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.

Books II

And five minutes this morning in one of Presteigne's honesty bookshops. I found a collection by a modern English/Welsh (?Anglo-Welsh) poet called David Greenslade, a book called Weak Eros, which looks really good. And I was undecided about a single volume of Dr Johnson's essays on the English poets - Dryden, Milton, Cowley etc - which had no spine and no front or back boards. Printed in 1821, abook about obscure poets, in that condition, who else was going to buy it, even at 50p? There is something about the text and layout of books from that time that I love; thick paper, wide margins, heavy, crisp serif fonts. And I might actually read this one.

The Coleridge Steps

An afternoon of garden tidying. I rebuilt the wretched strimmer-thing to cut the grass. The challenge of living as artists is to bring creativity to as many aspects of life as possible, not to keep 'creativity' for the working days. So I applied this to cutting the grass, and shaved the grass along the edge of the garden steps but left the bulk of the grass there long and shaggy. I don't like suburban formality in a country garden; we have lots of grass but it is patchy and uneven and will never resemble a neat lawn. (Over the summer I left a small corner to grow as wild as it could, and the grass reverted to a form of wild-wheat, with long golden stems and seedheads. And on rare warm evenings the light through the grass was lovely.)

The garden steps are a part of the oldest architecture of house and garden. The steps lead down from the late eighteenth-century toll road to the old front door of the house, which used to be a dairy. So the steps could be built and rebuilt over two hundred and thirty years. They are on the south side of the house but under a thick hedge and the steep hill, so get a bit overgrown. I attacked the grass, but left the moss and lichens growing on the mudstone walls and the ferns growing in the steps itself. In the rain, the stones and moss and ferns remind me of the Lake District and stories of Coleridge's unexpected arrival/departure from Grasmere; with my work on Wordsworth's time in this area I imagine Coleridge leaping enthusiastically up the steps to catch a lift on the road and disappear for months. There is also the possibility that Wordsworth - travelling into Presteigne in the 1820s - could have come along this road and seen the cottage/dairy, and so the steps. I will try and take a picture soon.

Wapley Hill Pictures

Not very good photographs, but I hope they capture the subtle changes in colour, the early mottling and fading.

I love this weird stump, it's one of the markers on certain walks through the woods - like Emily Carr's images of rotting totem poles in Canada - and now it has a fern growing out of it!

Wapley Hill, Mudlogged

Looking south from Wapley Hill towards Hereford, September 6th 2008

I try and get up the hill two or three times a week, and I suppose it is my 'patch' of wildness, the best place for seeing the natural world near here. This whole valley is a man-made landscape, of course, controlled and modelled for thousands of years. The pine forest on Wapley Hill is probably 30 or 40 years old, but the long avenue of beech trees through the middle is older, I think. This morning - after the heavy rains of the last week - the ground was sodden and the paths were either deep mud or washed to the bedrock. I was trying to see colour, the bronzes and deep plum-reds of the bracken and the starting-to-turn acid yellows of the beech trees. A lot of mushrooms, mainly yellow and purple russulas (I think) and the occasional fly agaric. The old tree stumps - moss-covered, starfish-like - had tiny clumps of slimy brown capped mushrooms on slender pale stems, and the mossy branches had tiny black dead men's fingers. The bracken seemed to be turning russet and bronze from the ground up; the pictures don't do it justice. A good morning, tramping through the sodden woods, collecting kindling and recording changes in bracken and moss.

Waterscape

It has rained for two days. The Met Office said that we would have a fortnight's rain in one day. Everything feels sodden; the roads have water standing on them the drains are full, the Lugg at Combe Bridge was coffee-coloured and swollen, starting to burst its banks. 'Burst' is the wrong word; the Lugg runs along the bottom of a wide valley here which has been carefully cultivated leaving a long area either side of the river which allows it to flood gently, to spread across the plain - and no further. The cattle use it, and the horses, and it is mixed marshland and woodland. At our point it is called the Moor, and is the ancient common grazing land for the village of Combe, which is where the name of the hamlet - Coombes Moor - comes from. Coombe, Coombes, Combe, perhaps even Combes, all variations of one place of about 30 people. The houses are at least eighteenth-century and were built on the slopes of the valley away from the floodwaters.

But tonight many of the rivers around here are on flood watch. The Arrow, across the hill at Pembridge, the Wye at Hereford and Ross, the Severn (which can flood spectacularly), the Teme at Ludlow, all on red flood watch. Since we have been here the floods have been tremendous; is this a summer pattern for the future, torrential downpours and weeks without rain, semi-drought?

Knighton Landscapes

Hills fading into low cloud and mist this morning - small hillocks like green whales surging through a field - pine forests regimented, orchestrated, rigid; a strange magnificence to such anal order, perhaps because of the contrast with the wilder elements of landscape. My mother's cousin used to live in Knighton and I often wonder if there are Thomases here still, distant cousins. Remote family. (A distant project, walking old family routes, finding old family towns buried beneath the modern world.) A town of tall narrow houses on steep streets, strangely Irish, strangely flattened Alpine. Grey stone walls, slate roofs, high white-painted windows. An old man in a coffee shop window, doing the crossword. A well-dressed mad man on an endless muttering walk of three streets. The cheerful clear English 'Hello!' from a post lady; the warmer, fatter, richer Welsh voice of the storesman inside the delivery depot. A man asking me the name of a plant, which I thought was a fig; another rooted outsider. Another funeral. A lot of rain, the surrounding pine forest dripping and draped with left-over cloud like wool on a sharp-wire fence. Watching leaves in gutters being carried by the water. Rain rain rain on the car roof as we drove home, the vast panorama of hills invisible behind the water.

Books I

To Presteigne yesterday in an afternoon of fitful rain and cool sunshine. The town was faintly, unusually subdued, as if waiting for another shower of heavy rain. I found some fragments of seventeenth-century Dutch tiles in Tony's antique shop; they are by far the oldest things I own. writing recently about Liverpool I wrestled with ideas about hoarding versus free travel - an argument I have had with myself many times and with others. Do we hoard books, music and beautiful objects or do we travel light and fast? And on a more abstract note, what are the things we hoard? Ideas and old feelings or memories can hold you back more than any number of books. Anyway...

I am a hoarder and will always buy new/old books. Rarely new/new ones. Books are the oldest things I own. I have a small number of treasured items that belonged to my grandparents, but nothing older than a century. I have a large number of nineteenth-century books - mainly poetry and history - and a smaller number of eighteenth-century ones - mainly 1730s religious works and the Gentleman's Magazine, collated and bound in the late 1770s - but before the American Revolution - which I found in the rain outside Atticus in about 1980. It cost me 10p. I also have one or two very old books which could date from the 1690s; I am not sure. Again, these are religious books and the proceedings of the Athenian Society. These old books are usually a bit battered and are not worth anything; I collected them because I pitied their age and vulnerability. Their sense of history; an odd volume of Tacitus from 1811, a loose volume of Goethe in Gothic German dating from 1816, a comparison between Aristotle and Plato in Greek and Latin dating from 1803. Who else was going to buy that? Hang the expense, another 50p to Tony's Antiques.

So the fragments of seventeenth-century tile are older than my oldest book, by at least 20 years or so. Shaky hand-painting, a glaze pitted by air bubbles. I will try and upload images when the light is better suited to my camera and ability; I manage to take a photo of the back, which resembles the corner of an unrestored fresco or a contour map.

Wapley Hill

A strange, uncertain, blustery day of strong winds and heavy rain. I was up in the woods on Wapley Hill this morning collecting pine cones and sticks for kindling, but everything was very wet. Stopped for a drink on a bench and the sunlight through the beech leaves was soft and dappled green, very beautiful. Beechwoods have been an important part of my life since I was a child, and in some way all beech trees I encounter - Wapley Hill, Highgate Woods, south Liverpool - seem part of one gigantic, scattered beech wood. In his book 'The Wild Places' Robert MacFarlane talks about 'personal maps', landscapes and wild places we all carry within us. A part of mine would be a beech forest. And then the rest of the Hill is shaggy pine forest, planted two decades go by the Forestry Commission; I don't like the monocultural element but the trees have an undeniable spiky drama, and seem to add an Alpine tone to the landscape. I'll writemore about this in the Landscape Writings work. I think I will try and get up into the woods after dark in a few weeks, perhaps once the clocks have gone back; the forest at night, alone, would be a very different experience.

The Turning of the Leaves

Is it my imagination or is it cooler this morning? Perhaps I assume September's sunlight to be cooling and not as thickly golden. A back-to-school light, dusty and tired. I have noticed patches of acid-yellow in chestnut and beech trees for the last fortnight or so. This seems an early turning to me, but I also remember a tree in Princes Park in Liverpool which seemed to turn and start losing its leaves at least a fortnight or three weeks before others in the same avenue. I came to the conclusion that it was in a frost pocket, more exposed to darkness and sharp drops in temperature than the others, so in effect for that one tree the season was a few days advanced. Was this true of all the seasons?

I have also seen rowan trees heavily laden with red berries, which traditionally was a sign of a harsh winter to come. And in the garden the giant beech tree - possibly as old as the house, about 250 years - has a small patch of fading on its eastern branches; not a turning yet, it looks more as though the enthusiasm has left the greenery, as if the tree is starting to lose the energy or will to stay summer-green. Justine commented that it began its turning at the same point last year, a sign that we have seen a year come and go in this valley.

I will try and bring more image into this Journal, so I will try and document this one tree's turning and perhaps some general views of the valley, say once a week.

A First Day

The season's first dawn.

View looking east from the Stiperstones, 6.15am, September 1st 2008

Up to the Stiperstones at 6am to go walking with painter Alistair Tucker. An astonishing morning, cold dawn light at 6.15am reddening quickly then warming into full sunlight. Fitful gusts of rain/sleet and mist - Alistair's comment that often the weather changes with changes in light such as sunrise or sunset - and then sheets of misty rain, cutting us off completely for a time from the valleys below. When the mists cleared we could see for 30 or 40 miles in all directions, out into Wales, eastwards towards the parallel ridges of the Long Mynd and Wenlock Edge.

The Stiperstones are a series of tors rising above the valleys of south Shropshire. A dragon's spine of raw sharp stones blasted by the last ice age. Devil-legends, associations with the Wild Hunt. A wild space surrounded by gentle (gentler) hill farms, and all morning we heard the bleating of sheep. A sense of distance and slow movement, rough walking and turf matted with heather roots and nibbled by sheep and rabbits. And an endless, sighing wind. I wrote about 20 pages of very rough notes which will be written up and then condensed into prose-poems. A fruitful morning, a magical way to spend the first day of autumn.

Another dawn shot, a low spine of stones looking east, 6.30am

View towards Shrewsbury, 11am