welsh hills again

It has been an extraordinary autumn.  Morning after morning up here on our hillside we have woken to golden light and heavily dewed grass.  We face South East and the morning sunlight pours in through our bedroom window, pooling gold on the carpet.  Outside everything is still flowering and glowing.  By lunchtime it is warm enough to eat outside. On many mornings the sky has been full of sun while the valley below us is brimming with mist. But by lunchtime the world emerges bright and clear and warm. Sedum throbs with bees and butterflies. Everywhere berries are ripe.  Cotoneaster herringbones its way up the stone wall by the drive. Rosehips swell. The walnut tree is laden with nuts in their glossy green cases which stain your hands a vicious black. In the edge of the hen enclosure I find this huge fungus, the size of a small plate, ignored so far by the chickens.  They are moulting and looking a bit scraggy, their feath...

Daffodils sing of spring and spring arrived this weekend in a glow of sunshine and yellow flowers.   I have been out in the garden all day long, spring cleaning the shepherd's hut and tidying and weeding everywhere. Spring hits me like this every year, giving me a great rush of energy and sending me outside at every opportunity. All the furniture came out of the shepherd's hut, except for the built in sofa which folds down as a bed and everything was laid out on the grass.  I swept the hut out, wiped down all the woodwork and cleaned the windows.  Then back it all went. Rugs were beaten, curtains shaken out, and the woodburning stove cleaned out. Today I painted the door and tomorrow I will rub down and paint the windowframes, as long as it is dry.  I have a yen to change the cushions and the rug and to move from a palette of soft creams, pinks and greens to something in blue and yellow.  It must be spring! As a break from cleaning and weed...

June 21st, midsummer's evening.  We decide to sleep in the shepherd's hut,  a night away for the sake of walking across the field.  Inevitably there is some football on the television so for much of the evening we are in the house as Ian watches while I potter about the internet.  Then at around ten o' clock I gather up my reading glasses and my book.  I am rereading, for perhaps the fourth or fifth time, "Notes from Walnut Tree Farm" by Roger Deakin.  It is a book full of snippets of Deakin's writing, notes and diary entries, some several pages, some only a couple of sentences long.  Some are musings about writing or nature. He walks, he works on the land, he writes about what he sees. I put my boots on as the grass is already wet with midsummer dew and close the house door behind me.  I should be bathing my face in this dew according to folklore, not padding through it in my wellies.  The sky is still light and the swallows are still ...

My little rowan tree took a long time to get going in spring but now it is full of leaf and going-over flower.  It stands protectively just behind the shepherd's hut. There it is, just behind the chimney, growing up out of the hedge.  To the left of the hut the boundary is holly trees, somehow with an elder growing amongst them.  You can just see the white of the elder flowers in the tree. The tree is multistemmed.  I imagine that might be as a result of the young tree being cut down with the rest of the hedge when it was smaller so that it has branched out like coppiced hazel. There are two other rowans in the field but the others are single stemmed.  They are graceful trees like that but I also like the gently spreading shape of the multi stemmed one.  If anything for me that increases the protective nature of its presence. Look up into the canopy between the two largest trunks and you can see why rowan leaves appear in designs for fabric o...

Well I am beginning to wonder whether I chose the right tree.  I can't say my rowan is doing very much.  All the other trees on Lucy's tree following blog seem to be making a bit more of a stir. There is the very slightest swelling of the buds but this particular tree remains very determinedly bare. At its feet the celandines are shining and the grass is growing. The badger path which runs beside the tree and under the fence into the next field is becoming well worn.  I wonder how many badgers are using it?  I must ask Ian to set up the wildlife camera over night up here so we can see. I am blaming the badgers for the fact that these daffodils have had their tops and flowers nibbled off.  I am not sure if badgers do have a weakness for daffodils and certainly most of ours seem to have survived unscathed but these are right next to the path - perhaps just too much temptation, like a piece of chocolate left on the worktop. There is much new ...

A bright cold day, the hedges crisp and bare and the sky blue and pale behind the leafless domes of oak.  Behind the hut the high wall of holly takes some of the wind but the hazel in the hedge outside my window shakes and flutters its last rags of leaves as a gust goes by.  I am sitting in the shepherd’s hut and have just lit a fire in the stove.   The wind catches the smoke as it leaves the stove pipe chimney and a puff blows past my window and away over the hedge, down the field and into the valley.  Soon the hut will warm up but for now I am still wearing my coat and my second pair of socks.   The blanket I crocheted so obsessively a few weeks ago is now finished and a wonderful thing to wrap around you while you read or think. Somehow it has very suddenly become winter.  When I drove away last week to spend some time first with my daughter and her family and then with my parents, my sister and her family, the rain was thudding on...

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...