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.