welsh hills again

I am sure that when I lived in a city winter was never this dark!  The clocks went back this weekend and suddenly the glorious extended autumn hit the buffers.  I looked out of the window at half past five, the lights having been on in the house for ages, and saw the black night.  Partly it is the totally welcome absence of light pollution here.  Stand in just the right place on our land and you can see the faint amber smudge of light which is Mold to the East but turn your back on that and the valley is very black.  You can't see the line of the ridge opposite or of the ancient hillforts to the west against the sky.  Look up and on a clear night you can see stars, but wander around and it is can't-see-the-hand-in-front-of your-face dark on nights when the moon is, as tonight, a waxing crescent.  It is close to total darkness. We go out to the pub for a meal, driving our narrow lanes between the high hedges.  In the headlights the browns and gol...

I love bonfires.  When I was a child I loved fireworks too.  Now I can take them or leave them but a good fire is a wonderful thing.    We had a fire in the field the other night.  We had been piling wood up for a couple of weeks, prunings of shrubs, trimmings of the native hedges, brambles and bits of holly cut back from behind the shepherd's hut.    The woodpile was ready to light and the pallet was covered with perennial weed to burn when things got really hot. It was a pitchblack night, cold and wet with gusts of rain blowing  out of the darkness, snatching at the fire and hurling flame and smoke back into the blackness. Standing on the doorstep it was the kind of night to drive you back inside but we gathered our coats around us and set out across the black field.  Soon the centre of the fire was a mesmerising glow. Gusts of wind made it roar into sheets of flame.  Our faces were hot although the rain blew cold on our...