Tor Falcon: Diary of a Wild Place

March, A Cold Morning With Pigeons

A shower of fine hail has muffled the early morning. The field is cross hatched in white. The small oaks stand out in relief along the edge of the wood and pigeons have decoratively arranged themselves in all the tall trees. The only movement is the gentle fall of snow. I watch for a minute or two, noticing how the pigeons have spaced themselves out. There seems to be some ideal distance they like to keep between each other. It’s an orderly scene, identical silhouettes an identical distance apart, tracing the shapes of tall trees.

But I can’t stay and the snow melts. The gas cannons ranged along each side of this valley start up and are joined by the usual din of the day.

Later as I stare out of my studio window I watch the same pigeons   flying in a no-formation formation from left to right…boom… and then back again. Their random flapping reminds me more of butterflies than birds. I look at the shapes of sky between their wings in the hope of finding a pattern. But I can’t find any rhythm in this chaotic pigeon cloud. Just a dash to the rape tops, before…. boom…. and a mad flutter away. Flutter…. boom, flutter….. boom, the daily life of a flock of pigeons in winter. 

February Bracken

Is it the ceaseless nagging of the wind, the rip and tear of an icy squall? Is it the weight of snow? Is it ice exploding through living call walls? The regular coating of rime or the deep luxury of darkness and the long cold stare of winter stars?

Whatever the reason, bracken is at it’s loveliest now. Bleached and broken, poignantly reduced to pink, it still gives the warmest colour along the edge of the wood. It’s thugishly perfect green days are a distant memory. The outrageous glow of autumn orange has given way to a delicate old age. Brittle and curled the few remaining upright stems catch homeless oak leaves like a sea anemone catches food particles. A swirl of wind and the oak leaves break free like a flock of little birds. Weightless, aimless they glint in the sun and subside back into the bracken’s boney old arms.

February, A plea for Scrub.

Farmers, single issue conservationists, neat and tidy minded people all agree that scrub is the enemy. It’s a loss of control, an invasion of space, a living metaphor for moral decline. Farmers are paid to “reclaim” scrubland or warn of low lamb prices and the disastrous consequences that will surely follow - less sheep, more scrub. Conservationists blame scrub for the loss of a particular leaf which rare butterfly caterpillars eat. Everyone knows that scrub encourages fly tipping, drug taking and murder! Culturally we seem to have a loathing for our most common and freely given plants.

The black thorn and the hawthorn, bramble, gorse and broom, the humble rush among others, are the bottom of a beautifully complex food chain. They are necessary in abundance to sustain the insects, birds and animals we all love. They grow enthusiastically and freely where ever they find half a chance.The first inhabitants of this country after the last ice age, they are more English than fish and chips. More English than the English. They are unpaid nurse maids to slower growing trees, no need for plastic tubes when a young oak is protected by a blackthorn. It’s no surprise that such a wealth of life has evolved  in association with them. Free, with scrub comes colour, movement, scent, song, birth, death and everything in between. 

I understand that the farmer has scrub clearance in his DNA. Even now, with his machinery and his deadly chemicals he can’t let go of the eternal enmity. His modern computerised efficiency leaves no corner unkempt. I understand the rare butterfly lover, I really do. I’m as saddened by the loss of unique habitats as anyone. But it seems to me, here in East Anglia, that the rate with which we are destroying everything natural is only getting faster and I wonder if perhaps we should look at what we do still have and make an effort to cherish that, before we get to the point when we are trying to recreate what was once most common.

The field, that has held my attention for twenty years, that surprises and enchants me every day, that I can draw and paint and write about endlessly is only scrubland. There are ‘common’ plants growing here that I don’t see anywhere else. There are more insects in this small island of wildness than in the thousands of acres of arable land around. It’s hard to believe in the received wisdom that scrub is worthless when all I see is so obviously worthwhile.

Shouldn’t we be giving thanks for prickly places? Rejoicing in a self sown riot of life? Counting our blessings for all that is local and overlooked, for the miracle of being able to take things for granted? As a society I wish we would realise that here are all the riches of the earth, right under our noses if only we could open our eyes and see them.

February, A Week Spent Quietly Among Friends.

It felt like I was last here in another life. These old friends I hadn’t given a thought to for a couple of months, I saw afresh in their mid-winter nakedness. Wide, wind blown, mossy and knobbled, these woody giants of the Cumbrian fells astound me every time I see them. And yet there is nothing particularly remarkable about them. They are just big trees. They are trees which have been, if not cherished, then at least left alone for centuries. Growing by becks, along walls or giving shelter to houses, no one has had any reason to remove them. 

To have come straight from a landscape devoted to the worship of intensive agricultural production and the chasing of short term grants, where hedges come and hedges go and where trees mostly go, to this place where trees grow unmolested for hundreds of years, is profoundly moving.

And so, I spent last week visiting my favourite Cumbrian trees. I sat snugly between the roots of the enormous High Cross oak, completely sheltered from the insistent north wind while I quickly drew Black Crag and High Nook farm. It’s bare oaks are as bright as emeralds and heavy with ferns. I walked through woods of soaring beech, into old oak coppice getting smaller and more tortured until the prevailing wind puts a stop to it. Down to the exposed bay at the end of the lake where twisted thorns have braved that violent wind for years. And into woods of huge Norway spruce and European larch. I marvel at the multitudes of warts on the holly growing out of a wall, I reverently walk between ancient ash coppice hedges. And finally I shelter under a wide sycamore branch as it begins to snow.

Silently, I begin to walk home in the freezing half light, when four luminously dressed mountain bikers flash past me. I hear their yells as they hit the bog below, eight wheels cutting through years of slow grown vegetation sink into wet mud. And then they are gone.

Deep silence accompanies me as far as the Scots pine behind the house, where the soft hissing of wind through needles tells me that I’m home.   

February, Snow Squashed.

Snow squashed, February flat, this field is being peeled back to sticks and mud. My hat offers no resistance to the cold wind that has found it’s way into my ears and is now aching deep inside my head. Is this the place that hummed with insects pollinating a million perfect flowers just six months ago? Is this bleak spot where I once sat all day, in clover up to my chin, and tried to draw bees?  Rotted,  smothered, drowned and broken, vegetation is returning to the earth. Winter is still taking away from this place, striping back and striping back. All echoes of summer are dead. 

I’m in no mood to linger and I turn for home. Squelching slowly along I know that in each slithery footprint lie thousands of tiny seeds. Unconcerned by the spite of the north wind, by their waterlogged bed, they wait. 

I think of the oak egger moth who laid her clutch of eggs on the new growth of a hawthorn in the autumn. I think of those tiny eggs, tucked away, waiting. 

And although the randy mallard are already paired up or chasing females across the lake. And although the days are getting longer and some birds are singing (I heard a pigeon coo just now). I know spring is still a long way off. I’m happy to wait too, from the warmth of my fireside. Counting my lucky stars that as the least hardy of all the species around me, I don’t have to spend the winter waiting in freezing mud.

January, Kilojoules

Everyone knows that the information on packets of food is there to mislead, confuse and befuddle. The bowls of confectionary, strangely labeled cereal, that my children love to eat for breakfast come in packets heavy with unintelligible nutritional information. I’ve often wondered how to recognise a kilojoule and what to do with the knowledge that there are 1637KJ per 100g serving.

Until yesterday that is, when I was walking along the edge of the wood in thick snow. It was well below freezing and the early morning sun had brought even lower temperatures. I was looking at how snow on different species of tree sits differently. The alder was coated in large fluffy dollops frilled by cones, strangely reminiscent of my grandmother’s bath hat. Oak looks like a frozen explosion, all random squiggles and different thicknesses radiating out into pale sky. And the ash, holds snow in a gracefully uniform way, with a regular rhythm running along each branch.

So engrossed was I with the laying of snow on branches that I hadn’t noticed the cows just ahead of me. They were standing in the sun surrounded by deep purple snow. And they looked like mythical beasts, fiery with heat. Warm creatures in a frozen world, creating their own warmth. It seemed to me that I was actually looking at kilojoules. This non visual measurement of abstract units had suddenly been made clear to me. I was seeing mammals burning energy. I could see the result of the hay, cut in June at around the longest day of the year, being turned to heat by cows in the darkest weeks of the year. I was seeing basic mammal biology with startling clarity and it was wonderful.

So this is a thank you to all gobbledegook writers, without whose opaque science on cereal packets I would probably never have wondered what a kilojoule was and certainly never had such a pleasing revelation while standing in a snowy field being surprised by a cow in the sun.

January, The Waiting Room

On the wall above my head is a large photograph of a smiling man holding a huge carp. There is a thank you note under the picture. The girl next to me is busy writing lists. She’s getting married in a couple of months and she’s got lots to organise. The young man over there is excitedly telling a woman next to him that he’s been accepted on a course at college. The man I’ve just been talking to has been showing me pictures of his first grandchild. This room is full of ordinary people that happen to be extraordinarily happy to be doing normal everyday things. This is the  transplant out-patients waiting room and everyone in here has had a heart or a lung transplant or is on the waiting list for one.

I’ve been here many times before with my husband during his long wait for a new heart. It’s the friendliest waiting room you’ll ever go in to, it’s a club you didn’t want to join but which positively changes your life forever.

Today we are here for his first appointment, post transplant. Still overwhelmed by the enormity of it all I watch the coming and going of patients and staff. I chat to the consultant who was one of the large team to forgo bed on Christmas day in order to organise and perform my husbands operation. I thank him again, I’ve been thanking everyone over and over again for weeks now. There really aren’t words to describe the gratitude I feel. The unconditional generosity of a stranger and the dedicated work of many many more is unbearably humbling. I feel that all the riches of the universe have been bestowed upon my family. The weight of this gift is going to take some getting used to. 

The need to give something back is huge. Whatever I do won’t be enough but there is one easy thing I can do. I can carry a donor card and perhaps continue the chain of giving. I can honestly say that anyone is welcome to my organs after I die. If they could help one person live to watch their children grow up, to fall in love and get married, to pass an exam or even just walk to their favourite tree, to do all the normal things that I’ve been lucky enough to take for granted my whole life then I’d be extremely happy. No, more than happy, I’d be overjoyed.

So, thank you everyone for your lovely messages. Enough on heart transplants, I promise. Let’s get back to normal.

December, Boxing Day

Feeling sick as we drove home from the hospital, the children and I saw hundreds of roe deer by the edge of the road. In fact that’s all we remember of the long journey home at 3am on Boxing Day, the peaceful faces of deer.

Later as I lay in the debris of our Christmas bed, I thought about the forester, shaved, sedated, cold and heartless, waiting for the most wonderful gift he will ever receive. A new heart. I cried tears that I thought would never stop. Tears for the year of waiting, tears of terrible fear, but mainly tears for the generosity of a stranger and for the grief of their family.

And so, a few days on and everything is going well, you’ll have to excuse me if I take a break from this Diary of a Wild Place. My quiet day dreaming has been swept aside in a torrent of emotion and driving, of talking on the telephone and endless medical jargon. Who knows, I may not start again. Perhaps it was a whiling away of time, my waiting game? I don’t know. 

But I do know that I wish you all a very Happy New Year.

December, Darkness.

The guy with the shaved head won’t get out of his car because it’s dark. He’s turned to jelly in his army boots. He can’t see where he’s going and he’s angry. He doesn’t thank me when I come to his rescue with a torch, he just blows smoke in my face. This graceless, baby of a man makes me want to disappear into the darkness.  

I love walking in the dark. Love opening my eyes and sucking every last shadowy shape into them. I enjoy feeling but not seeing the uneven ground under my feet, mud turns to grease, puddles expand, cow pats become boulders, sedge rips. I can get completely lost in this familiar place. It’s as if all the elements of here have been jumbled up, some are magnified others have vanished. There are rabbit holes where there aren’t rabbit holes, brambles claw my legs where there shouldn’t be brambles. The new moon rocks between ash branches as I slip and scramble my way through this transformed world. Moss on tree trunks is colder and wetter without my eyes seeing bright green. The sound of a clumsy foot sinking into deep mud is strangely soothing without eyes to see the pond beyond. Directionless wing beats of an unseen bird add to the disorientation.

The man continues loudly muttering about outside lights and safety as if I’m not only deaf but simple as well. Eventually he leaves and I wish him Happy Christmas with all the sincerity I can muster and let the quiet winter night settle back round me as his tail lights disappear over the bridge.

December, The Morning After A Sharp Frost.

Let your eye follow the rime petaled hedge parsley down the hill towards the dark December sun. A tiny scrap of concentrated amber, it begins to put rainbows into frost crystals from behind trees. It turns shadows purple then turquoise and paints the tops of birch trees rose. Feel the prick of glitter on your retinas. Listen to rime splinter and crash to the ground. Marvel at the heat in that far away orb while all around you begins to melt.