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.