Pause

Spring is suspended, paused in its progress by days of single-figure highs and an overnight frost. Having been well on their way to painting the valley green, the birches refuse to budge any further. The single beech in Horsehold Wood that took the bait when the going was good is now very much out on a limb, its companions steadfastly refusing to join it in solidarity. The male goat willows, the last of their spent yellow flowers having dropped to the ground, halt the unfurling of their leaves halfway. The oaks and ash know better than to even think about it.

At High Hirst Woodmeadow, the breeze is keen and cold but the gathering warm for the unveiling of its new signage, and also of a memorial stone for Penny Eastwood, otherwise known as Dongria Kondh, who did so much for nature in this valley. Nikki acknowledges the many people who have been instrumental in bringing this project to fruition – its hedgerows and its community orchard, its newly-dug ponds and its accessible path – modestly failing to mention how central she herself has been. Steve, as is his custom, fosters wonder in the audience with his explanation of the marvels to be found at our feet, this time with the tale of the pignut, and how its 16-year cycle of generation reveals how ancient this grassland, thronged as it will be in a few weeks with their little white flowers, must be. For now, it is just the wood anemones and dandelions in bloom, but soon it will be a riot, in contrast to the flat rolled, fertilised and reseeded meadows that farmers have, in response to the economic and policy conditions they have found themselves in, been pushed towards for decades.

The lengthening daylight hours and the warmth of the sun out of the wind do their best to make up for the sullen air temperatures. A speckled wood butterfly warms itself on a fallen birch branch in a dapple of light among the bluebells in Knott Wood, and a holly blue basks on the steps at the Birchcliffe Centre. Treecreepers and goldcrests sing, nuthatches trill and the scratchy tuneless refrain of the blackcap signals that it has joined its fellow migrants, the willow warbler and the chiffchaff, among the scrub of the railway embankment. A trio of jays, their rasping screams tearing the air, have a running battle through the treetops of Rawtonstall Wood. The canopy of its oaks is open to the skies for now, but will soon close, muffling the birdsong within its enclosed woodland world.

The first bracken fronds are thrusting through the grass in Peter’s old pig field. A curlew starts to wind up towards the climax of its bubbling song, only to think better of it as it drifts into a dogfight between a pair of crows and a sparrowhawk. A heron glides through the same airspace later, stopping, like the waters of the river whose course it charts a hundred feet below, for no one. Edge End’s cattle move, heads down, along their moor’s skyline above the strange ditches that scar its flanks, and the fleeces of the ewes and their newborn lambs glow in the evening’s low light. From Lower Rawtonstall comes the cheers and laughter of children playing, their joy intensified by being allowed to stay out late. The dusk chorus is as yet muted. It will swell some still twilight soon, when the temperature rises, but even then it will be but an echo of what it once was, with the British Trust for Ornithology’s latest breeding woodland bird index released this week showing a terrible and accelerating decline.