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.