Cloudscapes Again

Just now, a routine trip to the outbuildings and the hunt for a book, the clouds took me by surprise. Great towering thunderheads of boiling, slow motion clouds, dark lilac tinged with brilliant sunlit white, sharp like fountain-pen ink squirted into clean water, above the horizon a slash of razor light, huge and vivid. Manoeuvring their way out of Wales like a squadron of battleships. And over Shobdon hill, lit by the sun, a similar (never identical) gigantic tumbling of whites and greys, slow-moving, slow-changing, internally boiling mass of cloud. I find cloudscapes astonishing; I found recently some notes I had written about cloudscapes in cities and could gladly spend days here recording skies and clouds, as Constable did on Hampstead Heath. And by the time I have written this all will be changed out there, all the giant structures will have blown and shifted and changed beyond my recognition, an astonishing idea. I never did find the book.

Millefleur

With a couple of days of on/off rain the countryside has woken up. The trees have a fuzz of new growth and lots of blossom is starting to appear. In a few weeks the orchards will be full of bloosom, one of the sights of Herefordshire, and I am looking forward to this.

I remember hearing of 'millefleur', a patterning of flowers on a field background in late medieval and Renaissance tapestries - the idea was the ground was like a carpet of flowers, literally 'a thousand flowers'. Then one day in the car park of a small French town I saw it; the grass around the car park hadn't been cut for a few weeks and the flowers had taken over. For the first time as a natural phenomenon millefleur made sense. I was reminded of it today, as the fields and roadsides here are awash with dandelions, daisies, honesty, primulas; the field next to the river in Pembridge is a sea of yellow dandelions on the green background, looking exactly like a carpet. A beautiful sight.

The western light is filling the kitchen and shining right through to the living room wall. Last night we sat outside in the very last of the light and lit candles, watching bats and hearing the owls in the woods above the house. As the days lengthen and the evenings are lighter, we use the living room less and tend to sit outside if at all possible, part of the seasonal migration throughout a house.

Rogation Sunday

A minor religious festival, when the church asked for blessings on the crops and good luck for the coming year. I said no more religious references, but today we saw the rogation walkers in Staunton on Arrow, a group who walked the parish bounds after the service this morning to keep the geographical definition of the parish active. This is the 'beating of the bounds'. They were also being shown round a local organic farm called the Leen, a name which has its roots in 'lene' which means marshland, I don't know which language originally. Lots of places round here have derivatives of the word lene in them, as most places here are built on the valley floors or alongside rivers, land which at one time would have been marshy. Staunton is a very small apple village with an ancient church, and we went for a walk through a very muddy orchard, the trees starting to come into blossom, the ground covered in dandelions.

Grassways

We have two grassed areas around the house. One runs for fifty feet alongside the leylandii hedge (the birds love this for cover, especially the sparrows) and one is directly in front of the house. They are connected by three brick-and-pebble steps which at the moment have my lavender pots on. The grass is struggling to grow well under the hedge and on the rubble left by builders recently and over the last two centuries, not to mention the thin layer of rubble and earth over the septic tank. It grows well in some parts and not so well in others.

As I was looking at the grass last night I noticed a series of triangles of slightly lusher grass in front of the house. What could be causing the better growth? I came to the conclusion that I was looking at it the wrong way round. The triangles were the untrampled patches between shortcuts across the grass. These paths have compacted the earth making it harder for the grass to grow. One continues the path around the house, one runs to the middle of the lawn from the house, and one to the washing line and indirectly to the driveway in front of the garage, ie to the car. They are older than our presence here, evidence of previous inhabitants, like layers of old paint. Do we use them? There was something primeval about these tracks, an assertion in the face of modernity, the way people will impose real pathways over the best plans of urban landscaping. The triangles reminded me of the shapes on snowy roads, areas of tarmac left unused by the traffic but only noticeable when it snows. And this afternoon they are gone, but as the grass recovers in a few weeks they will reappear .

Seasonal Ghosts

There are days in every season which are ghosts of the season gone or the season to come; after days of gloom the sun is shining faintly this afternoon and it is warm enough to try some gardening, which feels like summer. Grass cutting, repotting, dusting, cleaning, watering. And coming in from the garden, a faint echo of holidays on the stairs; a smell of damp, old dust, shuttered rooms, faint incense. I doubt we will get away this year but such moments are good for the soul.

And the landscape is changing. The daffodils are fading back, the snowdrops are long gone. The hedge-banks are full of creamy yellow primroses and the woods are starting to show drifts of celandines, wood anemones, even bluebells. The paddock behind the house is full of daisies; and the grass here has stubborn dandelions in it. The fields too are waking up. After a month of Zen ploughing - neat, regular, rigid and unintentionally ornamental - the fields are starting to soften with new growth and large patches of acid yellow oilseed rape are starting to flower. A vivid, Van Gogh quality to these slices of sharp, sour colour; the fields resemble a patchwork of browns and these aggressive green-yellows.

And we are starting to see bees.

Building Stories

I've been meaning to write for a while about buildings in this part of the Borders. We went to Pembridge yesterday for some organic cider and I asked the cider man - who was trying to get us to drink lots of cider from big glasses - about the small barn they sell the cider from. I mentioned some time ago that the 'shop' is a dark wood and brick building reeking of apples and alcohol, the wood worn smooth and silvered with age or animals. Thirty years ago it was a granary a few miles away but had become redundant. The Dunkertons wanted something suitably quirky, practical and agricultural, so they bought it and took it apart, beam by beam, and rebuilt it at the cider mill. The old wooden beams are nearly all original but the brick infill was another rescue job, a skip or two full of what look like early Victorian bricks which they used to pack between the beams and struts. The building looks as though it has been there forever and is far older than the more modern cider mill buildings behind it.

Driving home I realised that the older more wobbly black-and-white buildings here look as though they have grown out of the ground. Pembridge has a long street of these elderly and unsteady houses which lean together for support. My favourite pub here is the New Inn in Pembridge, proudly dating from the 1300s (although the more sober county archaeologists could find nothing older than the 1600s. Still...) It sits on an island site with the old village market hall behind it, a lumpy growth of black and white buildings built over and rebuilt over for at least four centuries. It always makes me think of Tolkien's pub The Prancing Pony in Bree, a restaurant and hotel and village alehouse and stables all in one, the old centre of village life. And this morning we saw a cottage for sale that was probably at least three or four hundred years old. It was originally three farm cottages that were knocked into one house many years ago. They would have been two-room cottages, one ground floor and one upper room. The original beams had been painted thick black over the centuries - apparently a Victorian idea to repel woodworm - and curved sensuously through the white rooms. The house smelled faintly damp, like a cottage on the first day of a holiday.

The history of these buildings is buried beneath later additions, but many of these ordinary cottages - like this one, perhaps dating from the 1760s - have old hearts which have been added to over centuries. It makes me realise again how old commonplace rural human landscapes can be.

A Day for St George

It is St George's Day and the road to Ludlow this morning had a few St George's flags on it, as if defining the border with Wales. And my friend Joan sent me a postcard of an international St George from the church of St Julien le Pauvre in Paris, which I remember as a small Romanesque building on the Left Bank. Thanks Joan!

I am uncomfortable with St George. I do not feel English but I do feel British. There seems too much jingoisim attached to any celebration of Englishness, too many lagered up skinheads drunkenly attacking the police at international football matches. Perhaps there is too much colonial history attached to England, too much xenophobia and racism; but I also believe that English people should celebrate Englishness. In my ideal UK, there would be no monarchy or House of Lords or established church and the 'Union' would be a loose confederation of semi-detached nation states; Wales, England, Scotland and (perhaps even) Ireland. Billy Bragg wants an independent England with a new capital in York, a fresh way of looking at old issues. 'I don't want to change the world, I'm just looking for new England...'