A Solemn Stillness

We are waiting for the storm. All afternoon it has been getting darker and the air feels heavy, black clouds over the hills - 'a bit black over Bill's mother's' as the family used to say. Perhaps it will not break the way storms sometimes don't, but we have had tantalising periods of big fat lazy raindrops; then nothing. When it rains here we can hear it on the roof. There is no wind, the darkness under the trees is heavy and thick, brooding, pensive, real Green Man weather. The paddock behind the house is full of buttercups and daisies as a week ago it was full of dandelions; but the overriding colour is green, heavy motionless and dark.

We went to a short recital by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in Bedstone. Modern music, unexpected, thought-provoking; responding to nature and landscape in raw, unusual ways. The sheer beauty of a viola played live, a demonstration of harmonics; an old haunting sound. And the flute, an instrument I used to play for a short time, played properly and beautifully; and the presence of a harp, so close to the Welsh border, cascades of notes, higher and higher, a gentle fading. Unknown music on a stormy Friday after a working week, fantastic!

Hauntings

I don't know why, but even (hand) writing my Winter Journal over last winter I didn't mention the fact that the house was haunted. With some hauntings a presence is felt, an awareness, perhaps even a consciousness, the idea that someone who lived or died here is somehow still here. This house has none of that. Instead it is haunted by shadows and reflections, glimpses, unexplained sounds. I look up two or three times a day having seen a shadow pass out of the corner of my eye, only for there to be nobody there. Shadows pass across the windows, as if somebody is walking past. I answer comments that only I heard. To maximise the evening sunlight, the back door is half glass and the two inner doors to the living room are also glass. Open these together and an endless pattern of reflection and movement is created. This is probably what makes the shadows slip through the house, but I like the idea of a house haunted by shadows and reflections, unexpected silences and unheard words.

Woodsmoke and flowers

The morning smells of woodsmoke, a curiously autumnal start to the day. The season is fading now, but we do not mourn spring's passing the way we regret summer's ending because the days are getting longer and warmer. But still, from the point of view of these observations, something is coming to an end.

The days have started cool and sunny recently, with a vague mist on the other side of the valley. But then the skies have clouded over and the days have turned cooler and greyer, as if going to sleep after a bright start. The endless cycle of the wild flowers intrigues me; crocuses gave way to daffodils which gave way to anemones and bluebells, and now dandelions are giving way to more summery flowers like daisies and buttercups. It is cool at night still - cool enough for the fire - but the season is coming to an end.

Forest Murmurs

A late afternoon walk up Wapley Hill behind the house, a walk we haven't done since the end of last year. The top of the hill is thickly planted with pines by the Forestry Commission, but there are older deciduous woods along the roads and around the lower slopes. And across the middle of the Hill is a long beech avenue, maybe three-quarters of a mile long, a straight row of beech trees. They look quite old, and are certainly older than the surrounding pines. The FC do not manage these woods well and so they are gently reverting to real woodland, with only the deepest woods free of ground cover, mainly saplings and brambles. We have seen deer on the Hill as well, and we have seen their tracks on the old toll road, part of their route from the Moor to the Hill. The roadsides on the Hill were lined with wild flowers and the roads themselves were made of earth and hard stones. And even after rain a day or so ago the packed earth roads were bone-dusty, the colours of old cream or ivory.

The Old Toll Road Again

A walk in late afternoon to post a letter, along the old toll road and past the Methodist chapel. A warm, cloudy day, with occasional shafts of sunlight in the ditches, illuminating cow parsley, ragged robin, bluebells, wood anemones. The toll road is slowly disappearing into the undergrowth once again, with grasses and larger plants recolonising the blaze - plane-crash trail - of mud through the woods. The deep caterpillar track marks are still visible, but they are slowly disappearing under foliage. Many of the trees hacked by the water board had blossom on them a week ago and have now leaved (not left) even though they are lying horizontal to the ground. This reminded me of Richard Mabey's comments in 'Beechcombing' about tidying up woodland to chime more with how we think it should look. Soon it might be impossible to walk this way to the post box, and the old road will have vanished into the woods once again.

Hippies

From the late 1960s, mid-Wales saw a great influx of hippies. Perhaps they originally came to harvest magic mushrooms or grow pot on abandoned farms, but over the decades they have revitalised this area and started many cottage industries and businesses. Their politics and radicalism are now more mainstream than they were forty years ago, so much so that this area is very eco-active and Green. The national eco-pressure group Plane Stupid (campaigning against unrestricted air travel and no tax on air fuel) was founded in Presteigne, which takes a justifiable pride in its green activism. Every month has a different eco-suggestion such as change light bulbs, buy local food, or stop using plastic bags. Every shop seems to support these gentle campaigns, and perhaps not surprisingly a local health food shop recently took over an empty shop in the town centre. This weekend is the Tour de Presteigne, the world's premier electro-bike rally, which attracts competitors - sponsored competitors - from all over the world for two days of events and races through the town and countryside lanes. The town this morning was full of cyclists and electro-cyclists, as one day last September it was full of mud-spattered racing cars from before the Great War, roaring through town on their way back from two days of muddy racing in the Radnor forests. And ordinary quiet agricultural life goes on around this. One reason I love living here is this mixture of the eccentric and the practical, and the feeling that here the eccentrics are also the practical ones.

May Flowers

With the rain, the flowers are beginning to change. The lanes through Ledicot, a small hamlet near here, are lined with froths of cow parsley, three and four feet high, delicate, elegant, white lacy flowers on long stems. (They are everywhere, every lane and road has them to varying degrees, as every lane and road has primulas and bluebells and did have daffodils.) A probably-illegal vase of them stands on the windowsill here, with some of the mountain cornflowers from the garden. The blossom in the hedges is starting to disappear as the leaves on neighbouring trees thicken and obscure it. And the paddock flowers are changing too as the season starts to evolve into summer, with buttercups and forget-me-nots starting to take over from the dandelions which are now turning to seed. The passage of time measured by dandelion clocks. An art project has meant the collection of hundreds of seed-heads which are hung throughout the house to dry, ever-so-gently waving in the house's breezes. But something happens to dandelion heads, unnaturally dried and not allowed to explode in the wind. On the deep window ledges here they are spontaneously collapsing, perhaps under their own weight, a gentle silent deterioration, perhaps in protest at their captivity.