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.