St David's Eve

Tomorrow is St David's Day, March 1st.  I have bought some cut daffodils, which in the fire-warmth of the living room have started to open.  Tomorrow we will bake Welsh cakes and no doubt I will mull over the duller aspects of my Welsh family history.  March is not winter, as February is not spring, so this is my last Winter Journal entry.  I like the idea that there are days of the surrounding months in each month; that February has cold bright sunny days and March has hopeless dark wet days, but also April days of warmth and birdsong.  It has turned colder here again, cold enough for a frost perhaps.  

The days are longer and have seemed warmer, and our thoughts have stretched away from the fire to the garden and the outside world.  Our attitude if not the weather is becoming spring-like, vernal.  I want to be outside, planting and gardening.  My year has turned a corner and is heading for the summer, even on a cold night like tonight.  

I lost a few entries in January and early February and with moving house I lost the attention to small detail that I was trying to bring to the Journal.  And I have been without a camera for a month now.  But 'them's the breaks' and a small consideration.  I have enjoyed writing these observations and think it a good thing for a writer to work to even self-imposed deadlines.  

Another letter to an unknown reader.   Thank you for reading and following my Season.  No more of this Journal, but a Summer Journal will complete my on-line Year, and I will continue to write the landscape writings and Walkpoints blog. 

The Wood Train

Twice in a week I have shifted large amounts of chopped wood.  Last Friday I helped unload a trailer of logs, and today I cleared the old outside toilet of firewood.  We were fortunate to inherit a good store of firewood and two half-bunkers of coal; old coal, as the joke has it.  

Clearing the wood reminded me of the wood trains on the Ratty.  When I was younger I spent a few holidays volunteering on the Ravenglass & Eskdale Railway, the Ratty.  Most of the engines were steam-powered and ran on coal, but the drivers used wood to get a good blaze going.  Every couple of weeks a train of empty carriages was taken up to the woods at the top of the valley and halted outside a stone shed. This used to be a forge, but was now one of the railway's wood stores.  Filling every crevice on the train with eighteen-inch logs took about an hour, and the logs were unloaded again at Ravenglass sheds and then the carriages cleaned for the passengers.  It was a hard afternoon's work for a city-soft teenager, but great being out in the fresh air, the dense woods at the top of the valley, the strange old forge with its huge, silent furnace.  

Nearing An End

As the days lengthen, it has turned cool again.  In Presteigne yesterday everywhere seemed to be having a spruce up, a pre-Spring clean, but everyone seemed to be talking about the new cooler weather.  Stepped outside just now to see our afternoon's work; car-lights and farm-light pin-pricking the valley, owls on the hill in the last of the light.  

We spent the afternoon in the garden.  I managed to turn over the third 'new' veg bed, four made from one old large bed.  I am itching to get planting, but it will be another fortnight or a month until we can put anything out.  Gradually we change the garden, change the house; shift the orientation, reuse old rooms, bring old things back into use.  An ancient wicker basket, almost bottomless, cleaned out and lined with heavy plastic, makes an ideal kindling store.  The woodburner heats the house, fire becomes the heart of the cottage once again.  I switch the hall light off going to bed, and the hall is softly filled with firelight. Tolkien's Rivendell has a hall with no light but a permanent fire, a place of flickers and soft glooms, a place for thought and calm.  Every home should have one, at least for some of the time.  

Hedge Findings

We spent the afternoon filling gaps in the hedge.  The garden is bordered by old hedges, some holly, some hazel, some nondescript so we will wait and see.  We bought some bare-root hedge stock yesterday, a mixture of beech, field maple, hazel, dog rose and spindle.  This afternoon we cleared the dead leaves and stones from beneath the fence and dug a trench to plant them, about a foot apart.  We found fragments of roof tile (the house was once roofed with stone tiles) and some larger wall-stones.  We also found lots of washed-out pale blue pottery shards, as well as the more-usual willow pattern.  And a small, perfectly preserved, brass gas-lamp attachment, like a pipe designed by Jules Verne, presumably thrown out when the cottage was converted to electricity perhaps in the 1940s.  

Moorland

Driving home from Welshpool I noticed snowdrops everywhere; huge clumps along the roadsides, more than I seem to have seen before.   New grass cautiously springing up beneath dead blond stems.  A lot of mist and light rain on the moors as I drove out, which had cleared by the time I drove back.  I stopped at a steep bowl of hillside called the Ring near Felindre for elevenses, and sat and watched the shadows of the clouds moving over the brown hillsides.  Slow-moving shadows, the hiss of the wind in the grasses, white and rust-brown moorland ponies.  And the thin trickle of stony stream that becomes the River Teme further down the valley.  Out of Knighton the Radnor Forest rose on the horizon, deep black gullies still hiding seams of old snow.  

Cold Air

The days are noticeably longer.  The night starts fading at about 6.30am and it is still light until about 5.30 or 6pm; nearly twelve hours of almost-light.  A cool grey morning here, the tops of the Radnor Forest hills are under heavy cloud.  I have been doing some small jobs but opened the window so that I could hear the birds, as we have had some good birds in the garden recently; nuthatches, goldfinches, greenfinches, and this morning we saw a greater/lesser spotted woodpecker very briefly.  We hear the woodpeckers in the woods above the house but haven't yet seen them in the garden.  I have seen up to four buzzards over the woods and even a red kite.  

Perhaps the knowledge that this Journal finishes at the beginning of next week has lulled me into a feeling that winter is winding down.  But with the longer days and the milder weather recently, it feels as if spring is on the way, which it didn't last end-of-Feb as I made preparations for the Spring Journal.  

Fron Bache

Another bright, cool, breezy day, ideal washing weather.  As I was hanging out the washing just now, I could hear voices over the hedge in the graveyard next door.  A man and wife and their daughter.  They had come to tidy one of the graves and the little girl was asking questions.   'And she lived with Grandpa?' asked the girl.  'Yes, your grandmother,' said the father, implying to me at least that the grandmother had died before the girl was born.  When I was a child we would visit the family grave at Fron Bache in Llangollen at least twice a year, driving over in the autumn to tidy it for the winter and again in the spring to check that the winter hadn't been too hard on it.  We would spend a few moments tidying and cutting back the grass, perhaps righting the little pot.  My brother and I would have the job of replacing the lead letters that had fallen out; the O of Eyton, the family name I have inherited, the D of December.  Then we would have a pub lunch - the Hand, or the Britannia - and then visit cousin Arthur at Pen y Bedw.  He would be in the kitchen listening to Gardener's Question Time on Radio 4. We would stay for an hour or so before heading back to Liverpool.    Something of those Welsh Sundays has stayed with me, a day for family history and baking.   I thought of this house as the sort of Welsh cottage we would pass on our way home, the sort of place I would not want to leave.