A walled clump of pine trees stands sentinel above Wotton-under-Edge. They make an undulating rushing sound like the wind itself their needles quivering in the cold air. All around their base on the east side away from the sun snow has gathered itself into drifts. The first Arctic weather has arrived for the winter and now we remember what the cold is really like.
The copse of pines look out from Wotton Hill across a flat plain towards the Bristol Channel. The Severn Bridge is visible, its white H shaped uprights silhouettes against the pale blue of the horizon. To the west mountains are cloaked in snow. The Black Mountains? I guess so. Just for today transformed into the white mountains. As I set off a man was having a sandwich in a fiat panda listening to BBC Wales in Welsh, a reminder of how close we are to the border.
Nov 27th
It’s another freezing day. No snow but a biting wind as I set off exactly a week later from when I set off last time. Since then TTT and farewell to Glemham. I climb a steep path and then road up Blackquarries Hill. A hollowed out pumpkin cut in half and so bright and real compared to the leaf litter that has been one it’s bed. at the top the sun comes up and I say hello to a man who walks his dog and says nothing in return. His loss. Or his hearing loss?
Looking north imagining the way I have come I’m greeted by the strange sight of a plane seemingly motionless in the sky like a mobile above a child’s bed or a hover fly. I look at it – entranced – for almost a minute listening to its roar. When I shift my gaze I notice great banks of cloud pushing from the north creating the optical illusion of the plane not moving. It is the background that is in flux rather than the one object of my focus. It reminds me of being 4 or 5 years old in the thatched cottage I grew up in lying on the grass and looking at the roof of the cottage seeingly falling over under the moving clouds that pass overhead.
Long Barrow. View across to dark band of pine forest. And out of a row of fir spikes the slightly taller spike of Tyndale monument. How long ago? Two weeks?b
Water logged fields storm Bert. Trees down. Flooding
The Slow Walker 