The day after a weighty dump of snow, Litton huddled under its white blanket, threads of chimney smoke rising straight to heaven through the thin mist of a high pressure.
Every living thing seemed braced against the cold – the humans by their fires, the crows in the trees, shoulders hunched. A small flock of starlings burst from a warm cowshed as I passed, swirled once above my head and went straight back inside.
Crossing the chessboard of pasture south of the village, I noticed in two small fields a few sheep were scraping their hooves through the snow.
Otherwise the surface of the snow seemed unbroken, until I noticed the tracks of a hare and found the spot on a low wall where it crossed from one field to the next.
A line of pretty foxprints followed the wall’s line towards the woods at the edge of Cressbrook Dale.
On the path above the steep-sided gorge, I found more tracks, rabbit this time, and garish trickles of orange urine. I’d walked this way 10 days before and barely noticed their burrows, but now they were conspicuous, their location revealed by the rabbits themselves escaping the snow.
The only creature obviously present was a robin. It flitted in circles around me, skipping from twig to twig in a state of miniature fury, as I started carefully down the slope towards the bottom of the dale.
At one point I felt the rush of air from its wings as it swept past my face. Lumps of snow slipping from the high branches of an ash tree plopped softly around us.
Lower down in the dale’s shelter, the trees were clear and there were birds everywhere, including a gang of long-tailed tits working from tree to tree, flitting on together.
On the far bank, high above my head, the craggy bulwark of Raven’s Buttress rose above the naked ash trees, a small avalanche tumbling from its rim as a crowd of jackdaws rose to meet a single raven arriving from the east.
