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.