The First Swallow

The first swallow has been reported, which means someone has been watching. The dandelion leaves are sharp and pale and worth eating for exactly another fortnight. This week: a village in Essex that has kept a precise headcount of its witches for longer than anyone can account for, the hedge the swallow needs, a salad John Evelyn would recognise, and a sunken lane older than it looks.

On the Horizon

The light is adding a few minutes each evening. The soil is workable now, dark and crumbly in the hand after the long cold. The first swallow has been reported somewhere in England, flying low over water – arrived back from sub-Saharan Africa on a journey of six thousand miles, give or take, made twice a year by a bird the weight of a fountain pen.

Cattle are being turned out to grass for the first time, marked by a brief gallop across the field that takes everyone by surprise. Wild garlic is up under the trees this week, the smell carrying along every path through old woodland. The willow warblers are settling in, their descending song joining the chiffchaffs from last fortnight. Saint George's Day falls next Thursday.

The Sky This Week

Sunrise 6.03am  ·  Sunset 8.00pm
Moon  New moon on Friday – the sky will be dark.
Harwich tides  Low 5.20am  ·  High 11.55am  ·  Low 5.34pm.

The moon is all but gone. By Thursday evening it will have slipped below visibility entirely, and the new moon arrives on Friday. This is the darkest sky of the month, which is the best window for anything faint. The Lyrid meteor shower peaks on the night of 21–22 April, five days from now. Worth planning for: find a south-facing field away from streetlights, give your eyes twenty minutes to adjust, and look toward the constellation Lyra after midnight. The Lyrids are reliable and need no equipment. Saturn is low in the east before dawn this week, close to the thin crescent moon on Thursday morning. Venus is the bright one in the west after sunset, on a clear evening bright enough to cast a faint shadow on the ground.

Sunrise/sunset: timeanddate.com, Baldock  ·  Moon data: Royal Observatory Greenwich  ·  Tide times: UKHO EasyTide  ·  Lyrids: Natural History Museum

The Curious Instance of the Witch of Canewdon

If you find yourself anywhere near the Crouch estuary in Essex, Canewdon is worth the detour. It is a flat village on flat ground, the church of St Nicholas rising out of all proportion to the low hedges around it. The tower is fifteenth-century Perpendicular and visible for miles. The reason for that visibility is the reason for the rest of this story.

Canewdon has been associated with witchcraft for longer than the records go back. One belief in particular has proved extraordinarily durable: that as long as the tower stands, there will always be six witches in Canewdon – three from the gentry and three from the working people, distinguished in the local formulation as three of silk and three of cotton. The origins are unrecorded. It was already old when the antiquarians began collecting it in the nineteenth century. The insistence on exactly six witches, and the condition of the tower standing, reads less like a folk tale and more like a local ordinance.

The most famous figure to emerge from this tradition was George Pickingill, born in Canewdon in 1816 and still there when he died in 1909. He was a farm labourer by trade and a cunning man by reputation. He was said to be able to stop the reaping machines in the fields by raising a hand and whistling, at which point they would not start again until the farmer had paid what Pickingill considered a fair wage. Folks who worked alongside him for years insisted on this without varying the detail. Pickingill is buried in St Nicholas's churchyard, and the stone is still legible if you know where to look.

If you go, the village is a forty-minute drive from Southend or an hour and a half from London by train and bus. The church is open most days. The tower stands. Walk around it once. The belief, whatever its origin, has outlasted the gentry it claimed three of, the cotton industry it claimed three from, and most of the people who ever knew it. The current count is, of course, not available.

St Nicholas Canewdon: canewdon.org  ·  Eric Maple, "The Witches of Canewdon" (Folklore, 1960)  ·  Essex Record Office D/P 219: essexarchivesonline.co.uk

The Hedge

The Swallow Hedge

The first swallow of the year tells you one thing. Where it hunts tells you something else entirely.

Swallows arrive in Britain having flown roughly six thousand miles from southern Africa, at an average speed of twenty miles per hour, navigating by sun, stars, and the magnetic field. On arrival they need three things in close proximity: open water for drinking in flight from the surface, a sheltered structure for nesting (a barn, an old stable, anything with a ledge and a reliable dark interior), and insects in sufficient numbers to sustain them. The insects are the critical element, and the insects are in the hedge.

A swallow flying low over a hedge is using a specific habitat. The south face of a well-established mixed hedge in April, sheltered and warmed by the afternoon sun, generates a column of rising warm air that lifts small insects into the flight zone where the bird can take them efficiently. A thick hedge with ivy, bramble, and standing timber is productive ground. A recently flailed hedge offers little; a bare fence line offers nothing. Where the swallows hunt is a real-time map of which hedgerows are still alive and which have been managed into uselessness.

Swallows return to the same barn, the same field system, and the same stretch of hedge year after year. The hedge that holds them in April will hold them in September, when the late-summer hatches fuel the pre-migration feeding. Lose the hedge, lose the swallows. Oliver Rackham, writing in the 1980s, recorded the loss of hedgerow length across England since 1945 at roughly half. The swallow population in the same period has declined by a comparable margin. The two figures are not coincidental, and the relationship is not complicated.

If you want to do one practical thing for the swallow this year, leave a south-facing hedge near you alone. Do not flail it before September. Do not strip the ivy. The hedge will look untidy by the standards of a tidy garden. It will look correct by the standards of a swallow.

The Garden Plot

Weather Watch

The week is cooling after a mild spell. Daytime temperatures are sitting around 12–13°C, dropping to 3–4°C overnight – low enough for frost in sheltered hollows and along the valley floors north of Baldock. A light north-westerly has been pushing cloud through, but by midweek it eases and the sky clears. Thursday looks dry, with reasonable light. The soil at depth is warming slowly but has not yet reached the point where germination is reliable without checking. If you are sowing outside, test a handful from six inches down. It should feel cool, not cold. If it still feels cold, wait.

For the Longer Game

The first swallow is the traditional signal to plant out sweet pea seedlings that have been hardening off. If yours are not ready, sow a second batch now. April sowings catch up fast, and the later flowers often outlast the earlier ones – useful when the original sowing has been hammered by aphids or eaten by mice over winter.

Right Now

Rhubarb forced under a pot since February will be ready to cut now, the stems pale pink and tender. Pull rather than slice, twisting from the base. Stop forcing the same crown after a fortnight or you will exhaust it. The plant needs the second half of spring to rebuild for next year.

Maintenance

April is the moment to get on top of slugs before they establish. Go out after dark with a torch and remove what you find by hand. Unpleasant, but the most effective method anyone has come up with. Beer traps near vulnerable seedlings are the second-best option. The pellets are not.

The dandelion leaves in the margins are at their peak right now – pale, sharp, and a fortnight from going fully bitter. The Larder takes them this week.

The Larder

Dandelion Leaf

The dandelion is the most ignored plant in any garden. It is also, for about a fortnight in April, one of the most useful.

Dandelion leaf was eaten as a spring salad green throughout England from the medieval period, the bitterness valued as a tonic after a winter of stored food. Culpeper recommended it for the liver and the blood. John Evelyn, in Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (1699), described it as one of the most useful spring herbs, to be gathered while young and pale from the crown of the plant, before the flower stem rises and the leaf turns fully bitter. The salad itself was pale young leaves dressed with oil, a little vinegar and salt, often with a sliced hard-boiled egg and whichever other young spring greens were available. The French called it pissenlit for its diuretic properties – a use documented in English herbal tradition from Gerard onwards.

Feta and Dandelion Tart

Ingredients

• For the pastry
• 200g plain flour
• 100g cold butter, cubed
• A pinch of salt
• 1 egg
• 2 tbsp iced water
• 20g melted butter, for greasing
• For the filling
• 200ml crème fraîche
• 3 eggs
• 100g feta
• Two or three handfuls of young dandelion leaves from the centre of the plant — the pale ones that have not yet thrown up a flower stem — roughly chopped
• 50g sunflower seeds or pine nuts, lightly toasted
• Salt and black pepper

Method

1. Make the pastry first. Rub the flour, salt and cold butter together until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs, or pulse in a food processor. Whisk the egg with the iced water and add slowly until the dough comes together. Knead briefly on a floured surface, roll into a ball or sausage depending on the tin, wrap, and chill for at least half an hour.
2. Heat the oven to 200°C / gas mark 6 and grease a tart tin generously with melted butter.
3. Roll the pastry to about 5mm and line the tin, pressing it into the corners. Trim the overhang and put the lined tin in the freezer while you make the filling.
4. Whisk the crème fraîche and eggs together. Season with salt and pepper, and a grating of nutmeg if you have it.
5. Wash the dandelion leaves well, dry them, and chop roughly. Fold them into the egg mixture.
6. Take the tart case from the freezer, line it with foil or baking paper, fill with baking beans, and blind-bake for 15 minutes. Remove the beans and bake for a further 5 minutes.
7. Crumble the feta evenly across the base of the tart, then pour over the filling. Return to the oven for 30 minutes, until set, golden, and puffed.
8. Let the tart cool in the tin. Scatter the toasted seeds across the top before serving.

Dandelion leaves are at their best for about a fortnight, before the flower stems rise and the bitterness goes from interesting to unpalatable. The feta and the crème fraîche carry the bitterness — the salt of one, the fat of the other. A tart will keep for several days in the fridge; the leaves on the lawn will not.

Dandelion roots, lifted in autumn, can be roasted and ground for a coffee substitute that was a working-class staple through both world wars. The flowers, picked in May before they go to seed, make a sharp golden wine that needs a year in the bottle and rewards the wait. By the time you are drinking it, next April's leaves are coming up.

Source: John Evelyn, Acetaria (1699)

The Still-Room

Cleavers

The walk that found the dandelion probably also found cleavers – it is that kind of plant. The leaves and stems are armed with tiny hooked bristles that fasten to clothing and animal fur, which is how the plant disperses its seeds in late summer and how it earns its various names – cleavers, goosegrass, sticky willy, robin-run-the-hedge. If you have been on a path through old hedgerow this week, you have almost certainly brought some home without noticing.

Cleavers (Galium aparine) was used as a lymphatic tonic, a complexion wash, and a rinse for the hair and scalp. Maud Grieve, in A Modern Herbal (1931), records it as a reliable remedy for swollen glands and skin complaints, and notes that the plant is at its most useful gathered in April, before the stem toughens and the small white flowers set seed. The window for gathering it usefully is short – about three weeks. After that the bristles harden and the plant goes ropy.

Cleavers Rinse for the Hair and Scalp

after Maud Grieve, 1931

Ingredients

• A good handful of fresh cleavers stems — young, bright-green growth before any flowers appear
• Enough fresh cold water to cover

Method

1. Gather the young stems on a dry morning and rinse well in cold water.
2. Place in a pan, cover with fresh cold water, and bring slowly to just below a simmer. Do not boil.
3. Hold at that temperature for twenty minutes, then remove from the heat.
4. Leave to cool completely in the pan, then strain through a cloth, pressing the stems to extract the last of the liquid.

The infusion will be pale green and faintly grassy. Use as a final rinse after washing the hair, working it through from root to tip. Does not keep — make it the same day.

Recipe: Maud Grieve, A Modern Herbal (1931)  ·  Species: The Wildlife Trusts

The Weekend Walk

If you want a walk this weekend that reads the landscape rather than just crosses it, find a sunken lane. They run everywhere across England, particularly in the soft-soiled counties of the south and the chalk-edge country. The OS map will mark them as footpaths or unmetalled tracks; the giveaway is a path that drops below the level of the surrounding fields, with banks rising on either side.

A sunken lane drops below the field level through centuries of use. Every foot, hoof, and cartwheel that has gone along it has taken a little of the surface with it. The depth gives a rough indication of age: a lane one metre below the field is old; two metres is very old. There are hollow ways in the chalk counties worn into continuous use since the Bronze Age, their walls hung with fern, the path entirely hidden from the open field above.

Stand in the deepest part of the lane and look at where the shaded bank meets the path. Primroses will be at their most concentrated in those sheltered angles. Ground ivy is probably in flower, its crushed leaves smelling sharp before the small purple blooms are visible. Higher up, where the light reaches, look for early violets and the first leaves of herb robert. As you walk, watch the upper banks for hazel or ash tree roots crossing the path at head height where the lane has dropped away from the hedgerow above. The root was once underground. The lane has gone past it.

An Old Word for It

Holloway. From the Old English hola weg, literally hollow way – the sunken lane the Weekend Compass takes you down. Recorded in Anglo-Saxon charter boundaries from at least the ninth century, where they often served as parish or hundred boundaries because their depth and continuity made them legally legible features in a landscape where most other markers shifted. The word survives in current use among landscape historians, walkers, and archaeologists; Robert Macfarlane and Dan Richards revived it for a wider readership with their book Holloway in 2013, but the Sussex and Dorset farmers calling them holloways in 1900 had not been waiting for permission.

English Place-Name Society: nottingham.ac.uk/epns

In Good Report

The first swallows of the spring were recorded at WWT London Wetland Centre on 12 April, alongside house martins and over eighty sand martins already established across the site. The Wetland Centre's weekly sightings list now includes sedge warbler, reed warbler, and willow warbler — all arrived within the last fortnight. The spring migration is running close to its usual calendar. After a cold Easter, that is not what everyone expected.

Source: WWT London, 12 April 2026

The Turning Wheel

21–22 April – Lyrid meteor shower peak. The oldest meteor shower on human record, observed by Chinese astronomers in 687 BC.

23 April – St George's Day. England's patron saint, though his connection to the country is fourteenth-century at the earliest. Traditionally a day to wear a red rose.

25 April – St Mark's Day. Also the traditional date for sowing parsnips in much of southern England.

28 April – Old St George's Day under the pre-1752 calendar. Still observed in some traditional folk and Morris calendars.

Yours, until Thursday.

Meg.