It’s not long before midwinter’s day when I step out into Stockley Inclosure. It’s brightish, with a chill wind that rustles in the treetops and makes interlacing branches creek eerily as they rub together. Yet, within a dozen or so paces, my touching shadow pops a peacock butterfly into the air. It rapidly vanishes over a bank of still-flowering gorse. In a sheltered spot, close by a log shorn of all bark, gathers some filtered warmth. A large hoverfly Eristralis pertinax, basks at one end, while a clutch of bluebottles huddle together at the other.
The winter sun, low in the sky, creates much more interesting vistas than can be seen at other seasons. Shaggy hummocks of buff-coloured tussock grass range across a marshy area in the headwaters of Worts Gutter, standing out like discarded wigs on a bad hair day. Downstream, the current divides around a fractured grass stalk drooping into the flow, and sends a shoal of scintillations skimming across the surface.
Only metres away, the gorse bushes have no need of adorning flowers, as the sun sets them in radiant silhouette, beatifying each spine with a halo. A beech, by no means an ancient, has a twin trunk, one half shattered long ago. From a distance the beetle-bored remnant looks like a rusting iron sculpture, so stained has its timber weathered over passing time.
I make my way back following pony tracks through the woodland on a path around toppled trees and over threading drainage ditches. A fallen trunk sustains its own verdant lichen forest and, peering in, I half expect a pixie to jump out, asking what I want.
Stopping to get my bearings, I notice a moss-topped stump with a fine colony of white candlesnuff fungi (Xylaria hypoxylon). Most have creamy-apricot tips, a feature that isn’t described in any of my reference books at home; but there are others whose life is nearly spent, warty and jet-black, with long spore-bearing tips; a child’s imagination of witches’ fingers.
