still-Room
Wild Garlic
While the cabbage has been the kitchen's concern, the damp woodland to the west of Baldock is doing something else entirely. Wild garlic is at its sharpest right now – coming into full leaf in any damp wood, the smell carrying before you see the leaves, abundant before the flowers open and the leaves coarsen. The kitchen has its own uses for it, as last issue's Larder showed. The Still-Room is for the older preparation.
The word oxymel comes from the Greek: oxys, acid, and meli, honey. The preparation is older than English medicine by a considerable distance. Hippocrates recommended it. Culpeper used it. The still-room inherited the practice without much ceremony and applied it to whatever the hedgerow offered. The principle is simple: honey and vinegar together will draw out and preserve the medicinal properties of almost any plant you put in them, and they make bitter or pungent things considerably more drinkable in the process.
Wild garlic is exactly the kind of plant an oxymel was designed for. The leaves are available in quantity right now, the flavour is sharp enough to need something to soften it, and garlic's reputation as a remedy for colds, coughs, and what Culpeper listed as “all manner of cold diseases” has not really changed in four centuries. This takes four weeks to be ready, which means making it this weekend and opening it in May. That is the still-room's logic – the kitchen doing useful work in April that the kitchen will be glad of in summer.
Wild Garlic Oxymel
after Nicholas Culpeper, The English Physitian (1653)
Ingredients
- A good handful of wild garlic leaves, gathered on a dry morning before the flowers open
- Two parts raw apple cider vinegar
- One part good honey (heather or chestnut carries well)
Method
- Wash the leaves thoroughly and dry them well; pack into a clean jar.
- Warm the vinegar and honey together in a small pan over a low heat, stirring until the honey has fully dissolved. Do not let it boil.
- Leave the mixture to cool completely, then pour over the leaves until they are covered. Seal the jar.
- Store in a cool dark place for three to four weeks, shaking gently every few days.
- Strain through a cloth into a clean bottle, seal, and label with the date.
A tablespoonful in warm water at the first sign of a cold, or as a sharp dressing on anything that needs vinegar. Keeps for six months at least, longer in the fridge.
Source: Culpeper's Complete Herbal (1653)
The Weekend Walk
If you want a walk this weekend that puts you closer to the working calendar of the countryside, find a footpath that runs alongside or between lambing fields. Any of the chalk farms around Baldock and the Chiltern fringe will do, and most have public paths marked on the OS map. The best time is morning, before the day warms and the ewes have settled.
A ewe that has lambed in the last forty-eight hours will keep herself between you and the lamb, turning slowly as you walk past. One in the final hours before lambing will stand apart from the rest of the flock, slightly absent. Keep dogs on leads and maintain a normal pace. The farm is a working environment and the ewes will read your behaviour faster than you read theirs.
Walk back via the nearest churchyard. On a flat gravestone catching the morning light, look for grey-green or orange-yellow lichen colonies, growing at approximately one millimetre per year. A two-pence-piece-sized colony is roughly twenty years old. A patch the size of a saucer has been there since before the war.
An Old Word for It
One old word, chosen for the week.
Hogget. A sheep in its second year, between the lamb of last spring and the mature ewe or wether it will become. April is the traditional hogget season – the previous year's lambs grown on, the new year's lambs not yet ready – which is why a ewe in the field with a lamb at her side this week may herself have been a hogget on the table last April. If you want to taste the difference, ask at a farm shop or proper butcher: hogget meat sits between lamb and mutton, deeper than spring lamb, more tender than autumn mutton.
Source: Mutton Renaissance Campaign
In Good Report
The common crane — absent from England as a breeding bird for four centuries — has reached a record population this year. The RSPB reports that 2026 has seen the highest count of cranes on record in the UK, with birds now established at multiple sites beyond their Norfolk stronghold. The recovery began with a single pair at Horsey in the 1970s and has expanded steadily through a combination of habitat restoration and, more recently, a reintroduction programme on the Somerset Levels. A bird that Tudor hunters ate into local extinction is now nesting in ten English counties.
Source: RSPB
The Turning Wheel
13 April – Easter Monday. Hocktide week begins in some old parishes; in Hungerford, Berkshire, the Hocktide court still meets on the second Tuesday after Easter to elect parish officers, a custom continuous since at least the fourteenth century.
21–22 April – Lyrid meteor shower peak. Best after midnight, looking east. The oldest meteor shower on human record – Chinese astronomers noted them in 687 BC.
23 April – St George's Day. Patron saint of England since the fourteenth century. Real fellow, sort of – fourth-century Roman soldier, no recorded connection to England.
25 April – St Mark's Day. Old folk belief: anyone who keeps vigil in the church porch on St Mark's Eve will see the spirits of all those due to die in the parish that year walk in. Best left to others.
Yours, until Thursday.
Meg.
