Tag: Walking

Flakes of Gold

1 Comment

Last night’s half moon was a haze and today the woods seem singed, as though burnt by an exhausted, sinking sun, with faded greens and exposed boughs. Summer is passing – it’s back to work. Yet these past few months have felt like so much hard work, with juggling jobs and balancing the books. These are not comfortable times.

It sometimes seems like the easy option would be to say, Enough! Despite knowing this isn’t an option. Not really.

Instead, I’ve fallen back on looking for flakes of gold; finding the little glimmer that can light a whole day. For me, this has often meant searching for a familiar wonder: glimpses of glow worms burning like alien lights in the hedgerows. I’ve written about these beautiful bugs before, tiny neon lanterns, but this year they’ve taken on even more importance for me.

Last thing each evening after dark, I walk up the lane in the hopes of spotting a tiny green dot of light, almost talismanic. With each passing night, their numbers dwindle, like the lights going out along the front of a seaside town at the end of the season. Still I smile to see them so late on, now into September, my birthday month – a time of personal new beginnings.

I remember, many years ago, panning for gold in a water way – and the wonder at discovering tiny glints of yellow in the mud.

It comes down to feeding the heart with these scatterings. These splinters of beauty. Flakes of gold.

Wild Garlic

Leave a comment

There can be few places more beautiful than England in the month of May. Late afternoon, I went for a walk along a meander of the River Stour, which winds its way between the market town of Sturminster Newton and the village of Hinton St Mary. The water was slick with willow pollen and a little way up from the old brick mill, a couple of boys and a girl were splashing about in the ford, laughing and screaming at the cold.

The path took me past the house that was once home to the writer Thomas Hardy and his new wife, Emma. Some years ago, I used to receive acupuncture there. The sessions took place in a downstairs room that had been repurposed as a clinic, with a black treatment couch and charts of meridians and pressure points on the walls. At the time, I found it odd to think that some 130 years earlier, Hardy might have been sat at his desk in that same room, drafting The Return of the Native. What would his ghost make of the procession of semi-dressed strangers who visited now, to be pricked and prodded with tiny needles?

Further along the path from the house, through a spinney that floods in heavy rain, stand the ruined arches of the railway bridge, dismantled as part of the Beeching cuts. Here, a sports bag, clothing and a pair of shoes hung from tree. In the river below, two heads bobbed, shiny pink against dull green, like a couple of bizarre lily buds; two men wild swimming and scaring the ducks.

Beyond the bridge and the surrounding trees lie water meadows, now dotted with sheep and chubby lambs.

After the emptiness of winter, the fields have been repopulated, which means my young dog often has to stay on the lead longer than he might like, but there’s still plenty for him to sniff and enjoy. The path crosses the meadows into the tail end of Twinwood Copse, and here I paused.

The air was rich and heady, and in the shade of the trees lay a sea of stars, a pocket handkerchief; the fading white flowers of wild garlic lit by the sun. I let the dog lap from the stream while I drank it up; a sight to fold up and store in the memory; to bring forth when the warmth has gone.

Growing from What’s Buried

Leave a comment

The autumn rain has awoken a lingering ghost in the garden. A tuft of honey fungus has sprouted where an apple tree once stood ten years ago. The common name given to three closely related species – A. mellea, A. bulbosa and A. ostoyae, honey fungus is feared by gardeners for its ability to kill a wide range of trees and shrubs. Yet, while it doesn’t taste of honey, the young caps with their white gills are edible when well cooked.

At this time of year, fungi spring up as if by magic, here one moment and collapsed in puddles of decay the next. While walking in the woods today, I came across peeling caps of fly agaric, the poisonous, red-and-white toadstool of fairy tales. Their appearance was another reminder of what lies hidden, ready to surface when conditions are right.

Neither animal nor plant, mushrooms and toadstools are the fruiting parts of mycelium, the fibrous white bodies of fungi buried in moist soil and rotting wood. Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard has discovered how trees use underground networks of fungi to communicate with each other and send each other nutrients, likening the systems to our own neural and social networks.

The reappearance of fungi at this time of year also fits with the traditional celebrations of Samhain or Halloween, when the veil between worlds of the dead and the living is believed to become less opaque, and the past returns to haunt us. In my own dreams in recent weeks, buried memories have been resurfacing and I have found myself waking in anger at perceived wrongs.

So, what to do about returning ghosts? Folklore advises us to treat them respectfully – and then, perhaps, they might just help us, rather than harm us. Now is the season to honour the past.

Into the Gloaming

Leave a comment

Nightfall turned me into a ghost. It had been so hot, I’d dressed in white and hadn’t thought to change into more suitable clothing for a late evening walk. Now my husband was a little unnerved as I appeared to be floating across the field towards him.

With the twilight came the dusk chorus, dark’s answer to the dawn; in the woods, owls hooted and screeched. There was rustling close by, perhaps deer or a badger stirring, as the night woke up.

I’d hoped the day’s heat would be enough to light up the hedgerows, and I wasn’t disappointed. As we started down the track, we spotted the first tiny flicker: a glow worm suspended from a blade of grass. Further along, we found another and another deep within the hedge, fragile greenish-white dots of light.

It’s no wonder folktales abound about faeries. Midsummer Eve, a painting by the English artist Edward Robert Hughes (1851-1914), captures and transforms the charm of these dabs of hedgerow brightness, which cast their own faint shadows.

Of course, in traditional tales, fairy folk or, as they are also known, the Sidhe (‘The Good People’), are much more ambiguous beings than the merry crowd depicted in Hughes’s picture, and best not crossed…

Although neither fairy folk nor indeed worms, glow worms are similarly best left undisturbed in their natural habitats. Their bioluminescence is mainly generated by the female beetle (Lampyris noctiluca) with the aim of attracting a mate. In England, the best time to see them is between June and August – and  those up the lane certainly seem to be more active on balmy nights.

All the same, while they might be firmly of this world, glow worms nevertheless seem to suggest that, on warm summer nights at least, a little magic might just be possible…

The Edge of Spring

2 Comments

Drenched fields hold pools of sky and, in the surrounding farms, the cattle are restless in their byres. There is a tension in the air. One day the sun is out; the next it vanishes behind banks of cloud. Yet the birds are beginning to sing of spring, with the great tit’s two-syllable ‘It’s com-ing, com-ing, com-ing’; and pairs of jackdaws have started to make their nests in the outbuildings.

This past week, where others catch colds, I’ve found myself infected by anxiety. A couple of delayed projects meant my work temporarily dried up. Such are the joys of life as a freelancer: one day you’re drowning and the next you find yourself in a desert. Rather than stay fretting at my desk – or doing the sensible thing and phoning around for jobs – I went in search of water.

Over the course of the next couple of days, I walked for hours along the footpaths that crisscross the River Stour in the heart of the Blackmore Vale, a landscape immortalised in Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles. It’s flat and lush pastureland. The farms are large and ancient, and the river ribbons its way between them.

Along the way, I saw herons and egrets, skirted an ox-bow lake and was befriended at one point by a perky white terrier (whose owner I had to phone to come and fetch her, so keen was she on accompanying me across the fields).

And it struck me how hard it is to feel like a failure when you are walking: when you are simply moving one step at a time across the land and engaging with what you see, rather than worrying about what you should be doing or what you think you ought to have achieved. Equipped only with a map and a sense of direction, it can be easy at times to lose sight of the way markers – especially when you are trying to tiptoe your way round farmyards – yet somehow you always find the right track, even if it’s not the one you intended.

Of Rainbows and Burning Branches

Leave a comment

When I realised I’d just spent the last 10 minutes by the window, staring at a rodent that was fine-dining on the fat crumbs from the bird feeder, I decided I probably needed to get out more. To be fair, the rodent was a bank vole – that round-eared, snub-nosed cousin of the mouse – and it was a lot more interesting than your average hamster. But even so.

I’d finished work that afternoon on the first draft of a text, and my brain and eyes were aching from pushing words around. In fact, I was beginning to feel a little like the Jack Nicholson character in the Shining typewriter scene – ‘All work and no play…’

Fortunately, while being a freelancer can be a risky, feast-or-famine and occasionally lonely business, one of the perks is that you are, after all, your own boss. If you need to take a few moments out, there’s no one to tell you that you can’t. I pulled on my parka and headed through the door.

It started to rain – but no matter. The light was a curious cast of brilliance against dark rolling clouds, and the horizon was smudged by the tail of a rainbow. By the time I reached my destination, the drizzle had cleared and the sky had cleared to blue. The trees were bare, but out on the lake a pair of willows burned like two torches, their reflections catching fire in the water.

As I walked, I let go of the day’s trivia. And for a moment I experienced that sense of freedom which carries with it an echo of childhood – of just being. It didn’t last long, but it was enough.

Today, I made a point of going for a quick stroll at lunchtime. Just down the lane and into the fields, squelching through mud. And, yes, it rained and, yes, I got soaked. But again it didn’t much matter. I returned to my desk feeling alive and awake – and promising to give myself permission to get out more. To live a little.