Stories of the Sun

JANUARY

TILTING AT THE SUN

I SIT IN THE GRASS, damp from yesterday's rain, waiting. Winter's early morning voices have already begun to sing. Tawny owls call to each other in the trees above my sit-spot. I have brought with me a flask of coffee and a circular, sweet, orange, tortas biscuit. The sugar sparkles in the half-light and the orange pieces buried within it are like the sun I wait for, buried in the morning clouds. The sugary goodness from the Spanish flat-bread biscuit, once the favoured snack of stagecoach passengers, gives me much-needed energy. As I hit the alarm this morning to stop it from waking anyone else, the clock read 6 a.m. - a good hour earlier than I usually get up, but still not as early as I know I will have to, in six months' time, in order to continue my planned year of monthly sunrise vigils.

The sky is paint-pot black and the stars are bright. As I walked to the dark spot on the hill I have chosen for this project, everything felt alien. I kept thinking I could hear fellow mammals in the undergrowth when in actual fact it was the rustling of my own clothes.

I am lucky enough to live in a little village nestled in the South Downs National Park, which is an International Dark Skies Reserve. This means that urban skyglow is kept to a minimum through planning and quantifiable guidelines on light levels. In turn this allows the skies above the South Downs to be perfect for star gazing, night hikes and, of course, our nocturnal neighbours.

The village has no street lamps and this, coupled with the new moon, means there is no other light. I was glad of my torch. I could have risen later when the atmospheric light was enough for me to see by, still well before sunrise, but I wanted to experience the shifting in the light, truly immerse myself in the space between night and day.

I am reminded of the stories I have read, listened to and indeed told about the Lincolnshire Carrs. The stretches of boggy marshland that hide all manner of nefarious beings: boggarts, boggles, will o' the wisps, lantern men and disembodied dead hands. The folktale of 'The Buried Moon' tells of a time when the moon is trapped beneath the marshes with nothing to illuminate the night for months on end, until the villagers find a way to join together and free her. I am certainly able to empathise with the characters in these tales as the tree branches reach out of the hedgerows towards me, and the path, slick with mud from last night's rain, sucks at my boots.

Once I find my chosen spot, I turn the torch off and wait. After ten minutes of sitting, the darkness starts to lift and I see a yellow line appear on the horizon. Behind me, in the copse, a tawny owl calls and more soon join it, their k'wik and t'woo contact calls echoing back and forth. Dogs bark in the village below and the light creeps slowly into the sky until there is just one star left above me, trapped in the skeleton crook of a tree's branches.

In the wood, the tawny owls have found each other and their calls crescendo in a happy frenzy of voices until, just as suddenly, there is silence. Tawny owls have a variety of nicknames: brown hoolet, Jenny howlet, hoot owl and, in Sussex, the 'ollering owl. My particular favourite has to be the ferny hoolet, which combines its appearance with its call to create the perfect kenning for a Tawny Owl. The t'wit, t'woo that we classically associate with most owls is actually the contact call of the tawny owl and not just one owl but two. The t'wit or k'wik, as it is more commonly written phonetically, is the female and the t'woo or ho-hoo is the male. The two I had been listening to were a pair: a male and a female. A little early morning love story as the two of them found each other once more before retiring for the day.

As the darkness lifts, the clock strikes seven and the field of the day that I am familiar with comes into view, no longer the dark, unwelcoming expanse that it was as I struggled to find my way to the sit-spot. A finch bobs across my view from one set of trees to the next, its undulating flight unmistakable.

A splash of yellow appears above the trees; I can't be sure if the sun has come up yet or not. I don't think I've been up specifically to watch a sunrise since that morning on Helvellyn, and whilst I have worked night shifts in the past, I was working. You don't necessarily have time to take in the dawn in all its glory, or even notice the different stages of light and the sun rising.

A cacophony of rooks leave their roost for the day and they wake the collared doves who coo sympathetically.

A robin greets the light loudly and hops down from the tree to drink from a muddy puddle, leaving in a flurry of feathers as soon as it spots me. Shortly after the robin, a blackbird tumbles out of the hedgerow and disappears again, tutting at my presence. It would appear I am sitting a few feet away from the best puddle in the meadow.

The robin in folklore can be quite onerous. This one was certainly cross, if nothing else. It is believed that a robin coming into your house foretells the death of someone in the household. This is true for a robin tapping on your window too. Conversely, the robin also became the subject of a murder mystery in the poem 'Who Killed Cock Robin?' There's not much mystery to the story as the sparrow confesses within the first line; however, the story is well loved and ends in a rather fitting funeral for poor Cock Robin.

Owls are also considered bad omens in folklore, and given my early morning encounters with two dark messenger birds, I'm rather hoping that on this occasion this lore is not correct, and that I make it back down the hill and safely home.

It's almost completely light and it feels like the sun must have come up by now, yet I cannot see it and there are no clouds. I start to doubt myself. Perhaps I am sitting in the wrong place, facing the wrong direction? I check my position on a map. No. I'm facing east. I'm in the right place.

The robin's back and it trills at me as if asking permission to share the puddle. I, of course, acquiesce; it is by no means my puddle and I am pleased he has forgiven me.

It is now almost completely light; there are no more pinks, oranges or yellows in the sky. A Yaffle (green woodpecker) laughs at me from a nearby field. It knows I must be patient and all will be revealed.

At ten past eight, almost ninety minutes after arriving in my spot, the sun finally makes an appearance and, wow, is it worth the wait! Blinding shards of light spring forth through the trees and its warmth on my face is most welcome in the cold of that January morning.

It was by sitting in that field, on that January morning, waiting for the sun to appear, sitting through three stages of twilight, which I had yet to know had names, that I realised how little I knew of its habits and rhythms. So, once I was home in the warmth of my own living room, I started to learn.

In order to understand our ancestors' connections, lore and stories of the sun it is helpful to know a little of the science, so humour me a moment and let's delve into the heliophysics of our life-giving star.

The sun is a yellow dwarf star that is 4.5 billion years old. It is 26,000 light-years away from the galactic centre and is 150 million kilometres from earth. Its core temperature is 15 million °C or 27 million °F. It is the sun's gravity that stops the planets flying around the solar system getting swallowed up by black holes like a giant game of Hungry Hippos. The sun is master of the seasons, ocean currents, climate, radiation, auroras and, of course, the weather. Without the sun we would not survive.

The sun is approximately halfway through its life and according to scientists we have around another 5 billion years left before our star expands and consumes the solar system. That is, of course, unless we end it first.

The route the sun takes across the sky each year is called an analemma. Technically, it's our route, not the sun's, and it's not the sun coming up, it's us tilting at the sun like Don Quixote tilted at windmills. But let's go back to that analemma. There are scientists and photographers who have plotted the position of the sun throughout the year by using complex technology or patiently and painstakingly taking photos in the same spot every week for fifty-two weeks of the year. When they have overlaid these points or photographs, it has essentially created a figure of eight in the sky. This figure of eight has a small loop at the top and a larger loop at the bottom and sits diagonally across the sky. During the shorter loop the sun appears higher in the sky, and during the longer loop the sun appears lower, thus dictating the hours of sunlight we have. During the shorter and higher loop, the sun takes longer to make its journey across the sky each day. This is the summer. The lower and larger loop means the sun is not in the sky for as long. This is winter. It is because of the earth's position and its route around the sun that we get this analemma.

The earth's route around the sun and the angle at which it is tilted results in the seasons, and because of this, the seasons are different in the southern and northern hemispheres. It takes 365¼ days for the earth to move around the sun, and as it does so, different hemispheres are exposed to more or less light.

When the southern hemisphere is tilted towards the sun and the northern away from it, it is winter in the northern...