The track through the tunnel of hawthorn, strewn with spent blossom, is a church path after a wedding. Furry willow catkins lie on mossed walls like snagged fleece. A treecreeper sings into the hushed woods, tentative, uncertain. Just as furtive, wood smoke sifts through the rhododendron, up from Wood Farm. In the full flush of spring, it kindles a sudden ache for autumn – for cold air and clinging mist, for the tang of decaying leaves.
My son is alive to everything, as ever. He veers off the path with fox-like curiosity: to find wood sorrel to chew (could we make it into a drink, he wonders); to follow a deer trail through the rising bracken; to track down the churr of nestlings in a dying holly; to shin up an oak sapling, his grin framed in the fresh green of its leaves.
We settle into the sward under Steve’s kestrel box, empty this year, like every year. Gently, we tease froghoppers out of their froth to look at legs which could – scaled to us – launch them over the Great Pyramid. Our traditional game of I-Spy suffers from interruptions, though the best kind. Just as I’m conceding to his q – a distant, centuries-old quarry, it turns out – a tawny owl glides into an oak not twenty yards off. It realises its mistake as soon as it perches, and drifts back downhill. My son gives chase to catch another sight of it. When he is back, breathless, and searching for my s (sycamores at Edge End) a barn owl flies straight at us. This time, his enthusiasm gets the better of his fieldcraft, and he runs to meet it, arms wide as if to offer it an embrace. It banks, arcs – giving us a long view as it skims the horizon around us – and vanishes.
All this while across the valley, sheep are being herded from meadow to moor. It is a privilege to catch the moment that our favourite fields are ‘shut up’ for the summer – their fescues and foxtails, their buttercups and bedstraws will be left now to grow until hay time.
Threads
Tangled lines from the week’s weave, pulled loose.
Seeing the first proper rain in two months drift over the valley’s western headwaters / My son showing me currant galls on male oak flowers, then reading up about this new find together / The abundance of elderflowers seen from the train on our way to Belgium / Passing ten goslings along the canal towpath on our walk to the library / The relief at seeing our favourite ash back in leaf, apparently healthy, at the head of a wild clough / The diversity of activities connected to the local landscape on the Co-op’s community notice board – art exhibitions and village fetes, foraging courses and music concerts, whittling workshops and a stone carving festival, open air life coaching and ecotherapy, and the returning Handmade Parade, themed around water, woods and wilderness.
Landscape Story 