The stoplight red glass of the hawthorn berries shines with bright autumn days, morning rains and nights under the harvest moon. Now the haws are at their most dazzling though not yet edible, and the season is gold: gold-green, gold-yellow, gold-red, gold-brown.
But the mornings begin in fog, watched by the rooks around the Roman ruins of Viroconium, who hunch under their coats, sitting 80 together on electricity wires above the ancient Wroxeter city that seems to sink back under fields as their breath lifts.
Seen from a train north of Wem are buzzards in a ploughed field: not one or two but 40, 50 – they could not be called a flock as each one stood alone, staring into the earth, charming worms from the soil by the power of will.
In the lane running beside the wood, a dead badger lies in the gutter. You can never know whether badgers seen like this have been hit by a vehicle or shot or poisoned somewhere else and their bodies dumped. Inside the wood, patrolling spotlit glades, speckled wood butterflies flash their colours, jockeying on eddies of air rising from the quarry face between trees. Before dusk along the Edge the gulls return, as white and as dense as a squall of snow.
Hundreds come: common gulls, black-headed gulls, great black-backed gulls, in clans and mobs, singly, from the plough lands now the harvest is home. The gulls pour into Lea quarry pool, to float quietly in the safety of the water or to lounge like holidaymakers on the rocks, only raising to call when their compatriots arrive.
Even as sunlight flares amber behind the trees, up the Dales and in from the violet hills of the west, the gulls still come. Even as the rooks are released from their watch to clamour back to their roosts, even as the tawny owls plane through the butterflies’ woods, still they come.
This is the gathering of scarlet and gold. In the charactery of autumn its symbols make thoughts that glow in us but which are also sad, a homesickness through the glass of berries.
