The overnight rain was heavy and sporadically intense, washing moss and leaves from the roof, blocking the gutters and causing them to noisily overflow. By early morning the pasture across the valley, already saturated from previous rainfall, showed streaks of surface water that gathered into temporary pools at the base of the slope.
When the rain clouds eventually moved away towards the east, the unexpected warmth of the day made the air humid and heavy. A dull haze lingered over the hills, darkened in places by sharply localised showers. In the stream at the side of the lane, dark water sluiced between fronds of bracken and overgrown briar as it headed towards the river.
A single track road leads across the hillside and down into the valley of the Afon Rheidol. Drifts of beech mast, from the mature trees that form a canopy above the route, littered the surface, swept by the passage of occasional vehicles into a central line. Sudden sunshine illuminated the leaf fall from previous seasons where it lay by the roadside; shoots of ivy, vividly green against the dead leaves, had reached out from the hedge bank and begun to grow across this new habitat.
I leaned on a gate and looked eastward towards Capel Bangor. Across the flood plain, the pasture still bright and growing in the warm weather, the river was marked by the trees and scrubland along its banks. Here and there, oxbow lakes of dark standing water show where it has changed its path and cut off sections of a previous course, mapping out the cyclical history of erosion and deposition in the catchment.
Along the south side of the valley, fast moving cloud swept shafts of sunlight across the slopes, the low angle of the afternoon sun making the hedgerow trees cast long shadows across the fields. As the light changed, different layers of the landscape fell into prominence, with each aspect given new, yet transient, emphasis. The light faded and the wind suddenly cooled, so I scrunched back up the lane, then took the oak-marked footpath between the fields towards home. The rain soon began again, of course, but at least I was rewarded with a rainbow.
