The Season's Last Weekend

Gateway to the fields from Wapley Hill, November 29th, 2008

My last entry, I think. It has been cold and gloomy for the last few days and there is a feeling in the air that it is no longer autumn but not quite winter. Heavy coats and jackets have become normal gear. The last of the colour has drained from the landscape; the leaves have been stripped from the trees and those that are left are dulled and dry. And a few days now of cold; it has been very foggy for a day or two and today the temperature hasn't risen above minus three. On Wapley Hill this afternoon it was a few degrees colder and the firs were plastered with a heavy frost, as if the water had frozen to the branches. We had the Hill to ourselves apart from a girl on a horse and a jogger; but if it was minus five then perhaps that's not surprising.

This Journal is part of a series of online seasonal journals that began in the spring of 2008. From December 1st I will write a winter journal, and then a summer one next year, so that by the end of August 2009 I will have a full year's meditations on walks and weather and birds and trees. Every one hopefully is a little different. The handwritten precursors were more notebookish; I might try and follow this with the Winter Journal. Thanks for reading this Autumn Journal and I hope you will read the Winter one as well. http://awinterjournal.blogspot.com/

David Lewis

Nightwalking

Seed head, Wapley Hill, 7.30pm, 24th November 2008

I promised myself a night walk; when the clocks went back and the patterns of light and darkness changed I remembered how much I used to enjoy walking alone at night; Bedford Park in Southport, a cold dark flat space ringed by lights, or the long walks along the canals outside Runcorn with old friends. I chose Wapley Hill and decided to walk tonight. The road up the hill was deserted and very dark; the car park was empty and the Hill was in total darkness. Without the car's lights the stars appeared, the tall larches silhouetted against them. The sky looked pale grey/blue, the stars were so thickly clustered; there seemed to be no space between the stars, just more stars fading to beyond sight. I tried to adjust my eyes to the faint light and the stone road up the Hill gradually appeared. I was surprised at the amount of orange street light around the Hill; all the way between Shobdon and the Arrow valley seemed to be lit, like looking out onto a small town. I couldn't work out where all the lights were.

A cold night after a wet day, and the ground was heavy underfoot. The sky clouded over and the starlight was hidden, but in any case it was too dark to go too far into the trees. The sharp spikey pine silhouettes were clear against the sky but the deciduous trees disappeared. (In the Mortimer Forest this morning I was reminded that the thin branches of birch trees look like purpleish smoke.) The only sound was the wind in the trees. 'Trees are how we see and hear the wind,' said Roger Deakin, a quote I have been carrying around for days.

I managed to take some pictures but it was too dark for proper meditative nightwalking. I headed back to the car and took some pictures of seedheads. I had expected to be frightened in the woods at night but it was an empty, sighing space, silent apart from the wind and once a small animal, perhaps a rabbit. And the rattle of leaves out of the corner of my eye; a strange thought that the leaves fall at night as well as during the day. The car was spattered with golden larch needles on the way home.

Silver

A turn on the step from the garage; and looking westwards the whole sky was silver, a beaten metallic, soft, almost fragile.  The bare branches were motionless against the pale sky, a black feathering as thick as the stars.  

I suddenly realised late this afternoon that the season is winding down, or rather accelerating towards the winter.  Bitterly cold this afternoon, a keen wind from the north that has brought snow to many places apparently.  Here it has been wet and cold all day.  There was a sharp edge to the wind and the temperature in the courtyard didn't rise above about 5c all day.  Walking the dog down the toll road at dusk the sky was clearing; it could be cold here tonight.  

Apart From The Trees

A cold clear night, a whole skyful of stars and the Milky Way very clear overhead.  Dark at 5pm and only just above freezing at 8pm.  

Headlights from Presteigne visible a mile and more down the valley, thanks to the hedges being trimmed.  Long tunnels of moving light.  Ghost trees.  

We have seen a lot of nuthatches recently, probably the family that were reared in the old apple trees in the summer.  A young one watched me unpack a box of books from the garage a few saturdays ago.  They come to the bird table next door and we watch them in the ivy on the beech tree.  A short, loping flight.  

And unexpectedly we went to the river Lugg at Presteigne after heavy rains.  Usually the river is swollen and the colour of angry, milky coffee.  But this time the river was clear and we could see large maple leaves turning slowly in the stream, racing under the bridge and away, a slow, gentle movement in the ferocious power of the water.  

Wapley Hill Stories

Beech avenue, Wapley Hill, November 20th, 2008

The beech leaves had drowned the path and turned the whole width into a beech-leaf-field; only the surrounding conifers stopped the leaves drifting further. The path itself was marked by a double avenue, in some places a triple avenue, of old beech trees which were clearer, the architecture of planting was clearer, now that the leaves had fallen. The design became clearer even as the footpath between the trees disappeared... I am fascinated by these trees and their planting.

Forest Murmurs, November 2008

Deeper in the forest the trees are Forestry Commission conifers, planted as a commercial crop about 30 years ago. They too have a dark Teutonic beauty, a fairy-tale menace, a suggestion of wildwood. Under the canopy the trees have no branches, just wispy stems. But these collect cobwebs, mist, rainwater, and have a silver-gilt sheen that is very beautiful.

A different setting and a different second of light

Wapley Hill Images

Some snapshot images taken recently. Wapley Hill is our nearest place to go for a walk; we are on a busy B-road and the old toll road has grown over again, so that leaves only the Moor itself for a walk. This is boggy and not very safe for children. We have found it interesting how restricted our options are when it comes to walks; we definitely had more options in the city.

Small grove of silver birch, Wapley Hill, 20th November

Larch plantation on Wapley Hill - my local patch! Most of these have shed their needles now and the ground is carpeted with them.

More About Beech Leaves

Beech foot, Wapley Hill, November 20th 2008

The wind has changed direction; chopping firewood this afternoon the air seemed colder than it did this morning. The wind was from the east, straight down the valley from the Welsh hills, rattling the last of the beech leaves and the ash keys in the courtyard. The air smelled colder as well, a cleaner smell. Now at 7.30pm it has clouded over so the crispness is gone, and the wind has died, but it is still cool.

A good morning spent hunting for firewood on Wapley Hill. Gunfire and pheasants on the lower slopes, dogwalkers, and horses on the narrow Stansbatch road. In the week since we have been there the beech trees - on long avenues across the hill - have lost their leaves completely; the ground is covered in crisp, golden-bronze leaves, still dry. The paths have disappeared under the leaves, drifting the ground, as if under a light fall of snow with the same sense of vulnerability and impermanency. The leaves had been blown into these drifts and were far more 'solid' than they appear. But there were strange bald patches where the wind is stronger and the leaves don't settle.

It made me realise that the days are still shortening and the sun is lower in the sky every day. Half a mile down the beech avenue the sun came out, horizontal beams deep into the woods, lighting the smooth grey trunks. I have noticed beech trees more than anything this autumn, the beech-colours have been spectacular. And this morning the leaves were everywhere, drowning the path, blurring the definition of the avenue, smoothing everything apart from the trunks rising from the bronze floor like elephants' feet or the claws of giant birds.

A Half-Moon Day

A small moment this morning in the chaos of breakfast; putting bread out for the birds I could see the half-moon through the bare branches of the beech tree and there was a cool nip in the air, but the day felt fresh and silent. Now that we have lost the direct light the daylight has changed and the days are darker.  But for 30 seconds this morning all I could hear were birds - ducks on the Moor, pheasants, sparrows - and see the clear moon in a washed out pale blue sky.

On the way to Ludlow today I surprised a kestrel scavenging on the road; close enough to see tight muscular legs and cream-and-brown speckled underbelly feathers.   And on the way home from Presteigne we saw a sparrowhawk on a telegraph pole; we have seen red kites on the same road.  We drove through a shoot the other day; tweeds and hats and guns and muddy dogs, and beaters emerging from the hedges with braces of pheasants.  A gloomy day, a muddy road, the epitome of November.  

The season is winding down towards winter.  The days are shortening and we have lost the light by about 5pm.  Heavy clothes have become the norm.  I find it strange that at one time I meant to relate my seasons to saints days, lost festivals and old rituals; but instead I record weather changes and bird stories. 

Cascob

In the late afternoon we came home over the Radnor Forest hills and turned off to explore Cascob. The name alone fascinated us; what does it mean?  It is a small hamlet strung out along a long valley road, fields of sheep and small farms, a small river; perhaps the Lugg in infancy.   Unusually the old church was locked but the graveyard was guarded by two large sheep; just a few Victorian graves but the sense that the ground had been used for burials for centuries; mossed stones disappearing underground and a gigantic yew tree.  

As I came out of the church porch I looked up to see a vast flock of starlings overhead, maybe 2000 or 3000 birds, silent but for the beating of their wings, a susurration, almost a sigh.  They were heading for the pine woods over the river.  An astonishing sight, so many silent birds, the last of the day.  

Firewood and Gunfire

Sunlight through beech trees on Wapley Hill last week, before high winds had taken many of the leaves

Up on the hill this morning, foraging for firewood. A cool, wet day, good walking weather. The woods on Wapley hill are enormous, from the old-stand pine woods around the hill fort to the long rides of beech trees that run across the hill like Roman roads, dead straight. Many of these have now lost their leaves and the leaves that are left have lost their shine, their lustre. Perhaps these will stay all winter. With the falling leaves it was possible to see the planting arrangement, the long double row of beeches across the hill, maybe a mile long; Nazca lines of beech trees, invisible from the outside but presumably visible from the air. Some of the beeches on the hill are enormous and so presumably quite old; I don't know how fast beeches grow.

The fields around the woods are set aside at this time of year for the pheasant shooting. The beaters were up in the woods to get the birds back onto the fields - where there is still plenty of cover - and the guns were further down the hill, strung across the field at 40 yard intervals. The dull crack of shotguns; like a plank dropping onto a concrete floor, a short, sharp noise. I wonder what percentage of pheasants survive?

Grey Days and a Full Moon

A trip into Ludlow to see stoves and advent calendars; we bought neither.  But we managed to see many of the town's back streets, this eclectic mix of medieval and Georgian houses all jumbled together and no doubt growing over each other.  Quiet roads and chestnut trees.  Central Ludlow is very smart but the town has the usual drink and drugs problems further out.  The journey in through wintry lanes was very beautiful, the hedges shaved by recent hedgetrimming and now losing their leaves, the fields bare and empty.  The days have been grey and sunless, occasionally windy, misty.  We have had a lot of rain recently and many roads have been flooded.  

A lovely walk at dusk yesterday, down the old toll road to the tractors and the view across the valley.  A muddy lane in the fading light, the bare hedges, the day turning cold in a peach sunset with not a breath of wind; it seemed as though the land is turning towards winter.  

Beeches and Leaves

Beech trees, Wapley Hill, early November 2008

I have noticed that in recent heavy rains and strong winds the leaves generally are starting to fall from the trees. The beech in the garden has lost all but a few tufts of branches but this is down to its reaction to light. The beech trees have been spectacular this year; dull golds and fiery reds, shimmering bronzes; all on the same tree. The other dominant colour is an acid yellow from the maples; the trees look lit from within, as if each leaf generates light.

Remembrancetide

Pressed poppies, collected October/November 1998

The tenth of November this year falls halfway between Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day, making a period of Remembrance. I am deeply uneasy with the notion of remembering the war dead whilst doing nothing to prevent wars today; and especially as at the moment we as a country are still heavily involved in two illegal, immoral foreign wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And yet remembering (especially) the Great War seems fitting at this time, perhaps because it as far back as human memory currently stretches. There are at least three British veterans still alive, old men who visit schools to tell their stories to children who are a century younger than they are. Their First World War memories are all the more precious as they have aged and others have died; but it defines a person only by one time of their lives, and that 90 years ago. Perhaps we remember because we all have a Great War family story and like a British Day of the Dead we remember family stories at this time. I don't know.

Ten years ago I wrote a play called 'Third Light' which commemorated the 80th anniversary of the end of the Great War and dealt with these confused themes. One of the actors, Graham Frood, was old enough to remember the war; he heard the engines of a Zeppelin flying over his house in Stoke and hid under the table with his family; he remembered the engines as they were such a rarity. He also remembered two bonfires in the November of 1918, one for Bonfire Night and one for the Armistice. Sean Halligan, who played a far younger man, helped in selecting a performance venue and we visited Birkenhead Priory with the Wirral's links with Wilfred Owen. On a new traffic island outside was a brilliant flush of blood-red poppies and we picked a handful to press. Today, ten years later, I found them.

And at this time I remember my grandfathers, who both played a part in the first war. Vincent Lewis was a teenage sea scout and spent some time coastwatching on Bolt Head in Devon, possibly the furthest he ever travelled from Liverpool. My mother's father was a corporal in the Royal Welch Fusiliers and was wounded at Passchendaele. We have letters and medals and cap badges and photographs; history I suppose we can almost touch.

An Autumn Afternoon

A typical November day, misty, damp, a chill that seeps up from the ground - the tops of the trees lost in mist - a cold day in the garage with occasional views across to Shobdon Woods Hill, the mist draping across it; a soft day, a day for a long walk, the sort of day that has sudden patches of quiet, a pond of silence unruffled by anything; then a small piping of a bird, unseen, which only deepens the silence. I love days like this, cold and damp and gloomy; they make me think of the autumnal pleasures of firelight and woodsmoke and tea. It is a day for a bonfire of leaves, a day for fathers to burn leaves and wear gumboots. And at 3.30pm it is starting to get dark.

Fifteen years ago this week and next I was in Vancouver and I have been reading my journal; I recorded the same sort of light, a never-quite-bright light, as if the sun is permanently below the horizon.

Bonfire Night

A quiet day here for us.  Another dripping, cold, misty day; cars had their sidelights on all day and it never seemed to get fully light.  It was getting dark at 5pm, a thickening of the mist.  A typical November day.  I found thirty minutes this afternoon to repot the outdoor Christmas tree.  We bought it in Cooksons in Southport about three years ago, a small blue spruce in a red pot.  I love the idea of an outside tree; Christmas as a time of great darkness and tiny lights.  Cold wet hands scratched by the spruce's needles even through thick gardening gloves.  A strangely wintry job to do, a precursor of December and Christmas. Even mixing the heavy compost - made by our own worms, I am proud to say - with grit seemed like the heavy mixing of a Christmas cake.  

No bonfire tonight for us, even in celebration of Obama's victory in the American elections. We've not seen any fireworks either.   Country rituals seem sparser, less intense; more about darkness and silences at this time of year perhaps.   

Thoughts in Early November

A dank morning, cool and wet and misty and dripping. The Kinsham side of the valley is lost in mist. Good walking weather; I love walking in glooms and mists.

A huge swathe of the trees above this side of the valley has suddenly turned a peach-golden. Not deciduous trees but conifers, so I am assuming they are larches as they are (to the best of my knowledge) the only British conifer that is deciduous. A tight, neat patch of colour among the deep greens of the firs and the uncertain mottling of the trees on the wood's border.

November 4th - the Americans elect a new president today - a black president would send an astonishing message to the world and would be a huge step forward for the US; I would vote for Obama.

Tomorrow is November 5th - we won't be buying fireworks for many reasons but the blunt John Bull celebration of light and darkness - even if the origins are forgotten or at least no longer mean anything - is fascinating. The English see no poetry in what they do and look abroad for simple beauty; but they do small beauty nonetheless.

Three Northern Days

Beech tree, Coombes Moor, 30th October 2008 - view from the south; the only leaves are stubbornly clinging to the northern branches.

A journey north on Hallowe'en, pumpkins alongside the road in some places - snow on Shropshire hills and distant Welsh hills - some good river-walking along the Mersey, the light bright and hard, soft against the stones and recycled river furniture sculpture; the astonishment of rusted International Garden Festival barriers/railings, salt-bleached and weathered - the beech trees on the lane to the river still very leafy, obviously not lost the light the way the beeches here have. Some good explorations of derelict/unvisited spaces; more on the landscape writings blog I think. Amazing trees in Runcorn, seeming mile after mile of beech and maple gently golden-red-yellows, unseen, overlooked; a town planted for autumn colour. I was reminded of walks across Runcorn from the Ship Canal to Old Runcorn to the new estates and out to Daresbury; landscape and memory thoughts again better suited to the other blog.

Home this afternoon in a gentle November grey day; we only saw real sunlight once or twice. The beech on the lane has lost 75% of its leaves, because we have lost the direct sunlight and will not recover it until March. Strange and unsettling to be home; three days is sometimes a long time.

Overnight Snow

Woke this morning to the first snow - a thin covering, the sort of snow that freezes easily - over the whole valley apart from the very bottom, the Moor itself.  On the woods above Byton it was still on the trees, like blown flour, and stayed on the hilltops and the exposed fields on the top of Shobdon Hill until midday.  A cold day with a thin wind.  The hills further east seemed to keep their snow all day.  

On High Ground

Another cold day, four degrees below freezing at 8am in the courtyard, water in buckets frozen solid.  I love the cold.  Presteigne this morning was cold and empty, and not noticeably warmer and brighter than it was here.  

A good meeting in Knighton this afternoon, a possible collaboration project; landscape work and depths of paint and story.  On the way home I stopped at the ring of beech trees that marks a series of crossings; the main road between Norton and Knighton, Offa's Dyke, the Offa's Dyke path, and a small farm track.  All converge on this one spot.  I could not see the snow on the hills that I had seen on my way out, as there was a rolling snowcloud, a snow-ceiling, white and misty, cutting the hilltops away into Wales.  There was nobody about.  The beech trees had a mournful rattle to their leaves, but have lost fewer leaves than 'our' tree in the garden here.   It must be more exposed there so it's not the wind that has made our tree shed its leaves.  Tall, twisted Scots pines mark the Dyke line itself, a blond field, tree stumps weathered to a dull silver by the wind.  The fields had been cleared and turned and looked richly dark.  I made some notes for a poem.

And on the way home

A ring of twenty beech

Twenty crows on twenty posts

A place of empty winds, giant silences,

A place of failing light.  

Unheard winds in Scots pines, wind breaks

The dry rattle of the leaves, a home-place.

A light fall of snow, this smell of snow-air, 

sheep shit, gorse and sheep-paddled mud paths.

Snow on distant Radnor hills, 

a light snow in the wind, thickening

a thickening of light with snow.  

The conjunction felt welcoming, even sacred.  I was conscious of being on high ground, and I did not want to leave.  

Snowfall

Bracingly cold on Wapley Hill this morning on another forage walk.  We were passed by the sleek, gleaming racehorses from the stables being exercised.  The riders were well wrapped up against the sharp cold.  The light through the beech trees was soft and still; there was not a breath of wind.  The beeches have turned more since my last visit a week ago, and the light was dappled and pale golden, yellowed, still green.  The ground was cold even through boots and two pairs of socks and very muddy, but we collected three bags of free fuel for the woodburner, which is now drying on top of it.  I have also converted the garden bench into a temporary wood store as we have so much foraged wood at the moment.  

Walking down through the trees laden with wood it started to snow.  Some big lazy flakes against the pine trees made me think of Delamere Forest and Christmas; odd pre-Christmas feelings recently.   We only had one heavy snowfall last winter, the day before we went to Cornwall in mid-November, although we had weeks of sub-zero temperatures.   The snow didn't stick as the ground was too wet, but it snowed for a good five minutes.  A cold wet walk enlivened by picnic snacks, a good forage, a pleasant chat with some holidaymakers and a light fall of snow.  

Pheasants

Another frost overnight and the temperature hasn't risen above 3 degrees above freezing all day.   It has been cold for late October.  The birds have come back in force, and there were coal tits in the courtyard this afternoon;  this morning three cock pheasants walked around the house from the bread crusts on the grass to the leaves in the courtyard.  This was a beautiful sight. Pheasants are a sign of autumn/winter for me; the rich blues and reds and mottled bronze of the males, the delicate nutmeg black and brown females.  Even the males disappear into the undergrowth very easily, the mottling reflecting the changing colours of the bracken and leaves.  We have seen them on the Stansbatch road over Wapley Hill since late August, birds released by the Morris estate's gamekeeper to get fit for the guns from late autumn.    I don't agree with shooting anything for sport but I love seeing the pheasants - and partridge and even turkeys, but not for the shoot surely - alongside the road.  I would give the shot birds to local restaurants, and many turn up in local markets for as little as £2 a brace.   I choose to think that most survive the guns and the foxes and breed a healthy wild population.  

Wren

A strange day.  A frost overnight, the merest glance below freezing; but the whole day felt out of season, a precursor of winter.  It fascinates me that each season contains days that belong to the ones before it and after it.  A cold gloomy morning with a heavy hail storm.  This afternoon was more 'changeable', with rains and occasional blasts of bright sunshine.  I foraged for firewood in Mortimer Forest outside Ludlow; the beech trees were horizontally lit by strong sunshine which showed the variety of colours within each tree; gold and green and pale yellows, and deep bronze-browns.  A beautiful sight, peaceful and silent and almost warm, as if the light  was thickening with each day and not fading.  

Twice now I have startled a wren in the courtyard.    The birds are starting to come back after a summer finding food elsewhere, great tits and blue tits and nuthatches.  We think the nuthatches were nesting in the old apple tree in the paddock.  The wren seems to be foraging in the ash's fallen leaves and in the 'wild space' between us and the paddock; she sits on the wall and hops along looking for insects.  There is something feminine about wrens; as if they are all called Jenny.   

Discoed

Late yesterday afternoon we went to the art exhibition at Discoed.  The exhibition was raising money for the ongoing programme of repairs to the little church of St Michael, a tiny stone building with medieval roots.  A tiny, bare, spiritual space, cold and softly-lit.  Recent work has repaired the roof - grey dragon-scales like a ripple of armour - and installed new wooden rooms at the back of the church; I think it is intended to use it for more unusual events.  We missed the author Ronald Blythe who is heavily involved with the church restoration/maintenance project as one of the patrons; his books were on sale and we chose some Christmas reading.  His sermon at the Thanksgiving service yesterday morning was described as 'captivating' in a gentle way, like reading his books.  He makes readers see the world in a new light; his books have that sense of always having been in the back of your head.  Knocking on strangers' doors to see if famous authors are in is not something we normally do; but we did; but he wasn't.  Discoed itself is mainly a collection of medieval and very good modern medieval buildings around a muddy courtyard with the church wall making a fourth wall.  Tall trees and quiet, gloomy muddy lanes, some stunning views across the hills.  A very Sunday place, a very autumnal place.  An air of enthusiastic melancholy.  

Ghost Stories on a Sunday Afternoon

I don't associate Christmas with ghost stories as is traditional; it is the fading light and short cold afternoons of this time of year that always remind me of them.  A shifting, ethereal white presence in the woods as the light fails, an uncertainty, a vagueness; the link between dying year and the spirits.  I love the stories of MR James, the cloistered academic background and harsh open spaces.

But it is two American stories that I always try and find at this time.  'The Blair Witch Project' has a richly imagined mythology and background to the three students disappearing in the Maryland woods, a time line stretching back to the 1770s.  I don't think that this depth of setting could have happened without MR James, with his imagined books and references, his footnotes in Latin for scholars of fictitious books.  And the film too struck me with its shots of leaves, running streams, bare trees - and the ghostly,  blurred white trees-as-bone shapes of the night time shots - as essentially autumnal; only later did I realise that there were no old trees in the film, that the doomed students stumble through a young landscape.  

The filmmakers were also influenced by Stephen King, who often has great historical depth to his best work.  He is fascinated by the passage of time, especially within lives, from the importance of childhood - and childhood events - to the sense of the day before yesterday town, the immediate and longer-view history of his small fictitious New England towns.  I quoted him once in interview; his description of local historians as people who had come into a movie half way through and wanted to know what had happened before they got there.  They leave before the end, of course, but that's another story...

King's short book 'The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon' seems essentially autumnal and it is a wrench to be reminded that it is set in June.  A nine-year-old girl loses the path on a walk and stumbles deeper and deeper into the woods, further and further from the path.  The woods are indifferent to her but she is stalked by a primeval ghost-bear-spirit made of wasps and rotting bear flesh; wonderful.  She is out for a week or so and the story is full of King's small skills of character-building, small things she does and comes to realise.  Nothing happens apart from her wanderings and berry-eatings and falls and scratches; eventually she finds a rotten fence and follows it to an overgrown track which leads to a backwoods lane and then the highway.  Like his best work ('Gerald's Game', for instance) there is no 'monster' - but there may be - and the action is largely psychological.  But the sense of a haunting, of a person coming into the realm of something beyond their understanding, marks the tale, like 'The Blair Witch Project', as a ghost story.    

On the Clocks Going Back

The season is running away with me.  The courtyard is full of ash leaves and the grass is covered with the beaten bronze beech leaves.  I will try and add a picture of the tree - starting to lose most of the leaves into the garden - but the light has not been very good these last few days (soft, reluctant, easily lost) and I wonder if we will have direct light on the cottage now until March.   But despite these signs I only realised a day or so ago that in five weeks it will be December, and that the autumn is slipping away.

I have been reading a tourist's book on Vermont, mainly for the photographs of autumnal colour. It made me see the Lugg valley's trees in a new way, to see the huge patches of subtle October colour behind and between the evergreen plantations.  The valley is as transformed as anywhere in New England but the colours of course are not as startling.  

We think the landscape trees in Ludlow's Tesco car park are American oaks; I noticed them last year, deep fiery reds and maple-yellows as if lit internally.  The second Autumn Journal car park experience!  But if I were planting car parks I would go for strong blasts of seasonal colour, specimen trees that have a presence; these columns of young trees, bright in colour, stand out in the dull space; they add a perspective to distance and simply as trees add beauty to the industrial landscape.  

And tonight the clocks go back so we gain an hour in bed or something.  A turning point in the year, a man-made adjustment.  The house is dark in the mornings and the owls are often still calling as I get up.   They seem to prefer the dawn rather than the darkness before the dawn.  

Owl light

We have just heard an owl, at 6.30pm; it is starting to get dark.

Last night, as I was locking up, I stepped outside for the last of the day. It had turned cold so I closed up the greenhouse. All I could hear were owls; a pair calling across the valley and another one in the woods on the hill behind me. A dark evening, cold, the air scented with woodsmoke and the songs of owls.

It is all about little moments and being aware of happiness; a moment this morning on the front step, I looked up into a cold clear sky at a half-moon and a high flock of small white birds, which looked silver against the pale blue; a susurration, and they were gone.

The courtyard is full of ash leaves and the grass is covered in beech leaves; I will take a picture tomorrow, before all the leaves have gone. A windy day, cold and clear, made us realise how infrequently it really blows here.

Vancouverlight

Foraged kindling drying on the woodburner, October 12th 2008 - blurred, a notebook memory of time and place and light.

A feeling these last few days - as the light slips away from this house - that the days never get fully light, that in some way we are lit from below the horizon. I remember this feeling in Vancouver, visiting family in 1993, and the phrase has stayed with me. In this house it is literally true; the cottage will lose the direct daylight at the end of October, followed by the cottages at the end of the lane on the Moor, who will get it back earlier next February/March. The sunlight seems to be in the house less and less often, and only rarely does it strike the innermost walls. I will upload two images from last week of sunlight on the hearth-wall, the very centre of this cottage; but it was unusual, and we haven't seen it since. Even if we had no cloud the light would leave this house and slip below the southern horizon, Wapley Hill, but there is always the faintly horrific possibility of not even witnessing the light's final day. There is something sci-fi about such a precise awareness of light and so the movement of sun and planet; it reminds me of Silent Running, where the spaceship survives the meteorite storm on the dark side of Saturn and all the computer screens come back to white-noise life unexpectedly, an electronic representation of returning light. And more recently it reminds me of the Vin Diesel picture Pitch Black, where all manner of flesh-eating monsters are liberated by the long night of the planet's alignment with other worlds, blocking the sunlight. Having lived through a winter here it is not as bad as that, but winters here are noticeably colder and darker than in Presteigne or on the other side of the valley or even 150 yards down the road, where the hill drops and the light is stronger. And so recently the days seem gloomy and shorter; it is light only at 7.30 or so and gets dark between 6.30 and 7pm. This is the other side of autumn, damp and gloomy and cool rather than cold. And Great War images are starting to appear, in time for Remembrance Day.

Sideways light, the hearth-wall, October 12th 2008. Another slightly blurred image - perhaps the camera is dreading the loss of light.

Leafchasing

Japanese maple, Queenswood Arboretum, October 19th 2008; worried, delicate, silent.

I asked myself the other day 'why are you keeping a seasonal journal?' I don't really know. All my other online journals - spring 08, winter 08/09, and summer 09 - as well as the written journals, have sprung from my first autumn journal, nearly three years ago. I have always loved the autumn more than any other season, and loved the idea of recording the season's changes in journal form, but beyond that I think the only reason is to record the changes I see, to make myself more aware of what is happening around me.

The Americans call it 'leafchasing', the journeys across the States - especially the New England states - following the colours, tracking the season's movements, finding the best trees. Finding a tree in autumn colour attractive is linked to my ideas of beauty, but like beauty it is elusive and ultimately unattainable; beauty cannot be held, cannot really be touched or felt, it can only be seen. I find myself thinking at this time of year about the millions of turning leaves that - even in this country - nobody will ever see.

To Queenswood Arboretum at the weekend, a favourite place, 40 acres of woods between Hereford and Leominster. There is an autumn garden there, an area planted for leaf colour. And some of the maples were astonishing, bursts of yellow and crimson, peach and gold. The photographs don't do them justice, partly because it is atmosphere that makes experience; the cold afternoon, the fading light, the fresh air.

A Garden of Flying Leaves

Radnor hills from Old Radnor/Pencraig, October 16th 2008

The garden full of leaves for the second day running - cool, sunny days with a stiff breeze and cooler again at night. Househunting in Old Radnor this morning, some astonishing views of the Radnor hills - another village with a dual Welsh/English identity and so two names. Some recent images that I have forgotten to upload.

Welsh or Himalayan poppy, Presteigne, October 8th 2008

Fresh beech leaves and churned mud, Wapley Hill, October 15th 2008

Midway Point

Beech tree and firs, Wapley Hill, October 15th 2008

October the fifteenth, almost midway through October and so midway through the season. And I celebrated my forty-fifth birthday last Thursday, a midway point of my forties.

It has been a good autumn for colour. Driving north at the beginning of the week the colours were striking; maples and chestnuts, beeches and birches. Our beech has been losing leaves for a few days now and the garden this morning was a whirl of flying leaves, all perfectly bronze or gold. In reality of course the tree has many colours in it, from yellows and golds through browns to leaves that are still green. A walk on Wapley Hill this morning and there the beeches show up clearly against the evergreen background, so even though they are not as advanced (the ones I saw are on the southern slopes of the hill, I wonder if this make a difference?) as our garden beech they are just as spectacular. A cold still morning, last night's rain dripping off the leaves as we sat for snacks on the hill.

We have also had cool nights and a lot of mists. Perhaps I see the season more because of keeping this journal; it is a means of focussing on what is happening around me. A lot of mushrooms starting to appear and we could smell them - stinkhorns, I think - on the hill this morning.

A memory-day; I raise a glass to absent friends and family.

Autumn in the City

Cleveland Square and the Anglican Cathedral, Liverpool, 3rd October 2008

A chance to wander through the new centre of Liverpool last week. Huge changes to the fabric of the old Chavasse Park and the old streets leading down to the Dock Road - more of this on the landscape writings blog I think. But I was also intrigued by the trees, the natural landscape tamed and imported to decorate the new walkways and 'streets'. Suddenly, from a walkway, I looked down into Cleveland Square and I could see a blush of autumn colour caught by the sun through the buildings; it would make an interesting project to see a city as a wild space divided by buildings rather than a concrete landscape decorated with trees and parks.

Frost

Two nights ago we had our first frost. A thin, cold start to the day, the air dank and cold, as if it had been stored or came from under the sea; bunker air. There was a heavy dew and the grass in the garden was lank and heavy, the beech leaves glistening. (At night in the kitchen light they seem to glow expectantly, like anxious jewels; a trick of the light, warming the colour.) Driving to Hereford the mist in the valleys was layered, shifting, the hills clear and black above it, as if floating. The harvest is mostly in - we see tractor-loads of apples and potatoes on the roads - and the fields were bare and tawny, soft chocolate or a ruddy brown. There was not a breath of wind and the trees were motionless in the light mist. The hedgerows look mottled, green leaves and brown stems after hedge-trimming. The sun struggled to get through but lit distant hillsides softly, a hazy light, like looking back in time.

It has been a good autumn so far for leaf colour; the maples in the car park, our beech tree, and everywhere there seem to be huge crimson splashes of Russian vine - or Virginia creeper or Boston vine, I never know - and the chestnuts and beech trees generally are spectacular.

We walked in to the city centre over the Wye footbridge. The river had risen about eight feet and was a surging tide of coffee-coloured water, carrying large branches, a real flood water, moody and dangerous. It had burst its banks and partly flooded the Bishop's Meadow park.

I found an unexpected heart to the fields' colours in the Cathedral. I love the fat Romanesque columns and pale red sandstone, but on this visit I noticed a deeper, darker light - ambience - in the choir stalls, which were lit but inaccessible. The dark wood seemed to glow with a ruby light, a polish, and set off by the gold detail and suspended crown-of-thorns sculpture they seemed the warm heart of the county, connected somehow - by colour or mood or just journey - to a bleak agricultural landscape.

Evening

Beech tree detail, Coombes Moor, October 5th 2008

Not a breath of wind, every beech leaf motionless against the cold peach of the sunset; the temperature is dropping fairly quickly, we are always a few degrees colder here than our nearest weather station. I found a moment before on the way in from the garage, a moment of stillness to see the sunlight in the trees and just touching the turned beech leaves; a magical thirty seconds, an awareness of good fortune, an immediate living in the present. And then the day rolled on, the frozen milk became too cold to carry, something needed doing, the moment passed. But a beautful moment. And now the dusk has come to the garden - at 6.50pm - and the western sky is a soft, cold apricot or peach colour; more fruit images! I will try and find a moment to get outside in a minute. I thought I'd upload another image of the tree from this afternoon, a sharp contrast between today and 18th September.

Beech

Beech tree, Coombes Moor, October 5th 2008

A rare five minutes of sunshine on an otherwise cool, grey windy day - I had forgotten the glooms of autumn, that feeling of not being properly lit; and then the sun comes out and the light on the beech tree shows the advance of the season, the changing of the leaves, very clearly. This photograph shows the tree from the south, so it is the south-eastern aspect of the beech which is changing first. I wonder why? I remember one tree in a park near a flat I used to have; it always turned from mid-August, weeks ahead of the others on the avenue; a frost-pocket perhaps, a building's shadow.

I recently walked along the Prom in Liverpool, another large patch of beechwoods, another area of my internal woodland. And again, on the shores of Windermere, some truly gigantic beech trees, the last of the sunlight on the roots and branches making them look oiled, metallic, capable of movement. But in neither beech wood were the trees as advanced into autumn as the large beech in our garden.

Straight from a wobbly camera - beech roots, Windermere, early October 2008: oiled, muscular, wary....

Ordinary beauty

Not looking for New England - maples in the car park, 4th October 2008

We have been in the Lakes for a week, staying on the shores of Windermere. A lovely time to be in the Lake District, cool nights and warm days, patches of autumnal colour rather than great swathes. Some glorious views of distant mountains and quiet calm moments on the lake with an astonishing variety of bird life - cormorants, mergansers, swans, ducks, perhaps a dabchick. I will put more thoughts on the landscape writings blog.

We noticed some changes when we came home. The beech tree in the garden has a lot more golden and yellow leaves than a week ago, and the grass has a scattering of beech leaves on it. The woods behind the house and over towards Shobdon Woods Hill are more mottled than they were; the turning leaves are gentle and subtle, a fading within each leaf, like eyes closing slowly.

And on the way home from Leominster this morning we stopped briefly at the supermarket for supplies. And the trees in the car park were a blaze of colour. I think they are maples, but the range of colour - from deep, almost untouched, green, through yellows and peaches and reds to crimson - I found astonishing. I have written before that one purpose of these journals is to make me see the beauty in the everyday, to consciously be aware of the ordinary beauty around me. The maple trees in Morrison's car park today were certainly that.

Harvest Moon, Indian Summer

Harvest moon, Coombes Moor, September 18th, 2008.

A notebook picture, but up close it pixellates into something spatial, vast, unearthly; lunar.

A run of quiet, settled days, with cool misty mornings and days that are September-warm. Shorts have returned, short sleeves, summer dresses. Crisp beech leaves appearing on the grass in the early mornings. I would call this an 'Indian summer', this unexpected sunshine in early autumn, as if the season has been pulled back to reveal the summer beneath. After a gloomy and damp summer this comes as a time of calm after exertion; it is not an effort to enjoy these days.

And for the last two or three nights we have had spectacular sunsets of peach, gold and pink against soft grey clouds. After the sun has set the western sky has been a panel of monotone pale gold; astonishing. This calm warm weather, this settled weather pattern, is perhaps linked to the harvest moon; again over the last two or three nights we have seen a large peachy-gold moon, egg-shaped, draped in wispy mist like muslin, hanging over Shobdon Woods Hill. And it is harvest time; the farms are hard at work and we hear the machinery until quite late at night. The stubble fields are July-dry, the mud on the roads turned to summer dust. The woods on the slopes above the fields are starting to turn to browns and gold, and resemble the dust-smoke generated by a volcanic eruption, only frozen, motionless. It is a beautiful time, calm and warm and peaceful.

Warm September

Beech tree, Coombes Moor, 18th September 2008

A Tolkien morning, that began cold and misty and soon warmed up to another perfect September day; warm, still, clear. Tolkien describes an early autumn beginning to the hobbits' journey, a passage I find myself returning to over and over again. We spent the morning in a medieval gatehouse and a sixteenth-century manor house; now reduced in size and importance to a cottage that is for sale. Walls three feet thick, huge low deeply chamfered beams, a giant fireplace taking up half a room. And a large barn, suitable for a studio. A heavy dew on the grass, but the sun warm through old glass and cobwebs.

We discovered the other day that some tree-lopping needs to be done on the giant beech in the garden. It could endanger the power supply to this house and the one next door, so it needs a trim. I don't know when this will happen, but it made me photograph it this afternoon, before any work is done on it and before it turns any more. Everybody who comes to this house passes beneath the beech tree; it overhangs the lane like a welcome.

Iberian Plums

A small harvest of plums from the supermarket. Angeleno plums from Portugal, and Sun Gold ones from Spain. Delicate, soft fruit, the bloom on the Angelenos very easily smudged, the Sun Gold like bowls of yellow glass. There is something contemplative and Chinese about the soft September light - greyer again this morning - falling onto the bloom of fruit that has come from the Mediterranean, or at least the Iberian peninsula. And together the little orbs become abstract, a pattern of plum-gold and plum-purple, that suggest the harvest, the spattering of juice on fingers, stuffed mouths and happy children in an orchard; like the shouts of happy children blackberrying in the forest yesterday, their voices clear on the still air as the year fades.

September's half-journey

After the perfect cool sunshine, yesterday was a day of mists and dampness; we lit the fire after lunch and it warmed the old rooms all afternoon. Today is a mixture of the two, with misty distances, rare sunshine and a cool breeze. The sunshine has no warmth in it, as if it lacks confidence.

A ten-minute walk in the Mortimer Forest outside Ludlow. Giant fir trees, thick pine plantations, sighing birch woods. We collected half-a-bag of blackberries and a handful of kindling pine cones.

Behind the courtyard garden is Sally's paddock, part of the old garden patterns of these cottages; buried ponds, old apple trees laden year-round with mistletoe, and now producing apples. (Michael has the remains of a cider-apple orchard; the trees produce masses of apples - which taste of cider.) Between the courtyard wall and the paddock is a wild space three feet wide and fifty feet long. It is defined by our wall and a rotting fence. Over the years - as such spaces are - it has been used for dumping all manner of useless things; slates, old fencing, rolls of wire, unwanted tubes and boxes, even a canoe. But it is untouched, and so nature has reclaimed it. Everything is covered in thick mosses and lichens. The space has produced nettles and thick ferns, tiny pink flowers, grasses. It is ideal for insects. Above all, two ash trees have grown there and are now about thirty feet tall; smooth trunks, a stately shape, handfulls of ash keys.

Perfect September

A perfect September day, sunshine still warm enough to suggest the summer, not a breath of wind, the light motionless in the leaves, as if the sunlight itself was gently changing their colour. Whole banks of bracken on the hill seem to have begun to turn overnight, from green to a chalky plum red and then to russet and bronze. The sunlight reached the courtyard for the first time in days, although of course the sun is a little lower in the sky every day.

We spent yesterday morning in a cellar in Hereford, hanging J's exhibition for h.Art week which began today. Most of Hereford's back streets around the Cathedral are medieval, with Georgian facades. The cellar belongs to White Hall, a stone tile company, and they have transformed the cellar into a display space - white walls and subtle spotlights - which coincidentally makes a great space for displaying art. The work celebrates journeys and the surfaces of stone, and includes some carved roof tiles which are perhaps 500 years old. The cellar still has the heavy wooden ceiling beams and an old brick arch (the hidden supports of the city) in its darkest corners; the age of beams older by a century or more than the building itself never fails to astonish me. A hard morning's work, but a beautiful exhibition and a gentle, autumnal occupation, hanging art works in a medieval cellar.

The Unexpected

Wapley Hill woods yesterday, we saw a flickering shiver of mist, turning and writhing ten feet off the ground in front of dark pine trees; just water in the air, the air so heavy with water, a cold humidity, that a breath of wind stirs curtains of water to resemble ghosts.

And tonight, an ordinary teatime, a sudden mistiness, a fall of mists almost; from the landing window the valley was suddenly grey and hazy, but from the kitchen into the west the mist was golden; and then from the courtyard a gigantic rainbow, a full half-circle across the valley from Byton to Wapley Hill, brilliant and sharp; and a fainter second rainbow above it, a rare double. We stood and watched for thirty seconds, then the clouds shifted, the waters in the air moved and it began to fade.

Early Autumn Moods II

The sunlight is very low some days and the other day sent shadows across an old flagstone; a miniature landscape of peaks and hollows appeared, reminding me of the strange dry softness of old stone. I sometimes feel like touching worn stone floors; softened by centuries of use, iron tyres, leather shoes, hoofs.

In the mornings the bathroom has a end-of-holiday mood and smells of cold air and soap.

I realised the other day that the swallows have gone and the ones we see now are migrating southwards, passing through this valley with its insects on their way south. The last few days the valley has been full of swallows and house martins, great balls of 40 or 50 birds over the houses.

Small children going to Big School for the first time; the neatness of uniform, the uniformity of neatness.

Landscape tones - brown stubble, mustard and acid green potato fields. I was reminded that I see autumn colour in terms of metal - rusts, bronzes, golds. But sometimes fruit colours are more appropriate - peaches, plums, ruby-red raspberries.

Early Autumn Moods

The swifts have gone and the swallows have almost gone. We have seen them on the telegraph wires in groups, and assumed they had then gone. Then a week ago we saw them in Lingen, and even tonight I saw one or two over the paddock. But tonight the sky over the valley was full of house martins, maybe 50 or 60 birds, great swooping clouds of them.

Schoolchildren outside Lucton School on a geography project, measuring something, taking notes, watching the traffic. The Teme swollen, wide, the colour of angry coffee.

And an end-of-holiday mood in town this morning, cool with the promise of holiday heat (that never came) and bakery smells from the supermarket and a faint nip in the air; the mood of holiday-otherness even as we walked into the shop, so that for a moment even the Tesco in Ludlow seemed to have that familiar exoticism - or exotic familiarity, more like - that food shops abroad have. Then it went.

Holloway Pictures

A muggy, gloomy day, awaiting more rainstorms. These are notebook images.

Exposed oak roots just off the modern farm track

Guardian oaks - the entrance to the holloway is behind the right oak.

Inside the holloway

Holloway

In the Spring I tried to find a Bronze Age religious site at the eastern end of the valley, a spring I found given a sideways mention in something else. I found two possible sites, one on the rising floor of the valley in a field - cut into the bank, surrounded by guardian thorn trees - and one high up on the hillside, a deep pool again with thorn trees. Coming down from the pool I found what I thought was an ancient holloway, an old road following the hillsides.

Having read more about holloways in The Wild Places I decided to go back and try and walk it. The holloway starts about 300 yards from the modern road, as the cultivated lands starts to rise steeply in two drections, west and south, on a rough corner of hillside. I walked along a modern farm track from the road past a potato field - mustard yellows, browns and blacks and old greens, tartan colours - and followed it along an old hedge of elder and hawthorn or blackthorn. The track is deeply rutted. It swings past a small line of old oaks and sweeps up the hill into the fields. But just by the line of old oaks is the entrance to the holloway. It is choked with dumped, rusting farm machinery - some 50 years old at a guess - and coils of barbed wire, all thickly overgrown with nettles. As I turned in to the undergrowth I heard ravens and buzzards in the pine woods on the far hillside; I thought of totem birds, spirits of place. The totem plant is the nettle. The holloway at this point is about 25 feet deep, i.e. it is a trench whose deepest point is 25 feet below the surrounding fields.

The holloway has not been used as a track for - at a guess - at least 50 or 60 years, as this was a conservative estimate on the age of some trees in the middle of the track. The whole track was choked with thorns and nettles and had some spectacularly big ash, oak and beech trees in it, especially along the banks. I managed to walk and crawl about 300 yards through the holloway, before I reached thick thornbushes and a fence; the rest had been grubbed up (or was not below ground level). The ground was soft and crumbly, and there was lots of evidence of rabbits, foxes and perhaps badgers.

At the very least this holloway is a very old road which once led up the hill from the lower fields. But it is possible that it connected the lower valley with the sacred spring on the top, and could therefore be several thousand years old. I think it might have approached the spring in a circular way, a processional way, perhaps with reverence, leading over the lower slopes to join other semi-natural valleys and make an approach road to the sacred spring.