Beechring

Looking northwards along the Dyke from the beech ring

Five minutes out of the day to spend on Offa's Dyke, the earthwork that passes as close to us as the hills about five miles away. Bright sun and soft cloud, a piercing wind. Snow frozen in the ditches, dead grasses, leaves immobile on the ground, almost embedded. The wind was sharp and relentless, roaring in the bare trees.

Fields of giant, smooth lumps, like motionless whales, a slow surge; thin sunlight on ice in tractor ruts. The very wind seemed frozen. Long views into Wales, hills streaked with old snow. Shaved fields and copses, the neatness of commerce and its needs, defining place, sculpting landscape. A military line of old Scots pines marks the Dyke here, patches of gorse - big enough to make miniature gorsewoods - a bedraggled birch; but the place where the road crosses the Dyke is marked by a ring of giant beech trees, muscular and taut, like stationary green marbled flesh. I kept thinking of the word 'guarded' meaning both protected and wary. A splash of ancient thorn bushes, naked of leaves but draped - festooned - with red berries, voluptuous and seductive on this raw midday. Surrounded by neat fields and tame woods, the Dyke crossing was a wild space scoured and protected by the wind, cold and pagan, the essence of untamed winter.