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.
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