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.

Easter

A quiet time here. Easter Sunday always seems to start quietly, faintly, with the simple story of veiled women hurrying through the early sunlight to the tomb in the garden; the story is so immediate I can almost hear the birds and the city waking up around them. A Biblical story set at a particular time of day seems to have more immediacy, a further linking of calendar to theology. A peculiar Easter pleasure is lying awake on Easter Sunday before the house has woken and thinking about the women on their ordinary, colossal journey. And Mary Magdalene not recognising Jesus through her tears and mistaking him for the gardener; superb writing! And then this gentle, quiet story fades into the ordinariness of a Sunday, even one at Easter, much as the quietness of the garden fades as the women run back into the city. There is a theme in early resurrection stories of followers not knowing who Jesus was; the unnamed disciples walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus walked alongside him without recognising him and only when he broke bread with them did they see him properly. Oscar Wilde said that at least once in his life every man walks with Christ to Emmaus.

In the afternoon we went to Dilwyn for a walk. Dilwyn is a quiet black and white village with an old pub and a village green and an ancient church. The history in the church was layered, with old walls being reused, the footprint of the building shifting over centuries, arches being half-bricked up, doors left to a rood screen cleared five centuries ago. It was quiet and peaceful. Much of the church history here is like this; mediaeval buildings with roots in Norman or Saxon churches which are open all the time but have services twice a month.

There will be less spiritual pondering from now on in this Journal; I suspect like a lot of people I get so far thinking about religious truth and no further; and when I think about it again I have to start again. But this is one of life's great thoughts, the relationship we have with our souls and the universe and the world around us; it is a spiritual journey in its own right. Too many people these days do not think about it at all - or maybe just do not think at all.

Tenebrae

We have been burning cherry wood, dried garden off cuts, a gift from my in-laws. It burns solid and leaves the shapes of branches and twigs of ash in the stove, fragile ash-twigs that dissolve with a breath of wind. Cherry become ash.

It has been a cold day, a day of sudden cold storms, sleets and clouds and unexpected sunshine, darkness, squalls of rain. Dramatic weather for Good Friday. On Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Saturday the church service of Matins was closed by an event called Tenebrae, which means darkness. As the service progressed the lights would be extinguished, leaving only the Easter candle lit; hidden behind the altar, symbolic of Christ's light hidden in the tomb. A gentle, quiet, melancholy act of filling the church with gloom, which (coincidentally, this year)echoes in church mystery and theatre the greater earth and sun drama of equinox. Tenebrae is only beautiful if you have faith that the light will be reborn, that Christ will rise, that the sun will climb higher in the sky and the warmth will return. (Otherwise it would be a death-ritual, a Gothic celebration of non-existence.) The connection with the equinox this year is a magical, poetic coincidence. The priest at St Teresa's, Father John, said that when he came to the church 30 years ago there was a large iron frame for 30 or 40 candles, that during the end of Holy Week was wheeled into the church for Tenebrae. The gradual softening and fading of light in a church must be very beautiful. I wrestle with conventional faith, but I find the poetry of the church very moving, never more so than at Easter.

Vernal Equinox

Yesterday was the vernal equinox, one of the two times in the year when the day and night are of equal length. A gentle reminder that no two days are ever the same length, that the year is made up of days which are lengthening or shortening depending on the phase of the relationship with the sun, the relationship between light and darkness. Six months of days shortening, six months of days lengthening, with no finish, no stasis beyound the endless round of lengthening and shortening and these two turning points, the equinoxes, and their dark halves, the solstices, the shortest and longest days and nights. Seen in these terms the nights are just dark days, halves of time, unobserved and overlooked, like a watch ticking in a coat pocket. It is almost a romance, this long-term and tender agreement between earth and sun, a romance made up of moods and phases, perhaps good days and bad days, calm days and angry days. The whole of a spring journal should revolve around the equinox, but living in a world of electric light and time I am so out of touch with the passing of days and nights that it has become an academic enquiry, not a conscious awareness. How many of us live an awareness of moon-phases, sun-journeys? And this equinox is marked by fierce winds, rains, skies sharpened by the wind; a fine moon last night, a skyful of bright stars and fast clouds.

A Hundred New Rivers

We have had a dry year so far; January was mild and relatively dry and February was cold and dry, but we have had very little rain. Then at the end of last week, we had two or three days of heavy rain, connected perhaps with the 'Canadian' storms. The river below us burst its banks, and the Moor was flooded. The valley is wide and shallow, and the very bottom of it has extensive low-lying fields and rough pasture alongside the river channel, the very boggy common/wild land called the Moor, a place of reeds and spongy ground, self-sown trees and saplings. Mick the Flower says that they get teal and snipe nesting there, as well as occasional otters. There is a clear fence line which separates this land from the grass lands for the animals, at which point the land begins gently to rise. Over the centuries this has been a managed landscape, and the Moor is left to take the occasional floodings of the Lugg. This happened last week. We could see thin strands of silver through the reeds, pools of water under the trees reflecting the heavy sky. Further up the valley, the Hindwell brook had burst its banks at the Combe bridge (the only crossing point) and was filling the neighbouring field with turbulent dirty water. New streams were running through old stream beds under the bridge and rushing through the snowdrops in the woods. The flooding is expected and controlled at this point in these young rivers' lives, but elsewhere in the county they have had a lot of problems over the last six months or so. Although they'd be short-lived, one expert calculated after heavy flooding last year that Herefordshire had a hundred new rivers.

St Patrick's Day

'Are you out for St Pat's?' they used to say. In Liverpool twenty years ago this was an important day. A breakfast in the Irish Centre, the old Georgian Irish Centre near where the Irish used to live by the Catholic cathedral, a real Irish rib-sticker of eggs, potatoes, mushrooms, toast etc and bacon for those who indulge. The little shop there used to sell shamrocks on St Patrick's day and wearing them as buttonholes we would saunter out onto the streets. I carefully put mine in water one year and wore it the following year as well. Nothing was made of St Pat's in the city in those days and only occasionally would we see other shamrocks, other gentle celebrants. From late morning we would make a long slow pub crawl through the lower end of the city's pubs; for famously Liverpool has no real Irish pubs. Gentle pub crawls have a magnetism and we would collect people who stopped for one, or two, or the whole afternoon, people out for different reasons, work, shopping, on the way to the bank. A motley crew of suits and office frocks and shopping bags, out for the moveable drinking feast that was St Pat's. The slow gentle drinking would go on all day and break up as the pubs filled with ordinary drinkers in the early evening. The talk was general and specific, but always seemed to come round to family and links with Ireland, forgotten stories, old villages and lost relatives.

My father's mother's family the Downeys were originally from Co Kerry, and the stories have it that they left Kerry because of the Famine and went to Cork, and then to Liverpool. I have always half-thought that the family were Catholic and lost their faith in the robust secular energy of England. My grandmother was married in the Anglican St Cleopas' in Toxteth, but had a hologram of the Last Supper and called her only daughter Patricia because she was born on 17th March; scant evidence but not very Protestant things to do. I am not Irish, just as I am not Welsh, nor Scottish because of a Scots grandmother; these are threads in my heritage, not the heritage itself. But Kerry is a stronghold of Gaelic and I often wonder if this too is a lost language in my heritage, a linguistic glass ceiling beyond which I cannot travel. So tonight I will remember old Irish drinking days and the shop that sold shamrock, and raise a glass to my Auntie Pat on her birthday.

Palm Sunday

A marker for Spring, an event in the Christian year. I am a vague and uncertain believer but I love and (I suppose) partially revere the natural world, so I love the connections between the natural cycle of the year and the Church calendar. Rooting the needs and dates of the Church in ancient rites and festivals was political - but also poetic and beautiful. The old rites have surfaced through centuries of Christianity in this country, as if rubbing it away, so that many people who are in no way Christian 'celebrate' Christmas with a tree, family parties, presents; more a celebration of Yule, a festival of lights at the darkest time of the year, than a commemoration of the birth of Christ. And now we approach Easter, the age-old celebration of the return of the sun and the arrival of Spring. I must admit I love the dark austere beauty of Holy Week with its staged violence and its despair; and the connections between Resurrection and sun-return - and the anxiety, the uncertainty of it - are haunting and magical. The hedge-rows here are full of daffodils and the bank on the old toll road has careful lines of them, planted methodically but strangely; why straight lines? I have seen primroses in the verges as well, and small crocuses pushing aside the dead grass. And we have the daylight for longer and longer each day.

A Rain Day

It has rained all day. We were woken by rain on the roof in the night and the skies were grey and clouded all day. The hills here are crowned with pines and the misty rain makes them look like Alpine foothills, as if when the clouds lift great mountains will be revealed. I like the variability of a landscape like that, its sense of potential; Alpine mountain, Welsh hills, English fields.

It is my son's birthday and we have been doing gentle party things; cake, candles, presents. When he was born it was bitterly cold for weeks and I remember snow in the ditches as I drove to the hospital, frosty skies and hard bright stars. He was born in the early evening and I also remember pulling the curtains aside in the delivery room at dawn of that day and thinking 'Today I will become a father.' An astonishing thought, which fixed the view of grey-golden clouds in my mind's eye. And he was born on a rare double moon, which I hope is a good omen. I nearly called this post 'fatherland', suggesting the new place I live, my new perspective since becoming a parent; but it seemed too flippant. Instead I will raise a glass to his future, and simply wish him all my love and all best wishes.

The Hill Fort

Another portion of the synopsis chapter. A little overworked but again an attempt to describe time and place and the experience of being in a landscape with a sense of history. This is the oldest landscape I have written about, nearly the oldest artificial landscape I have seen.

The hill fort is the crown of the hill, surrounded by a silent wall of tall pines. The air is colder and wetter, cobwebs of mist, long grass. These trails are less well used, there is little to see here, nothing to do. The pines get older and seem thicker as they near the hill fort, as if the older ones have been laying siege to these ancient ramparts for much longer. An old guard of trees, an ancient stand-off. (There is something paradoxical about these pine forests. Their straight lines and regimentation suggests the Romans which may once have besieged this fort, but in their shagginess and darkness they are also suggestive of northern Europe, a Germanic gloom echoing the great Teuterberg forest where the Legions were massacred, the echo and hope of all these Iron Age peoples. ) At a junction of two paths is the triangular frame of an unused information board, heavy square timbers uncomfortably like a siege engine, abandoned or no longer needed. A stile and a whip-fence, and we are in the fort.

Immediately the landscape changes. The thick forest is gone, replaced by open ground and golden bracken. There are a few sentinel trees, birch and beech and young oak, and only the occasional fir like a hostage prince. The ground breaks in steep frozen waves of bracken, the first of the ditches built to defend the fort itself, the outer defences. The ditches are still ten, twenty feet deep, concentric rings deepening as they near the final rampart of the fort. The effort required to dig these long trenches, the man hours, the organisation; it is still astonishing. How long did it take them, how many people were involved? The ditches are still quite deep and half a mile long. Their military analysis, their intelligence; each ditch has two steep sides, making perhaps a complicated series of narrow ramparts and fall-back positions, making it more and more difficult for the exhausted enemy to overcome the defences. Eventually the last and deepest ditch is reached, still twenty vertical feet of wall to assail before the attackers can fight their way over the wall and into the fort. Today an open path winds carelessly over these worn ramparts and ditches, an echo of the structure beneath.

The hill fort itself is enormous, as big as a large village or even a small town. The rampart wall surrounds and defines a huge open space of bracken and sighing grasses, red-golden and bleached white gold, dotted with oak groves, solitary birch and beech trees. In the valley below they still tell newcomers ‘the village is gone’, as if it went within living memory. Were there stone houses here, streets, open market spaces? Perhaps it was only used in times of war, a safe place for surrounding villages, continually guarded by a skeleton ‘citizens’ army’ keeping it in readiness. The southern slopes, today under thick pine forest, are gentle and smooth, and were perhaps cultivated in terraces or strips, small patches of woodland kept for firewood and building materials. There is a gap in the ramparts here, thin evidence of an old track into the fort, and it is not difficult to imagine herds of sheep and oxen being driven up the slopes into safety, anxious men and women, excited, half-scared children.

The space inside the ramparts is wide and dramatic but the history is buried, and must be partially invented to breathe again. The mind leaps and is fired by this empty place. It is not difficult to imagine wooden ramparts and defences above the earthen walls, a stockade – or a series of stockades – within the ramparts. This fort is supposedly two thousand years old, the Iron Age, a time straddling the beginning of the Common Era, the time of the earliest Roman invasions. What would they have seen from these high walls? The spikes of pine trees destroy the view, and the connection with other hill tops is lost; perhaps as in other parts of Europe these hilltop sites were part of a complicated pattern of sanctuaries, fortresses, shrines, visible from each other and part of a huge sacred/defensive landscape. What was it like here, two thousand years ago? The land would have been partly cleared of forest for cultivation and animals, there would have been tracks connecting one small village with another; the fields would have been hard won and much smaller, there would have been more forest, fewer trails, smaller villages perhaps stockaded against wolves and bears, but perhaps it was not radically different from what we see today. From the hill fort perhaps they could see other forts on hills two, three miles away, wooden walls and earthen ramparts, the defensive centre for another handful of small settlements, tribal allegiances, petty kingdoms. Perhaps the sheer size of the fort means that the area needed a big fort, that it was quite densely populated, or that in times of trouble people came here from miles around at the first sight of thick oily smoke on the horizon, a sign of villages burned and crops pillaged, the signal to close the heavy gates and take stock of weapons and supplies. Where was the water supply on top of the hill? Is there a spring here still, hidden under the bracken?

Mysterious pits are guarded by fences and stern warnings; the site of forges, quarries, arsenals? But the mossed concrete looks twentieth-century, so perhaps it was a second-world-war observation post or a fire-watch station. Easier to fence off and let it rot than dismantle it. The northern side of the fort is almost inaccessible through the wet grass, but the curve of the hill can be seen as it starts to turn and then gather speed and momentum as it hurtles steeply down towards the distant road. The muddy paths lead back through the ramparts and into the forest.

There is nothing here today to show that people once lived here. The only fires are made by stray campers, druggies, hippies hoping to commune with the past, with nature, with the stars. There are groves of oak trees and sentinel beech trees and acres of golden bracken. The grass path winds through the bracken and the long grass, shadowing the ramparts before cutting through them at the western end and diving steeply down the hill towards distant Wales, a narrow sheep-track through the ramparts. The overriding colours are gold and bronze and deep greens; birch leaves and beech leaves and dead, golden bracken.

It is haunted by absence, this place, haunted by what is no longer there and cannot be seen or felt. Centuries ago there was a settlement of sorts here, but today there is nothing. The spikes of the pine trees stand around it like prison guards after visiting time.

How do forts die? Perhaps the fort or fortified village was never used in anger, perhaps the high walls never defended the inhabitants against anything worse than a winter wolf-pack. Or perhaps it fell to besieging Romans after months of starvation and siege warfare, the hill slopes scarred by campfires, the cultivation pillaged by hungry soldiers. It is impossible not to imagine the last to live here, the last to leave. What would they make of this open, brackened space? Were there groves of oaks here then, are these ancient trees the descendants of Iron Age sacred spaces? The surrounding pine forests would terrify them, this whispering, man-made darkness pressing on the walls of their fortified village. Walking down the muddied paths through the thick trees I wondered whether the last defendants were overcome by superior Roman technology, and led away to slave farms or markets, glancing over their shoulders as the soldiers torched their thatched roofs and the dark smoke rose into the sky, a signal to other forts, other villages to check supplies and weapons and take to the hills.

Wapley Hill

I wrote this as a sample chapter for a book; perhaps not surprisingly I didn't get the deal! It is an earlier piece of the Hill Fort post you might have read. It tries to capture time and landscape, a sense of place, which is what I am aiming for in my work at the moment.

In high summer the narrow road is as dusty as Italy, the yellow-grey dust hanging in the air long minutes after a vehicle has driven past, clinging softly to the hedges and wildflowers and lower branches. In autumn the roads are muddied by the farm vehicles heading for the fields, cartloads of stones put down to strengthen the entrances, the yellow earth churned to muds and chocolate, the fields vast Zen gardens of brown earth with a lone tree to mark older fields, lost boundaries. The white stone path leads steeply upwards from the lane, a slash of bone-dry stones in summer, a gentle stream in winter. And deadly straight; a pull for calf and thigh muscles, designed for the petrol engine and therefore able to ignore the contours, ignoring older, gentler roads which were designed for horse or human foot. Only at the first of the older paths does the new road lose confidence and start to wind. The hill falls away to the left, a stand of sighing pines, distant fields and woods. Already we are a good height above the lower rolling landscape, the valley floor.

The older route through the woods is more pleasant than the new road, more enclosed, quieter. It seems to mark a boundary between thick pine forest and more open, more mixed woodland, although even this is still dense with fir trees. At a sharp bend in the trail is an old oak tree, thick with ivy, almost invisible against fir saplings and hedge. Beyond, the cleared field drops sharply, neatly towards the road.

The lower slopes are heavily wooded, thick pine forest planted darkly, fringes of escaped birch or beech trees, the occasional shaggy oak. This is a commercial landscape, as agricultural as the fields that surround it, but as the land levels out the woods are varied and unexpected; a patch of gentle birches, an avenue of golden-green beech a mile long across the hillside, the floor a golden-red carpet of leaves. The pine trees press around these erratics and stand in long tight rows on boggy ground, made soft by rain and decay and the stumps of their predecessors, some draped in lichen like white paint, a sort of offering on a makeshift shrine. They are tightly packed to make them grow tall, to waste less ground, to make each tree merely a collection of planks growing together. Filtered from above by spindly whips of branches, the light at ground level is weak and aquatic, and rotting stumps resemble broken equipment from a huge, forgotten shipwreck. Narrow paths between the trees lead nowhere, perhaps to glades of livid green moss, pale mushrooms, more rotting wood, more moss. The gloom leads off into the trees.

This year or the next the machines will come and lay waste to this sighing army of trees, deep wheels and chains and gangs of men will clear a stand of timber twenty, thirty, perhaps forty years old, clearing the ground for new plantations and leaving a charnel ground of splintered trunks, deep trenches, heavy mud. The tracks these machines leave can be seen for years, false trails, parallel trenches colonised by mosses, grasses, brambles, saplings until they eventually disappear altogether, worn down by rain and slow growth. The hill seems littered with these old trails. And at the top of the hill is the bald space, the old hillfort itself.

Stone Head Again

I realised today that moving the stone 'Celtic' head from Michael's fields next door to our garden has made me look again at the siting of the garden in this river valley. The land starts to rise at this point, and in the thirty feet of garden from north to south the land rises by about three feet, and continues to rise up Wapley Hill. Michael's theory is that these eighteenth-century cottages were built on the worst land in the estate, the land that was no good for agriculture or forestry. That is why the toll road and the modern road are here as well. The head - should it have a name? A gender, certainly; she is a she - has made me look at the orientation of the land east-west as well, looking up the valley towards Radnor and down - although we have no windows that way - towards England. I have looked at England all my life.

I like the idea that this river-spirit stone head has made me reassess this landscape, the position of this house. It is in all probability not a Celtic river-spirit, carved two thousand years ago to guard or represent a long-vanished spring; but I also like the idea that it could be. She has fired my imagination to see this as an ancient and sacred landscape, a buried-in-plain-view landscape of old hills, carved stones, mistletoe in trees and vanished springs. Every night I see the stars over the steep hill and think of the huge Iron Age hillfort that is up there beyond the trees in the darkness and the ancient silence.

Night skies

A thickening sky; a fine Gothic scythe of a moon, slowly, lazily, gathering clouds, that might not amount to much. They are dark grey against dark blue and faded grey at the edges, a colour pattern that reminds me perhaps wrongly of Fuseli; the colour of old paintings of faded nightgowns, soft-faded lead paints, metals and whites and old oils.

The front windows of the house look east, into Wales, and the clouds build up without hurry over the Radnor Forest; they look threatening, snow-filled, angry, but haven't the energy to do anything and dissipate equally slowly, falling apart over the wild hilltops near the Powys Observatory. I love it up there, gentle, massive hilltops, silent fields, sheep and endless winds, even the strange military squares of Forestry Commission timber, like the 'tortoises' of Roman shield-walls, or Zen gardening on a massive scale.

The winds of the recent storms seem to have passed. I feel as if the real force was elsewhere, and that the storms could only reach us with a ghostly, feeble reach, but still strong enough to rattle slates and overturn pots. The ragged edges of the storm, the 'skirts', a phrase that has played with me all day, the idea of a skirt and of something being skirted. Words can be mulled gently for hours or days in a writer's head. The winds last night felt as though they were scouring the sky, the moon looked small and raw, the stars brighter but polished with sandpaper. As if a layer of sky had been rubbed harshly away by the wind; and for the first time since a meteor shower last August I saw a shooting star over the hill behind the house.

The Poetry of Place

Some of a journal like this should be about events, our doings, but some of it should be about the poetry of where we live, the reasons for living here. We have more or less decided to stay within this area, between Presteigne and Kington or over the Welsh border properly, towards New Radnor; an ambiguous Border area, a faultine of English/Welsh identity. The area changes all the time, a turn in the road reveals new distances and smoky hills, bare woods, fields, hedges.

I like the ambiguity of the area because it seems to reflect a depth and richness in family history, family identity, the melting pot inside each of us. The Welsh is strong on both sides of my family and my maternal grandfather's family were entirely Welsh-speaking in the 1901 census; but I have lost this, and feel a slow rising of regret at this lost language in my heritage. My father's mother's family were from Bantry Bay in Ireland, the heartland today of the Gaelic speakers; this too seems a lost element in my make-up, perhaps a part of my soul. Of course this is just writer's overattention to detail, denying the more important idea that we make ourselves; neither of these elements are me, they are threads in the carpet of me, a part of the rich tapestry, that is all. But there is a similar uncertainty here, except it is topographical not concerned with family. I like living here because of this warm ambiguity of place, where towns have two names, towns which straddle an invisible border in more ways than one.

So - some local placenames, all within a mile or two of here. Court of Noke, Sned Wood, Cross-of-the-Tree, Hell Moat, Byton Hand, Rowe Ditch, Mistletoe Oak, The Globe (actually a woodland), Mortimer's Cross, Horseway Head, Cabal, Deerfold, Crookmullen. The placenames I search for the most are the ones in England that are left-behind Welsh names like Ty'n y Coed - 'the house in the wood' I think - or the Welsh names slowly disappearing into English, leaving a pronunciation like 'Mocktree' for Mochdre.

Stones and water

A quiet day here with the storms all elsewhere. A rainy day morning of mists and low rain, a Lake District day when stones and moss and grasses were all illuminated by rain light. Alone in the house to work I opened the windows and let the damp air in, bright and fresh and with a slow after-the-storm mood. It was wet and windy overnight but we have been spared the heavy rains and driving winds that the rest of the country has had. Or rather the valley is protected from heavy weather by its position, shielded by Welsh hills or Shropshire's Blue Remembered Hills or even the Malvern Hills thirty miles away but visible from the hill behind us. Mick the Flower who lives down the lane once told me about the hills twenty, thirty miles away that protect us from the extreme weather, and it is true that most of the weather comes down the valley from the west, from Wales.

We went out for firewood as stocks are low, over the hills to Aymestrey on the old Roman road connecting Wroxeter with the vanished Roman city at Kenchester. How much longer will we be having fires? And then tonight a series of short power cuts at dusk, so it is advisable to always have candles and wood in. Our wood comes from a sawmill at Mortimer's Cross near Aymestrey, the offcuts from roofbeams, kiln-seasoned oak blocks which burn slowly and leave very little ash. They have a simplicity, these small dry cubes of oak, that makes them very modern, contemporary plinths, uncarved sculptures, with the accidental tannins or staining like miniature landscapes. They are astonishingly beautiful objects, and we use them as bookends or to display small sculptures as well as firewood.

Daffodils and Honey

There are more birds every day, it seems. Buzzards, ravens, rooks, garden birds. I have become obsessed with rooks after reading Mark Cocker's 'Crow Country' and wonder where they go when they fly over; from feeding to roost, to preparing the rookery again? Amazing that a book can shift your perception of the natural world. A robin ventured into the kitchen as we were talking in the garden, looking for crumbs.

In the last of the light we drove over the hill to Pembridge, the nearest of the half-timbered 'black and white villages' for which Herefordshire is famous. This side of the hill is less glamorous, more workaday; the black and white is buried beneath Victorian brick. On the way we drove past a grubbed-up orchard, a strange sight in this apple-growing area; the trees lay flattened, as if astonished. It was rare to see such violence, but the trees must have been diseased. We love the trees, the wildlife, the sense of space, but every inch of this countryside has to turn a profit.

Pembridge has some very old buildings. The New Inn was built in the 1300s and many of the houses on the long main street were built between the 1300s and the 1500s, and a dendrochronology team from Sheffield University was able to not only date house construction to the year but also to the season; the late summer of 1490, the spring of 1535. But what I like about Pembridge is that it is not pretty; the houses are black and white, but they bulge into the street, overpowering the pavement, leaning against each other, with a mad unstable roofline making an uneven terrace of black beams and white walls a mile long. And at one time all cities in the country looked like this. We were in Pembridge to go shopping, as I buy my honey from the last cottage in the village. The bees are kept in the field behind the house and the honey is marketed through a collective of beekeepers. It is very good honey and I like buying locally and from a cottage which has a proper ding-dong bell on a handle, a glimpsed living room around an old fireplace, comfortable and homely.

Home through the lanes to Stansbatch on the other side of the hill from us, where there is a tiny plant nursery which has a stall on the road; an old market barrow with wooden wheels and a striped awning, selling bunches of flowers and tiny things in pots. Today they had bunches of daffodils for 50p, grown on site, so the kitchen has vases of opening daffodils all over the place.

Stone Head

The watermen flooding through the valley awoke ancient river stones and old pathways lost in the woods, and left mud-scars, hacked white timbers, fresh tarmac stitches across the roads. Their mud trails are full of confused rocks, calcereous mudstone, we call them river stones; eggs and half-eggs of stone, grey-mud-stone, muddied brown-grey; a subtle colour, indistinct, vague; they crack into three-dimensional jigsaws, crumble in your hands, unused to air and light after five hundred million years underground, this floor of an impossibly ancient sea. Not a fine stone but layered, shale-depths, inch-thick, two-inch-thick layers; raised as walls and turn-edged as cattle-floors, fireplaces, where with heat it polishes softly to a steel grey.

But the rumblings of the watermen also touched stranger things, and brought an ancient boulder to the surface, a smooth stone the shape and size of a small human head. I thought instantly of river-gods, Celtic heads at the heads of rivers, spring-goddesses; she rose in Michael's stone-fields (builders' rubble from two centuries of DIY) and surfaced gently, bobbing in long grass and drying soil. Three buzzards appeared as I righted her, washed the mud from her sightless eyes, turned her north towards the distant river; guardian-birds. It seemed right that she reappeared at the foot of the hill and the edge of the fields, the hinterland between slope and marsh, a place of springs and uncertainty. The soft bubbling of springs, grass waters, underwater stones, smooth water slipping down to the widening river. I righted her on St Valentine's Day, a pagan fertility festival in late winter, a celebration of the distant hope of spring. She sat for a day or so among the modern garden ornaments, where the Roman god eyed her warily; but any garden is too tame for her; she has memories of blood-lust firelight ceremonies, mushroom feasts, wild dancers. I moved her to the wilder corners, higher up her old slope, where she could realign the garden with the valley landscape, and her eyes and beaky face can see the untamed flood-marsh and the distant river.

The Old Road

The house is flush with the road, but the road no longer exists; or rather it runs for a matter of yards either side of the house, like a railway station with a small section of preserved track and then wilderness. It reappears a hundred yards along the valley, is tarmacced and used, then disappears again, part of a network of old tracks, half-roads, that didn't all make it into Ordnance Survey. Our road was a toll road built in the late 1700s and part of the Radnor toll system administered from Presteigne, marked by a plaque in the town centre. But it was outgunned by the modern road, and apart from isolated stretches it has disappeared into the light woodland along the valley side. Until now. Since September Welsh Water have been replacing water pipes, and finally reached us a month ago. The pipes run under the old toll road for some reason and the water board sent in a mechanical digger to trace the road and clear the trees. They found the pipe and replaced it and have gone, leaving white-gashed trees and thick mud. The lines of the road are clearly marked, overgrown hedges and mossy walls originally laid and built in the 1760s. But the road itself has gone. I had expected hardcore, road-stones, I don't know what. But even the modern machine could not uncover any road surface, and the line of the 'road' is slanted, drunken, reflecting the hillside not the toll road. Walking to the post box along the toll road - off road as it were - is like following the trail a plane crash makes in a jungle. The trees are hacked and broken, the trail is wide but thick with deep mud and heavy mudstones. I find the loss of a road to nature deeply poetic, that a road surface could slip underground, overgrown so much that leaves become mud become soil, and a whole road could disappear.

1668

The hills here are like whales rising from the valleys, low and wooded, long and hump-backed. Over the border the hills start to rise and around New Radnor they are steep and strangely bald, stitched together with Welsh field boundaries, overgrown walls retreating underground, cropped grass, stunted thorn bushes, the whistle of the wind. I love these boundaries, so old they look grown not artificial. We went to see a house, a farmhouse with a collection of barns. How many of these derelict barns have we seen now? I photograph latches, boards, old doorways, strangely rootless agricultural details. The house was built in 1668 and was wide and low, with good views across the steep fields, massive floor-beams, stone roof. Damp, cold, unloved. How old must the beams have been in that house, a century old say when it was built? They were saplings at the end of the sixteenth century, the late 1500s. The barns were later but still massively wooden and in fierce winds would have creaked like upturned ships, dry-stone-keeled and lined with straw. Behind the house on the bare hill was a bleak wood, full of dead branches bleached like old bone, gnarled trees fifty feet high, tight grass. And beyond that the steep curve of the hills, the sheep, the endless wind. It was beyond us in many ways, but we loved it.

Hillsides and Rivers

This valley has been inhabited since the Iron Age, but it has no name. Geographically it is the upper valley of the River Lugg, part of the Teme Valley and indirectly part of the Vale of Severn, a spiralling series of river-names to describe an unfolding of the land. It is a flat agricultural valley dominated by low steep thickly-wooded hills, with other unnamed valleys leading off and so making further low hills; suddenly they open up and then disappear again, secret places, thick with woods, uninhabited. But it is a landscape created by water. The river Lugg is about five hundred yards across the shallow valley from us and at this point is about ten feet wide, overhung with young trees and creating a wide marshland clearly separated from the dry ground around it. The houses are built on the dry ground and even during the floods of recent months - when the river burst its banks many times and flooded the marsh - none of the houses here were touched. It is a Welsh river and rises over the border, where it is called Llugwy; as if the English have hacked off the letters or syllables they cannot use or do not understand. There is perhaps a connection with the Welsh for light; and also with Lewis, distant, faint, ancient word-cousins. Once in England the river meets the river Hindwell, which rushes through the valley from near Radnor. William Wordsworth had family connections at the source of this river, Hindwell farm, where there is a large pond and a Roman settlement and groups of standing stones. At a different time his cousin also farmed at Broad Heath, about a mile from here, down the valley towards Wales, and I often wonder if he walked along the Hindwell between the two farms. He is supposed to have considered this Radnor/Wye landscape the most attractive in Britain - after the Lake District.

At night we can still see the farm-lights on the hillsides across the valley, although these will vanish as the leaves reappear on the trees. A strange thing, unnatural light here; I have become preoccupied with cutting light pollution and the small spills from the house I try and stem with folds of curtain. The darkness seems more important, the starlight and moonlight the natural lights of night-time.

Cold

My generation has always lived with a sense of apocalypse. We have never lived with a hopeful future, a sense that things would be better. When I was young the threat was seen to be from the Russians and from nuclear war, a short and unimaginably violent conflict which in minutes would destroy human life as we know it. This threat is supposed to have receded with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, although the situation is not as clear as it was and there are more unstable states with nuclear weapons than before. Now the immediate perceived threat is from terrorism, especially 'Islamist' terrorism, and the longer darkness of global warming.

I sometimes do not believe in cold. Old people have no faith in heat, and will wrap up on warm days and mutter about it not lasting. They remember a time without central heating, without reliable and controllable warmth. But it is the cold I do not believe in, the cold I have no long-term faith in. Is it warmer during the winters now than it used to be? Are we facing a future where the cold retreats to extremes - Arctic theme parks - and skiiing in Europe is a thing of the past? Nobody knows. Here we had a cold winter, colder than I am used to, with fortnights of subzero temperatures and a cold snap of minus eight centigrade for a night or two. But a future without appreciable cold terrifies me.

Welsh Snow

Awoke to a pale crust of powdery snow, which was starting to fade as the daylight warmed the ground. It had come from the west, from Wales a mile away, and the western windows were still wet this morning. The house sits square to the compass; a western side facing the Welsh hills, a southern side, a northern side and an eastern side facing into England. All day we have been threatened by snow, the clouds leaden and full of it, the occasional flurry of sleet or frozen rain. The sky has been sullen. I drove to Leominster and there was no colour in the landscape at all, just hills unfolding in shades of greys and pale whites, sharp silhouettes of naked roadside trees black against the greyness, the constant threat of snow. There was snow on the distant hills, in the Radnor Forest and beyond, all day. And then I turned a corner and the sun came out, and it was so clear that even driving I could see buds on the trees, the promise of leaves and blossom, tree-flowers. Seasons do not end abruptly but fade reluctantly, and this fading is a special moment between one season and another, this sense that the winter is leaving but can still blast us with blizzards, subzero temperatures, glooms.

Galanthus

A day for mothers. It occurred to me that there are a number of small celebrations of fertility in the approach to Easter, the great spring festival of rebirth and renewal. St Valentine's Day is one, a celebration of sexuality hidden beneath bows, cards and pink chocolate. And there is Mothering Sunday, when mill workers were given time off to visit their mothers. It used to be associated with Simnel cake, I think, as Easter now is; so perhaps the generosity of the mill owners was a forced response to something older, deeper, one of the many pagan streaks running through British custom. In celebration we drove to Galanthus, an art gallery in the Wye Valley, to see the fields of snowdrops; Galanthus is the Latin name for the snowdrop family. A bright cold day, the light on grey tree trunks soft and dry. Herefordshire has many ancient trees and we drove past Moccas - a Welsh name submerged by English usage - which has some astonishing trees, squat toad-like trunks and amputated limbs lying next to the bodies. I have never lived anywhere with such beautiful trees.

Stars and Kites

The light goes quickly here still, despite my enthusiasm, and the evenings are still cool and dark. But Powys/Herefordshire is the best place in the UK for stars, so there are compensations. There are very few street lights and on a clear night the sky above the valley is a silent blaze of stars, literally like diamonds spilled across black velvet. The Milky Way, the very centre of the galaxy, is clearly visible as a thicker cluster of stars, as if they are drawn to the centre. A strange feeling to look up, untold vast distances, into the centre of our galaxy.

The hills into Wales look like velvet as well, like old worn velvet, and the fields towards Discoed and Radnor are brushed with blond stubble, as if the green is about to burst slowly through. A quiet drive this evening to see very old houses in New Radnor, and on the way through the valley we saw a red kite. An amazing sight, riding the thermal, turning slowly, hunting. I had to stop suddenly; fortunately there was nothing on the road. A bird quite distinct from the buzzards we get here, more elegant, more refined. They are quite common in Powys and are the symbol of the county. And famously they used to scavenge in the streets of London.

I have celebrated Dt David's Day for many years, and this year I decorated with daffodils and baked Welsh cakes this afternoon. The journey to Radnor was a way of absorbing landscape and skies on this most Welsh of days.

Dewi Sant

March is not a traditional time to celebrate the end of winter but there has been no direct sunlight here for four months and even today's cold sunlight seems warming and to offer the promise of summer. The sun slipped below the hill at the end of October and everybody in the hamlet knows exactly - to the day - when it will reappear on their house.

It may still be very cold in March, but here winter is over because the light has returned. We were promised March 1st and the first creepings appeared a day or so ago, touching the courtyard wall and stretching warily through the garden. We danced in our ability to cast shadows. And with the light has come the birdsong, even on the grey days.

The long darkness is due to the position of the house, tucked into the hillside of a valley which straddles the Welsh border and gives us a border identity that I like; local towns have two names, an English one and a Welsh one, and in Llandrindod Wells our hamlet was written Cwm Mawr, the big valley, and not the English Coombe Moor that the maps have, the moor for Coombe, a settlement further down the valley. But maps older again have the place as Cwm.

This used to be the Welsh kingdom of Powys, and appropriately we have seen wild daffodils flowering alongside the roads for the last couple of weeks, primroses and crocuses, and the last flowering of the snowdrops. Even the roads busy with heavy lorries have small clumps of snowdrops and daffodils. Winter may not be officially over, but Spring has arrived.