Driving out of Sheffield, I pass half a dozen men hurrying up and down Manchester Road, pointing long lenses into the glacier-blue sky, like paparazzi, and pull over to see what the fuss is about.
The cause is a flock of exquisite, starling-sized birds, their silky-smooth, dusky-pale plumage flushed with cloudberry amber, their heads topped with a punky crest, and their eyes dark with a warlike black mask. They are ransacking the ornamental rowans lining the road, much to the annoyance of a mistle thrush, which sallies angrily from its berry-laden perch to rebuff the raiders.
Waxwings breed in taiga, the boreal forest that encircles the upper reaches of the world, drifting south in search of winter food. According to the Sheffield Bird Study Group the city, like elsewhere in England, has seen an unusually impressive irruption of them this winter, the birds driven over the North Sea by the cold snap enveloping the continent.
I leave the scene, delighted, and continue onwards. Snow has enchanted the upper reaches of the Dark Peak, amplifying the sense of world-apartness when I step into Kinder Scout’s labyrinthine interior, the singularity in the middle of industrial England where every footfall is a gamble with the ground, and time and space seem mysteriously distorted.
In the heart of it all, I find some Kinder trespassers. Two sitka spruce have sprouted from the peat and grown surprisingly tall, incongruously sharp and dark amid the white, tundra-like tableland.
As the large plantations like those in the Alport Valley mature, more and more self-seeding conifers are appearing in the uplands, leading some to warn of a threat to the Dark Peak moors as we know them from an exponentially increasing seed bank.
The landowner, the National Trust, typically seeks to pluck stray saplings, citing their deleterious effect on the underlying peat. For now, however, these two specimens are being tolerated; apparently because every Christmas someone festoons them with baubles.
Waxwings, cold sun, crunching snow, a pair of wayward spruce. Walking along the western escarpment at sunset, it feels like the land has been brushed by the exoticism of the Arctic, and I dream of high latitudes.
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