Hawthorns hoar-frosted with blossom. Erringden Moor sheened with cotton grass. The Craggs’ northern hairy wood ants’ nests seething with solar-powered labour. Campers cluster at Old Chamber. Horses graze in the wooded folds of Foster Clough. Cries of Howzat! ringing from the neat green pitches of Booth, Old Town, Luddenden Foot, carrying across the valleys in the quiet of the sun-baked afternoon.
All is well, it seems. But the sun has sailed unhindered through the endless blue, day after day, for two months now. This extraordinary spring has outshone even that of the first lockdown, and is now the driest in a century.
But what is there to do but take what is given? The farmers certainly have to: the meadows are being mown, already. The Hitchens and the Southwells have made patchworks: fawn and green, clean-cut and waiting, stitched across the Hathershelf hillsides. And in the lush tributary valley of Luddenden, the Mallinsons move in concert – one tractor rowing up, another pulling the droning forage harvester, a third with a trailer gliding alongside to take the green load. The yield’s thin, perhaps. But better now than not at all. Into the clamps, under the wrap. Take what’s here.
Upstream, where the swards are not quite ready, other farmers are still at other jobs. David is fencing where his fields drop into Mould Grain Wood. Trevor brings his sheep trailer home along Calf Hey Lane. The Lunds loose their prize-winning Texels from the close above the farm into the wide expanse of Jack Allotment. Joe rolls his quad slow past each of his cattle for an inspection as they graze in the rough high pastures beside the waiting shell of Clough Head.
An entire spring of days that spanned bright mornings to golden evenings can so easily feel like a gift. But small streams and seeping springs are silent, parched, and the luxuriant green of new growth is, in places, singeing to scorched browns. The rain that is finally coming will be a kindness.
Seeds
Drifted, carried, scattered: what the week let fall.
The churr of woodpecker chicks from the oak, the sharp ‘chip’ of their parent urging us on to school so she can feed them / An hour on the Heptonstall playground bench, the view reaching twenty miles beyond the spinning and sliding and climbing children / A lime-green caterpillar at eye-height, dangling from a holly by invisible thread / A long catch-up with a friend in the shade of a willow / Cool drinks from May at the end of a hot walk, after a chat about her starring role in Sarah Mason’s Pegs & Bacon / A single bloom of broom on the hillside once called Whins, a yellow reminder of the gorse that must have grown there / Submerged for days on end in ancient landscape history, reading of medieval commons in The Harvest of the Hills, writing the centuries-long story of High Hirst / At the Town Hall, Sally Zaranko’s ‘walking weavings’, feathers and rushes, bark and bones threaded in yarn for the Pennine Way’s sixtieth year.
Landscape Story 