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?