On 28 December we had one very clear day after all the snow fell. I can’t account for the different sky colour in these pictures, it has not been done deliberately. The first tree is a cherry in front of our house. It was almost falling over (our neighbour advised me to chop it down in case it fell on the house), but in the last ten years this cherry has gone to great trouble to lean backwards, growing mostly towards the left, and nowadays it seems much better balanced and less scary in a high wind. The other trees are all, I think, birches of different ages.
My favourite is this last one, though I can’t give any good reasons.
Crow’s Nests
That lofty stand of trees beyond the field,
Which in the storms of summer stood revealed
As a great fleet of galleons bound our way
Across a moiled expanse of tossing hay,
Full-rigged and swift, and to the topmost sail
Taking their fill and pleasure of the gale,
Now, in this leafless time, are ships no more,
Though it would not be hard to take them for
A roadstead full of naked mast and spar
In which we see now where the crow’s nests are.
Richard Wilbur (with thanks to Language Hat).
A Bad Guide 
They’re barks, I gather. Or so says the dogs.
Happy new year!
Glorious, all of them, and I’m glad you liked the Wilbur poem!
Happy new year!
Beautiful pictures! The poem is just right for them (and vice versa).
Happy New Year! Bonne Année! Godt Nyttår!
A guid New Year to yin and a’.
Wallabies pah! Wegotta seal.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2255632/Seals-remarkable-journey-travelling-50-MILES-inland-St-Ives-Cambridgeshire-swimming-flood-water.html
I’m glad you like the poem too, m-l. I think it maybe appeals especially to people with our sort of climate.
The seal is pretty impressive. And it made its own way there, unlike the wallaby. What’s going to happen to it now?
It is a fine poem. My family used to build sailing ships e.g. clippers for bringing back wheat from Australia. Then iron ships came in, and we had to find other ways of making a living. Farming in Iowa was one – there was less competition in that.
Thank you, Sashura. Where I am it is not really cold, but somewhat similar to England or Northern France. I have lived on both coasts of Canada, but not in the main part where it gets really cold. In one place where I lived, close to Southern Alaska, there were mostly evergreens, but there were birch forests too in some areas.
I like bare trees – trees in any season, actually. But not everyone does: I remember reading an amazing letter to the editor once, or perhaps an article quoting that letter, to the effect that “bare trees in winter, without leaves, are very ugly, and serve to remind us to cover our bodies and never be seen naked”.
Oh, so you’re warmer than us, m-l (“А.Дж.П.Краун” is just me).
dearie, I think I’m part Scottish. My father having turned 100 last year, I’m now able to look up his birth certificate at the New South Wales registry of births, marriages and deaths. It shows he has ancestors called Williamson and MacClafferty. Apparently the latter are from Ulster, though they must have started out in Scotland before heading south. I’m going to hire a kilt.
Oops! I know the Russian alphabet and had identified your name in a previous instance, but I did not really look closely this time and since Sashura has been writing his name in Russian lately I automatically thought the message was from him. But yes, climatically speaking the Canadian coasts (up to a certain latitude) are probably warmer than Scandinavia.
You certainly have an interesting international pedigree.
For the kilt, you will have to choose between Scottish (multicoloured) and Irish (plain colour, not nearly as attractive).
International but only colonial – so really not that interesting (no languages except English). I was certainly thinking of getting a multicoloured kilt.
My daughter’s first non-trivial sentence was “Daddy’s too fat for his kilt”.
Not at all trivial, and hardly surprising she ended up in philosophy.
dearieme, I thought that kilts were adjustable (up to a point). Aren’t they adjusted to the body with fastenings that look like the two ends of a belt, with more than one hole?
It turns out I’m not related to the MacClafferty family after all. But I am descended from one Robert Crothole, from Cranbrook in Kent, who died in the Tower of London in November 1381 as a result of taking part in the Peasants’ Revolt (against Richard II). Finally, an ancestor I can be proud of.
m-l: “up to a point” is the point.
“an ancestor I can be proud of”: doesn’t that depend on his motives and his actions?
Motives & actions in the 14C. are a bit of a mystery. From what I’ve read, dying in the Tower in November of 1381 (rather than earlier in the year) means you were a revolting peasant rather than a tax collector. I can certainly be as proud as the members of another family I could mention whose ancestor is Richard II. This Crothole is my only relative to have done anything noteworthy (unless you count founding a business, which I really don’t) in the past 1,000 years. One was an MP, but he didn’t do anything. Today I found another ancestor: one Seth Hawker, my great-great grandfather, b.1795 in Somerset, who was sent to Australia in 1817 for having gone off with somebody’s six hens. I might be happier about him if he hadn’t later been tried in Sydney in 1822 for murder, after having shot dead an aboriginal woman whom he suspected of stealing corn. He was acquitted, but even so he’s someone whose motives and actions I question; you could never feel good about being related to someone who had done that. I knew someone whose uncle had been in the Waffen SS in Russia during the war, but apart from that I don’t know anyone with shady relatives – and yet you’d think there must be lots of people who are related to murderers.
AJP, we are not responsible for our ancestors, whatever they might have done good or bad. But do you know how to pronounce Crothole? (Crot-hole, Croth-ole, Cro-thole?)
It’s certainly the first; it’s uncommon enough that it’s not in any of my surname books, but I found (via Google Books) a 1598 will in which one of the items was “to Christopher Crouttholle son of young Christopher Crotthole my godson £8”; clearly if it can be spelled Crouttholle or Crotthole we’re not dealing with the “th” fricative.
Well in later centuries it became Crothall and I was assuming it was “Crot-hall” or “-hole”. I don’t know how to treat an ambiguous “th” like that, but I read that this Crothole’s father was John de Crotehole, born about 1302 in Montpellier, and his father was John or Jean de Crotoll b.1282, also from France, so it must have started out as separate t+h. The family lived in Kent for at least the next 600 years, and it may have become “th” at some point.
Four trees? Four candles! And none of those trees are firs.
AJP, you see, you do have an international pedigree.
“Crot-hole” was my first attempt at pronouncing the name, but I had no idea it might have been a French name.
Luckily, his Italian cousin Giovanni di Arsoli had no descendants in England.
I wonder what that Crotoll is supposed to be. No local placename around Montpellier seems to fit. Could it be that Croteholle is a better spelling of a Frenchified Flemish name or some such? Was he a military man?
Maybe it was an abbreviation of the McRothole’s of County Clare?
Rattlesnakes are called Crotalus because of their rattles.
Jean de Crotale “John of the rattle”? It would have been du Crotale, wouldn’t it? Besides, the word isn’t attested that early in French. But it does look suspiciously like what you’d expect from a cognate of rattle
In the OED I can’t find an English rattle (instrument) before the 16C. so it perhaps didn’t exist.
I assumed he was a military man, Trond. His son acquired a largish piece of land in England.
I LOVE the idea of having relatives in Montpellier. Maybe I ought to drive down with some boxes of Q-tips and match local DNA samples against my own.
My search – McRothole’s of County Clare – did not match any documents.
Did you try the “Mac” spelling? Or the O’Crotholes?
Trond: Could it be that Croteholle is a better spelling of a Frenchified Flemish name or some such?
The name, especially if spelled with the letter “h”, does sound more Germanic than French or Occitan. Montpellier is approximately in the centre of Occitan territory but a person with that name is more likely to have been a soldier (or descended from one) come with the armies that devastated Occitan country around that time. More of the spelling variants have h than don’t have it. Since (most) French, and Occitan, did not have the h sound at that time (or now), this sound in the name would often be ignored by a French- or especially Occitan-speaking scribe. Most people at that time were illiterate and scribes would try to write down what they heard, hence the many spellings of the same name.
I think the H spellings are the later, English ones. The first person of this name I can find using google is Jean de Crotoll, b.1282 in Montpellier. This comes from lots of family-tree websites that must have cut & pasted that info.
But if Crotoll is the oldest version, why would later ones add an h in the middle? Perhaps the name was written that way because a local scribe ignored an [h] sound which did not exist in his language, or the name was later reformed on the basis of others which sounded somewhat similar and did include the sound [h]. Crotoll, although recorded in Montpellier, does not ring a bell at all for an Occitan origin. The de which is part of most noble names (menaing “of” or “from”, the following word indicating the place belonging to the noble family) was also often added to a non-noble name by someone who had become wealthy or well-known, so that it is not an absolute marker of noble origin. Crotoll is recorded as the father of the Montpellier-born Crotehole. Surely the father knew how to pronounce his name, but if he was an illiterate soldier, the spelling Crotoll ignoring the [h] must have been that of a scribe. But if the son was literate, he might have known how to spell his name in accordance to its normal pronunciation, hence Crotehole. The fact that the family then moved to England suggests to me that they were (Northern) French, not Occitan. By that time the Occitan lands and nobility had been devastated by the Albigensian crusade, during which Northern French troops overpowered and plundered the then richer Occitan-speaking South under the pretext of destroying the “heresy” of Catharism, which had made many converts among the population, especially the upper class. These people resisted with heroism and dignity but the majority perished.
The later spelling Croutholl, with a different vowel, make sense from the point of view of French evolution from Old to Middle French (the version which most influenced post-conquest English).
I’m researching 15th and 16th century ancestors from Benenden in Kent and in my research came across this useful document. It may help you too?
https://archive.org/details/chronicalofcrota00crut/page/8/mode/2up
I’m sorry to have to tell you that Jeremy/AJP died in 2020, but it’s good of you to add that information for those of us who wondered about the name.
https://languagehat.com/jeremy-ajp-rip/