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.