All but this morning’s soft brown molehills was stiff with frost. The ground knock-hard, the grass stems and hedge twigs rimed. Something had happened to the old land, making it new. The old held to some moment under last night’s stars when the history of footprints, tyre tracks and rain ruts stopped. The new came with the sting of ice, sharp edged, unyielding.
A wind blew over Edge Top and its chill shivered brittle weeds in the Gallows Tree field. As if coming through windows there was an aluminium glow that appeared to flow between the dark mesh of trees. A path through frosted tangles of briar, bramble and hawthorn was a metre wide at base and closed at head height into a tunnel. It faced into low January sun snagged in the wood beyond the tall ash trees.
As sunlight shone down the tunnel it lit 10,000 droplets as frost on the stem tips began to thaw creating a glory. Outside the glittering tunnel a cold mist wandered across the valleys, sometimes filled with sunlight, sometimes shadowy grey. I watched a hill take shape inside low cloud. It was ragged with trees on a ridge, and, shrouded, it seemed to appear in a place where there was no hill at all.
Noise of traffic on nearby roads and shotguns several fields away seemed to come from behind a screen. All that was really clear was the bird call.
As sunlight reached into the ash stand the birds passing by the trees also sounded new: redwings, long-tailed tits, great tits, chaffinch, robins and wrens, had a sharper, more urgent, confidence.
The sun-silvered young hazel stems took on shapes of things that would never be cut: walking poles, thumb sticks, cudgels, wattle fences, pea sticks, chair legs. In quiet corners some dog’s mercury and cowslips were already in bud. Little miners pushed soil up from underground.
The new year tightened on the tunnel path, soon to close that way through the woods. The cold mist crept back until the birds fell silent and the old land was lost.
Paul Evans @DrPaulEvans1
