WINTER WALKS

 

WINTER WALKS

Snowy Woods

It was probably the winter of 1946/7, when we had so much snow. One of Dad’s good ideas backfired, but I’m glad he was oblivious, or at least didn’t let on. If it was that winter, I was gone 11 but still prey to menacing imaginings.

            There was a brilliant moon and he decided we’d go for a night walk in the woods. The snow had obliterated the path but we walked among the trees, picking our way in the direction we wanted without difficulty as we both knew well that area of the great ancient oak wood near home.

            The air was utterly still, the tree trunks black and straight, and the snow’s crusted surface sparkled. The deep silence oppressed me. I had the strong sense we were being watched. Followed. I wanted to listen for footsteps behind us, but paradoxically the silence was filled with the crunch crunch of our footsteps breaking through the crisp surface and compressing the softness beneath.  I dared not look behind yet I schooled myself to stop and glance back. Nothing but tree trunks. But even the bigger oaks threatened. They were big enough to conceal a follower, a watcher.

My head was full of the echo of my pounding heart.

The nameless presence had already invaded me. My crunching footsteps were its crunching footsteps. My heartbeat was its heartbeat. It was within me. The follower was Fear. I was crushed by its malevolence. Only a scream would release it but my throat was paralyzed.

Dad was entranced by the magical scene and I’m sure he’d have been amazed if I’d sought his hand for reassurance, but my fear prevented all thought of contact. I was held in an isolating island within my foreboding. I laugh at myself now!

 

WIND 

The sharp cleansing of a cold wind is invigorating; the balmy softness of a southerly breeze is comforting. Positively good feelings about my old enemy. No warnings of trouble impending, which for years was the reaction to strong wind which haunted me for so long. On Bardsey my response to wind was an oppressive anxiety of danger at sea for the small open boats our men were in while making the crossing to the mainland, or out pulling pots. And damage to the roofs of the buildings was always at the back of our minds. The clatter of wind -stressed slates above our heads was a reminder.

             Then for ten years as a trawlerman’s wife, haunted by possible widowhood and fatherless children. Whenever the wind got up, there was menace. Nights were disturbed as every gust, change of direction, increasing force, was felt on the roof and sent along an invisible thread to wake my anxiety.

Does all this reflect my earliest memory when still in the push chair I was wheeled alongside a row of old oaks at the roadside, hearing the wind roaring in the branches. One was  wrenched off and lying below. Did it happen then, or was it just evidence of an earlier storm?

And when a bit older and walking, I was afraid of the wind in those trees, pausing at the beginning of the row to pluck up courage and then dash across  to the safety of the far end. I sensed my parents were bemused by this antic. I never said, probably hardly comprehended my fear.

It has taken more than half a lifetime to shed the feeling of the wind’s menace and to enjoy the ever-changing variation of moving air.

 

WALK, mid January

Our lockdown walk this morning was a breath of fresh, calm air after the wet, windy Storm Cristoph which brought so much misery of floods and snow further north. A watery sun shone through small gaps in the thin cloud, but it wasn’t strong enough to make shadows. Great and Blue Tits and Chaffinches were calling fitfully in the hedges, arching thorny briars of dog roses leaned over, still carrying blackening hips; Hazel catkins were shaking loose, aptly named Lambs’Tails by country children. The ivy berries, always the last of the winter harvest to ripen, still weren’t really ready.

We were walking round Luckett Great Meadow down by the Tamar, boundary between Cornwall and Devon. At the far end, the ditch which drains Hampt Marsh was a rushing gushing stream and nearer where it runs into the Tamar, the water was backed up in a muddy lagoon, such was the height of the main river, swollen by the recent rain.

 

An Alder leaning over the stream was a soft purple haze of still unopened catkins.

 

 The river was full. Great quantities of muddy water swirled past, the trees and bushes normally up above the water, were up to their knees but clots of twigs and leaves, abandoned right up on top of the bank showed the water had been about 4 feet higher at its peak. A recently-planted young tree, well up on the bank and protected by a stake and tree-guard, had flood debris draped around its guard. It had had its first christening!

 

Bank-high.

 

 Clumps of snowdrops, widely naturalized in Cornwall, were standing flowering undeterred, on the bank newly scoured by the flood. A Song Thrush sang loudly, repeating his phrases from the top of an oak.

Our usual way back out of the meadow alongside another stream running  from Luckett into the main river was blocked by more backed-up water and a fallen tree so we made our way through the middle of the meadow which has a long wet reedy depression, no doubt an old riverway  until we could go round the head of it and back to the gate. We put up what must have been at least 15 Snipe from the rushes, getting up in ones, twos and little groups with a grating call as they zigzagged away. Crouching down, Tony called me back to look at a recent Field Vole’s dining table, a little pile of fresh, neatly-chewed short lengths of grass stems and leaves hidden in the centre of the raised dome of a clump of rush.

Our usual return was blocked. The river had backed up the gullies.

Snipe.

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www.northcornwallnaturalist.blogspot.com

www.musingsfromhigherdowngateandelsewhere.blogspot.com 

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