verdancy
Pontycymer, Cwm Garw, South Wales
16th April 2014
motion
The season is on the move. Brambles sneak out their long thorny feelers, green fern heads unwind and the catkins on the alder give way to fresh folds of leaves, thrusting through like small fingers, grasping at the air. In the pulsing world too, things are on the go. Tortoiseshell butterflies drift on gentle gusts around the garden; jackdaws congregate in ragged black crowds to ride up and down the air currents above the rooftops; the white doves from the next village batter up and down the valley more energetically than ever; and high up on the hilltop moors, a red kite slowly circles.
Under the sun, all these layers of life reaching skyward. But none impress me so much as the visitor on our windowpane, who, with resolve and audacity, is quietly going for it, at a snail’s pace, climbing infinitesimally up.
Pontycymer, South Wales
6th April 2014
equinox
finally
we tilt sweetly
towards the sun
Pontycymer, Cwm Garw, South Wales
20th March 2014
whiteness
The whiteness of Scottish winters is on the go. Not held static with ice or slowly settling with heavy snows but moving: slim streams rushing down hillsides, big sea rollers whipping off into windy spray and blowing foam, sudden batterings of hail. Overhead too everything is in motion: thick white clouds scudding across the sky, the swift belly-white of the gulls fleering around beneath. When there is snow, it comes and goes; a dusting here, a gully-full there, before it’s rained out, wind-scoured, leaving only bleached stones and bones.
And the whiteness of Scottish winters is noisy. None of the soft muffling of snowfall or low creaking of ice. Our whiteness roars and rumbles: beaching waves, rapid rivers, the high clamour of waterfalls, the bright clattering of frozen rain. Scotland’s whiteness throws itself in your face and into your ears. It whips and lashes.
Even the elegant pale-limbed birches wave energetically alongside the running water, although occasionally you come upon the stillness of a white sea-washed stone resting silently at the head of the tide, cast up, waiting for the pull of the travelling moon.
Assynt, Scotland
6th March 2014
streaming
River Inver, Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
1st March 2014
strange lights
Last night the sky was weft with strange lights. They appeared first in the north: an array of subtle green shafts glowing gently across the back of the sky. They were uncanny, difficult to focus on, seeming still at a quick glance but moving almost imperceptibly with slight shifts and shimmers. You had to look at them only intermittently, as if visually standing back from them, as they hovered above the horizon, until gradually, barely discernibly, they strengthened and spread and eventually the whole north-eastern sky was shot through with a shimmering green shine.
That was it for a while. Cloud came, covering the green shafts, and the night became damp and subdued. We went inside to warm up in front of small flames of gold and amber but when we came back outside, the sky was alight. Soft ribbons of rose and green streamed towards us from the west, flowing upon us in long sinuous tongues, and waving and wafting over our heads like smoke. Their colours were paler than the brighter green of the shafts to the north but they moved so sensuously; flaring and subsiding, weaving and dissolving in and out of each other, stretching and illuminating the dark width of the night.
It was difficult to get a sense of their scale. Their display took over the whole northern half-dome of the sky, arching over our heads and homes, appearing infinitely far and intimately near, and seeming to move both quickly and slowly at the same time. And the light itself looked both alien and familiar, eerie and incredible. The night felt hallowed and hollowed and filled.
Eventually cloud came once more, and rain, extinguishing the lights, and the sky became blanketly dark. A few hours later, however, when we stepped outside, the rain and cloud had blown over and the stars had been restored.
It seemed surprising to see the night showing itself again. The stars were so white – bright all the way down to the horizon – and the spaces between them so black. The north star had pinned itself overhead and in the time since the lights had begun, smothering the stars, the Plough and Orion had wheeled well around it. Time had resumed now, constellated and clear.
Even after the stars were restored though, a low arc remained, radiating from the north: stalks of faint greenish light lined upward into the height of the sky, like the backlit stems of tall pines in an invisible night forest. But there are no trees here, only rolling ground, and stars, and lights.
Balchladich, Assynt, Scotland
27th February 2014
arc
Lochinver harbour, Assynt, Scotland
23rd February 2014
beach
The land is slow here. Green hillsides flow gently down and shallow lochs lie pooled in their hollows. Sheep, cows and horses lazily graze and the odd car putters along the small single-track road which curves along to the beach, where the gentleness finishes and the land disgorges itself between steep-cliffed jaws.
Great slid slabs and tumbled boulders lie piled around a choked throat of a beach, thrown up from a raw red gut. Some are smoothed into sensual bulbs and bulges by the steady lapping of the sea, but at the edge of the sand, worn rows of serrated teeth catch at the sea’s lips, and white waves rush over and smash into scudding cream foam.
Someone nearby told me that only a few years ago the beach was scalloped and sculpted with golden-white sand, before a few storms blew it all up onto the grass (and the farmhouse) behind. But I like it like this: rock-jawed, boulder-throated, and frothing wildly at the mouth. It’s not a beach to be folded into brochures. There’s no domestication here.
Balchladich, Assynt, Scotland
22nd February 2014
by yon bonnie banks
Water is everywhere, pouring, rushing, pooling; the land is alive with water. White burns bubble through the woodlands on one side of the road; on the other side, trees are drowning in a wide field of water. It’s impossible to tell where the course of the river is or was – the whole field is flowing, and high on the hillside beyond it, huge falls roar where there were none before.
We’re safely north of Loch Lomond now, but as we wound round its banks, the loch itself was beginning to take its share. The outer half of the road towards Pulpit Rock had disappeared and road crew were there on built-out platforms rebuilding it – on stilts. It was a tight passage round the cliff there, squeezing between the water rushing down the rocks and the gouging maw of the loch.
As we come further north, the streams multiply. The steep hillsides are threaded by strings of white water and, as we approach Glencoe, the hills are scarred and scored in white. Snow fills each high crevice and ravine, highlighting the bare black bones of the rock shouldering through. Below the snow, streams continue the white lines, racing down the creases to the valley floors.
It’s not just the intensity of the water but its frequency that’s overwhelming. Each rock face is run over by a hundred slim streams. Even on the lower slopes and flanks by the roadsides, a new stream is gushing down every few yards, flooding the road and forcing us through ford after ford. Water is just pouring off the hillsides.
Water falling, water rising. And through the air too, great banks of rain move in horizontal gulfs. From safe inside the car, they almost feel sheltering, these great grey washes, engulfing us, until the wind harnesses them into harsh lashing whips. And so, through the water-ridden world we travel, sheltered and invigorated alternately, and all the while feeling secretly blessed by these thousand bright white streams.
Driving up the A82 (past Buachaille Etive Mòr, Glen Coe), Scotland
20th February 2014
life
life green-bladed,
life lily-tongued.
Pontcymer, Cwm Garw, South Wales
2nd February 2014