The Returning Swift
The swifts came back this week. They were not here on Sunday and on Monday evening they were, six of them, screaming around the eaves at the corner of the Wallington Road. The summer arrives with them every May. This issue: a dance that runs through the kitchens of Helston, what those screaming parties actually tell you about the weather, wood sorrel in a Restoration salad, and a Norman arch as a thousand-year clue.
On the Horizon
There is a pale translucent indigo holding in the sky well into the evening now, the dusk thickening late. The verge grass has come up thick enough to hide the last of the bluebells in the shade of the hedge. Up on the escarpment, the ewes are already moving their lambs to new ground. The young nettle tops are still worth gathering for soup – the window closes by the end of the week. Beltane has just gone, and the swifts arrived on Monday.
The Sky This Week
Sunrise 05:31 · Sunset 20:27
Moon Waning Gibbous · Last Quarter 9 May, 22:12 BST
Harwich tides Low 09:13 · High 15:41 · Low 21:38.
The Eta Aquarids are still active this week, a day or two past their peak of Tuesday night. The shower runs from debris shed by Halley's Comet — the same material the Earth passes through every early May — with the comet itself not due back until 2061. From Britain the radiant sits low in the south-east, so the meteors to look for are the long, grazing ones that cross a good stretch of sky before burning out. The waning gibbous moon rises around midnight, leaving a darker window before it clears the horizon. Both the meteors and the swifts are using the same May sky this week; the difference is that one of them will be back next year.
Source: timeanddate.com, Baldock · Royal Observatory Greenwich · UKHO EasyTide
The Curious Instance of the Furry Dance at Helston
On 8 May, the doors of Helston open. Not a figure of speech: the principal dancers of the noon procession enter private houses from the street, pass through to the back, cross the garden, enter the next house, and emerge again into the street. Householders expect this. They clear a path through their kitchens.
The event is called Flora Day, or the Furry Dance – “furry” most likely from the Cornish fer, a feast or fair, though the Latin feria is also proposed, and neither is settled. The dance runs from seven in the morning to late afternoon to a single tune played by the Helston Town Band: one melody, circling and unhurried, repeated from the first procession to the last. In 1911, Katie Moss arranged it as a parlour song under the title The Floral Dance, and the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band put a version in the charts in 1977. Helstonians are specific about the distinction. The tune that starts in Coinagehall Street at seven in the morning is not that tune. It preceded both arrangements by a century or more, and it will be playing here on 8 May whether or not anyone outside Cornwall knows the difference.
The processions are ordered by time and by age: children dance at ten. The principal noon dance is formal – top hats and morning coats for the men, white dresses and hats for the women, lily of the valley carried in the hand. Doorways and window boxes are dressed with bluebells and beech boughs from the night before. The street closes to traffic.
One tradition gives St Michael defeating the devil above the town, who dropped the boulder he was carrying in flight; that stone, it is said, was later built into the wall of the Angel Hotel on Coinagehall Street. A second describes a pre-Christian spring festival, predating any saint's day. A third proposes a midsummer fair moved forward in the calendar and then separated from its occasion.
If you want to see it, tomorrow is the day. The noon dance fills Coinagehall Street, and the best position is near the top of the hill, where the tune reaches you before the dancers do.
Sources: Helston Flora Day · Royal Cornwall Museum · Cornish Language Board
History
The Swift as Calendar
The bird above the eaves this week is the most precise migrant we have. The swift crosses the English coast in early May, and that timing has been recorded for long enough now that it can be measured against itself. Gilbert White was noting the dates at Selborne in the 1770s, and his entries are still used today as a benchmark for how the population is faring. The bird is the same bird; the country it returns to has changed. Average arrival and departure dates have shifted, and the population has fallen by roughly half since White’s time.
What the arrival tells you is the state of the insect population at the moment the swift crosses the English coast. Swifts feed entirely on the wing, catching insects in mid-air, and cannot simply land and forage if the sky is empty. A late arrival in a cold spring means the insects were not flying. An early arrival means they were. The swift is a reading of the season made by an animal that cannot afford to be wrong.
The screaming parties, those groups you see tearing around buildings at high speed on May and June evenings, are not feeding. They are young, non-breeding birds flying for the sheer practice of it, covering distances in a single evening that would exhaust anything slower. A swift is built so specifically for the sky that it cannot take off from the ground; the legs are too short and the wings too long. Everything it does happens in the air: eating, sleeping, mating.
Watching them tear a circuit above the rooftops on a warm evening, you feel the sound before you properly see them – a thin, piercing shriek carrying over the chimney stacks, building as the group circles. We know, as Gilbert White did, that the silence will come back in August when they vanish as quietly as they arrived. White also recorded in correspondence from the 1780s, and the belief held across Hampshire and the chalk counties well into the twentieth century, that swifts nesting under the eaves of a house brought summer with them and that harm to the nest invited the weather to turn. If a pair have found their way back to the same gap under your roofline this week, the old view is that you have been lucky for the year. For these few months the air above the village is theirs.
Sources: Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne (1789) · BTO Swift survey · RSPB: Swift
The Garden Plot
The Weather Watch
Low pressure is sitting over the week and most days will carry some rain — not the sustained kind, but enough to cap a freshly raked seedbed if you leave it exposed. Daytime temperatures are holding between 15 and 17°C and the soil at 10cm depth is now above the germination threshold and staying there. Night frosts are no longer a realistic risk for Hertfordshire. Anything already in the ground will take the wet without complaint. If you have a bed prepared and waiting, cover it until you're ready to sow.
The Longer Game
Sow a second round of salad leaves now, with beetroot and carrots after them. The soil is warm and the light is long, and three weeks between sowings is the difference between continuous picking through the summer and a single glut followed by nothing.
This Week
Your first strawberries may be colouring up in a warm spot. Taste one before it is properly ripe. That sharpness — half-sweet, half-green — does not last more than a week.
Maintenance
Hoe annual weeds on a dry day while they are still seedlings. A warm week in May can turn a manageable job into an afternoon of pulling established plants. The window is short and the hoe is faster than you think.
The Larder
Spring Honey
The first honey of the year has a fresh, floral quality that demands to be used immediately. Gervase Markham, in The English Housewife of 1615, describes it as the working base for what he calls Small Mead – a lightly fermented, restorative drink for immediate household consumption rather than for the cellar. Fresh honey was boiled with water and aromatic herbs like rosemary and sweet briar, and the result was kept clear and thin and drunk at the spring table. Every properly run household had some on the go through May.
Honey and Lemon Posset
A posset was originally a hot drink – warm milk curdled with wine or ale, sweetened and spiced, and prescribed for colds, sleeplessness, and most things in between. The cream version came later, and the lemon version later still. By the time Hannah Glasse was writing in the 1740s, a lemon posset meant cream set with citrus juice and left to hold its shape in a glass – barely sweetened, barely complicated, and finished in ten minutes.
Spring honey is the right sweetener here. The lighter floral character doesn't disappear into the cream the way a darker autumn honey would. Use it cold, stirred in at the end rather than heated – boiling burns off what you're adding it for.
Set it in small glasses and leave it in the fridge for two hours. It will be firmer at the edges than the centre.
Ingredients
- 600ml double cream
- 4 tbsp new spring honey
- Juice of 2 lemons, strained
Method
- Bring the cream to a simmer in a heavy pan and hold it there for three minutes, stirring.
- Remove from the heat. Stir in the honey until dissolved.
- Add the lemon juice and stir again.
- Pour into four small glasses. Cool to room temperature, then refrigerate for at least two hours before serving.
Spring honey loses its perfume on heating. Stir it in off the heat rather than boiling it through.
After Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, 1747.
The Still-Room
Salt of Sorrel
If you are walking a hedgerow bank in May and notice a low-growing plant with heart-shaped leaves in threes and small white flowers veined faintly pink, you are looking at wood sorrel – and at one of the more useful plants in the old household's cleaning cupboard. Pinch a leaf and put it on your tongue. The sharp, clean sourness you get is oxalic acid, present in sufficient concentration that between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries wood sorrel was harvested commercially, dried, and sold under the name sal acetosella – salt of sorrel – primarily as a treatment for iron mould on linen.
Iron mould is the rust-orange staining that appears on white fabric left in contact with damp metal: a forgotten pin, a wet iron, a damp-sealed chest with iron fittings. It is notoriously resistant to ordinary washing because the iron oxide has bonded to the cloth fibres. What oxalic acid does is convert iron oxide to iron oxalate, which is soluble in water and lifts cleanly in a rinse. The chemistry is straightforward. The plant does it without bleaching the surrounding fabric, which most commercial rust removers cannot claim.
The sun is not incidental to the process. Ultraviolet light accelerates the reaction, which is why old household manuals are specific about laying the treated linen in direct sun rather than simply leaving it to sit. Dorothy Hartley notes the practice in The Land of England (1979), and versions of the same instruction appear in household guides through the eighteenth century: apply, expose, rinse. It works in overcast conditions but takes longer. A bright May morning is the ideal circumstance, and the wood sorrel that provides the treatment is at its most abundant at exactly that time of year.
Sources: Richard Mabey, Flora Britannica, RHS — Oxalis acetosella, Culpeper's Complete Herbal, 1653, Internet Archive
Wood Sorrel Juice for Iron Mould
Gather a large double handful of fresh wood sorrel leaves and stems. Rinse in cold water. Pack into a mortar or a folded cloth and bruise thoroughly until the leaves break down and release their juice – the liquid should be bright green and noticeably sharp-smelling.
Strain through muslin, pressing to extract as much juice as possible. Decant into a small glass jar or bottle. Use immediately or within two days, stored in the fridge; the juice oxidises and loses its strength quickly.
To treat iron mould: apply the juice directly to the stain with a small cloth or brush, saturating the affected area. Lay the fabric flat in direct sunlight. Leave for thirty minutes to an hour, checking periodically. The stain will begin to fade. Rinse thoroughly in cold water, then wash as normal.
For a stubborn stain, repeat the application before rinsing. Do not allow the juice to dry completely on silk or very fine linen without rinsing – test on an inconspicuous area first.
Wood sorrel is not the same plant as common sorrel (Rumex acetosa), which is larger and found in grassland rather than shade. It is also not clover, which it superficially resembles. The heart-shaped leaf and the white flower are the identifiers.
The Weekend Walk
The Round Arch
Hertfordshire is full of Norman flint churches, but you can find their equivalents almost anywhere. Walk into the oldest church or parish building in your village this weekend and look at the arches. The round arch, Norman or the rarer Saxon one that predates it, comes centuries before the pointed arch. Norman arches are often decorated with chevron or billet moulding cut into the stone above the span; Saxon arches are plainer, rarer, and often built of noticeably larger blocks. Either one tells you that the building has foundations a thousand years old or more.
The village green outside is probably older than it looks. Most of what we recognise as the classic English village green was formalised in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the open ground itself, the part that was never built on or ploughed, often predates the settlement that grew up around it. If a Jack-in-the-Green procession came through your area on May Day – a figure covered head-to-foot in greenery walking the parish – the green is where it would have ended. The custom is still kept in a handful of English towns, Hastings and Knutsford among them. Look for the chevron or billet moulding on the Norman arch as you go in, and the round span above your head as you pass beneath it. The swifts are up there the whole time, relearning the geometry of a village they left in August.
Sources: Pevsner Architectural Guides · Historic England listed buildings
An Old Word for It
Screamers. A colloquial name for swifts, recorded by Gilbert White at Selborne in the 1770s and in common use across the southern counties. You will hear them this week.
In Good Report
A piece of news worth passing on, from this week.
The Bank of England announced in March that the next series of banknotes will carry British wildlife. The decision followed a public consultation in which 44,000 people were asked what theme should replace the current historical figures on the reverse side. Nature came first, with sixty per cent of the vote. Architecture came second. Historical figures themselves came third.
The specific animals and plants have not yet been chosen. A second consultation opens this summer, and the Bank has assembled an expert panel to help compile the shortlist – among them wildlife filmmaker Gordon Buchanan and Miranda Krestovnikoff, vice president of the RSPB. The panel's brief is to identify species that are native, recognisable, and visually distinctive enough to anchor the anti-counterfeiting detail that banknotes require. That last criterion is more interesting than it sounds: the fine surface structure of a feather or a leaf works in the same way as a hologram.
When the consultation opens, it is worth having a view. Scottish notes have carried otters, red squirrels, and mackerel for years. The question of which species represents England – or Britain as a whole – is not straightforward, and the panel will receive whatever the public sends them.
Source: Bank of England, March 2026
The Turning Wheel
What’s coming, in the next fortnight.
8 May – Helston Flora Day – the furry dance through the streets of Helston.
13 May – Old May Day – the pre-1752 May Day.
14 May – Ascension Day – forty days after Easter.
Yours, until Thursday.
Meg.
