The light is already leaving the valley on this December mid-afternoon, though it lingers on the larch tops in the hillside wood to the north. Beyond that, the high fields are suffused with a rosy glow. The four Scots pines by the river are taking on the softness of dusk as I pick my way towards them through sodden rushes. A half-detached limb sweeps down to rest on the grey drystone wall and I’ve come to pick its cones in a personal annual ritual.
The cones, closed and pointed, have a rough solidity under my fingers, their overlapping plates rhythmical in their Fibonacci arrangement. It takes some tugging from the springy branches to stuff my pockets. Once home, I fill a terracotta dish and set it by the wood burning stove, a small celebration of hearth and winter. By spring the tough cones will have expanded, loosening their papery seeds, which I will sow in a nursery corner of the vegetable garden.
My pen moves across the thick white paper of the sketchpad as I draw the cones, learning about their spiralling form as I do so. The pine cone is sacred to many cultures and represents renewal and eternal life. Thirty miles to the west of here is the Victorian church of Wreay, shaped like a Roman basilica, decorated in carved stone, bog oak and pierced alabaster. Filled with exuberant plant and animal motifs, it was designed by Sarah Losh, part memorial to her sister Katherine, whose claustrophobic mausoleum stands in the graveyard.
Energetic natural forms ornament this compact stone church: snake and crocodile beneath the eaves; caterpillar, owl, vines, fossils, dragonfly and a spread-winged bat inside. And everywhere there are pine cones, in finials by the nave, door handles, on the window surrounds; indeed Jenny Uglow’s biography of Sarah Losh is entitled The Pinecone.
Now, as I draw and study the cones from the riverside Scots pines, I think of their symbolism, of regeneration and enlightenment, in this turning time of the year, and of the strange and beautiful church at Wreay.
