Letter to an Unknown Reader

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

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

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

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

David x

Hills and Fields

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

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

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

Leaves and Falling Rain

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

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

Wapley Hill Again

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

Meadowland

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

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

Presteigne Moods

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

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

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

A Cap of Dublin Tweed

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

A Solemn Stillness

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

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

Hauntings

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

Woodsmoke and flowers

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

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

Forest Murmurs

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

The Old Toll Road Again

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

Hippies

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

May Flowers

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

Queenswood

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

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

Green Darkness

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

Alpenkitsch

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

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

Garden Archaeology

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

This Chance of Birds

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

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

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

Europe Day

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

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

Borth

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

Llangollen

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

The Tenacity of Dandelions

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

No Nearer Remembering

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

Beltane

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

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

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

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