The marshes in our parish are divided into rectangular fields and every one of them is bounded at its margins by four dykes, making each a kind of grass island. Yet all their banks are topped with a palisade of reeds, and if you see it from any elevation this rectilinear arrangement of phragmites resolves into a continuous grid pattern of reed walls.
See it from any distance, however, and the foreshortening at work in your perspective causes the fields to vanish, while the lines of winter-soiled reed amalgamate into a seemingly solid beige canopy of feather-headed grass.
Reed, but especially last year’s crop with its crown of seed, has this strange, wonderful capacity to refract light. Towards evening as the angle of the sun gets ever more acute, so the glare off the marsh intensifies.
It is into this atmosphere that the barn owls make entry when they emerge to hunt. The flight action is slow and precise, but the course is wandering and punctuated with frequent plunges. Then they rise again and the light underneath them wells and catches in that broad underwing of oat-white. Most blessed is the moment when the owl hovers to study some rustle or minute motion. It adjusts but lingers, and the wings seem to grow in width and slowness.
Since the reed is last year’s manufacture and now essentially dead – and we should pause to note this irony: it’s the one plant more beautiful dead than alive – one is looking in these moments at last summer’s sunlight mingled with that just arriving. The owl brings this drama of the old and the new light to its penultimate refinement.
I say penultimate because every evening in this week of astonishing Hellenic blue skies I’ve gone down to the marsh to catch its effects at the moment when the sun sets. At the point below its going, this Claxton world of reed and owls is bathed in a flare of winter gold that is pure and deep. Across this sea of colour strands of spider silk are momentarily exposed and the phragmites is exalted as dancing lines of cold fire.
