Letter to an Unknown Reader

This is the last entry in the Spring Journal for 2008. Tomorrow it is June and June is not a spring month, no matter how cold. Many blogs seem written by surfers or students and are loud and noisy and trendy; I hope that this one has been slow and meditative and calm. And today it feels strange to finish this, to end these observations, these letters to you, the unknown reader.

I have kept a seasonal journal for three years now. The idea is to record the passing of a season, the three months day by day, as well as the cultural associations and events; Halloween, Christmas, Easter, Midsummer etc. The Spring Journal is the third season I have written about; two Autumns and two Winters, with mixed results. This Journal is different from the hand-written ones; less personal, or rather less about my family but no less intimate. Next year I will write a Summer Journal, and I will take what I have learned from this Journal and apply it; how many photos? What sort of text? How poetic, how creative, how family-based?

So if you have read this Journal and enjoyed it - or even if you haven't - and if you have any comments/suggestions please let me know. I can be contacted at stonesandwater@gmail.com

In the meantime, thanks for reading and I hope you have enjoyed it as much as I have.

David x

Hills and Fields

To Titley and Kington this morning, ways over the hill not used for some time and the ditches and hedges are much thicker than they were with cow parsley and wild flowers. The hedges too are thickening up, the views through them lost until October. Warm, slightly stuffy weather, threatening rain, promising sunshine, and neither appears. We found a new walk at Kington, along a short stretch of the Offa's Dyke path, a narrow river track still a little muddy from the rain a few days ago. The river full from rain in the hills, noisy and strong. The path went round a large field of buttercups, quiet, perhaps an unused paddock, thick and seemingly flooded with gold, surrounded by trees heavily leaved. It no longer feels like spring.

Home over the hills for the change, and we stopped up on the tops near the Observatory. A clear afternoon with a suggestion of haze, the hilltop silent apart from a skylark, the sheep and a warm breeze. We stood on the roadside and had a 360 degree view of hills, woods, fields of sheep, distant hills fading to silhouettes, empty of people and almost no houses in sight. And no traffic, so a peaceful and quiet five minutes away from the world.

And tomorrow it is June, the start of summer. Presteigne is becoming a summer town, garden events and outdoor parties starting to be advertised, the occasional groups of walkers or cyclists, holidaymakers. The ditch spring flowers have faded and only in the deep woods are there still any bluebells. The trees are fully leaved and the hedges are thick. It may be occasionally cold, but spring is over here.

Leaves and Falling Rain

A quiet day, warm and a little stuffy, as it has been these last few days. Waiting-for-a-storm weather, misting the hills like a Japanese painting, with the sort of light that intensifies the Green Man darkness under or inside the trees. We drove across the border to Bleddfa, a tiny village on the edge of the Radnor Forest, the foothills of the Radnor hills; a long long straight road, up and up, winding along the valley in swoops and hairpins; pine forest and fields knee-deep in buttercups and brown cows; it could be the foothills of the Alps. Bleddfa is famous for its artists' community and the old schoolhouse is now an exhibition space, with an exhibition of charcoal drawings by an artist called Celia Read. Strong, powerful work, intense, unsettling, but also strangely calming. She had hand-written quotations from Rilke and a book called The Poetics of Space, quiet deep thoughts about inner landscapes and domestic vastness, a beautiful idea which illuminated the dark drawings. The church next door was also part of the artists group but was seven hundred years old, a plain simple space, deep windows and a fantastic wooden roof. The huge wooden door alone - studded with nails, repaired and patched, bone-dry and bone-coloured, as if made of massive driftwood timbers - was worth the drive. And in the Lugg valley as we neared the house, a red kite being mobbed by swifts and swallows; a bird made of blades, a bird raggedy-sharp, razor-edged, being swooped over at by birds like black scythes.

And now it rains and in green darkness and wet gloom the month draws to an end. At the beginning of the Journal my time-sense looked backwards, as the days lengthened I remembered the dark months just behind me; now I look forward to warm summer nights and have lost the sense of the days lengthening. Tomorrow it all ends...

Wapley Hill Again

A lot of heavy rain recently, warm, stuffy days and cool nights, cool enough for a small fire. Everything has grown tenfold, and walking up Wapley Hill this afternoon the nettles and dock and ragged robin alongside the path seemed three feet higher than a week ago. From the top path a brief glimpse of distant hills, layered in shades of grey like tissue paper, the spikey horizons of misty pine woods. As soon as we got into the woods we could smell the pines, a dark Germanic smell, rich and resinous, the smell of vast untamed Northern forests. And yet it is a small forest in Herefordshire; one landscape conjuring another, the way a classical building in soft evening light can remind us of Italy. I do not want to describe landscape in terms of allusion or reference but this shorthand, these visual guides, are a starting point. In terms of the buildings, perhaps the aim would be to suggest Italy without recourse to columns and porches; suggest a mood, an emotion, that different people will interpret in different ways according to experience and personality. But then every allusion does this...!

Meadowland

This house is part of Coombes Moor, a hamlet of small, largely eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cottages in the Lugg valley, above the flood plain - the Moor itself - and before the steep hillside. Largely unproductive ground set aside for estate cottages. But looking at old maps I realised that the cottages themselves have shifted over time, been extended and demolished, joined with others, cleared completely. The hamlet used to be bigger and has a 'shrunken village' at its heart, the stone rubble in Michael's fields. Local people still remember the cottage in such a field, or near the Moor, or on the road. These cottages all have gardens which would have been productive kitchen gardens at one point.

The paddocks behind the house are divided into four equal smaller paddocks, knee deep in buttercups and daisies. On the old maps they are marked as gardens, perhaps even ornamental gardens, and I have wondered if anything of this garden archaeology has survived. With the longer grass an oval of moss has appeared in the paddock, perhaps an old horse pond or fish pond; and the trees there are apple trees, festooned (the only word) with mistletoe, and now apple blossom. The grass here needs cutting again, but I love the longer grass and would happily let it grow into meadow again. It is full of dandelions and clover and perhaps buttercups, and looks shaggy and natural, somehow sleepy. But if I leave it then the landlord will come round and strim it mercilessly, as he does with the top grass near the hedge.

Presteigne Moods

A walk from the river to the centre of town and back again, a gentle pace, a warm sunny afternoon; local boys jumping in and out of the shallow water, skateboard boys, cutoff jeans, baggy hair and long t-shirts but friendly and a little shy. A day for sitting, slowing down, the sort of day men in Presteigne take to the streets and play chess on the pavement, the sort of day the antique shop owners sit on their wares outside and talk to passers by. The sky over the town full of swallows and house martins, the occasional swift. The sunlight was cool but warm enough, the light gentle - if it was September it would be regretful - on the classical facade of the Judge's Lodgings and the whimsical Italianate clock tower of the Assembly Rooms.

And then today, a damp day of mists like smoke drifting through the pine woods on the hill, threatening heavier rains, warm, almost stuffy. The town was envigorated by a lick of rain, the plants on Broad St fresh and green; yellow poppies, rosemary, pom-pom hydrangea. The same walk, from river to town to river, past higgledy-piggledy houses scruffy and pristine. Strange names here, old history; Ave Maria Lane, Canon Lane. Muddy tractors heading out to the fields, hippie mums in Indian fabrics, faded jeans and heavy boots. The river fierce and swollen after a day or so of rain.

Presteigne is a sleepy town, an old town, not so much untouched by the modern world as unscarred by it. There are supermarkets but they are small, local, almost independent. The town centre roads are narrow and slow and lined with medieval houses and shops given a new face in the late eighteenth century. The pace of town life has been saved by the by-pass, which used the footprint of the railway to curve through the town and on into mid-Wales. Yet there is a ring of modern houses around the centre, a leisure centre, a well-respected secondary school and a good junior school; it is a lively place, a healthy place for all its sleepiness.

A Cap of Dublin Tweed

Times can overlap, events become everyday. Every Sunday morning reminds me of being in Dublin with my brother, a day or so before I got married. He had come all the way from Vancouver for the wedding and we were able to steal a day or so away as a sort of stag party, although it was just me and my brother in Dublin, and anyone less likely to enjoy a stag do would be difficult to imagine. One of the best holidays I have ever had. Dublin on the Saturday morning, city walking and shops, the Book of Kells again, the long gallery and ancient books of the library afterwards. Lunch in an old haunt, O'Neill's, where the Trinity staff used to drink. Wanderings and occasional pints and old discoveries, back streets and cobbles and rooftops and an evening pub crawl through Martin's wish list of Dublin boozers; etched glass, shiny gas lamps and worn wooden tables and conversation, conversation, conversation. Guinness and talking and Dublin at midnight, walking home through musicians and crowds and rain for more Guinness in the Octagon bar before bed. And bright and early on the Sunday morning, the city deserted, the train to Blackrock half empty of people going home, best frocks, crumpled suits. Blackrock was town-grey and misty, a place of sea and rocks and dog-walkers alongside the waves. I came away with a battered copy of John Ackermann's 'Welsh Dylan', about Dylan Thomas's relationship with Wales; overpriced at three euros but worth it for the title page used as a bookmark - Shelley in Dublin, poems by Brendan Kenneally, signed by the author. Endless time in Irish souvenir shops, the leprechaun key rings, the Famine laments, but time spent with my brother was invaluable, a gentle, funny, kind man. A swirl of a journey home to the airport past churches and washing and Sunday afternoons the world over. So I thought an Irish ballad should be written but I am not the person for it; all that survives is the last two lines 'and all I have/ is a pint-potful of memories/and a cap of Dublin tweed.'

A Solemn Stillness

We are waiting for the storm. All afternoon it has been getting darker and the air feels heavy, black clouds over the hills - 'a bit black over Bill's mother's' as the family used to say. Perhaps it will not break the way storms sometimes don't, but we have had tantalising periods of big fat lazy raindrops; then nothing. When it rains here we can hear it on the roof. There is no wind, the darkness under the trees is heavy and thick, brooding, pensive, real Green Man weather. The paddock behind the house is full of buttercups and daisies as a week ago it was full of dandelions; but the overriding colour is green, heavy motionless and dark.

We went to a short recital by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in Bedstone. Modern music, unexpected, thought-provoking; responding to nature and landscape in raw, unusual ways. The sheer beauty of a viola played live, a demonstration of harmonics; an old haunting sound. And the flute, an instrument I used to play for a short time, played properly and beautifully; and the presence of a harp, so close to the Welsh border, cascades of notes, higher and higher, a gentle fading. Unknown music on a stormy Friday after a working week, fantastic!

Hauntings

I don't know why, but even (hand) writing my Winter Journal over last winter I didn't mention the fact that the house was haunted. With some hauntings a presence is felt, an awareness, perhaps even a consciousness, the idea that someone who lived or died here is somehow still here. This house has none of that. Instead it is haunted by shadows and reflections, glimpses, unexplained sounds. I look up two or three times a day having seen a shadow pass out of the corner of my eye, only for there to be nobody there. Shadows pass across the windows, as if somebody is walking past. I answer comments that only I heard. To maximise the evening sunlight, the back door is half glass and the two inner doors to the living room are also glass. Open these together and an endless pattern of reflection and movement is created. This is probably what makes the shadows slip through the house, but I like the idea of a house haunted by shadows and reflections, unexpected silences and unheard words.

Woodsmoke and flowers

The morning smells of woodsmoke, a curiously autumnal start to the day. The season is fading now, but we do not mourn spring's passing the way we regret summer's ending because the days are getting longer and warmer. But still, from the point of view of these observations, something is coming to an end.

The days have started cool and sunny recently, with a vague mist on the other side of the valley. But then the skies have clouded over and the days have turned cooler and greyer, as if going to sleep after a bright start. The endless cycle of the wild flowers intrigues me; crocuses gave way to daffodils which gave way to anemones and bluebells, and now dandelions are giving way to more summery flowers like daisies and buttercups. It is cool at night still - cool enough for the fire - but the season is coming to an end.

Forest Murmurs

A late afternoon walk up Wapley Hill behind the house, a walk we haven't done since the end of last year. The top of the hill is thickly planted with pines by the Forestry Commission, but there are older deciduous woods along the roads and around the lower slopes. And across the middle of the Hill is a long beech avenue, maybe three-quarters of a mile long, a straight row of beech trees. They look quite old, and are certainly older than the surrounding pines. The FC do not manage these woods well and so they are gently reverting to real woodland, with only the deepest woods free of ground cover, mainly saplings and brambles. We have seen deer on the Hill as well, and we have seen their tracks on the old toll road, part of their route from the Moor to the Hill. The roadsides on the Hill were lined with wild flowers and the roads themselves were made of earth and hard stones. And even after rain a day or so ago the packed earth roads were bone-dusty, the colours of old cream or ivory.

The Old Toll Road Again

A walk in late afternoon to post a letter, along the old toll road and past the Methodist chapel. A warm, cloudy day, with occasional shafts of sunlight in the ditches, illuminating cow parsley, ragged robin, bluebells, wood anemones. The toll road is slowly disappearing into the undergrowth once again, with grasses and larger plants recolonising the blaze - plane-crash trail - of mud through the woods. The deep caterpillar track marks are still visible, but they are slowly disappearing under foliage. Many of the trees hacked by the water board had blossom on them a week ago and have now leaved (not left) even though they are lying horizontal to the ground. This reminded me of Richard Mabey's comments in 'Beechcombing' about tidying up woodland to chime more with how we think it should look. Soon it might be impossible to walk this way to the post box, and the old road will have vanished into the woods once again.

Hippies

From the late 1960s, mid-Wales saw a great influx of hippies. Perhaps they originally came to harvest magic mushrooms or grow pot on abandoned farms, but over the decades they have revitalised this area and started many cottage industries and businesses. Their politics and radicalism are now more mainstream than they were forty years ago, so much so that this area is very eco-active and Green. The national eco-pressure group Plane Stupid (campaigning against unrestricted air travel and no tax on air fuel) was founded in Presteigne, which takes a justifiable pride in its green activism. Every month has a different eco-suggestion such as change light bulbs, buy local food, or stop using plastic bags. Every shop seems to support these gentle campaigns, and perhaps not surprisingly a local health food shop recently took over an empty shop in the town centre. This weekend is the Tour de Presteigne, the world's premier electro-bike rally, which attracts competitors - sponsored competitors - from all over the world for two days of events and races through the town and countryside lanes. The town this morning was full of cyclists and electro-cyclists, as one day last September it was full of mud-spattered racing cars from before the Great War, roaring through town on their way back from two days of muddy racing in the Radnor forests. And ordinary quiet agricultural life goes on around this. One reason I love living here is this mixture of the eccentric and the practical, and the feeling that here the eccentrics are also the practical ones.

May Flowers

With the rain, the flowers are beginning to change. The lanes through Ledicot, a small hamlet near here, are lined with froths of cow parsley, three and four feet high, delicate, elegant, white lacy flowers on long stems. (They are everywhere, every lane and road has them to varying degrees, as every lane and road has primulas and bluebells and did have daffodils.) A probably-illegal vase of them stands on the windowsill here, with some of the mountain cornflowers from the garden. The blossom in the hedges is starting to disappear as the leaves on neighbouring trees thicken and obscure it. And the paddock flowers are changing too as the season starts to evolve into summer, with buttercups and forget-me-nots starting to take over from the dandelions which are now turning to seed. The passage of time measured by dandelion clocks. An art project has meant the collection of hundreds of seed-heads which are hung throughout the house to dry, ever-so-gently waving in the house's breezes. But something happens to dandelion heads, unnaturally dried and not allowed to explode in the wind. On the deep window ledges here they are spontaneously collapsing, perhaps under their own weight, a gentle silent deterioration, perhaps in protest at their captivity.

Queenswood

More tree stories. This is a very wooded part of the world, with giant or ancient trees everywhere here. This morning we went to Queenswood Arboretum, a large area of hilltop woodland about six miles north of Hereford, and a favourite place of mine. There always seems to be something new to discover, new walks, new trees. A place of memory and dedication, wilderness and research, picnics and children. There are long walks of oaks, hundreds of different species of trees, grasslands, heavy wooden benches, distant views of south Herefordshire. The Autumn Garden has trees which look their best in the autumn, maples and acers and beeches, and on a sunny day in late October it is very beautiful. Driving past later in the autumn two years ago it felt as if the season had spilled out from the Garden and was flowing down the hill as trees outside the park began to turn.

Today the handkerchief trees were in leaf, and sure enough each conventional green leaf seemed to have a foppy white handkerchief-leaf hanging beneath it; a delicate, restrained, somehow eighteenth-century sight. We wandered through a grove of giant redwoods, wellingtonia and sequoia, which towered sixty or eight feet into the sky. And these of course are only half-a-century old. Their trunks are like thick red fur, like Chewbacca the Wookie, and with the fairly low morning light seemed to have faces in them. I wondered if this is where the idea for totem poles came from, the idea that the sculptors were just carving what was already in the wood. A glorious, muddy, rainy-spring-light morning, and a good way to spend the rain.

Green Darkness

The first cool day after a week of warm sunshine. In the last few days the hedges and trees have almost visibly swelled and grown, so that the countryside looks summery rather than spring-like. And with this a green darkness has returned to the trees around here, a darkness at their very heart, a darkness around the trunk where the light cannot penetrate. This tallies with the Green Man idea - and there is a Green Man Festival soon not far from here - the idea of a presence in this greenery, an awareness. Yet the ground is still covered with bluebells and anemones, spring flowers. This is how one season fades gently into the next. Spring is winding down, and a cool evening like tonight's is a reminder of what we had just a month ago. Each season has elements of past and future within it.

Alpenkitsch

Many of the hills here are crowned with thick Forestry Commission plantations of pines, commercially grown and harvested after twenty years or so. The FC has many small woods near here. Wapley Hill, above the house, is a thick pine plantation surrounding the hill fort. I would prefer to see the acres dedicated to deciduous woods or even for the pines to be less regimented, less tightly packed, but I have a soft spot for them at the same time. The spikey firs remind me of Germany or Austria, especially when the rain-mist drifts through them and distances are foreshortened, suggesting the foothills of the Alps. At Christmas I went all Nordic folk-art and was inspired to collect fallen branches and pine cones and make a Yule wreath of fir branches and cones, which has been added to the branches arranged over the fireplace, the cones and fir picking up on the stone to suggest a mountain hut. I like to think. It is probably more suggestive of Toblerone and cuckoo clocks, and has been dubbed 'alpine kitsch'.

But there is a serious point to this. The 'wideness' of the countryside here, the variety of landscape, has enabled me to think about the fields and woods in different ways. I am reading other writers who have described natural landscapes in the hope of articulating what I see in a new way or at least an unusual way. Thinking about Herefordshire pine woods as the foothills of the Alps is one example of this.

Garden Archaeology

The mountain cornflowers are cautiously opening on the top grass, the stretch of scruffy lawn that runs alongside the hedge which in turn marks our boundary with the old road. The grass here - Michael is cutting it today, perhaps sick of looking at it as it gets shaggy - is thin and weak, probably because the soil beneath is poor and stony. We tend to leave it and allow the dandelions and grasses to get quite tall; TV gardeners would call it 'prairie planting.' If we have to have grass at all I like the idea of some areas being neat and clipped and some areas being wild and shaggy, allowing small flowers and unusual grasses to grow. The contrast between neatness and wildness appeals to me. The hedge is not to my taste - 1980s leylandii - but the small birds love it as it is relatively open inside but quite thick. There are some elements of garden archaeology in this top lawn; the leylandii, a flight of brick and gravel steps from the lower lawn to the top, the large clump of moujntain cornflowers and an unidentified pink flower with fleshy rubbery leaves. There is a wooden deck around the large beech tree, a continuation of the top lawn; slippery in winter it has seedlings growing in the cracks, but it gives good views up the valley and I often sat on it last summer. There is also a listing rose arbour, a small metal frame with some struggling roses and the remains of a fountain inside it, suited better to a performance of the Arabian Nights than here. But taken together these oddities are the remains of a grand plan for this part of the garden.

This Chance of Birds

It is late spring. Each season has something of the previous and the following about it, so early spring feels like winter and late spring feels like the summer. The weather has been warm and sunny for nearly a week, warm enough for linen shorts and no socks! We have been sitting out and watching the sun sailing west and then going down behind the Welsh hills, out in some cases until 9.30 or 10pm, eating out as much as possible. Next year I will be writing a Summer Journal (watch this space) and so I will be starting about now with ideas and early thoughts; a strange notion.

The hedgerows are lined with cow parsley and the thorn hedges have thickened out. Every tree now has leaves and in some cases they look full and summery. The beech tree on the garden lane which leafed from the inside out has now a full covering of leaves, a full head of hair. The apple orchards have blossomed and the neat ordered fields of blossom are everywhere between here and Hereford. Sally's paddock has a young brown foal in it, as well as two lambs. It is a magical, ordinary time.

I borrowed the title from an Edmund Blunden chapter in 'the Face of England', as the birds here have responded dramatically to the weather and longer days. Kites we saw on the way home from Borth, and again near Knucklas. The paddock is full of swallows and house martins who are nesting nearby; we have seen them collecting mud from Michael's fields. The swifts - easily my favourite bird - have come back to Presteigne and Ludlow, great sky-shoals of them high above the rooftops, high above the church last week, their screams audible above the car noises. But they are urban birds and we do not get them here.

Europe Day

Two memories of old VE Day in France. Once I stood in Bayeux in bright sunshine, the small bridges over the rivers bedecked - the only word, implying weight as well as decoration - with colourful flowers, as a parade of old soldiers marched past carrying regimental flags and wearing their medals. A band, the local French Scouts or Guides, another band, a different group of soldiers and young people. I remember the sunlight on the gold braid on the flags, the dignity, the seriousness of it. And five years later I was in a small Provencal village, where the parade of soldiers was just three men, very smart in blue blazers and medals, carrying gold-braided tricolours and regimental banners. There was a small band, and then a huge parade of American motor cars which went on for a long time. Each driver was awarded a rosette, each recipient made a speech, and on it went. Elderly fat Frenchmen drove past on LOUD Harley-Davidson motorcycles. We escaped for the day but when we came back in the late afternoon the speeches and driving and motor-cycles were still going on. (I find the French love of American culture - or aspects of it such as rock n roll and motorcycles - odd but fascinating; as if these two revolutionary countries had deeper connections than first appear.)

It is now called Europe Day to celebrate peace rather than defeat, but perhaps with fewer old soldiers less seems to be made of it. I wondered if they made more of it in Normandy because their sense of liberation in 1945 was stronger, as they saw heavy fighting for weeks after D-Day; the countryside is still dotted with gigantic cemeteries. In Provence the sense of liberation - especially nowadays - was perhaps more academic. Either way, a strange coincidence to witness the celebration twice at opposite ends of the country.

Borth

A mad tumbling day of moors and warm sunshine and endless fields of sheep, the roads running across the high turf past old hedges and distant farms and strange thick pine woods to valleys and chapels and white houses; and eventually the sea, bright and sparkling and hazy, pouring onto rocks and strips of sand alongside a tiny single spine of a street, salt-peeling paint and whitewashed walls and winds of fine sand. New buildings of white walls and slate roofs, a crispness to their novelty, their importance. A crouch of sturdy blue houses, their windows wide to the sunsets, older houses slowly climbing the hill to the war memorial above the grey-blue tumble of the rocks and the sea and the sand drying to gold. A warm welcome from new friends. A day of bare feet and sand in toes, a day of ice cream and faded carpets, the touch of bone-dry salt wood on feet calloused by winter. A day of sandcastles and flags and rock pools and crab-light and tiny sand-fishes, the sunlight glinting on rock-water, the laughter of children. Too soon we had to leave, back across the fields and the sheep and the high moors to tea at home, salt on our skin, the shells and the stones drying in the evening light as we turned for bed.

Llangollen

A recent visit to Llangollen in bright clear sunshine, chasing family stories. I parked in the town centre and tried to recreate foot journeys my mother and the family would have taken forty, fifty years ago. From the railway station I crossed the bridge and left the crowds behind, walking along the A5 and up Birch Hill to the old family house Pen y Bedw. It looks the same as ever, the dark paint still gently peeling, the glass still rippled and hand-blown. A solid, late Georgian house, heavy sash windows and a large front door. It looks to be better cared for than when we were last there a few years ago. The family sold it when Arthur died in 1995 but it is strange the hold, the pull, that old houses have on me. I tried to find a road or footpath to the cemetery on Fron Bache, but I was deflected by a stream and so I walked up from the A5. The road to Plas Newydd was busy but once away from it there was nobody about. I waved at an old woman potting some tomatoes and was goggled at by some young people - it was probably the shears - but apart from that I saw nobody. The cemetery is one of the most peaceful, beautiful places I know, reminding me of Shelley 'it might make one in love with death to be buried in so sweet a place'. I tidied the grave - which was full of dandelions and primulas and tiny yellow and white flowers - and had my lunch watching the clouds on the Velvet Mountains, the patterns of light and shade drifting across the hillsides. Buzzards high above me, crows in abundance, tiny figures climbing Castell Dinas Bran in the sunshine. A soft, gentle day, rare solitude, the richness of everyday history.

The Tenacity of Dandelions

Today is the first warm day of the year. The beech tree in the garden next to the lane has turned from bud to leaf, from the trunk outwards, from the inside out. The hedges are thickening up and the views across the fields are changing, closing in, shrinking distances. The lawn has grown again and the old paths I mentioned have reappeared. The dandelions have come back with a vengeance; the grass is dotted with their nodding yellow heads and there seem to be more of them now than before I worked on the lawn. A new feeling comes with the sunshine, we feel more open, less huddled. It has been a long winter. We have had the heating on and fires lit since October, six or seven months ago. But today feels like summer.

No Nearer Remembering

A few nights ago I was hunting for a book when I was distracted by the clouds, and again today we have had some astonishing clouds as patterns of rain and warm sunshine sweep across the hills. The book I was looking for I did not find and have not found since; or rather I have found it but it was not the book I thought it was. I was looking for a book of Dylan Thomas' poetry as I am constantly reminded of a line of his when we walk through the woods along the old toll road. The muddy woodland stretch connects with a better track which leads past an old Methodist chapel, now converted to a house. The road is quiet and the wooded bank is full of primulas, the chapel old and small with big startled arched windows. Dylan Thomas has a line about the owls hunting low by Bethesda Chapel, and walking the old track past the little chapel - in this English-speaking part of old Powys - always reminds me of the line, especially as there are often owls in the thick woods above the chapel. And having not found the right book I am no nearer remembering the line. But in this instance perhaps the poetry lies in the association, not in the text.

Beltane

Only a month of blogging to go! I can see why people have this on/off relationship with a blog; it is a constant background to your life, this open letter to friends and family and possibly people you don't know. But I will stick with the original plan and finish it at the end of this month, so that the observations cover the three months of spring.

Tonight was warm enough to sit outside until the sun went behind a cloud, part of a low dark pattern of clouds - thick ink in clear pale blue water - that sat on the western horizon. Then it turned cool. The sky is pale and clear and we may get a touch of frost tonight. It has not been warm. This time last year we filled the small courtyard in the old house with candles in pots and sat outside until 10pm. And I remember the first April in that house, when we hadn't even cleared the garden; we hung the candle pots and lanterns on the old tree and sat outside in the gloaming making faces at the little boy next door.

The hedgerows are full of wild flowers, primulas, cowslips, honesty, late daffodils, escaped tulips. The woods are beginning to show life on the ground. On the back road between Aymestrey and Deerfold is a long bank of woods, incredibly steep, which is starting to come alive with bluebells and white wood anemones.

And it is Beltane, one of the turning points of the old Celtic year; in Irish-Gaelic the whole month was called 'bealtaine'. The feast marked the end of winter, the start of the summer grazing. An alternative pattern of days, other possibilities to the division of the year. Old calendars hold a great fascination, as if secrets are hidden there, lost folklore, even lost science.

Cloudscapes Again

Just now, a routine trip to the outbuildings and the hunt for a book, the clouds took me by surprise. Great towering thunderheads of boiling, slow motion clouds, dark lilac tinged with brilliant sunlit white, sharp like fountain-pen ink squirted into clean water, above the horizon a slash of razor light, huge and vivid. Manoeuvring their way out of Wales like a squadron of battleships. And over Shobdon hill, lit by the sun, a similar (never identical) gigantic tumbling of whites and greys, slow-moving, slow-changing, internally boiling mass of cloud. I find cloudscapes astonishing; I found recently some notes I had written about cloudscapes in cities and could gladly spend days here recording skies and clouds, as Constable did on Hampstead Heath. And by the time I have written this all will be changed out there, all the giant structures will have blown and shifted and changed beyond my recognition, an astonishing idea. I never did find the book.

Millefleur

With a couple of days of on/off rain the countryside has woken up. The trees have a fuzz of new growth and lots of blossom is starting to appear. In a few weeks the orchards will be full of bloosom, one of the sights of Herefordshire, and I am looking forward to this.

I remember hearing of 'millefleur', a patterning of flowers on a field background in late medieval and Renaissance tapestries - the idea was the ground was like a carpet of flowers, literally 'a thousand flowers'. Then one day in the car park of a small French town I saw it; the grass around the car park hadn't been cut for a few weeks and the flowers had taken over. For the first time as a natural phenomenon millefleur made sense. I was reminded of it today, as the fields and roadsides here are awash with dandelions, daisies, honesty, primulas; the field next to the river in Pembridge is a sea of yellow dandelions on the green background, looking exactly like a carpet. A beautiful sight.

The western light is filling the kitchen and shining right through to the living room wall. Last night we sat outside in the very last of the light and lit candles, watching bats and hearing the owls in the woods above the house. As the days lengthen and the evenings are lighter, we use the living room less and tend to sit outside if at all possible, part of the seasonal migration throughout a house.

Rogation Sunday

A minor religious festival, when the church asked for blessings on the crops and good luck for the coming year. I said no more religious references, but today we saw the rogation walkers in Staunton on Arrow, a group who walked the parish bounds after the service this morning to keep the geographical definition of the parish active. This is the 'beating of the bounds'. They were also being shown round a local organic farm called the Leen, a name which has its roots in 'lene' which means marshland, I don't know which language originally. Lots of places round here have derivatives of the word lene in them, as most places here are built on the valley floors or alongside rivers, land which at one time would have been marshy. Staunton is a very small apple village with an ancient church, and we went for a walk through a very muddy orchard, the trees starting to come into blossom, the ground covered in dandelions.

Grassways

We have two grassed areas around the house. One runs for fifty feet alongside the leylandii hedge (the birds love this for cover, especially the sparrows) and one is directly in front of the house. They are connected by three brick-and-pebble steps which at the moment have my lavender pots on. The grass is struggling to grow well under the hedge and on the rubble left by builders recently and over the last two centuries, not to mention the thin layer of rubble and earth over the septic tank. It grows well in some parts and not so well in others.

As I was looking at the grass last night I noticed a series of triangles of slightly lusher grass in front of the house. What could be causing the better growth? I came to the conclusion that I was looking at it the wrong way round. The triangles were the untrampled patches between shortcuts across the grass. These paths have compacted the earth making it harder for the grass to grow. One continues the path around the house, one runs to the middle of the lawn from the house, and one to the washing line and indirectly to the driveway in front of the garage, ie to the car. They are older than our presence here, evidence of previous inhabitants, like layers of old paint. Do we use them? There was something primeval about these tracks, an assertion in the face of modernity, the way people will impose real pathways over the best plans of urban landscaping. The triangles reminded me of the shapes on snowy roads, areas of tarmac left unused by the traffic but only noticeable when it snows. And this afternoon they are gone, but as the grass recovers in a few weeks they will reappear .

Seasonal Ghosts

There are days in every season which are ghosts of the season gone or the season to come; after days of gloom the sun is shining faintly this afternoon and it is warm enough to try some gardening, which feels like summer. Grass cutting, repotting, dusting, cleaning, watering. And coming in from the garden, a faint echo of holidays on the stairs; a smell of damp, old dust, shuttered rooms, faint incense. I doubt we will get away this year but such moments are good for the soul.

And the landscape is changing. The daffodils are fading back, the snowdrops are long gone. The hedge-banks are full of creamy yellow primroses and the woods are starting to show drifts of celandines, wood anemones, even bluebells. The paddock behind the house is full of daisies; and the grass here has stubborn dandelions in it. The fields too are waking up. After a month of Zen ploughing - neat, regular, rigid and unintentionally ornamental - the fields are starting to soften with new growth and large patches of acid yellow oilseed rape are starting to flower. A vivid, Van Gogh quality to these slices of sharp, sour colour; the fields resemble a patchwork of browns and these aggressive green-yellows.

And we are starting to see bees.

Building Stories

I've been meaning to write for a while about buildings in this part of the Borders. We went to Pembridge yesterday for some organic cider and I asked the cider man - who was trying to get us to drink lots of cider from big glasses - about the small barn they sell the cider from. I mentioned some time ago that the 'shop' is a dark wood and brick building reeking of apples and alcohol, the wood worn smooth and silvered with age or animals. Thirty years ago it was a granary a few miles away but had become redundant. The Dunkertons wanted something suitably quirky, practical and agricultural, so they bought it and took it apart, beam by beam, and rebuilt it at the cider mill. The old wooden beams are nearly all original but the brick infill was another rescue job, a skip or two full of what look like early Victorian bricks which they used to pack between the beams and struts. The building looks as though it has been there forever and is far older than the more modern cider mill buildings behind it.

Driving home I realised that the older more wobbly black-and-white buildings here look as though they have grown out of the ground. Pembridge has a long street of these elderly and unsteady houses which lean together for support. My favourite pub here is the New Inn in Pembridge, proudly dating from the 1300s (although the more sober county archaeologists could find nothing older than the 1600s. Still...) It sits on an island site with the old village market hall behind it, a lumpy growth of black and white buildings built over and rebuilt over for at least four centuries. It always makes me think of Tolkien's pub The Prancing Pony in Bree, a restaurant and hotel and village alehouse and stables all in one, the old centre of village life. And this morning we saw a cottage for sale that was probably at least three or four hundred years old. It was originally three farm cottages that were knocked into one house many years ago. They would have been two-room cottages, one ground floor and one upper room. The original beams had been painted thick black over the centuries - apparently a Victorian idea to repel woodworm - and curved sensuously through the white rooms. The house smelled faintly damp, like a cottage on the first day of a holiday.

The history of these buildings is buried beneath later additions, but many of these ordinary cottages - like this one, perhaps dating from the 1760s - have old hearts which have been added to over centuries. It makes me realise again how old commonplace rural human landscapes can be.

A Day for St George

It is St George's Day and the road to Ludlow this morning had a few St George's flags on it, as if defining the border with Wales. And my friend Joan sent me a postcard of an international St George from the church of St Julien le Pauvre in Paris, which I remember as a small Romanesque building on the Left Bank. Thanks Joan!

I am uncomfortable with St George. I do not feel English but I do feel British. There seems too much jingoisim attached to any celebration of Englishness, too many lagered up skinheads drunkenly attacking the police at international football matches. Perhaps there is too much colonial history attached to England, too much xenophobia and racism; but I also believe that English people should celebrate Englishness. In my ideal UK, there would be no monarchy or House of Lords or established church and the 'Union' would be a loose confederation of semi-detached nation states; Wales, England, Scotland and (perhaps even) Ireland. Billy Bragg wants an independent England with a new capital in York, a fresh way of looking at old issues. 'I don't want to change the world, I'm just looking for new England...'

Birds and Walking Stick Wood

I forgot to add that we have seen swallows and house martins over the last week. We first saw a house martin on (I think) April 10th, but I wasn't sure and didn't quite believe it. But over the last couple of days we have definitely seen house martins and swallows over the paddocks here. We also have dandelions and buttercups appearing in the grass. But it is still cold!

Some research and observation has led me to think that the whole side of the toll road is an old hazel wood, coppiced some years ago and now a riot of stems. They are starting to blossom. As we were there this afternoon, a sudden breeze got up and the branches knocked together again like walking sticks.

Landscape writing

I have been reading older seasonal journals I have written. I started this project in 2005 but as I have said this is the first one I have written/published on-line. The earlier Journals are hand-written notebooks, covering two autumns and two winters. I was surprised to see the differences in style between those older 'books' and this Journal. This Journal has to be more explanatory and more in the nature of a letter to a friend than a diary; I find myself explaining things and wondering whether my reader (hello Mum) will get a full picture of the season happening here. One reason I love living in the countryside is the immediate opportunity it has given me to explore new ways of writing about rural landscapes. My published work has covered Liverpool's history and urban landscapes and the urban and rural landscapes of Southport. But I also spent six years assembling a loose collection of more experimental urban writing called The City Notes, loosely a diary of Liverpool street journeys; I wrote up long walks and journeys taken with friends or alone across the city, wrote down odd thoughts and descriptions of city life and my experiences in other cities, recorded odd overheard stories about buildings and places, wrote down my dreams of the city drowning or being consumed by fire, or simply devoid of twentieth century buildings; anxiety dreams masquerading as city journeys. About 80 pages survive, approx 40,000 words. It is a snapshot of my life in the city nearly ten years ago, awkward and sprawling; I imagine it is unpublishable.

The Notes grew out of straightforward recording of overlooked urban landscapes (especially street names) discovered through walking, and was an attempt as a writer to find a language for the articulation of fleeting, splintered urban experiences, on a very basic level of verb and noun and adjective and the structure of sentences. I am not sure if I succeeded! I did not wish to find a new language for the city, just for my vision of it.

So now I hope to start taking these urban notions of landscape writing apart and begin to find a voice, a personal, a unique, way of writing, for rural landscapes and journeys. One immediate result is time travel; the sheer age of ordinary place here, the gentle accessibility of medieval church or Bronze Age spring/religious site. Another immediate result is this blog, this journey through a season; I hope to do more of this kind of work in the future and to develop a manner of rural landscape writing that I can be happy in and with. Watch this space!

Bird Stories

Yesterday Presteigne was a town full of rooks. I nearly wrote 'a townful' to try and indicate the fact that the birds seemed to be everywhere. There are many tall bare trees and the birds seemed to be flowing through them and over the rooftops, to perch on TV aerials and chimney pots. The air was full of their cries, competing with the church bells. The whole valley is a great place for rook-watching - crow-watching generally - and my interest was sparked by seeing them in the fields and on the roadside fences. There is a large field called Broadheath Common on the very border of Powys and Herefordshire which in August and September was often full of feeding crows, although I didn't stop the car to check which birds they were; only if they flew over the road could I identify them. Certainly there are ravens on the hill behind the house, and this morning we had a carrion crow in the garden. I assume it was checking the hedges for the nests of sparrows. A big bird to see close up, crow-black, bible-black, huge bill.

Yesterday we also had two partridge walking up the lane to the main road, and we saw them later in the afternoon in the paddock behind the house. They always look baffled and self-conscious. There are plenty of pheasants about still and we often see them foraging in the roadsides; they have visited the garden a few times as well. Their clacketty, wooden call is part of the soundscape of the valley.

Even with putting food out the numbers of birds visiting the land around the house has dropped in the last two months. We have stopped putting nuts out and so the great spotted woodpeckers and nuthatches have stopped coming, as have the greenfinches and siskins. We still get dunnocks and house sparrows as well as chaffinches, blue and great tits, long tailed tits and occasional marsh/willow tits. There are many buzzards on the hill, and last summer Michael suspected a goshawk up in the trees there as well.

Grey Moods

I love the mistiness of this time of year. Yesterday the valley was awash with low cloud, trees emerged silhouetted and still, dripping with moisture, the view stopped about 100 yards away. And in light rain the Welsh hills seem to dissolve into layers of cloud and mist, a grey pallette ranging from grey-white to grey-black in the distance, a shifting pattern of shapes stitched together with old hedges and thorn boundaries. Words for the greyness; pearl, mackerel, gunmetal, silver, pewter, but none capturing the mattness, the blank flatness of the clouds. And this morning the skies are low again across the valley, the sky a pale backdrop to the still trees. It is grey and cold. But it is the middle of April, and so the grey air is alive with birdsong.

Near Full Moon

Nothing for four days! My reader will have found another blog. Proper Spring weather at the moment, snow showers and cool sunshine, and the nights are cold. A bright clear sunset over the Radnor hills, clear enough to mark the shifting sense of west that my father noticed some weeks ago; as the season progresses the sun's journey becomes more apparent as it sets further 'right' or even 'northwards' along the horizon. The shifting sense of west, of all direction. And now a cold near-full moon over the hill behind the house, the first stars appearing in the deep blue.

A number of walks recently along the old toll road to the post box or just for the puddles. Twice this week we have seen the race horses from the national hunt stables at Byton Hand. At 7.30 as I am getting the breakfast ready we hear the horses being ridden along the main road, and we often see them on the hill as they have a large field up there and are walked up and down twice a day, I think. There are horses everywhere here, and the lanes often have groups or single horses and riders in them. The familiar, atavistic smell of horse shit; stables and dung and warmth.

We are also out more on foot as the days are longer. Dandelions have started appearing, along with the banks of primroses. There is a steep, scary road (but a lot of country roads are scary) from Kinsham to Byton which we can see on the other side of the valley, cutting through the hillside and horizon. At the Kinsham end it rises through mature woodland, and the roadsides are lined with little white wood anemones. Spring seems to be pushing back the Winter but it is not going easily.

More Hereford Stories

An hour or so to wander around Hereford this morning. Older, smaller cities have history everywhere in a way that bigger cities - although no younger - do not. This is probably because of the bombing during the Second World War, when Britain's bigger cities were heavily attacked. But even older districts of Liverpool or Manchester or Birmingham or Sheffield are rarely older than Victorian with some Georgian survivors. In smaller cities the heart of the city is medieval, or rather the buildings and not just the groundplan are still medieval. I stood for five minutes next to a dusty overlooked doorway in Hereford this morning that is probably 500 years old; boarded up from the inside it has not been opened in decades, but the hinges and door furniture are still there, the solid wooden door and the Gothic arch it sits in are all intact.

I wanted to see the light in the cathedral this morning, a fitful morning of bright sunlight and wintry showers. The Romanesque pillars are great fat things, massive and tall, and the thin sunlight picked out subtle gradations of colour within the stones, pinks and greys and whites, a soft wash of light across the smooth surface. It brought me up short to realise that they have been there for nearly 900 years. The cathedral has a healthy approach to modern art and is proud of three large tapestries by John Piper, more subtle colours shot through with darker streaks, echoing the old stonework around them. And this morning I found a chapel off the Lady Chapel, a tiny place with three small Gothic window frames which have had new stained glass windows inserted into them. They illustrate the life of Thomas Traherne, a 17th century poet, a local man and priest who wrote about Herefordshire landscapes. He seems a guiding spirit for my kind of work and I should find out more about him.

Small Places

A Lake District morning of birdsong and wet stone. A walk through the toll road woods with family and friends, the mud made slippery by overnight rain. On the hard road - old road which hasn't fallen out of use - the puddles were deep after the rain but were clear and still. Roads are landscapes of tar and stones, potholes and layered mud, and are as affected by weather and gravity as much as the landscape around us. The rains had washed tiny grains of soil into the puddles, creating microscopic layers and estuaries of silts and pebbles in the clear water, like freshwater rock pools. They were also popular with children old and young who splashed them to thin brown mud, the silts moving in the water like coffee stirred in a mug. But the rain held off and the roads are used infrequently, so the muds would settle in the puddle after an hour or two. A poetic legacy of the journey; long after we are at home and our visitors are heading northwards, the waters and silts finally separate and the tiny rockpool landscape re-appears.

Cloudscapes Again

I could spend days watching the clouds. I once went to an exhibition of Constable's cloud paintings and drawings, his meticulous observation of time and place and sky, his beautiful attempts to understand the background to his paintings. The valley here runs nearly east-west and we can see some astonishing cloudscapes during the day. Huge grey-bottomed white clouds on great, slow journeys with the wind, soft grey walls boiling up over the Welsh hills, ramparts of grey-white cloud looming over Shobdon hill in the late afternoon. The purest clouds look like white ink spurted into blue water, a clean edge and firm shape. I have taken to keeping a pair of sunglasses in the kitchen, which faces west, to cut the glare from the sky and reveal details, the better to catch these strange patterns of evening cloud over Wales, layer upon layer building great hills above the real hills of Radnor like echoes of the Cambrian mountains which once stood there. Sometimes the very tops are struck by the setting sun, a vivid slash of sharp golden light across the mountain peaks; and a moment later it is gone.

A Walk in the Woods

After work and jobs this afternoon we took the dog along the old toll road. For the first eighty yards it is well-maintained, as it leads to Michael's fields and what was the old Oat House, still there in the 1950s, and now half surviving as field stores. The Oat House was possibly a village mill for grinding oatmeal, but wind or water or donkey-powered, I don't know. Beyond the turning into the fields the road was inaccessible until the water board hacked their way through a few weeks ago. In the month or so since they have finished, some of the thinner branches have whipped back across the path, and some of the bigger ones - hacked, broken, lying horizontally - have started blossoming. (Much of southern England must have looked like this after the storm in 1987, and recently I have read how much of the devastation rejuvenated itself with no human aid; and often where people did clear and plant, nothing grew.) The track slides through the mud along the side of the hill and joins a heavily overgrown trail that once led to the Oat House, a track now full of saplings and even small (post-1950s presumably) trees. The trail is only distinguishable from the wood floor by the overgrown mossy wall that once defined road from field. These old tracks join a relatively well-used modern track that leads to a farm, a chapel and a house. The woods are starting to come alive again, or rather the life is starting to reveal itself. Primroses, wild daffodils, wood anemones - whole banks of these near Byton. The thorn bushes are starting to put out leaves in 'our' woods and we have seen blackthorn blossom on other lanes near here. As the trees start to put out leaves, I realise how few native British trees I can safely identify. There are birch on the toll road, and hazels, as the squirrels from the hill leave the shells neatly pillaged.

Hedges and Boundaries

Can identity be linked to landscape? By 'identity' I mean the sense of self that we all have, the sense of who we are. I have been thinking about national identity; how we define where we come from. From an early age I was aware of Irish and Welsh and Scottish strands in my family history, yet all these strands had become English - albeit Liverpool English. I thought this morning what if something radically different was turned up in family history research, like a black African great-grandfather? I thought that that would startle me out of my assumptions but it also made me realise that the Irish/Scots/Welsh family have in some way affected my sense of who I am, of where I come from, from a very early age.

And of course if I was the Duke of Westminster then my whole life would have been defined by 'landscape' in the sense, the awareness, of the responsibility of owning large areas of Mayfair and Cheshire; and beyond this the sense that this ownership has defined my family since the Conquest. On a vaguer level, perhaps a more poetic level, I have been thinking about Welsh hedges. These field boundaries always make me think of driving into Wales as a child, seeing the family in Llangollen and then home for school on the Monday morning; even now they remind me of my auntie Gwynneth, my uncle Arthur, the Welsh side of the family, my awareness of that stretching back forty years. All from seeing some ancient thorn hedges!

There is more to this linking of cultural/national identity and elements of landscape than I can see. All I can say at present is that it has been on my mind as we explore this borderland between England and Wales.

Western Light

The journal began with the return of light generally, the mark of spring. We were waiting for the light to return from above Wapley Hill, from the south; it is the hill that cuts the light for so many months over the winter. But over the last week I have noticed the western light getting stronger as the sun is higher in the sky. Last summer we spent long evenings sitting out in the last of the sunlight and then the dusk; as the house faces due west the light stayed longer on the house. And in the last week the western evening light has penetrated to the deepest recesses of the house, the river-stone wall in the living room. As I write the sunlight is pouring in through the kitchen and into the living room to hit the stone wall with the woodburner in it. The oldest part of the house dates from the 1760s, and the original inhabitants must have anticipated this light epiphany, the return of the evening light, when the whole house was lit, almost as much as the return of the southern light, the general light, itself. I have never lived anywhere and been so aware of daylight.

And yet it is cold; four degrees below freezing is forecast for Presteigne tonight and it could well be a couple of degrees colder out here. So I will light the fire and we will watch the sunlight and the firelight in strange competition.

Maps and Cloudscapes

My 1951 Bartholomew map of the Vale of Severn is a different definition of this landscape. It seems to define where we are in relation to the Severn river, rather then the Wye which modern maps do. A different orientation of river landscapes; Lugg, Teme, Wye, Severn. The higher ground is marked in shades of browns, and the highest hills here are in the Radnor Forest, which is a dark chocolate brown. The land falls from there towards Worcester and Stourport which are in pale green flat areas. The county and national borders snake across the map but the further west you go the higher the land; the brown sits on the left of the map like a raincloud.

This afternoon we drove to Monkland and left the hills for the flatter landscape of the Arrow river. (Never was a river so mis-named; rarely have I seen a more twisty river. Perhaps the name has evolved from something else.) After a morning of snow-clouds and white-outs the landscape opened up and seemed flatter and therefore much bigger. The clouds were piled up in the blue sky as I imagine they are in the American west, gentle white forms growing and towering into great thunderheads over vast flat plains. I wanted to stop the car, lie in a field, watch them moving and changing. I love the hills and after five years on the flat coast of western Lancashire they are very welcome, but flat open landscapes give huge sky and cloudscapes and this afternoon their soft threat was very beautiful.

And after a quiet sunny evening the clouds have closed in again and the light has turned a sickly greasy brassy colour, like unpolished trumpets; the valley has disappeared and the trees are reduced to silhouettes. But the snow will not stick and in five minutes the sun will be shining again.

A Townful of Stories

Yesterday we went into Hereford. The centre of the town - of the county - is compact and almost free of cars. It was a bright cold day and outside the cathedral was a man playing a penny whistle, a haunting sound which he made soft and then stronger, louder then quieter; and all the time he was fighting the breeze. I love seeing musicians on the streets, they make people think of the street in a different way, not just as a route between departures and destinations. Hereford is a very old city and I kept seeing fragments of the city walls, pierced by roads and rebuilt, down back alleys and near roundabouts. It is a city of old narrow streets, especially around the cathedral on the river. The old Wye bridge dates from 1490; the cathedral precinct is Saxon in origin, and there seems to be discussion about the Romans in the area. But the story that fascinated me yesterday was the dedication of the cathedral to the Blessed Virgin Mary and St Ethelbert. He was an Anglian king who was murdered by King Offa and his head was thrown into the river - the Lugg. The Lugg is a long river and flows near Hereford which even then (seventh century) was important, so it has nothing to do with this valley. But I wondered if there was an age-old memory of heads and Celtic guardian river-spirits which had become grafted onto the historical story. Why cut off his head at all, and why throw it in the river?

Sunlight Observation

The light moves further into the house every day. Strange oblique shapes, sharp needles, diamonds, blunted squares of light suddenly appear on walls; places we haven't seen light since October. In any house the pattern and habits of light over a year can be charted, the simple journeys of light through a building - any building - can be measured and anticipated. Or even filmed. These chart the journey of the planet through space, its relationship with the sun. Imagine a house marked by these observations, walls covered with dates and times, a house decorated with dates of sunlight, overwritten year upon year! (One year I might rent an empty building and do just that, a building as an observatory of sunlight.) I am still unfamilar enough with this house to be surprised by the appearance of small light-patches on wall or carpet; and equally surprised when, suddenly, like now, they fade into the general greyness.

The Wichita Lineman

Some people have no poetry in their lives and cannot find it; others have it without looking for it or perhaps wanting it; I am fortunate in that I look for it and find it. I spent some time scrubbing the sheep skull that I found on the walk; washing this profoundly strange bone-shape, weird chambers once filled with brains now empty and washed clean of mud, strange wafer-thin blades of bone dividing the head-space into rooms; an odd thought. And this afternoon I cut the grass for the first time this year, a bright and warm afternoon, shirt-sleeves weather, the grass strangely thick, matted. It stained my hands an unfamilar brown-green. I saw a yellow 'hi-viz' jacket in the lane and asked the man if he was lost. But he was an employee of the power company, or whichever branch of it looks after electricity poles. He was a Londoner and stopped for a chat. He had a small electronic hand-pad and a map of poles in the valley, and was on a long series of short journeys to map the electricity poles here. He was checking their condition and whether they needed tree-surgery (ie overhung) or were rotting or weakened. His real paper map was a series of ovals - almost cartouches - and numbers, more like sea charts or radar blips or weather maps than anything relating to geography. He stayed for five minutes, noted the number of the pole (no poles in this valley have proper plastic number tags) and the relationship to the beech tree and the hedges in the lane. His work was awkward, beset with dogs and sheep, and difficult. And yet it seemed to me immensely poetic to see a landscape through something as ordinary as electricity poles, a landscape through dead trees recycled, a whole valley reduced to ovals and numbers and poles. But perhaps it was a good thing he met me cutting the grass, not washing the mud out of a sheep's skull...

Game

I forgot to mention that the other birds we see frequently are game birds, pheasants and partridge. They are bred for the shooting season over the winter, and there are many small pens in the woods near here where they are reared. I do not see the point of mindless slaughter and would always want to eat anything I had shot, but I also love the sight of the birds on the stubbled fields. Male pheasants are very beautiful birds, richly coloured with bronze and reds and deep blues. The females are patterned with soft browns and streaks of darker browns and greys, camouflaged against the fields and bracken. They stand about with an air of mild surprise - the foxes must love them - until the first guns scare them into hiding. On the hill once we had ten or fifteen birds flying through the tall, sparse trees to escape the guns in the valley below, a whirring, clacketty flight then a long glide. The other game birds are Red-legged Partidges, small dignified birds that scurry through the hedges and for all their striking colour can disappear very easily.

Orchards and Cider

This afternoon we drove to Pembridge to buy some cider. We buy from Dunkerton's, an oldish cider mill which has been organic since the 1930s. The 'shop' is an ageless shed, a wooden frame with brick infill, crumbling and seemingly held up by apple fumes. A stray shaft of sunlight lit the wooden pillar next to me as I waited with my empty water bottle to be filled; pitted and grey-stone wood, polished smooth by I guessed the animals that used to live here. The shop is lined with modern barrels and has a concrete floor with channels for the overflow. In the summer it was a dark place, wet and slopped with cider, which reminded me of the Dock Road pubs in Liverpool which used to waste a barrel of ale onto the road outside the pub to entice the newly-paid dockers. Even on a grey day in April the whole place had a rich appley smell, and the huge wooden crates were stacked by the entrance; TED 1, TED 4, TED 3. What does it mean? And I found some real poetry, the names of the apple varieties taped to the barrels: Sweet Coppin, Dabinett, Stoke Red, Foxwhelp.

And on the way home we passed a cleared orchard. A week ago we noticed men digging and burning a whole field of apple trees, which must have been seriously diseased. Now the ground is cleared, raked smooth like a Japanese garden of brown earth, with an immense pile of sawn logs next to the gate, and a great pile of smouldering ashes. A strange sight, dark and apocalyptic, the antithesis of the Wassailing celebrated long ago on Twelfth Night.

Flights

There is rain moving down the valley, but the skies here are still clear and the woods are full of birdsong. I have never been able to distinguish one bird from another simply by its song; urban birdwatching is more a question of what-can-you-see. But here, or anywhere with a greater sense of space, there is the opportunity to see more of the birds' life and hopefully to identify perhaps by sound alone. Over the winter we had some astonishing birds coming to our feeders. Great Spotted Woodpeckers, Nuthatches, Siskins, Long-tailed Tits (they are still here), Greenfinches, and Marsh or Willow Tits; far too similar for my eyes yet. We also had more common birds such as Blackbirds, Chaffinches, Blue and Great Tits, and Tree or Hedge Sparrows; again, my eyes cannot yet distinguish them. We also have Dunnocks, small beautiful birds like grated nutmeg, a pattern of browns and greys. In the lane we have had Bullfinches and Treecreepers, and there are many owls here. I cannot identify by sound alone, but I think we have had Tawny Owls in the woods and Barn Owls over the fields, which I think is about right. And on the walk yesterday I saw a pair of Wheatears, strangely desert birds of pale yellows and dark browns, perfectly camouflaged against the blond ground and stubble.

There are at least eight or nine buzzards living on the hill above us; we have seen all of them at once, an incredible sight. There are also Ravens at the top of the hill; I have a Raven amulet from Canada, which gives them a poetic dark jesting character in my eyes, as if the Raven is a Loki bird, undermining and scheming. And there are flocks of Rooks, strange black flaps of birds which fling themselves across the road. We see them everywhere here, as wooded country with open fields is I believe ideal for them. I tried to draw them, these patches of darkness, but I have not drawn since childhood and my work was clumsy and childish. Mark Cocker's book 'Crow Country' made me see them in a new light, their endless patterns of roosting and feeding; I read the book because of the amount of Rooks here, but the book made me aware of roosts and rookeries as well, and their vague unrecorded history.

Images of Ancient Landscapes

The Byton well/spring, surrounded and guarded by trees.

The old trail up the hillside.

The hill-top pool.

The hollow-way, definitely an older route up the hillside.

Walking Ancient Landscapes

A cold bright day, the valley scoured by a stiff wind, the sky bright and clear in strong sunlight; the shadows of the clouds moving softly across a bare hillside, a small herd of horses racing across a field.

Coming home from Presteigne I saw again the alignment of the valley, almost definite east-west. The well/spring at Byton that could be a Bronze Age religious site would, I realised, sit on the hillside facing the setting sun. Yet there was a second possibility. On the hillside high above the valley is a spring, clearly marked even today; another water-source and almost on the same grid reference. They were worth an afternoon's walking so I walked along the old toll road (bare branches knocking together like walking sticks) and across the fields to find the well. And if what I found is the site, it is bigger and more obvious than I had expected. In a low bank is a horseshoe of level ground around a series of pools which could be springs, or all feeding from the one spring. It is surrounded by shrubs and low trees and faces exactly the setting sun. The sheep use it to drink from, but what would survive after two millennia? When history is absent it is preferable to explore landscape creatively, poetically, or through symbol. The pool is protected by the shrubs and low trees, descendants perhaps of the vastly ancient grove it was once hidden by; and one larger sycamore (a Roman tree) stands guard to the right.

In this mood I carried on up the hill behind the site and joined an old forestry track in the woods. This in turn led onto an older track alongside the woods and up onto the achingly bare hill behind them. The older track - deep, overgrown ruts, a slice away of the hillside - disappeared under fallen trees, but a newer walking trail led up onto the bare field. The second possibly-Bronze Age water source was a deep brown pool in the steep hillside, guarded by holly trees and oaks. There seemed something ancient about the idea of holly and oak, but here too there was nothing to indicate a religious site apart from the size - the pool was about ten feet across - and the location, which was facing south-west across a huge piece of Herefordshire; on this clear afternoon I could see about 40 miles. I could see two bonfires in the valley far below, the smoke trailing in the fierce wind. On the way down the hill I found an ancient hollow-way, overgrown and used as an unofficial tip; but the thought occurred to me that the old woodside path on the way up could have led to the pool, and this hollow-way (still guarded by old old trees) could have led down. Did I find Bronze Age sites? I do not know. I saw trees that look like stone, bleached branches like old bones, hard ground the colour of ivory; I found a sheep's skull near the hill pool and above the treeline; I walked through deep deep tyre ruts the colour of sand and found an old hollow-way, still a green place in the surrounding harsh blond fields, and I think I found the water-source that has been described as a possible Bronze Age site. An astonishing walk and in the end it does not matter; the eyes, the way, to see the landscape are more important than what is seen.

Ancient Landscapes

I spent some time last night researching a landscape feature near here called Rowe Ditch. This is a ditch and earth bank some two miles long which runs north-south and was possibly built by the earliest 'English' or Anglian settlers in the Arrow valley in the 7th century. The Ditch runs over an earlier feature, a sort of enclosure perhaps with a hut, which has revealed Iron Age through to Roman 'items'. So the Ditch in theory is later than Roman, and the theory is that it was built to defend a small tribal area from the non-Romanised Welsh, other Germanic brigands or the Romanised natives.

But the internet also threw up some stories about this valley that I found interesting. As recently as 1973 an Iron Age deer figurine was found on one of the forest trails leading up from the valley, about 100 yards from here. The piece is now in a gallery in London. It was five inches wide and four inches tall, and was washed out of the hillside by heavy rains. I presume it came originally from the Iron Age hillfort above it on the steep slope but I find the survival and chance discovery of such objects very poetic; the journey of a piece of jewellery. There is also a 'shrunken village' in the valley which is centred on the houses we live in, presumably the builders' rubble that Michael keeps finding in his fields; centuries of over-written occupation, demolition, burnings, rebuilding. Architectural layering of the valley-side.

The story I found most astonishing was the discovery 20 years ago of a possible Bronze Age religious site centred on a spring across the fields, almost visible from the house, under the Byton side of Shobdon Woods Hill. The site could have been created/erected four thousand years ago. I wonder what it looked like. A secret place, a small wooden or stone shrine around the spring, decorated with flowers like well-dressing, or more like a parish church, a place to mark births and partnerships and deaths? How did it connect to other shrines, other sacred places? The Lugg here is surrounded by 'mounds', possibly burial mounds or defensive structures or old house bases above the flood-marsh. A picture emerges of human presence (if not occupation) here 4000 years ago - how important was the religious site? - and then the creation of the hillfort a mere 2000 years ago. Suddenly my Celtic river-spirit head seems quite possible - perhaps she came from that spring! I am interested in poetic history, not historical accuracy, and the layering of history here is astonishing. The possibility of human presence in the valley and along the river stretches much further back in time than I had imagined.

Time on This Planet

There is a vast, spatial poetry to the movement of time and planets. The seasons turn on equinoxes and solstices, an unending ebb and flow of light throughout the galaxy, as planets turn and shift on their axes, restless in their slow, gigantic relationship with the sun. On this planet - perhaps on others - the presence of people in the daylight is also manipulated, hours brought backwards and forwards artificially, our days subtly rearranged to give us the most daylight possible. It has only just occurred to me that in some way this must happen all over the industrialised world. Last night the clocks went forward one hour in this country and immediately the daylight - especially on a bright day like today - seemed to be here longer. One of the darkness-thoughts of Christmas is the fact that it gets dark at 4.30pm, whereas tonight it was light at 7.30pm. We have three more hours of evening daylight at the end of March than we do at the end of December. Changing the clocks, realigning our habitation of daylight, is an event on a cosmic scale, a small reminder of the movement of the planets, the music of the spheres. It happens twice a year and is strangely beautiful.

Storms and Food Stories

The last few days have been unsettled; stormy, wet, cold, then calm and filled with sunshine, then a snow shower and more rain and heavy cloud. When the sun disappears behind clouds the wind is cold, as if the air cannot yet hold the heat, as if the year is too young to know how to retain warmth. Last night we had a series of tall heavy thunderclouds building up over the Welsh hills, vast, boiling grey mountains, higher and higher up the sky, until dissipated by the cold wind. At last the stars appeared and it was calm and cold; but ten minutes later it was raining. This is how Spring should be. The hedgerows are full of wild daffodils and primroses, tiny creamy-yellow stars highlighting the dead blond grasses and grey-blond road mud.

This morning I had local honey for breakfast and we bought cider from the organic cider-mill near Pembridge. This reminded me that a woman in Leominster - our nearest big town - is spending a year eating and drinking nothing (apart from tea and coffee) that isn't grown or raised in Herefordshire. She even thinks that people could live comfortably eating NOTHING that wasn't produced within ten miles of Leominster. Honey, milk, eggs, cheese, beef and lamb/mutton, strawberries, pears and apples, damsons, vegetables; beer from any number of local breweries, cider from huge orchards, apple-brandy and even wine from two or three local vineyards. Agriculture - viniculture - is ancient here; there is a vineyard near Wroxeter (admittedly in Shropshire) which was originally planted by the Romans. Our nearest Roman road is about six miles away, a strange thought to imagine Wroxeter wines being carted along it to the larger town at Kenchester two thousand years ago.

Cherry wood

Trees have come to fascinate us. Across the garden from the kitchen door is a large beech tree, probably as old as the house, fifty feet tall, an astonishing display last autumn of reds and gold leaves. Nothing special about it, nothing out of the ordinary, but a magnificently ordinary tree. I have become more aware of trees since we moved here. A long-held dream is to work with wood, to make furniture; Herefordshire is thickly wooded and there seem to be many courses to learn these skills and produce chairs and tables. I have one or two tools that belonged to my grandfather, and cherish the thought of sharpening them and using them again. This is on a par with learning the Welsh my other grandfather spoke; and probably as unlikely.

The very last piece of cherry wood is a thick branch, maybe two inches thick, which we have been drying for a week or so. By chance I cleaned a band around the middle, and beneath the city-lichen-moss was the deep polished ruby red of the bark. The contrast was sharp, intense and yet the colours were subtle and quiet. An ordinary piece of wood came alive, became a thing of great beauty almost too good to burn, as many of the oak firewood pieces are.

A grove of polished young cherry trees would be very attractive, in a minimalist Japanese way. This view of trees, ornate, even manicured, bears no relation to the ancient woods we saw this morning; but like people our ideas of beauty change depending on age.

Trees and Sitting Out

A walk this morning around the grounds of Croft Castle. The grey woods were very beautiful on this cold bright day, smooth trunks and early buds lit by the still-low sun. Croft is an old place with an Iron Age hillfort but it is famous for its ancient trees. There are groves of oaks five and six hundred years old, and gnarled, squat odd trees that could be older. Ancient trees defy our concept of tree beauty; they are not tall and slender, they are fat and toad-like, limbless, ripped, scarred. The trunks look like cooled lava, crusted, bubbled scars flowing downwards, creating trunks at ground level that may be forty feet in circumference. For this reason there are clear rules for measuring these trees. We have found that living in the coutryside has changed our ideas of landscape, and our interests have become more elemental; mudstones, prehistoric buildings and 'land marks', ancient trees, the routes of rivers. A good walk through groves of slender young trees alongside the stream, where we were sheltered from the breeze. It was sunny enough at lunchtime to sit outside. In western Lancashire my mother has been sitting outside ocasionally for a few weeks now, well wrapped up but enjoying the sunshine. Today we risked the breeze and had half an hour of cool sunshine with our coffee. With missing the light comes missing the warmth.

Stars and Light

Stepping outside just now, the sky is awash with stars. Not the very best we have seen here, when the whole sky is silvered and there are stars between stars; but many many more stars than we used to see in the town. It used to irritate me, the amount of light pollution, the thoughtless filling of dark-time with unnecessary light; sometimes external lights would come on when I was walking on the other side of the street. (This led to me occasionally park-walking, savouring the deep silent darkness of the local park empty at night, the stars gentle and moody, the horizon vivid with orange light; the traffic seemed muted, distant. It is a strange need, all that is left of my wild side, this urge to darkness.) Here I have become obsessive about the unnecessary spilling of light. In the countryside light - and sound - travel much further and the light from the kitchen window can travel fifty feet across the paddock, fading but still strong. I switch off lights in rooms we are not using, but I also close curtains like other people switch off lights.

Evening Cold

A clear cold evening; a blue blue sky paling to steel blue at the horizon, darkening to a soft darker blue overhead. Cold and still tonight, the blue sky darkening and pricked with silver stars, the bare trees silhouetted and motionless against the sky. And again, having noticed this brown greyness of the bare woods here and at Kinsham, this soft haze of the woods is everywhere, great swathes of plain empty woods between here and Hereford; in another month or so they will start to green up and then disappear into thick, fresh woodland. I am also looking forward to the orchard blossom, the strange regimentation of pinks and whites across the county. But on a cold night it still seems a long way away.

Lugg Slate Water

The house at Kinsham is perched above a dramatic valley, the course of the Lugg, a steep river valley with hillsides of grey bare trees, distant pine woods. The valley was supposedly used by Lancastrian soldiers fleeing their defeat at the battle of Mortimer's Cross in 1461. The river at the bottom is about twenty feet wide and from the hillsides was an astonishing green colour, green the way slate can be green, appropriate for a Welsh river perhaps. It looked cold and ancient, still running through a valley it made how-many thousands of years ago. And then we saw it again today, from the sawmill at Mortimer's Cross, where we were buying firewood. The river runs past the saw mill (a strangely North American sight) towards the water mill, still powerful and turbulent, and still defiantly slate green. It runs many miles south of here before it joins the Wye.

Kinsham

History and stories are layered here, the countryside, in a way that isn't true of cities. History is present in cities but it is overwritten, so that what used to be there is present only in old photographs or history books. Urban history books record the ongoing evolution of the city. In the countryside there is more space and so things - objects, buildings, stories - coexist, side by side. Yesterday we went to the daffodil afternoon at Kinsham Court. This is a not-very-impressive big house on the other side of the valley from us. The house and estate have had a chequered history, even the little I have come across, and has belonged to among other families the industrial Arkwrights and the aristocratic Harleys, the Earls of Oxford. The Harley Estate still owns huge areas of land around here. To be near Lady Harley, Lord Byron rented Kinsham Court in 1812 for a year or so, and wrote part of 'Childe Harold' there. (I like the idea of living between Wordsworth's river, the Hindwell, and Byron at Kinsham Court. Were they ever here at the same time, I wonder?!) I wanted to see the Kinsham church, which I found when I walked to the remains of Limebrook Priory in December. The Priory is crumbling back into the ground but the church at Kinsham is about the same age - built in 1300 - and so was a tangible link to that time. When I saw it, the church was cold and empty and gloomy, the light fading midafternoon. It is astonishingly plain, meditative, monastic. The huge wooden door - proper church creak - is probably the most ornate thing on show. Yesterday the church was full of people having afternoon tea on a cold bright day. The daffodils were splayed out across the hill above the valley and the pine woods, and the whole place and day felt English and - for a place with so much history - strangely timeless.