welsh hills again

Yesterday the sun shone, the sky was blue and there was warmth in the air. Older son and his fiancée were visiting for the weekend. We had been eating chocolate brownies. A pub meal was planned for the evening. There was no doubt that a good walk would even things up a bit. We walked straight from the house, up the track and out onto the hills to walk a huge curve which would bring us along the other side of our valley and eventually back up the hill home. From the top we could look down on the holiday cottage and you can even see the shepherd's hut in the corner of the field. You can't see the house from here as it is tucked away in the trees. The hills are just beginning to green although the trees are stubbornly bare and the bracken has yet to sprout. Hugh and Lindsay stride out and I, theoretically the leader of this walk, just about manage to keep up. It is much wetter up here than I had expected and Hugh who isn't wearing walking boots gets...

Sometimes you just find yourself feeling a bit inside out, like a cat with its fur stroked the wrong way, a grumpy toddler, an awkward old lady.  At the end of today I felt peopled out.  A few days with primary responsibility for my father in law and my grandson, love them both dearly though I do, coupled with the expectation of a further week full of friends and family coming and going, suddenly made me feel crowded in upon and oppressed. This always puzzles me.  When I have done the tests that corporate life throws at you on odd occasions such as  the Myers Briggs which looks at various aspects of your personality, I always come out as an extrovert.  And it is true that I love people and today had a great lunch with some very good friends we had not seen in ages and loved the chat and was energised and delighted by their company.  And yet, as tonight, I can quite suddenly feel the wind change. The demands of other people seem too much.  The comprom...

This box full of delight brought to me by mountainear has been  keeping my spirits up for a week or two when I have been drinking my cup of tea in the wooden greenhouse.  I have kept sticking my nose outside, smelling for spring but it has been so cold only the snowdrops have replied. But today we woke to clear blue skies, a sharp frost down in the valley but up here on the hill the day quickly became one where the you could feel the season on the turn.  I went hunting for flowers and found one of my hellebores had burst out of its fat bud while I had my back turned.  Tip her head up and look into her face. This morning was spent making bread and sowing seeds in the still chilly greenhouse.  This afternoon it was time to lift our own heads up from the list of things to do and get out onto the hills. The catkins are hanging on the hazels.  This is a cobnut we planted in our field, shining with spring. Up on the ridge just below Penycloddiau there are s...

May is a time for wildflowers here. The primroses have gone, the wood anenomes are disappearing and the foxgloves have yet to come. But everywhere along verge sides and at the base of the hedgerows wildflowers are crowding out the grass. The wild cherry blossom and the blackthorn are fading but hawthorn, known also as may for the month of its flowering, is frothing along the hedges. Our hawthorn hedges here on the hill are still resolutely green, but for the sake of a couple of hundred feet (sorry, I know I should think of height in metric terms but it is a painful translation from feet to metres and doesn't mean anything in my head so I will old-fashionedly stick to feet today) the hawthorn trees at by the river in the bottom of the valley are just coming into bloom. Here is the first, the flowers flushed ever so faintly with pink. Walking today with a heavy pack (practice, practice for the Offa's Dyke, a little easier each time) I saw the impact of height on both plants and ...