Snowlight

A frozen world; moorland between Felindre and Dolfor, January 7th 2009

A long drive this morning to Welshpool via Knighton and Newtown. The road between Presteigne and Knighton and then Knighton and Dolfor, just outside Newtown, felt like the roof of the world; isolated, marooned, lonely. Snow on high ground, the white spine of Wales. The road seemed a black ribbon in endless distances of snowfields, white and grey distances delineated and marked by black hedges and bare trees. A beautiful wind break of beech trees, the snow plastered elagantly against their trunks, a frozen waterfall of icicles just off the road, four feet high, too dangerous to stop. I squeezed a few minutes out of the day to walk on the moors above Felindre, my boots crunching on dead dry heather and whipped-icing-sugar patterns of blown snow. The views from the top of the moors were astonishing, a vast and empty landscape, beautiful; the cold was cumulative, nowhere near the minus 9 we had here last night but growing, seductive, subtle. The snow had settled on paths making circles and strange shapes against the brown ground or bare heathers. Up close the ditch-waters had frozen into basalt shapes, miniature Giants' Causeways of ice, forming ice-caverns six inches high. The beech ring on Offa's Dyke seemed almost tame in comparison, but here too the cold crept up through my boots and the wind was keen. The pagan ring was not as eerie, but I was hungry and there were other visitors; I am a selfish walker. Nevertheless the beech trees' bareness against the mottled snow was very beautiful. I could have stayed out all day. And now the temperature has risen to freezing point and snow is threatened; I will get the firewood in.