On the Green Hill

From Meadow to Moor

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.…

A Gilded Spring

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,…

What Remains

It’s May. It’s time for a dawn chorus. But this year, we don’t just slip out the back, listen, then crawl back to bed. This year, we walk through it – and on into the morning. After all, the singers don’t slink back to sleep. At five past four, when…

Shifting Ground

A stonechat’s dry pebble-clack from the rushes, a linnet’s song – all ricochets and sparks – from a willow. Reed buntings, dapper white collars, smart black caps, pose on a lurching wall. A cuckoo calls – rich, mellow, a pipe organ in a hilltop Methodist chapel. It’s brazenly perched on…

Land Keepers

A Sunday morning round of our favourite loop. Up through meadows, growing despite the dry. Down through pastures of plump slumped sheep. Back over the shoulder of the hill into the sun, where we found David, fettling a fence. Curlews coasted on the still-cool breeze while he talked of the…

On the Green Hill

The gate is looking worse for wear. Clinging to its hinges for dear life with a lean, its top bar lost, its others loose. Stone gate stoops as big as megaliths shoulder it upright on either side, like friends at the end of a long night out, for now. I’m…