Beechwoods and Ice Caverns

Some more images from this morning's journey. The beechring at the junction of roads and ditches, Offa's Dyke and the modern roads. The Dyke and ditch are visible here but are slowly falling back into the landscape. The bare fields beyond were frozen and covered in settled and wind-blown snow. Only under the hedges had it settled any deeper. A familiar image of mine, a landscape framed by bare trees, the view from the woods.

I found a whole ditch of these strange forms alongside the road on the moors. In summer they are waterlogged and edged with reeds, but in this unusually cold weather the ditches are frozen solid and have formed these weird shapes. Crumbling cliffs of basalt-ice forms no more than two inches long, the collapsed pattern of an earlier freezing; a cold poetry, invisible, a ditch of these shapes as long as the moors. And a strange, pregnant, soft grey light, a light expectant with snow.