Finally the cold has begun to bite. Winter has bided it’s time. The ground and I both scoured by the bright flakes of sleet and ice. Wind raking the fields.
The snow is here. I head out. I can see two feet. I am swallowed up in a funnel of snow and ice that breaks like waves against me. The fury takes the breath from me. I lean into it. Turn my head so my coat collar is above my mouth. I am old. And bald. And I have no hat. And I am freezing. I follow the foxes paw prints down the drive to the quarry field and past to the road where I lose her in tractor tracks.
We’ve family to get home. I drive with them out past the winding closed in roads and when we hit the village the ice is clear.
Though winter has bitten it has closed its jaws on us late and lightly . It is rarely below 8 degrees. The sheep are in the lambing field. It is sheltered on three sides and still has fresh grass. The woodlands too, which we don’t graze in summer or early autumn, have a crop of standing hay. Bright green grass and weeds the sheep will feast on. In amongst the alder a good six inches of wild meadow in places. At Christmas the occassional wasp, clumsy with cold and sleep, flies with drowsy fury into my face.
The next morning the hill has an inch of snow. No deer tracks. No fox, pine marten or badger that I can see. From the lime kiln at the top of the hill I can see the valley is covered. Leaden clouds drift with their bellies skimming Arigna mountain in the distance. Grey drifts of snow tumble from them and tether them to the mountainside like an anchored ribbon of snowfall.
The light of the day breaks. The Primroses, early to flower, plant a banner from Spring in the heart of the Winter. Herb Robert Flowers too. The grass has begun to grow again in ungrazed fields. Winter should be biting. But it’s rolled over us with a passing snarl. It never sinks in it’s teeth.
Later in the month I hear the geese close by, the clamour of them calling me across the hill to each other from a farther abandoned field where they graze. I climb the hill from the farmyard to find them. I have heard them on our farm too. But not seen them. Their chatter barges through the silence like no other sound here. I found them once in my friends field. I had taken a long shortcut through their high meadow. You can see a patch of the far lake through the trees. And there, grazing, the black and white chevroned birds. They took to the air like reverse lightning, connecting ground and sky and all between as they rippled into flight from the frozen green of the field into the great sky and were gone. They graze the grass hereabouts in the quieter places. A hill field. A farm that has no one on it. A patch of land between Spruce deserts. I can see them. They graze a rich scrap of land that lies fallow between three farms and the forestry.
A farmer stops me. “I am having a man lay a hedge. He tells me I have a woodpecker in the field. I thought you’d like to know.” His smile is broad. Happy that he has me told. Happy that he has one in his field. A small surprise the wild world springs on us both. I ask him where. I follow the road. Bright flame licks briefly at the shoulder of a hill where I guess the work of laying is being done. The hedges here uncut, largely, except where the phone company have them flayed to a splintered and useless brokeness. His hedges and margins school me. My field margins do not look like this yet. We will plant trees this year on our boundaries. In our pastures too as silvopasture. But I have something in my eye now to aim for.
The hazel and ash trees three deep in the hedges here. Older trees too, in the uncut hedgerows. Mature willow curl their gnarled way to the sky. They seem to grip the very air and twist themselves around it to grow. The drumlined fields bordered here on all sides by treelines. Three deep in places. And the sound of the place is of birds. So many. Between where I am and here is there is a Spruce forest. At it’s heart and once you are in, a quiet place. Badgers dig at it’s borders. The buzzards too roost where the forest looks out upon the fields. The squirrels are at it’s edge too, followed cheek by jowl by the pine marten. But once you are in it is quiet except for the sound of trees which is the sound of wooden ships at sail in seas. The wind washes through the canopy. The trunks flex and crack. But of birds and other living things few.
The small farms that shoulder one another here on their little hills share much of the same character. Abundant trees. It is loud with life. Across the hills, the bare, clean limbed trees overlap against the sky, branches fanned against the copper and blue. Red kite hunts here I am told. The country breathes with the sound of living things.
And I think. What I walk through to get here, the perfect quiet of the uniform Spruce, is what will replace the song of the birds and the rough edged hedges of the open farmland. If these farmers, with their love of untidy lanes go. It will be planted, with Spruce and descend into quiet, and dark. And what is here will not be. The soft hedged edges of the bird loud hills.
Farming is not perfect. But walking, I find much good here in it.
The last weekend of the month is Forest School. The first in an age. The children drawn up through our woods by the scent of beech smoke tumbling down the hill to the yard. I’ve lit the campfire. Cleared a windthrown tree with an axe from the path. The children weave between the trees. Woodsmoke and memory thread through them too. You do not know what you have, sometimes, till it is gone. You do not know what it was when it has been gone for so long. Welcome back. The woods are loud with mischief again.
