As I open the back door, the path shows up in a rectangle of light, the gravel sparkling like golden sugar. My breath shows in pale mists that billow and dissipate in the air. The owls that called repeatedly at dusk are now silent, hunting for voles across the frozen haugh. There’s the sharp smell of cold, and the river seems much louder than it does by day.
Here, in the frost hollow of the valley, it is a couple of degrees lower than the surrounding hills. Cooler air, being denser, flows down into the bowl of the land. The grasses and seedheads of the garden become outlined in hoar frost, coated in spiky crystals, the shrunken browns and greys of dying foliage enlarged into something magical.
I look up to the night sky through the black filigree of ash trees. There’s the Plough, looping its arc over the dark wooded hillside, and the bold W of Cassiopeia overhead. These are the stars of my Berkshire childhood, pointed out by my mother, along with her favourite, Orion, which would rise each December above an old apple tree.
Here, under the dark skies of the North Pennines, there are so many more, because of the lack of light pollution. Stars flicker and burn from horizon to horizon and the Milky Way stretches in a fuzzy belt across the sky.
On winter nights like these, it’s not uncommon to see the northern lights. Alerts are sent to my phone from aurorawatch, a free service of Lancaster University. Then we drive up out of the valley to better see the slanting streaks of pink and green, soft as if painted with a watercolour brush, more dramatic when revealed by the extended exposure time of a camera.
The lights dance and shift, fading or intensifying, rippling and undulating in curtains of colour. When the children were little, they would be bundled up in coats and blankets to be thrilled by this lumiere show. Then I would point out my mother’s stars and pass to them a love of the night sky and a sense of wonder.
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