combe gibbet
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Nature Notes
Lamplight, Wessex Heights. Ours is a literary landscape, like much of Britain. The land has a pull on us and often, the most enduring way to express that is through words, conserving or farming it; planting woods, naming fields, woods and recording it on maps. I spoke recently at The Museum of English Rural Life […]
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Nature Notes
A Raven in Snow. Our house is an island in the mud. Our plank drawbridge to the lane falls short. And then, at last, it snows. We wake to a white and would-be silent world, were it not for the wind ghosting eerily through the house in its unsettling northiness. We rush out to feed […]
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Nature Notes
Digger on the hill. We go out just before sunset on a glorious day where the sky is swimming-pool blue. A warm breeze provokes whitebeam leaves into light. It is not strong, but it is a portent of the weather to come and enough to turn the wind turbine on the far hill, so I […]
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Nature Notes
The darkness, being double the light. Between sunrise and sunset there are precious few hours now. The dark is double the available light. And in December there are other pressures so, for a while, I am indoors, or dashing about more than I would like to be. The stolen hours out become ever more intoxicating, […]