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.