I am just about to duck instinctively when whatever is heading straight at our heads banks sharply and misses us by metres, its yellow-rimmed eyes fixed upon us as it flies. Its chest is the colour of snow and stone and unmistakable.
There almost seems to be a moment of mutual surprise between us and the peregrine. After shooting over a rocky brow, it drifts easily through the wide expanse of Langdale, like an arrow that has achieved sentience after release and gone its own leisurely way.
It’s a weekday, I’m off work, and clouds and crowds are both so far absent. Looking at the clear tops above, I feel like a kid waiting to get at his presents. As we perspire up The Band, the sun is miraculously warm, and I offer thanks for the imminent demise of winter. There is a liminal ambiguity to the day; patches of snow lie around and the fells are still the pallid colour of winter, but the sense of hibernation is over. Days like this incrementally build a spring.
On Bowfell and Esk Pike, the still air carries the sounds of Lakeland. Raven croaks echo off bare rocks, scree scrunches underfoot, laughter is half-heard from a mile away, and low rumbles drag behind the contrails of high jets. Upper Eskdale is abstracted by haze into receding lines of blue.
On our return descent from Scafell Pike, a front of fog nears us. With the sun at our backs, I see my shadow thrown on to the cloud as a rainbow-haloed Brocken spectre, a fleeting confluence of sun, water vapour and backscattered light.
RS Thomas wrote that the goal of life was the readiness to receive ephemeral moments like this, comparing seeing light in a field to “turning aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush” (The Bright Field). I fumble for my phone, which I sense the stern Anglican priest would disapprove of – hard to imagine Moses taking a selfie with the flaming bush and uploading it to Instagram.
But suspended between seasons, caught in the obscure space between clear air and cloud, the angel remains a sign of the possibility and potential in these shining inbetween days.
Follow Country Diary on Twitter
