Summer started, I think, the day I stood beneath the sky of swifts. Veering and rattling and looping in figures-of-eight around my head, the troop skittered between the walls, up to the eves of the houses, back over my head to the church tower I stood beneath. There were not one or two, or even a magical five or six that we might see here if we’re lucky, but a sky full. I watched in delight, squinting against an unexpected sun, orange and yellow poppies gleaming from the wall behind me, as the birds filled the generous and quiet street. We were in Brittany and had cycled from Roscoff to Lannion in the second to last week of May, headlong into a heat wave, the first of five to hit northern Europe this summer. The temperatures soared above 30 degrees and I remember sweltering in my long pants and jacket, my panniers mocking me with their hidden pyjamas and jumpers I’d packed for colder days. I lived in the one skirt and T-shirt I’d brought, out on the deck of our Airbnb in Lannion by the black river. We adjusted quickly to the rhythm of summer, rising early in the morning, heading for the coast, seeking out the shade. The heat was welcome, that first time, the land still bright and green and full of life, that day when summer began.

~

It has been a summer of places.

There was a feeling back in early June. We’d returned from Brittany and the heat had subsided into cool dampness, swelling the deep green Devon lanes to bursting. It was the desire to explore places and understand their layers and histories. I was reading Rob Cowen’s long-awaited book The North Road and it reminded me of the deep joy I experience when I make connections with places, maybe through reading, or researching their history, or encounters with them. An injured shoulder (from aforementioned cycling trip) had left me thinking smaller thoughts, so I walked the Tavistock canal path with a friend one day. We crossed the roundabout on the edge of town, and slipped through a gap in the wall onto the old towpath, where the air was cool, green, secretive. We barely saw a soul until we happened upon a party of ten or more walkers right at the end of the walkable route, where the towpath enters a tunnel and slips away underground until it reaches Morwellham. We walked beneath a viaduct with no remaining purpose, neither road nor cycle path, then over an old abandoned holloway lane, past meadows stretching out below us, and beneath low stone bridges streaked with verdigris, where copper leached from the stone.

Another day I took a train to Taunton with a friend to visit the Museum of Somerset and the Roger Fry exhibition. At Taunton station, a large laminated (mostly) green, wall map of Somerset greeted us, its northwestern shoulder nudging the Bristol Channel. The M5 is certainly my life’s equivalent of Cowen’s A1 that tracks a south-north line between London and Edinburgh and the M5 runs right through Somerset. As I stood in front of the map, I realised I was looking at an entire county that I’d ignored for over fifty years of my life, perceiving it as a geographical featureless space to rattle through on our way to the southwest, or in latter years to make the infrequent journey up the line back to Gloucestershire. Taunton, its county town and the hometown of my husband’s father, was tatty and depressed. We walked beneath the slow feathered explosion of a decaying pigeon, stuck to the anti-bird spikes beneath the iron rail bridge welcoming us to the town. Past nail salons, kebab bars and barbers lining the main road into town, the only retail options of an immigrant underclass. We turned off along the River Tone, where people sat at tables outside a café pretending it was more summery than it was. Skulking behind the bushes lay a low red castle, the Museum of Somerset. It was a different world inside, bright and newly renovated, an intelligent artistic space. The exhibition was excellent, telling the story of Fry’s life and celebrating the artistic talents of his wife Helen Coombe, too. His early portraits in oil offered entire worlds of texture and colour that I wanted to step into. I loved the landscapes inspired by his travels to Italy, Algeria, Tunisia, France, Switzerland, and the Black Sea in 1897. His still life works were influenced by Cézanne and Matisse, presenting a crenelated artichoke leaf, an iridescent pheasant feather, a banana in a teacup and lustre jug, a collage on closer inspection.

Later, I persuaded G to return to Somerset with me, to visit a couple of National Trust properties. We drove through Somerset villages, warm with Ham stone (I learnt in the museum), through Barrington with its bakery sign propped against an open gate, then on to Montacute and finding the Phelips Inn, open for coffee, sunshine pouring into the narrow flower-and-table-lined alley beyond the skittle sign. We parked at Monatcute House just around the corner and ate our sandwiches in the car as we waited for torrential rain to pass. The front cleared quickly, and we stepped out into intense blue skies, which set the crisp Ham stone of the Elizabethan house off a treat. There were bulging hedges that lined the perimeter, like the Hungry Caterpillar G remarked, radically pruned conical yew hedges, the baluster, obelisks and finials of the stone wall, the smooth oriel window and the mysterious sunken spheres, and the little creatures high above us on the gables. A spectacular house virtually to ourselves on a perfect day. Rain threatened to sweep through again, so we headed off to Lyte’s Cary Manor, a more human scale home with cottage gardens and cosy rooms.

Midsummer was spent staring at swallows through a window in Calstock Arts Centre, a converted chapel on the edge of the Tamar just over the border in Cornwall. The tickets were gifted to my mother-in-law, and more my music taste than G’s so I went with her. We arrived early and selected seats right at the front. The window was the focal point for the audience, and the musicians, Cara Dillon and her husband Sam Lakeman, played in front of it. As soon as the music started, the swallows swooped in, investigating the eaves at the apex of the roof above us. One swift veered past, then two geese, and a buzzard circling in slow sweeps above the trees on the horizon. The music accompanied me as I traced the bumps of the trees across the water, imagining the track beneath my feet, peering into the shadows where trees meet. The light changed slowly as the sun lowered in the sky, the shadows flattened the bright green and deepest blue of the skies softened to mute hues of khaki and lilac. The swallows all gathered for a last jamboree and then, they were gone. Something tumbled from the roof, an owl perhaps. Clouds reflected the sky, dusky pink, then indigo. Our midsummer evening was a treat of song and swallow.

Another heatwave hit towards the end of June and this time the headlines mentioned little else: records broken for the hottest June on record, warnings that this would be the coldest summer we’d remember, but then our eyes averted by an earthquake in Venezuela, Starmer resigning as Prime Minister. I’ll remember those three days, each hotter than the previous, trapped beneath a heat dome that I feared would never shift. Three days of no exercise, no walks, no venturing beyond the perimeter of our house and driveway, minimising movement, pinned to my desk by marking and meetings, my brain dulled and pinched with a headache. This was climate change in our own backyards, and I felt the primal fear that there could be no moment of my time left on this earth that wouldn’t in some way be shadowed by the grim knowledge of what we have done to the planet. When I sensed the ruffle of the air, I stood outside beneath droplets of rain that tasted like desolation.

Mid-July: more sun, more heat. Sparse clouds, a soft lilac against a hazy blue sky. I walked to work alongside the old airfield that simmered through a chain link fence, the white oil containers painting a desolate mid-western scene. Back home, hard desiccated apples hit the roof and rolled to the ground, untouchable by the wasps. Each evening, I watered two small patches of land, where my rudbeckia wilted and a few red flowers peeped out of dried grasses and dock seeds. France burned, Spain burned, Scotland burned. Each evening, I feared I could smell smoke, hear crackling flames at our door. G’s granddaughter was born on the 15^th in the Caribbean and I wondered for a moment what her earth would look like as she aged into the twenty-second century.

August brought more fine weather, but the heat was gone, gifting us rich buttery evenings and the clearest of blue skies. We had officially entered drought, and the land had settled into its dry dusty rhythm. Everything in statis, green leaves shocked to crusty brown, golden grass everywhere, blocks of gold on the horizon where harvests are already gathered in. The hedgerows were thin and desiccated, and the blackberries, those staple favourites of our autumn store cupboard, were hard and bitter. Stupefied bumble bees swayed through the few flowers left in the garden, drawn to the surprising second flush of wisteria and my one surviving yellow rudbeckia. It was a thin season this summer, a mean one, a season that refused to be bountiful this year.

Now, we’re almost at the end of August, summer is done I can smell it in the air, the clouds have gathered and the rain is coming, they say. I walk up to the moor and there, under the usual telegraph pole, is the family of barn swallows that visit each year, all gathered in the sunshine after the rain, chattering amongst themselves, as if nothing were amiss. I began my summer beneath the swifts and end it beneath the swallows. There is a symmetry there that stills my breathing a little. We may never know another summer when the fear doesn’t bite but, for now, I shall breathe in the cool air and be grateful for all of us, plant, creature and human, who get to live the story a little while longer.

Leaving me to pack, Debbie heads off alone along the High Street in Tenterden in a hopeful quest for a pair of secondhand, worn-in leather walking shoes to replace her painful new boots. Incredibly she finds the perfect pair in a charity shop and joins me to share a delightful breakfast in a shady courtyard in Brunch & Brew. Collecting our bags from The White Lion where we’d spent the previous night, we set off a final time along the high street to pick up the trail once more, another elusive exit through a narrow street striated with white and black clapboard.

Past a natural water drainage system on the edge of town, lined with wildflowers. Into the greenwood again, newness at every turn. Across kind meadows speckled with shade. Through hedgerows heavy with hawthorn blossom, sheep disturbed from their shady drowsing. Past ancient oak trees in the middle of fields, where bird and sheep gather. A farmgate tips us out onto a busy road heading south and we hurry to the next National Trust property at Smallhythe Place, bought by actor Ellen Terry in 1899 as a country retreat, an ancient place where the sea reached in medieval times. Edy Craig created the museum in the 1920s after her mother’s death, curating all her books, play scripts, posters, and costumes from her life in theatre. She created the Barn Theatre too, which sits incongruous beneath a vast thatch behind the cottage. It is hot now, and we have many miles to go, so we leave the honesty, lavender and irises of the small garden behind, and set off across the ancient sea bed, the shipyards of the old port impossible to picture on the dusty track.

On through the village of Wickersham, where we eat snacks on the grass verge. And then the trail confounds us once more, just when I was thinking this could be the most perfect bucolic landscape I’d ever encountered, bewitched by the ease of the trail, the slope of the land, the warmth of the breeze, the scent of the hidden honeysuckle. Somewhere, the trail marker vanishes, and we make a mistake across a pasture thick with thistle and long grass. Blisters swell on the soles of my feet and we retrace our steps again, to find another painful route up through scrubland with no sense of trail or direction. I realise too late that the Ordnance Survey map we have been relying on is from the early 2000s. My phone lays bare the difficult few miles we covered; I take no photographs between 14:29 and 16:16 when we find our way along the road to Peasmarsh, via the hotel at Flackley Ash. A gracious favourite of Debbie’s family, she takes me in to show me the lounge and I long to sink into their comfortable sofas with a cool drink, but I grit my teeth and we step back out into the warmth and finally pick up the High Weald trail. Five more miles to Rye as the shadows length.

We spent two nights in the windmill in Rye, the once and future seaside town that’s mislaid its purpose. The next day, we sit on warm stones outside Rye Castle and look out across the marshlands reclaimed from the sea. Our third National Trust property is the home of Henry James, the American writer, Lamb House. I’m delighted by the writing desk with the copy of his book and how he edited it around the edges (I did the same with my ethnographic notebook in my PhD) - and the pictures on the wall of all the writers who were invited into his home. How important the company of fellow writers. There is no sea, but there are kings in my Rye story: Henry VIII who commissioned Camber Castle, windswept and stranded above a long gone tideline, George I who stayed in Lamb House in a storm, and the sad news of Michael Pennington’s death, who I had once met backstage after his 12-hour marathon of playing the lead in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Parts One and Two, and Henry V. Rye is a strange but compelling place with an atmosphere I find hard to place.

The last day on the train home, I reflect on our days spent in/on the Weald, a place so different to the familiarity of the south west. Images rise in my consciousness and I write them quickly. Red brick, green fields, blue sky. Fields without limit and sheep like buoys afloat in a verdant sea. A place resolute in wealth, both old and recent, but not immune to the inflammatory politics of the right. Its proximity to both London and France, Rye one of the Cinque Ports along the south coast. A long dusty gravel track, talking of years past, forks in the trails of our lives, with decisions made and consequences lived. Long shadows kicked down the track, where we passed wedding guests in satin dresses, clutching hat boxes and wincing over stones in tight shoes. Rye appearing on the horizon, our home for the night, the white windmill, a tiny cotton fleck in the distant green. The sea that haunted every step but was never seen: the old tideline at Smallhythe, the flat flint tracks of the old seabed, now swimming under long meadow grass, James’ morning constitutional to the harbour, the ‘islands’ of hills above the flat lands.

Rooms to write in, views to inspire. Pinecones scattered on sandy soil. Neat, tiled cornices on cottages. Red roses pinned to the brick wall, red roses pinned to a midnight blue wall. Doorways open to the early May heat, an ease of entrance and exit unfamiliar to our winter-clamped limbs. French doors from James’ breakfast room leading to the garden.

The train climbs back up the Weald, hurtling me back through our three-day journey in reverse. Places encountered, once unknown, now a little more familiar: Royal Tunbridge Wells, Brenchley, Horsmonden, Cranbrook, Sissinghurst, Benenden[1], Rolvenden, Tenterden, Smallhythe, Peasmarsh, Flackley Ash, Rye.

The train gathers pace and quickly, the mood shifts. Clouds pass over the sun, memories of my dear friend’s embrace fade, people and town re-appear, and the dream-like state of the Weald is lost in a heartbeat.

Resurgent May, softness with energy,
Warmth after cold, reunion after loss.
It is a columbarium full of doves,
A susurration of the living leaves.
Murmur, old music; Sun, shake out your locks,
That heavy fleece, that rowelled aureole;
But in th’ intoxication of this spilth
Let us be stolid as the flood arrives;
Practise a difficult sobriety,
Keep hold on wits, not lose them in the fierce
Draughts of such wine.

Vita Sackville-West, The Garden, 1946

[1] The placename element ‘-den’ (often seen in Kent and Sussex) denotes a woodland pasture or swine pasture. Derived from Old English/Jutish (often denn or dene), these areas were historically used for grazing pigs on acorns and beechmast in the dense woodlands of the Weald.

We lingered over breakfast – berry compote, sourdough, chargrilled bacon, scrambled eggs - then packed up and moved on. There was a short walk past the sewage works (small, barely visible) through Sissinghurst estate woods, which rang with blackbird and shone with new greenness, the road now a faint thrum behind us. Tense steps along the public road up to the entrance of our first National Trust property visit of the walk (spoiler: we had three). Much has been written about the garden created by Vita Sackville-West, after their purchase of the ‘castle’ in 1930, and its subsequent renovation, but suffice to say it occupies a perfect location on the rise of a hill, with sweeping views down distant fields of the Weald, and surrounded with sumptuous and intricate garden rooms, filled with vivacious and dreamy flowers, balancing sun and shade, swifts and swallows, and distant thrumming bees weaving high into their oast tower nest. I dipped and dived amongst the growing numbers of visitors, seeking out quiet spaces where I could, and marvelling at the work required to create and maintain such a garden.

By 1.30pm, it was time to press on with our walk. Debbie’s friend had joined us at Sissinghurst and kindly dropped us off further along the trail in Benenden, where we began our second long walk of the trip in the heat of the day. Another false start courtesy of poor signage (despite reading the OS map too) and we made it out of Benenden onto the trail, first skirting shady woodland then edging our way round orchards of apple and pear. There were wide open fields, where solitary trees offered shade to flocks of sheep, and narrow gaps between hedgerows dripping in May blossom. Distant lines of red brick drew our eyes beyond the green, and white-capped cawls of oast houses drifted like sails in a mauve-blue sky.

Another mistake in Rolvenden demanded we retraced our steps, before reaching field after field of Brassica napus, rape seed. We waded through the yellow flowers that reached to our shoulders, our feet obscured by stem and leaf, our ankles clutched by invisible binds that threatened to topple us with every step we took. The feeling of making our way through the field hovered between tenderness of being stroked by a million plants and insects and the more menacing sense that I was being swallowed by a sea of green and yellow. We were both relieved to make it to the other side, our trousers and shoes smudged with green streaks and still grasping tiny nests of vegetation.

Beyond Rolvenden, we struck out across flat wetland. We had the snaking Chalybeate channel and the Kent & East Sussex steam railway line to cross before we began the final climb up to the small market town of Tenterden, our feet tired and sore on the baked clay path. Shadows lengthened and the red brick of the high street glowed with the heat of the day.

Back home now, on the first day of June, where damp air softens the eyes and grants permission for more solitary introspection and writing, I discover that Vita was a poet as well as a gardener, creating two book-length narrative poems The Land (1926) and The Garden, twenty years later. Project Gutenberg offers the full text, and I spend time skimming her words, finding stanzas devoted to the yeoman, the farmer and the vagrant, and the demands of farming the extremes of summer and winter on the Weald, where the clay sucks in winter, and cracks in summer.

I could lose myself in the poem, but the day presses on and calls me to other tasks. I’ll leave you with an extract from The Garden that speaks to me, recalling our perfect spring day on the Weald:

Then in the poignant moment made aware
We are all things, the flower and the tree,
Detail of petal, and the general burst
Greening the valley and th’ horizon hurst;
The bud still folded and the bud fulfilled;
We are the distant landscape and the near.
We are the drought, we are the dew distilled;
The saturated land, the land athirst;
We are the day, the night, the light, the dark;
The water-drop, the stream; the meadow and the lark.

I have spent many months, years even, walking the paths and lanes around my home in West Devon, but sometimes another place begins to fill my head. Over the years, I have walked on many occasions with a dear friend – Brittany, La Gomera, the south-west coast path, London. This year, now she is living back home in London after a decade in France, I fell upon the opportunity to walk somewhere I was unfamiliar with but had felt drawn to for years - the garden of England, the High Weald, criss-crossing the south-eastern counties of Sussex and Kent. I called my friend and planned us a three-day route that started close to Royal Tunbridge Wells, heading in a gentle south-easterly direction down to Rye, following the High Weald Landscape Trail (HWLT).

My train was delayed from Plymouth, of course it was. I’d accepted my fate of missing my connection from Charing Cross, but somehow (thank you underground deities), I made the Tube connection in record time and caught the designated train on my ticket, with six breathless minutes to spare. I met Debbie as planned in Orpington, on the train, close to Tunbridge Wells. From there, we took the bus to the Weald village of Brenchley to the east where it took us twenty confusing minutes to find the beginning of the trail. The elusiveness of the HWLT was to become a feature of the next three days: ambiguous signposting then the elation of finding the trail again, spotting the small yellow disc nailed to gateposts across the fields.

The trail skirted south of Horsmonden: beneath hops strung from tall dark poles, alongside expansive private estates stripped of all but statement trees, through small close meadows gleaming with yellow buttercups. Later, the path crossed four or five large fields, free from pasture and returning to scrubland, a patchwork of buttercup, ox-eye daisies, red campion, dock, stitchwort, and nettle. One of the only steep climbs of the trip brought us into Goudhurst and then onto Angley Wood, where multiple forest tracks seduced us off the path. The high street in Cranbrook retreated beneath an onslaught of flower and vegetation: white windows gleaming against blood-red roses, red brick arches barely visible behind frothy purple wisteria, narrow brick pathways hidden beneath rock daisies. I was beginning to see that these villages and towns we passed through could be painted with a palette drawn from Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours: Brownish-Orange (79), Chestnut Brown (103), Bluish Purple (36), Snow White (1) and the hematic Arterial Blood Red (87), each sequestered behind a rapture of greens that defied description. Our home for the evening was the delightful Milk House, and I still dream of the culinary highlight of the trip - the ginger, marmalade and passionfruit cheesecake.

This is a brief post, a snapshot of the trail - I intend to post the other two days soon, but for now we are off to Roscoff this afternoon on the ferry on our bikes. I’ll write about that trip too, but hopefully this first day is sufficient as a teaser of the delicious High Weald Landscape Trail.

“If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills - then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory—” Virginia Woolf, Sketch of the Past

What is my base, my bowl that keeps on filling and seeking? I could see myself on an empty Cornish beach, humming a tune, the lead in the debut of my life, a young woman who could not believe such ecstasy was possible, alone with the wide skies, the insistent surf. Another time, traversing a rocky shore, sure-footed, nimble, as I placed my feet amongst the barnacles. The event could only have lasted moments - I know nothing of what came before or after - and again there was the elation of foot meeting rock, a body isolated yet completely implicated in the world, effortless, brimming with potential. That feeling has stayed with me, fleeting as it was, that I can do anything, be anyone if only my feet remain connected with rock. If only I can remember that being out in this world is a bowl that fills and fills.

I’ve tried hard to remember ever since. Back in the days of late February, before the light returned, I found another line that spoke to me, from the poetry of Ada Limon: her line “a green skin growing over whatever it was winter did to us” (Instructions on Not Giving Up) - these words carried me through the final days of the season, and I was validated in feeling that winter had flattened me beyond belief some days. In the persistent light after dinner one early spring evening, still grey skies to the east held lighter portions to the north-west, where chimneys of the village smoked with frugal fires, lit in the wake of the Iran war. Clouds piled on each other to colour the west, and rooks streaked across the near sky. I could sense the darkness retreating, my body preparing for its liberty.

Tender pink buds of Beech, like smooth thin fingers, curled out of their skins. There was fleeting sunshine and daffodils everywhere, Magnolia, pink and white, dotted around the village, suddenly present in close colourful neighbourhoods.

My bowl began to fill again. I took my first bike ride of the season, the first since early November, and although my eyes and balance were reluctant, and my mind and belly anxious, I went out anyway. Hot searing muscles, but as we got up onto the common we met the light. Willow clouds circled the tower up near Princetown, horses bowed their noses to wet grass, tyres gripped through mud and dew. I managed a feeble few miles, but it was enough for a start.

The rising sun forced its salmon-pink glow on the slanting clouds behind the trees, still bare from winter, longing for their spring disguise. Sleight-of-hand, winter one day, almost summer the next. Three fine days, skies blue all the way to the top of the cosmos. Tiny fists of blossom cloaked the pear tree, the camellias nearing their curtain call. Spring as a play, a pageant, performed on the stage of this place. Does the metaphor work? That essentially this is all an illusion, a momentary but marvellous exhibition?

Later, I sat on the deck, hands cool, toes warm, sky filled with bird chatter. Between me and the smooth grey-blue distance, a layer of white Magnolia was newly revealed, another layer of pink beyond, foreground of hopeful Hazel and young Hawthorn. Slate roof, brick chimneys. Two, then three, four rooks glided past. A rustle in the bush at the foot of the garden. My fountain pen slides across the page, tip meeting its shadow in sharp jabs of composure.

I looked for every opportunity to fill my bowl again. Another joyous bike ride, in still air, mild even after the frost, around to Burrator and up to the old railway track. Receding hills, Sheepstor church in the valley, then a clump of trees towards the south. If I squinted and tilted my perspective, it looked like a distant mythical city, flags dancing in the breeze. A new path, snaking up towards Sharpitor, where we abandonned our bikes in the boulder field and climbed the rest of the hill to the tor.

Wind in the night, a confused sky of bold steel-blue and pink, still barely-bare branches of trees on the crest muddled the sky, forming small squares of complexity against the horizontal blinds. Magnolia defied frost and mind, and we were grateful for the millennia it had had to perfect its art of clinging to life.

In late March, we shed our winter skins once and for all, and cycled to Plymouth to board the Pont Aven, one of only three sailings this season of the Brittany Ferries ship across to St Malo. We had only three days, one night on board the ship, and two in a neat Neo-Breton house in Dinard. My bowl filled to its brim, with the perfect blend of small adventure, French encounters, and Bretagne, the place to which I return time and again. What will I remember from these days?

That final magnificent morning, crossing the Barrage du Rance in reverse and finding ourselves back in La Cité Solidor with its perfect beach, sharp morning light, the French out on their balades. Espresso, a pain au chocolat wrapped in a black napkin by the man in the tabac, a tender act as if he were tucking it up in bed. In the intra-muros of the old city, I attempted the smallest of French talk with a woman at the café on the northern walls – c’est froid, oui, c’est le vent – before we took another sweep on our bikes across the wide golden sands, where twin stick figures were silhouetted against the silver shining sands.

The collection of people on the beach, maybe fifteen with long rakes, combing the beach in repetitive patterns. I thought they were detectorists to begin with, then saw they were raking the sands into repetitive Celtic patterns. When I looked over the wall an hour later, they were all spread across the beach holding hands. Then, later still, they had moved to the far rocks, where they huddled together, clapping their achievement.

There was the man with a pick alone on the mud, looking for cockles. Another man on his boat, adjusting his fawn sail, tiny beneath the gleaming cityscape of the Pont Aven. Out on the startling turquoise sea, a burgundy Breton Crabber amidst hundreds of tiny white sails, snaking in long lines through and around the islands. Five people on the beach on Dinard Plage in a stiff breeze, struggling to pitch a tent to collect shade, like a thong, G joked. An old man jogging in the Memorial Park whom we passed three times beneath the pines. More small talk in a public conveniences secreted amongst the walls of the old city of St Malo - quelle bonne experience du toilette, avec la music, vous! - I indicated to the amused woman in a hi-vis jacket in the wooden office.

It was only a few days, but it appears that is all it takes to smooth away the congestion of winter. Those huge clouded skies, the chop and churn of the white-teal-turquoise seas. Space, light, time to observe.

On Writing

The reason for my absence on Substack (please forgive me shaky return) has been that I needed to focus on completing the first draft of my historical novel, set in the Tamar Valley. I finally finished it in the week before Easter and I printed it out soon after, compiling it in two ring-bound volumes ready for reading and editing. A long journey lies ahead, but I am proud of myself for reaching this milestone. I shall share more of the process in later Substacks.

1. On developing the habit of writing

One of the first things that struck me from reading VW’s diary entries was how often she discussed her habit or daily practice of writing. She described the importance of “snatching time” from the demands of daily life, perhaps after a mealtime, to sit down and write in her journal. There was a sense that this quotidian habit of building words became the fountainhead of her writing career. Since I began my (mostly) daily practice of getting words on the page, I can vouch that it has been the singular most important act of becoming a writer. I have learnt not to recoil at the simplistic phrasing or all-too-familiar choice of vocabulary, finding comfort that VW too found her diary entries to be sorely lacking in style and vocabulary (I acknowledge our bar of quality is drastically different!). I sense that these fragments of ours, if not caught in the moment when they are observed or felt, are doomed to be lost unless we stamp them in words. If we snatch enough time, what might we accrue? How often do we miss those opportunities for want of the ‘right’ journal or ‘beautiful’ pen? For years, I was a stationary-and-new-journal addict; elaborate distractions, it later turned out, from the humble act of simply writing some words down and seeing where they took me. I wasted years but if there is one lesson we can learn from VW, it is that snatching time to write is where it all begins.

2. On honing our craft

Her diary was a wonderful vessel for writing down the “fidgets” when she was feeling out of sorts, sadly a recurring theme through the years. Indeed, I got a strong sense that her diary-writing had often been a therapeutic act, with the fluidity of her phrasing the perfect device with which to capture the stream of her consciousness. Yet, the diaries proved far more than tools for wellbeing; they became the apparatus by which she honed the craft of writing. This worked in several ways: firstly, the act of writing on a regular basis for one’s own pleasures (or personal archive) “loosens the ligaments”, she claimed, or acted to “uncramp” her thoughts and words, thus enabling her hand and mind to connect, allowing the tumble of words to escape. She likened it to the place in which she practised her “scales”, a familiar method for pianists who require nimble fingers to prepare for the performance. Secondly, she knew that by writing freely in her diaries, without self-censorship or over-attention to style, she was able to sit with the chaos of her thoughts and make sense of them as her pen travelled across the page. She understood the importance of putting pen to paper, even when she didn’t feel like it, as once she started, she would end up somewhere she couldn’t have foreseen. The diary also became the place in which she would “always practice every style; it’s the only way to keep on the boil”. It was even a place in which she practised choosing the right word: I delighted in her observation “the Sun streams (no, never streams, floods rather)”. I have been a diary-writer for most of my life but in the past six years since I’ve established a more purposeful practice, I have seen my writing improve too.

3. When we hit a wall

Feeling overwhelmed with information, or the writing process, is a common feeling these days, and so it was that writing fatigue was a recurrent sensation for VW. Her descriptions would be comical if they were not so relatable: “One wants simply to sit on a bank and throw stones” or the perfect “I am going to wrap my brain in green dock leaves for a few days”, for her head was “a pudding”. When we hit this wall of fatigue that leaves us blocked or unable to write, how do we coax ourselves gently back to writing habit?

I found evidence of three remedies in VW’s diaries, and again I find comfort that I already make good use of all three. First, getting outside for a walk and getting some perspective on a writing problem would often be enough to rekindle her creative spark. Nature is a constant companion in her diaries: either employed as metaphor (“a very sparsely sown field’ when describing the white hair of her brother, or a story like a “profuse peony”) or as general observation of an atmosphere or time of year, as when she wrote soon into the war “I deserve a spring”, where she could relax into the “trance of pleasure”. Walking alone in nature affords time to observe, be in the moment, and attend to the great sweeping of time. Second, a creative hiatus could be swiftly moved along by reading a good book by an author she admired, taking note of how they used language, and simply copying their style until something clicked. Third, she warned against becoming too swept up in the externalised life, where we spend too much of our precious time viewing ourselves as others see us. Whilst we understand that we come into being through our relations with others, we must always counter this with quiet time alone. It is crucial that we learn to draw the scattered parts of ourselves back together as VW did and never to be afraid of the quiet times. I learnt a strong lesson from her diaries that it is imperative that we find our own personal prescription for interrupting the creative hiatus.

4. On living a balanced life

VW knew better than most how important it was to find balance in life. She would crave the stimulation of being in company, then become exhausted by it, and yearn for the sense of peace and contentment that came from her quiet days at home with Leonard, where they spent their time together yet reading and writing alone. This tension between the external and internal worlds feels so familiar to me, but as I grow older, I am happier with the balance I strike, between my externalised and internalised worlds.

VW argued we must all do battle with the “code of values” that we live by; a balancing scale on which we weigh up what’s best to do with our time. For her, it might be learning Russian, reading Wordsworth, darning stockings, or seeing friends. We make multiple decisions daily and weekly on what to do with our time, ensuring all the while that the checks and balances on our scale of values remain in fair working order. My scales include spending time with G, family or friends, yoga, walking, reading, writing, and of course the biggest weight on my current scales, working. I nod along in agreement as she claims there is always a sense that doing something for one’s own pleasure is suspect.

5. On accepting the labour of writing

Writing is hard work; we should never be under any illusion to the contrary, whatever stage we are at with our craft, or whatever accolade we might have achieved. From the lofty position of 2025, it is hard to imagine a line-up of great English writers without Virginia Woolf on the podium but, of course, it wasn’t always like this. Back in the early twentieth century, she was in the thick of it: working daily on her writing, coming up with ideas, living a public life, writing professionally for literary journals, and all in between debilitating bouts of severe illness and depression. If I ever find myself wondering at how difficult it is to sit down at my desk and work, I remember her claim that each day’s writing was “like a fence I have to ride at, my heart in my mouth till it’s over, and I’ve cleared, or knocked, the bar out”.

I learn that doubts are inevitable. They pervade the pages of her diary: the recurring melancholy that arrived with the onset of winter, the tragedy of a life lived with no children or friends too distant, the pain of “failing to write well”, the inevitability of growing old. I know all these doubts but also how the act of writing can diminish them. Her wariness of giving too much credence to her doubts is a salutary lesson in life, too. She knew how her doubts if given attention would affect others or become a “thing”. The insight here: our doubts never go away, don’t expect them to and take the boosts when they come, whether it is someone saying they love your writing, a positive review, or an article published.

There is a pervading sense of the physical pain and torment she faced every step of the way as she wrote novel after novel; the feverish act of formulating an idea, the relentless showing up at her desk to dash out the words, the months (and sometimes years) of work, the meticulous and slow editing process (and she typed it all out again, of course), before the final pain of exposure, the moment of setting it before Leonard to read. I see equal delight and despair in her diaries, the “never again, never again”, the flashes of brilliance, the setting to and breaking away. And yet she continued to write and so can we, if we accept that writing is labour.

6. On trusting the process

For someone in the early stages of writing her first draft of a novel, I can thank VW and her meticulous diary-keeping for insights into the process of writing a novel. There is the excitement at the start which over time quietens when the “doubts creep in”, followed by grit and “determination not to give in”, a desire to enjoy the process and yet – I am assured to read even she found it so - “writing is always difficult”. It was illuminating to see how she used her diary to chart the progress she was making. She would catalogue the wins, rehearse the doubts, and lay out the plans she had for completion. She would talk numbers often, setting herself the goal of editing ten pages a day, for as many days as required, for example. By taking note and reflecting at a certain stage of the process, she was able to go back to a similar point in a previous year or novel and know that this was to be expected and that she would made it through. Over the years, she became adept at spotting the patterns of novel-writing that can be obscured for those of us at the very start of our journeys. To know that she found the process difficult but kept going anyway, gives me enormous courage.

Importantly, I learn that the time it takes to complete a book will always be longer than expected. More than once, her ambitious words “I’ll dash it off by next week” turned into self-chastisement when, three weeks later, she would admit to having written nothing. For someone who began her novel in 2020, paused for too many years, then returned to it this summer, I cannot say how reassuring it is to have this insight. There is time, or rather every creation takes the time it takes, and there is little we can do when our lives get in the way, as they inevitably will.

7. On being inspired

Inspiration comes from many sources, but VW was deeply inspired by reading the work of great writers, like Bryon, Shakespeare, or Virgil. She was a prolific reader and literary critic and dissected texts to uncover the secrets of a writer’s style, turning then to her diary where she could practice the style. There is always someone with whom we compare ourselves, a writer who we can only read in awe at their genius on the page. For me, it might be Ronald Blythe, Robbie Cowen, Robert MacFarlane, or Virginia Woolf. For her, it was Shakespeare and his ability to “do things I could not in my wildest tumult and utmost press of mind imagine.” I think we might all secretly admit to our despair at ever being able to write as we wish: “why then should anyone else attempt to write?” Our world is infinitely richer because she continued to write, despite the comparison.

It can prove challenging for the writer to read for pleasure, she admitted: “I believe one could get back to the older rapture of reading if one did not write. The difficulty is, writing makes one brain so hot it can’t settle to read; and then when the heat goes, I’m so tired in the head I can only skirmish.” At the same time, her perennial advice when a writer found themselves stuck was to read something, do something – “and off winged my mind along those wild uplands. A hint for the future. Always relieve pressure by a flight. Always violently turn the pillow: hack an outlet. Often a trifle does.” When reading failed, she would get outside to walk or sit by the fire: “only the fire sets me dreaming – of all the things I meant to write.”

8. Learn to navigate post-modernity

It has been over a century since VW wrote her diaries; modernity has been and gone, and we are scooting fast through post-modernity. But times really don’t change much for the observant and sensitive writer. There is the familiar waking with the sense that “all England [is] spoilt: terror at night at things generally going wrong in the universe” (25 May, 1932) or when we see “all the violence and unreason crossing in the air; ourselves small; the outside; something terrifying; unreason”, followed swiftly by the writer’s salve, “Shall I make a book out of this? It would be a way of bringing order and speed again into my world”.

She lived through challenging times. In the early months of the second world war, she felt that “all the blood has been let out of common life” and her ability to write felt stultified. Stepping out for a walk brought her back to the moment, writing later: “and for the hundredth time I repeat any idea is more real than any amount of war misery. And what one’s made for. And the only contribution one can make—this little pitter patter of ideas is my whiff of shot in the cause of freedom. So I tell myself.” (6 Sept, 1939). Like us, she was bewildered at the pace of change, dizzy in a terrifying modern world, the feeling of dislocation and disassociation ever close by. How often do we read similar accounts these days? And there it is, written in a diary over a hundred years ago, the words of a woman trying to make sense of the senseless. I wonder at the inevitability of it all and whether we can accept it and anchor ourselves back to the material? The insight in times of uncertainty, political turmoil, and hatred: pick up your pen, write your way through the dark times, for you never know who will find comfort in your words.

9. Knowing why we write

The insights so far have started from the premise that writing is important, but why do we write and why is it important to know why we write? It was a question that VW often asked herself. Sometimes it was simply “the fact of my own pleasure in the art”. Other times, she announced it was only through writing that she felt whole, but there was another reason hidden within her pages. It was the importance of attempting to pen the ineffable. What do I mean by that? VW described the ambiguous concept of something there and, sometimes, simply it or the thing itself. Perhaps it makes more sense as a process: of chancing upon moments, images, or feelings that evoke a sense of the divine, or beauty, or one-ness. If we don’t believe in God, then we are left struggling with how to name this thing, of course, but writers and artists through the ages have attempted to do just that. Over and again, I return to the simple justification for why I write: my job is to notice and capture it somehow, shining it back to the world for all who read our words to nod along with us, murmuring yes, I see that too.

I’ve known for some time now that we stand a greater chance of touching this thing when we are calm or quiet, or out walking or being in nature. VW wrote that the “look of things has a great power over me”, which helps me understand why a certain phrase stooped me in my tracks:

we had tea from bright blue cups under the pink light of the giant hollyhock

Why did this simple phrase move me so? Was it the redemptive contrast with her diary entry two months prior, complaining that all felt “insipid and worthless”, and admonishing herself for “always spouting words”? That she reached such an existential brink of emptiness, “walking the strip of pavement over the abyss”, then could find delight in one simple tableau of colour and light? How could she know that over a century later, these words of late spring would wing their way into my morning when the world had grown dim? Oh, let us never be in doubt of the power of writing such moments.

Over the years, her desire grew to record the thing itself (the exact way that rooks tumbled in the sky, for example) and I recognise that urge within me too and wonder what it is. When we write, perhaps we should remember that we are forever “holding the thing; – all the things – the innumerable things – together.” (31 May, 1933)

Reading A Writer’s Diary was like having an intimate conversation with Virgina Woolf. At times, I felt like a voyeur, digging about in the emotional depths of her life. It also reminded me a little of when I first watched Titanic in the late ‘90s, knowing full well what happened in the end, but entranced by the very living-ness of the characters on the screen as they hurtled towards their fate. As I turned the final pages of VW’s diaries, I feared I would see signs of a life becoming untenable, unravelling to its inevitable conclusion but, instead, just days before she took her own life, she was still writing, full of life and anguish, thought and insight, living a curious life in pursuit of purpose and proportion, in the attempt to get to the thing, the ineffable thing.

What can we learn from her final words?

I mark Henry James’s sentence: observe perpetually. Observe the oncome of age. […] Observe my own despondency. By that means it becomes serviceable. Or so I hope. I insist upon spending this time to the best advantage. I will go down with my colours flying. Suppose I bought a ticket the museum; biked in daily and read history. […] Occupation is essential. (8 March, 1941)

That we must always live in hope for a future. We must always keep ourselves occupied. We must observe. Walk. Talk with friends. Be curious. Write.

Woolf, L. (ed.) (1953). A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf. Hogarth Press.

I forget each year that I must undergo The Transition. From summer into winter, from light into darkness, from hope into gloom. I wrote about this last year, and I am sure to write about it next year, but there is something about the newness of dark shadows that catches me unawares each year. The recurrent sense that I am walking a precarious line.

It helps that our house is orientated like a compass. It faces due south, and the rear windows look north towards the village, where strong southern light illuminates the church and far emerald hills. My office and our bedroom face east, the space of mornings. The bathroom and kitchen have windows and rooflights which gather up the western afternoon and evening light. There is a moment in the year, well two moments, as we near the spring or vernal Equinox, when the evening sun is at the perfect angle to stream through our opaque bathroom window. At a certain time in the early evening, sun rays skim our neighbours’ roof and stream through the ragged branches of the old apple tree, painting onto the window a fuzzy fawn-grey simulacrum of the scene outside. One evening in a brief break from the gloom, I looked out and caught a glimmer of movement, the shadow puppet of a small bird. I saw the blurry grey outline of his beak, his legs, his smooth back, his keep-up-rightness. Life (and light) at the pivot-point, poised, balanced.

Mornings began cool and dark before the light mustered, subdued and the palest blue beyond the blinds, with none of the rousing clamour of the summer’s morning light. Darkness edged nearer at the beginning, and end, of our days. There was thunder one day and I walked up to the moor, skirting the luminous edge of the blackest sheet of cloud.

I began the subversive gratitude practice led by Jeannine Ouellette of Writing in the Dark and my journal this month was peppered with reluctant gratitude for the less pleasant and joyful moments of my days. I wrote that I was grateful for getting caught in the downpour at the end of the previous day, for a long while walking the line between vast open blue sky and towering clouds, black-bellied, with wraith-like sheets of rain wafting towards me. I was grateful that with only twelve days of rain, the dry-ness that dusted those long summer days was long gone. Everywhere seemed to spring leaks: the start-of-semester staff conference was hampered by a leak in the adjoining theatre, there was a mysterious and unfathomable leak in my neighbour’s house, and one in her new partner’s roof. We tramped damp grit and fallen leaves into the house.

There was one long productive Sunday, when a front of heavy rain passed through all day. It cleared at half six and the low meagre gold sun forced itself in stark angles at the end of roads, into alleyways, upon church tower clock faces. We walked up to the luminous field, its air still and fresh from the rain, the green rising to a wall of black cloud at the very top. It produced a startling effect, a flipped picture in which the sky provided the undertones and the hedgerows and hawthorn berries provided the source of light.

September was the month of red and green, in the striped skins of the apples plucked fat from our tree, in the deep fuscia and lobelia flowers against the green quarry face, in the blood-drops of hawthorn berries against a charcoal sky. We filled our kitchen table with apples that we peel and core, chop and steam, and bag for the freezer. Weeks and weeks’ worth of packaged fruit sunshine to see me through the winter.

I was grateful for September sunshine coming after three weeks of heaped clouds, close mizzle and cold gusty breezes. I was grateful for black mornings. I was grateful for the cold. I was grateful for old friends who know me and my family and our shared history. I was grateful for a warm bed and heating at a flick of a switch and for clever people who understand philosophy. I was grateful for baby-blue skies and low brutal sunlight that cast long shadows into the edges of my vision.

I was grateful for the headache that greeted me as I woke. For the chill morning blue and the warm evening gold. For the jackdaws that foraged on the road. For the collegiality of people, doing their best for the university, our city, the students. For the spider’s web wedged in the doorway of the workshop, which each morning was laced with shining silver dew-drops like a bag chandelier strung with crystals, sagging under its own opulence. For the jovial sight of Hedge’s (our resident hedgehog who visits every evening) backside trotting across the deck towards the yew tree. And for those three pristine flowers that rose unexpected from my hosta on the porch, a white shock out of time.

I was grateful that we hurtled towards October. I was grateful for this gentle segue into winter. I was (and always will be) grateful for rudbeckias, which beamed their yellow luminosity across our garden, lighting my path as I walked the eternal line between light and dark.

The month begins with a spur-of-the-moment decision to go to see the show Three Acres and a Cow in Plymouth, described as the history of ‘land rights and protest in folk song and story’. The phrase ‘three acres and a cow’ turns out not only to be a song that we were all enlisted to sing together but also a slogan used by a group of radical land reformists in the 1880s to promote the idea of a smallholding – and therefore the means to be self-sufficient - for everyone. It seems such an antiquated idea now and I wonder at an era where the idea was entertained as a serious proposition of liberal politics. I run the calculation for today, totalling up the acreage of land in the UK (around 60 million acres) and dividing by the population (pushing 70 million), and figure it would not be possible to have even one acre each now. The population at the time it was proposed was a surprising 35 million people, so barely two acres each, even then. I wonder where they thought the rest would come from, until I realise it was likely to have been a policy only for men and their families.

The two people in the show walk and sing us through a washing-line history of a thousand years of English land ownership, revealing the evolution of the shocking concentration of land (and therefore wealth) in the hands of the aristocracy. We learn that our modern scourge of scarce affordable housing is just one ongoing legacy of the mass migration from the land during the parliamentary enclosures in the late 17th and 18th centuries. The woman closed the first half of the show with a reading of John Clare’s poem The Mores, about the loss of the common land following the enclosures in his lifetime:

In the blue mist the horizon’s edge surrounds

Now this sweet vision of my boyish hours

Free as spring clouds and wild as summer flowers

Is faded all – a hope that blossomed free,

And hath been once, no more shall ever be

Inclosure came and trampled on the grave

Of labour’s rights and left the poor a slave

Over the interval, it comes to me in an epiphany that this legacy of enclosure lies at the heart of why I love living in the far west of Devon so much. With still-common land within walking distance, grazed by sheep and ponies and cattle, I have the good fortune of that ‘sweet vision’ whenever I wish for it. That ‘unbounded freedom’, its ‘only bondage’ the ‘circling sky’. I spent my childhood in Gloucestershire, a place that kept me out, with its Private signs everywhere, its blocked footpaths and barbed wire fences, so I know well how most of the country has lost this freedom we have the privilege of knowing here. At the end of the show, they leave us with Rebecca Solnit's words about the power of story to remind us what we've lost. I find some comfort that this Substack has been carrying the words of this same story in some small way.

The next day, still mulling this sense of history, I join a sensory walk up to Sharpitor near Princetown with writer Kirsteen McNeish, organised by the Dartmoor Preservation Association. A key part of their mission is to encourage and facilitate access to the moor for all people and I find it timely after the revelations of the previous evening. I scribble some words. Harlequin fields lie before us, diminished of water, patterned with cow-like shadows crossing the empty moorland. Close by, there are white plates of lichen, flecked with black, scored in the granite. Almost out of earshot, there is a distant youthful burr of a motor. The sun deepens the shadows in the sweep of land, the light luscious and glossy like butter. I sweep my gaze down through the rocks and catch a sheep looking at me, holding my gaze for a moment before turning her face towards the sun. The granite is wild against the molinia grass, like a tossed sea of terrible peaks and troughs. The land is tilted, unbounded, there is no container to hold us. Silence filters through our fingertips and falls at last. The wind teases us. I tilt with the land, between the moon the lake across the sky. We come together for the briefest moment: writer, photographer, anxious wife, horse-carer, mother, before turning for home.

I dream later of horizons, orientating towards the dark.

The land bestows us with gifts.

On most of the walks I take in those middle days of August I remember a Tupperware to carry home the blackberries. There is an evening when we walk through fields closed in by the mizzle, another that glows when we take the path to the top field where we find handfuls. The air offers up a chattering clutch of swallows or martens, I can't tell which, wrapping up summer as they skitter and dart around my ears. I wonder if they are coming to snatch up the insects I have disturbed from the bushes. Some leaves have turned their faces already, always a kernel of the coming season in the peak of this one. The sunset hovers around 9pm for what feels like weeks and I feel the pause, the collective holding of breath. The bushes gift us blackberries for weeks: I soak them until the insects yield their grip, I make jam and apple and blackberry crumble with the sweetest white nectarines, and I sprinkle the seeping berries on my breakfast. I know they taste all the sweeter for their momentary appearance at our table.

There is one hot weekend in mid-August spent clearing and cleaning, where I prepare for a busy week ahead. In the early morning before the sun reaches its fierce fullness, I clear the path down to the foot of our garden where the gunnera lives, in readiness for the tree surgeons coming to fell a tree. I appreciate the irony of writing about trees being felled on my drive into Plymouth, when I am complicit in taking one down in my own garden, but this is a conifer-turned-bully planted in the 1960s, crowding out the rest of the garden with its black shadow and drifts of acidic needles. It is time for the light to return to the garden. There is just one pink seed head of teasel this year (my first ever Substack post described the local connection to the wool industry that teasel signifies). I endure three hot hours of scratches and spikes from rose thorns and brambles, to clear a path down the stone steps. A robin joins me on a low branch at my feet, swaying on his tiny stick legs in the warm breeze. The two tree surgeons are grateful for the ease of access, when they work through one of the hottest days of the year two days later.

The land continues to offer its gifts, to me and to Amazon delivery drivers. I discover they like our pears and clear the lower branches of fruit whilst we were inside. Later in the month, I discover that my dear red apples have vanished too. I am surprisingly cross, then feel instantly guilty for all that I own and covet (because, well, see land access above).

Water ~~

The tall golden grass in the old airfield sways beneath blackening skies and I admire the Wyeth-like landscape framed by the old oil containers, until the airfield is mown, reduced to a crispy stubble. There has been very little water this summer and although there is no declaration of official drought in Devon, the earth dusts over and the leaves prematurely drop from the great chestnut in the field, crackling under our feet as we walk. There has been no swimming for me either in the dry summer, except one short dip on our bike ride out to Looe in early June. Instead, it has been a focused season, one spent close to home, dreaming of trips in the soon-to-be-finished campervan, to dip my toes in chalk rivers, to see the heather on the Cairngorms. I save places on Google maps in ever-expanding lists. I must know on a cellular level that I am in need of water, as all living creatures are in these desiccated times, for I choose The Flow by Amy-Jane Beer to read for my next book. I learn of rivers I have never visited, canoeing, the perils and magic of water, the ease of flow.

Then a few days ago, after what feels like weeks (months) of dry weather, the sky collapses and rain falls in torrents, soaking every inch of everywhere. When I step out of my office at lunchtime in a pause between showers, the air has reached almost tropical humidity. I stand by the fruit trees, where every leaf sparkles, each vermillion hawthorn berry is a perfect sphere with its own lens of water, each one blinking in the light, a scene in constant movement. And there is a sound that I haven’t heard in a long time. The sound of millions of drips of water, caught for a moment in the trees, finding their way down to the soil in a lavish symphony of patter, where each one will replenish the life-giving moisture required by every root and insect. Later, I can almost feel the new sheen of life vibrating from each leave, stem and flower.

Air {O}

In these final few days of August, there is the tiniest shift in the quality of the air. I sense it when I spend the holiday weekend close to the ground, handing tools down to G where he lies beneath the van fitting a self-levelling suspension system. I sense it when I crook my neck to study the moss and lichen, the miniature grasses that have made their intimate home in our gravel. I sense it in the honeysuckle air above our heads.

I sense it when I walk up to the moor, along the narrow lane where, for the long months of summer, a group of small chattering birds have greeted us, ducking and diving from hedgerow to hedgerow. As we approach the place where the telegraph wire housed starlings a few weeks back, we see a series of small dark shadows, like black tags spaced out neatly in line, and decide it is time to identify them once and for all. We open the Merlin app and wait for their chatter to return but they’re watching us approach. We squint up to look at their underbellies, white with a dark head, but my friend is certain they have no long tail feathers, the sign of the swallow. I look up at the perfect moment to see one fly feet above me, this one with two long tail feathers like a Victorian gentleman's moustache, so I am convinced they are barn swallows. We are near barns, it follows, but I need evidence. As we walk beneath the wire, they rise and tumble off in all directions, leaving me with four brief seconds of video, two of which they are still sunning themselves on the wire. Back home, I study the video, pausing it frame by frame, waiting for the tell-tale silhouette.

Ten birds with no long tail feathers. I look up the RSPB website and it informs me that young swallows have no tail feathers, only growing them later. Then, there it is - when I slow the video right down - the last two to lift off from the wire have long tails! Mum and dad. We had disturbed a large family gathering. I am delighted to have solved the puzzle once and for all, and beyond delighted to know our local barns have supported a whole family of the enchanting creatures. They will be leaving us soon and I wish them a fair wind.

Summer is taking her leave, can you feel her kissing your cheeks, offering her parting gift of this sweetest of air?

I thought I would take this opportunity to revisit what I set out to do when I started writing this Substack. For those who haven’t read my ‘About’ page, you might wonder why I chose Three Wild Steps as a name. It began as an Instagram feed in 2018, before morphing into this Substack in 2022 but if I was choosing a name now, I don’t think I would pick it again. It reflected a moment in time when I was making a conscious decision to live a little slower and engage more with my place. I had left my academic job at the university (not the one I am at now) and in the first few days wondering what on earth I had done, it was my short walks out into my local place that brought me solace and a sense of ‘rightness’. The name arose from that early sentiment and it is still an intention that I hold close when I write, so I haven’t felt deeply moved to change the name. Let me try and explain a little more about this process by unpicking the name.

I need no-one to tell me that Wild is a contested word and concept: one that has shifted in intent and meaning over the decades, and that continues to shape-shift as our understanding of our relationship with nature, and culture itself, changes. For me, though, the word still offers a metaphorical resistance to the structures and strictures of society and a counterweight to our appalling collective relationship with nature. The word also honours my local companions or co-creators in my writing - the plants, flowers, birds, and animals – as well as the sense of a landscape that has refused to keep step with the full ravages of progress.

As every month does when you look closely, July offered those fragments of wildness. There was my encounter with our apple tree. For the first time since we planted it, the tree is heavy with blush fruit, a favourite haunt of the local wasps who have nested in the quarry face. I picked one last night, it took ten or so full turns for it to release its stem into my fingers, and I surprised a wasp that had crawled deep into a hole on the other side. I let it wander off, giddy with sugar, then took it to the kitchen to slice it thinly. That’s our soil and sunshine you’re tasting, said G, watching over my shoulder. And, oh, did it taste sweet. I am happy to sacrifice a few apples to the wasps’ drowsy cause, but I have longed for my own tree of eating apples. Those fruits will be mine.

There were those hot days, when sunlight crept early into the bedroom. Blinds soon shut again to keep the house cool for each day dawns the same. Clear fresh-blue skies, pigeons calling across the valley, wrens piercing the air, rooks cawing in the trees. There was that time driving home across the wide flat common, its short grass studded into the far distance with thousands of yellow common cat’s ear and tormentil. Picture-book perfect cumulus clouds were painted in the hazy northeast sky and sheep were folded into the shade of hawthorn trees, escaping the shimmering heat. There was that one dead tree, a macabre and stark silhouette against the gentle sky, each desiccated smooth branch hung with black birds.

There was that day that my colleague and I discovered an abandoned playing field at the edge of our university campus, two goal posts rising above frothy swathes of creeping thistle releasing their seed into the warm air in drifts. We startled a flock of small birds who rose as one creature up into the sky, there for a moment, gone before we could know their names. As we pushed through the spiky thistles at ankle height, a rustle ahead revealed two fallow deer leaping away towards the hospital. A delightful wild mini-safari at lunchtime, only a few hundred metres from our offices.

The wild - often that simple and fleeting reminder that something other-than-human is happening - can be found anywhere.

The next word is Steps and again, I like the fluidity and multiple meanings in this simple word. I measure my steps each day, aiming for the elusive 10,000 of the things. One thing that has remained true in my evolving Substack has been my focus for my writing, on the juncture between place and selfhood, memory and identity. My posts have often featured my literal steps out into the world, walking with nature, to understand and know my place and landscape better. I wrote on an early post on Instagram (2018), as I was finding my feet as an observer and writer of nature:

Why do I always forget how healing a walk in nature is? The winds are southerly and warm, over 50mph, but walking along the lanes around my village, the Devon banks sheltering me from all but the sound. By the time I found the berries, little starlets on the road winking at me, I felt whole again. Note to self: when the restless doubts stir, put your boots on and get out. Coming home is good, now.

Since then, I have always made efforts to step out into the world. I have posted accounts of my walks over the past two years along the South West Coast Path in Cornwall, from Plymouth to Looe, and from Looe to Par the following year. Steps also happen in places and my Substack is a record of place, a topological archive, and an account of its inhabitants. In this coming year, I am likely to be posting from further afield but these past years have been spent mostly in my local place, with short trips to Cornwall or Brittany.

The third word in the name is, well, Three – I liked the ring of the number, it had a shape to it, and I knew too well that it always takes more than one step to form a habit. Three is also a number that invokes spirit as well as materiality of things in the world. Of course, it has been three years since I began my Substack and on adding up the number of posts since July 2022, I discover with a there you go kind of feeling that this is my thirty-third post. I like the resonance of the number ‘3’ and I have read that three was once considered a magical number, which represents wholeness, abundance and wisdom. I don’t know about the latter two, my posts have hardly been prolific nor full of wisdom or use to anyone by myself, but I like the idea of wholeness. Writing ourselves whole. Bringing in those outliers that rattle around in our orbit and yet, when we look them in the eye, turn out to be the main show all along.

The number signifies the importance of habit and discipline of writing in my journal or field notebook. I record fragments of what I have observed, writing the details as vividly as I can, but not worrying about the flow of sentences or choice of words too much. I also found writing five things of note in my early morning hour devoted to my own practice yielded thousands of words over a season. It has not always been this way, however. In my post Small Things (November 2023) I shared my response to the perennial challenge of every writer - finding time. In my post Keeping on eye on things (February 2024), I describe my morning writing discipline for the first time. It has proved time and again to be the engine that drives the production of my words here.

Fragments of July. There are always fragments to notice afforded by walks in the long deep evening sunshine. The hints of dying leaves already, a cluster of red-russet oak leaves amidst the fresh green ferns, Hart’s tongue, cleaver, hemp agrimony (thoroughwort). Death is always at work amongst the living. The towering bulging rain clouds, another evening, beams of sunlight limning the far fields beyond Horrabridge. The gentle slope up to the bold tops of the moor. The bracken is chest-high, and one frond shines gold amidst the luscious green. Rust-brown cattle lie on the common in a loose cluster, giant creatures with eyes half-closed in the ecstasy of chewing grass, my beloved studs of tormentil lining the worn paths with acid yellow. Everywhere is silent and warm, the air close amongst the deep greens and sand grasses, mixed with pink-tipped agrimony. The slow tilt towards the mean side of the year is beginning.

Fragments. I spend two days in the urban midlands, attending the walima of my close friend’s son (akin to a wedding reception) in a grand ballroom in an old industrial estate in Digbeth, Birmingham. I changed into my shalwar kameez under the watchful eyes of a Peaky Blinder. I drove back later to a soulless but comfortable Holiday Inn on a roundabout outside Gloucester, where I caught the final 30 minutes of extra time of the Women’s Euro Final between the England ‘Lionesses’ and Spain, and watch in awe as they win on penalties. I smile broadly to myself, girl power, finally.

The next morning I took an early morning walk around my old home-town, weaving a route through quiet streets around the cathedral green, Bishop Hooper’s lodgings, Shire Hall, College Green, the old Sainsbury's supermarket in Hare Lane where I had my first Saturday job as a teenager, its roof hanging off, the decay on the streets all too palpable. There was the old Regal cinema, now a Weatherspoon’s pub, where we watched Return of the Jedi when it came out. King’s Square where we would hang out as teenagers, all its fountains now dried up and paved over. The old Debenhams was a hive of construction activity, being repurposed as a city campus for the University of Gloucestershire. Maybe there is some hope of regeneration. I felt sad for my old town, such beautiful buildings, such history. A childhood of places etched into memory.

I will leave you with the words of Mary Oliver (2009) in her poem To Begin With, the Sweet Grass. It so beautifully articulates what I have tried to do here on this Substack: pay attention, look closely, record what I see, seek meaning beyond the material. Step after step, into the wild world.

Behold, I say---behold

the reliability and the finery and the teachings

of this gritty earth gift.

[…]

For one thing leads to another.

Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.

Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

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Just sometimes, weather, place and imagination converge in glorious medley. My short drive from my friend’s house in Nailsworth to my other friend’s house in Prestbury, barely an hour long, was one such occasion. I could have taken the longer but faster route on the motorway, but instead I chose to follow the Painswick Road to Cheltenham, an old favourite from many years ago. I look forward to reading Rob Cowen’s book The North Road, where he follows the A1 up through England, and I understand well the imaginative power that a road can exert on you. The Painswick Road is the local name for the A46, a main road starting in Bath and heads north-east following the Cotswold escarpment towards Cheltenham. From there it skirts Evesham and Stratford-upon-Avon, both of which have childhood resonance, before heading into the less-familiar land past Warwick. It loses its way a little around the East Midlands conurbations of Coventry and Leicester, before a strong straight finish through Newark, Lincoln and culminating in the east port of Grimsby. A road that dissects the country in half, perhaps even along ancient Mercia and Anglian lines. Perhaps one day I’ll travel the whole route, but on that midsummer day, I picked the road up in Stroud.

Stroud is full of unsettling memories, for it was our first home together after a traumatically unsuccessful attempt to secure residency in Australia, where most of G’s family lived, and where he had spent his childhood. I passed Folly Lane where we renovated our first house together and from where it was a two-minute walk to my brief job in a parent education charity based in an old stone building at the foot of the hill (one of seven in Stroud), with the lovely Debbie and Deb. Here I reeled from the upheaval of leaving my home and work in the Lake District, but the place began the slow process of making home together and finding a place to belong.

The road winds up through close woodland to Painswick, where the buildings on the narrow main street were almost luminous in the morning sun, like the Cotswold stone had some inner light it was gifting back to the street. Two women in smart linen dresses shone as they walked down the narrow pavement. My family came from around this northern edge of the Cotswold escarpment and from the many journeys I made into the Cotswolds when they were alive, I recall the light and this glow of stone. I was tempted to turn off at Stamage’s Lane to find the stone house that we almost bought to renovate, the one that slipped away, but the road pulled me on, past the sign to Cranham where as a teenager I tackled the Cotswold Marathon even with friends, 30 miles walked overnight in February along the Cotswold Escarpment from nearby Gloucester. I recall I made it three-quarters of the way before the knee-high snow we had to plough through in soggy boots got the better of me. Checking Google, I find the event is still going strong and astounded to find the Sealey Trophy (my family surname), with its little leather boot, is still being handed out to the fastest winners. There’s even a Risk Assessment with what to do in Extreme Weather, an administrative detail that was sorely lacking in 1984.

I'd been reading Laurie Lee’s delightful As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and back on the road, I looked across to the ridge of the Slad Valley where he left his mother waving farewell:

I looked back again and saw the gold light die behind her; then I turned the corner, passed the village school, and closed that part of my life for ever.

The road wound up through the woodland, with fields of gold and fawn reaching out to the right across the valley. Heat bubbled up from grassy fields, sheep hid in shady hedgerows. It resonated with Lee’s description of the land he crossed heading east:

White elder-blossom and dog-roses hung in the hedges, blank as unwritten paper, and the hot empty road – there were few motor cars then – reflected Sunday’s waste and indifference. High sulky summer sucked me towards it, and I offered no resistance at all.

It was a scene unchanged since my childhood, and perhaps even since the 1930s when Lee walked to Spain. Unchanged in appearance perhaps but, under the surface, beyond the hedgerows, the world always changing, compressing, ageing. Further down the road, a vast flat plain - the site of Gloucester and its close neighbour Cheltenham - opened to my left and as I dropped down the escarpment into Shurdington, where the heat intensified in a moment. Whole fields were consumed in hot dusty noise, being swallowed by the construction of new builds. I entered Cheltenham along the Bath Road, its busy narrow street where I had shopped and revelled with family and friends in years past, then drove alongside the hospital where my dear great-uncle and aunty died decades ago, one by one, taking Laurie Lee’s old Gloucestershire with them. I was deeply rooted in this old world by the time I reached Rachel’s house in Prestbury. But, then, we whiled away the hot afternoon in the shade of an umbrella, first in the Royal Oak, then in her garden, and the future hurtled towards us, as we shared our own progress, plans and dreams.

Much of my writing in this Substack is about place and how I have come to know my parish over the years through my walks. But over the past three years, I have come to know my place in a different, more expansive, way, through cycling. The pace at which we travel through a landscape has a deep bearing on how we experience that place. On the slowest end of travel, the pleasures of walking have been well charted by many authors but on the speedier end, driving for pleasure probably ceased in the late ‘30s soon after the Michelin Road Maps and travel guides were published, enticing motorists out for spins in the countryside. When I was a child it was still normal to hear older people speak about going out for a Sunday drive, but the idea that one might take the car out for a spin for pleasure these days is almost impossible to imagine. It has been a joy to rediscover cycling in my middle years, for it surely finds the sweet spot between the two: slow enough to allow me to really sense the place as I travel through it and powerful enough to take me miles further than my feet can in a day.

The concept of place is a fluid and slippery one. On the one hand, it is a physical reality full of visceral details - rocks, tarmac, signs, buildings, trees, bodies of water. On the other, we cannot escape from the ways in which we construct places in our minds and the representations of place we encounter. Each physical place, rooted in geology and cloaked in human and more-than-human endeavours over millennia, has its own imagined geography. My earlier account of driving along the A46 is one such imagined geography, but allow me share another.

One of our cycling ambitions has been to circumnavigate the lower Tamar estuary, a route of around fifty miles. After a hiatus of almost four years, I recently made the decision to complete my two-thirds written novel, which I have set on the Cornish banks of the Tamar. There is a small section of land, between Cotehele in the north and St. Mellion in the south, which I have never visited in all my years living in West Devon, and it is here that I have set my novel. Our cycle trip around the Tamar would take in this place, making the journey one with high stakes attached, as my physical encounter with place rubbed up against my imagined geography. My deepest and unspoken fear was that the veil would be lifted by the mundanity of a place that was no different to all the others and that my imagination, stilted at best, would find it near impossible to continue with my writing.

It was a particularly fine day shortly before the solstice that G and I set off with the aim of completing the Tamar circuit that would see us cross over the Tamar Bridge into Cornwall in the south, travel up the western banks of the river as it narrows towards the northern crossing at Gunnislake, and back into Devon. Much of our chosen route would pass through the Tamar National Landscape, an area of outstanding natural beauty – this map shows it off a treat (if you want to have a sneak review of where my novel is set, it is in the small green bulge beneath Cotehele ;) ). After a brief dip in the sea near the Waterfront pub on West Hoe in Plymouth, we cycled up through the western towns of Stonehouse and Devonport, formerly the Three Towns of Plymouth. We shot past the grey granite walls of the docks hiding their dark military secrets and onto the Tamar Bridge before we knew it, startled by the ease with which the cycle lanes had carried us safely through the busy streets.

On the other side in Saltash, we peeled off the bridge and down an old steep hill towards the waterfront, pausing to take in the river view from the ‘other side’ in a small park, with Victorian ironwork lampposts and benches. We found Pill Lane on the northern edge of the town and picked up a narrow muddy bridleway through dense woodland that hooked up to the cycle path on the footbridge over the A38 at Carkeel roundabout. Another recharging pit stop at Costas (we have electric bikes), a brief stop to lust after the new bikes at Certini’s, then back deep into the shady leafy countryside alongside the river. Down through the strangely named Botus Fleming where a large house was still being built on the small parcel of land we had almost bought over ten years ago. The air was still and hot by now, the sun reaching its zenith in the sky, but the deep lanes along the river were deliciously cool. We couldn’t avoid a short and alarming spell on the dusty hot tarmac of the main road north at St Mellion, as large heavy trucks squeezed past us, but then we dipped out again and found Crocadon Farm, a beautiful old farm building, now a restaurant and café, set in acres of waving golden grass on the slopes of the river. I could barely tear myself away from the cool interior of the stone café, with its door open to the baking hot courtyard beyond, but soon we were back cycling through delightful lanes down to Halton Quay.

We were entering the places in which I have set my novel and I think I held my breath as we sped down the steep hill, the river shining in brief glimpses through gateways and over hedgerows. Halton Quay has a pivotal role in the story, and my characters live and work amidst the cottages and fields around there, so this was the moment of truth. I propped my bike on the dusty gravel near the river and watched its brown expanse slide past me. The air was heavy with heat, but it was still, quiet, just the faint sound of a breeze in the trees behind us. It was an enchanting place. By some strange combination of intuition, close study of Ordnance Survey maps, and luck, I had chosen an enchanting setting in which to express the core theme of my novel: how being close to nature transforms us.

The lanes up to Cotehele are the lanes along which my characters walk, and I had an uncanny sense of travelling through the lanes of my own imagination. After an ice-cream stop at Cotehele Quay, we struggled up the lanes to Gunnislake before being rewarded by the long steady sweep down into the town. Back across the Tamar, far narrower now, amongst the traffic, heart pumping as we climbed the hill on the other side, up onto the Bere Peninsula, back in Devon. It was an easy ride down the backbone of the land towards Denham Bridge, which crosses the Tavy hurtling towards the Tamar, and one final slow climb home back home to our village.

Since that day, my mind has re-arranged itself and a fuller picture of the Tamar valley has emerged to take its place in my writing bones. It is a rich and complex picture, a lived experience now. It is etched with deep lanes, golden fields and old apple orchards and, now and then, there are glimpses of the slow quiet brown river down there in the valley, doing its old appearing and disappearing trick, its ancient work of gathering and carrying the water of this land, out beyond the people places, out to where it meets the salt, out to the ocean.

Time played tricks on me this month. It was a month that sped by. It was a long luxurious month filled with green and yellow, white and purple. It was a gust of moments passing through for not quite long enough. It was the steady tug-of-war between moments of joyful life returning and the distracting churn of modern life. When I caught myself veering towards the latter camp, I tried to slow down enough to simply be with the plants. But I found myself bored with the old story we tell ourselves that is almost kitsch in its normality; time passes, blah blah, moments must be captured, yeah whatever, stop and smell the roses, obvs.

I have just finished reading To The River by Olivia Laing and I was struck by the way in which she manages to variously describe the recurring theme of how we live our brief human lives between two shadows or two winters. We do not know what came before and we do not know what comes after. It may sound kitsch and cliché, but universal truths so often are. Our lives our brief (in relation to the existence of the planet) and we owe it to ourselves to sit up and take note where we can. Laing recalls the writings of Bede, where he presents the metaphor of the swift flight of the sparrow through the mead-hall, where it briefly leaves the wintry wasteland for the light and warm fellowship of the hall, before it flies back out into the winter night again. It’s a sombre image but one that I like. It is our duty to be as conscious as we can for our own flight, so I want to chart my own oh-so-fleetingly-brief stay in the mead-hall of May.

It was early in the month, when hot sunshine was still a novel experience, that I drove across the bare expanse of shining moor and dropped down into the streets of Exeter that teemed with the almost-bare bodies of students. I had a vibrant PhD supervision meeting with my new PhD student in the Boston Tea Party and recalled those flashes of clarity and intellect I had been gifted with my own supervisors almost fifteen years ago. There was the lazy afternoon that followed, spent on the terrace of my parents’ house, mesmerised by the sparkling sea beneath the shade of a bright yellow umbrella. When we were eating that evening, we marvelled at a rook leave its perch on the roof above us to swoop down and gulp a wasp out of the air, the precision of its beak silhouetted against the sinking sun.

There was that first bike ride up the rough track to Sheepstor. After weeks of dry weather, the ground was firm enough for the venture and we ate sandwiches at the top, looking west to Cornwall, before riding down through a soft plain of Molinia grass that felt like sailing through gentle waves on the sea. There were iridescent beech trees awaiting us at the foot of the slope, gleaming in the sheltered valley where silence fallen. There was no human in sight save a solitary green tent over near Sharp Tor. The steady pedalling around Burrator was blissful: the heady scent of golden azaleas lifted through the air and the deep blue of the reservoir glistening through the trees left me dreaming of Italian lakes.

Above all, the world should be home, said poet Stephen Spender. We remade our May world as home, different from last year but with flashes of delight. It was a world of ramsons passing, May blossom emerging and fading, and forget-me-nots sheening blue, of apple blossom, bright yellow shocks of gorse and the tiniest fronds of bracken unfurling amidst the ruin of last autumn. We went out on our bikes when we could: one time in the quiet coolness up on the common, pedalling through sunbursts and shadows of oak and frothy hawthorn, down through tight dusty paths and down through the woods to the River Walkham. We took the familiar path back across the common from Long Ash and down the east lane to our village, through high hedges of pink, blue and yellow, and the briefest glimpse of the Tamar. I cannot recall what we spent our other days doing, but we were busy, the days passing swiftly in a blur of flowers and never-dimming sunshine.

I did find some still moments. One morning, fresh and scented with wisteria, we drove to the River Yealm on the south coast to meet a friend who had invited us to spend the day on her boat. It was a long and perfect day out on the water. We talked, ate, rested, and gazed at the pink cliffs, cleft with rockfall and caves. We imagined what living on a boat might feel like and glimpsed into others’ lives. The river had filled to its rocky edges by the time we returned by dinghy to the secret slipway.

Then, there was another morning after a night full of rain that began wet and secretive. Looking out of the porch window, I saw a burst of gold shoot through the trees, where its beam caught the tip of the pear tree for the briefest of moments, turning it into a dragon burning solar fire. At the rear of the house, the doors were wide open to the cool morning air and the clamour of baby bird song. Everything was dripping from the previous night’s rainfall, and as the sun rose each sphere caught its light for a second. Beyond the church, rooks gathered and arced through the sky, their morning murmuring more urgent than the one at dusk somehow. They would return to the fields with their young soon. The hawthorn drooped under the weight of its own blossom, each branch a fat tube of froth and flower. The swathe of buttercups, campion, forget-me-nots, geranium, and comfrey in our wild patch beneath the quarry wall reminded me of the small Asturian fields we saw a few years back, each a wealth of flower and insect and bird.

Not all the revelry in our mead-hall of May was brief, thankfully. There were three days towards the end of the month, when time did slow and all things came into focus. We have had our bikes for almost three years and have enjoyed many day trips, some nearing fifty miles, but we wanted to push ourselves further. As we live barely three miles from Route 27 (the National Cycle Route that links Plymouth in the south-west Devon to Ilfracombe, in north-east Devon) it made sense to choose the route known as the Devon Coast-to-Coast as an easier introduction to bike touring. Even though we have electric bikes, the up and downs of the Devon hills take their toll not only on our thigh muscles but also the battery life of our bikes, so we had to choose our stopping points carefully. We had cycled the route to Plymouth many times before but this time we wanted to head north so I planned a route in three stages. The first day would see us to Petrockstowe, then we would take a round trip to Instow on our second day to complete the route. My childhood memories of the steep lanes in north Devon left me a little reluctant to plan the full route to Ilfracombe so we were happy to call it quits when we reached the sea. We would return home on the third day.

We cycled forty-three miles that first day, from our home on the western edge of Dartmoor to a luxury wagon [i] near the start of the Tarka Trail that I booked for two nights. When we arrived mid-afternoon, and I’d finished exploring the cupboards and the bathroom, and pacing the perimeter, I sat down at the table outside in the sun to write. Gosh, but it took a while to dig into that slower rhythm. I felt fidgety and edgy like I had been emptied of my day-to-day concerns but was still waiting to be refilled with something meaningful. You can’t sit still, can you? G remarked. The sun was hot and the clouds sallow wisps in a pale blue sky. There was something about the air that reminded me of summer days as a child in Gloucestershire, when I was not up to much, just swallowing the land-locked and oppressive air, imagining other places with life happening anywhere but where I was. I fidgeted some more, stood up to inspect the planting around the wagon, sat back down again. There was a stirring of the tall oak trees that lined the path beside us, a sense of something welling up, bringing a change to the column of air above me, rattling the brittle birch leaves, but as soon as it arrived, it fell away. Nothing came to pass. The minute hand ticked.

I like to think I’m attuned to the natural world that surrounds me at home, but I was surprised to feel little connection to the life around me. How long would it take me to feel at home here, I fretted? What does feeling at home anywhere mean, other than a duration of time thrown at a place? A red mite sped along the bench before shooting beneath the cover of my notebook, another memory plucked from close familiarity with the hot walls of childhood. The stiff, darted leaves of teasels trembled in the breeze. Buttercups filled the field, and their sunny faces made me itch for home.

But home was now miles away. In my mental map, I could see us there in the centre heart of Devon, a little closer to the north coast now than to the south, an unknown land. I felt daunted, a little giddy even, to know that to get anywhere but certainly to reach home, we would need to dedicate a day of strenuous muscular effort. There was no internal combustion engine we could climb inside and turn a key. Being in that mid-Devon field amidst the oaks and buttercups and swallows, I felt as if I had stepped back in time. Perhaps that why the memories surfaced. There was a simpler, smaller life to be had amongst those plants, trees and birds, I could almost believe it to be true, but there was the tinny murmur of G watching something on his phone and the hum of the fridge, the precision cut circular window perfectly positioned to gaze upon the distant view from the comfort of one’s pillows. Later, I lay down at eye-level with that porthole-turned-portal to the clouds where I watched two swallows cross from left to right, one returning a moment later, right to left, then three scooping together through the round air beyond the glass.

It turned out that it did not take us long at all to sink into that place of strangers. Sleeping next to the open porthole window, our alarm call was a blackbird singing inches from our ears. The soft cool air from the window cocooned our sleep and we woke to a cool and damp second day, with some sharp rain showers interspersed with fierce sunshine. The wagon was only a few minutes cycle from the Tarka Trail and after a lazy morning at the wagon, we followed it north towards the coast, mostly downhill through green damp tree tunnels that were thick with stagnant ditches and rich in ferns. Down over the meandering Torridge which had broadened out over a weir and shallows, all the while we followed the cycle route with periodic reminders of the old railway line it had once been. The railway had itself replaced the former coaching route from Plymouth to Bideford and I had a sense we were travelling a very old path that joined two very different coastlines, one with its face to Brittany and Europe beyond, the other looking north-west towards Ireland and the Atlantic.

Once we left the trees behind at Great Torrington, the skies had cleared of their morning rain and the air had warmed up. By the time we reached the estuary, the water was Mediterranean-turquoise and the sand a vibrant picture-book yellow-beige. Thousands of ox-eye daisies lined the path and waved us on towards the sea with tiny snow-white hands. The landscape was expansive: we passed through old stations cheered up for the tourist trade, across large bridges as the river twisted and turned beneath us, and beneath the towering road bridge that shuttled traffic to Barnstable. The pastel cottages of Instow were a pleasant surprise and after a brief stop at a hip shack in the dunes [ii], full of nets and buoys and fishing crates from Plymouth, we turned for home. I was sad to leave behind the holiday cheer but the uphill track back to Petrockstowe beckoned. Days later I would feel like we had been stretched taut to the outer edges of our lives, there on that tip of land by the sea, and the hours and days that would follow would be a pulling-back, a retracting of time and spaciousness, back into familiarity and constraint.

I get ahead of myself. Our third and final day of cycling was glorious. The hot tub (did I mention the hot tub??) was almost too warm but my muscles were grateful. I sat eye-level with the fresh green of the hedge around our tiny encampment and let my eyes blur the green of the trees beyond the field. Above me, the sun breached the tips of the old oaks and silver shafts of photons carved the sky into segments. Due to route confusion on our first day, we had arrived at our resting place via a main road from Hatherleigh, but this time we wanted to follow the Route 27 on its proper, if somewhat longer, course. We left at half-past seven and picked up Route 27 to Sheepwash, where muscular thatched houses crowded around the church. It was commuter time, or what counts for it out there in the under-populated region of mid-Devon, and we pulled in a few times for cars to pass. We dipped right down then to cross the river (where they washed the sheep perhaps?) and on up to Highhampton, its name hinting at its lofty position at the top of the county, where the ancient roll of northern Dartmoor gleamed on the horizon.

On down into the market town of Hatherleigh along a cycle path between sunlit tree and waving grass meadows. We squeezed through a Road Closed sign in the town and suddenly we were retracing our steps from the first day. And that was when time started to do its uncanny trick of passing by in a flash, as my eye was caught once more by things I had noticed on our route out. On the bank of trailing blue geraniums, on the trees of deep red rhododendron planted alongside a house that reminded me of the Queen of Heart’s rose trees in Alice in Wonderland, on the gate we had rested beside as the expanse of Dartmoor and opened out before us. Places I had delighted in the first time around, seen from a different angle, with the sense of no time passing between the two perspectives. The delightful road through the woods south of Jacobstowe that we had had to ourselves on the first day, had impatient commuter traffic this time and three sets of dog walkers, reluctantly holding their dogs whilst we passed. How strong our singular journeys are in this lifetime, as we slip through time with fleeting moments of intersection with other lives, each on their own singular journeys.

Okehampton was there and gone in a moment, all the while my sense of time was compressing, speeding up, like we had been let out on vast rubber bands, stretched to their maximum reach when we had rested in the sun at Instow, and now being pulled at frantic speed back to source, to our home, our lives. Later, we lolled around listlessly for the rest of the day when we had finished our journey, panniers unpacked, bikes put away, but not sure what to do with ourselves back in our static and greedy world. The spacious feeling of possibility vanished, as I suspected it might, and with it went my identity of being someone capable of adventure. I felt vaguely anxious again; my return to work on the horizon, chores to do around the house, the van to finish. This place of ours is beautiful, but it holds us oh so tightly.

The weather broke towards the end of the month. The bright dusty sunlit land turned cool and deeply green once more, the hedgerows flecked with yellow poppies and pink campion. Swallows tumbled ahead of me down farm tracks on my evening walks and tangles of wet grass and ferns brushed my legs. The first pink spires of foxgloves appeared along the village lanes, a soothing harbinger of June, summer on its way. The elder tree in our garden was an exploding universe for a few days, with swirling galaxies of creamy flowers.

I say again that May has been a mead-hall through which we have flitted like restless sparrows, once or twice alighting on a moment, to rest a while and take the spectacle in, before it’s time to pick up the pace again. I wonder if time has always been like this, stretchy and fluid, and I wonder too how we might use this knowledge to contort time around our own desires. To do so, surely we will have to be brave occasionally and dare to step beyond our homely perimeters.

[i] If anyone wants to have a few days in retreat, I can’t recommend it highly enough – here's the link to Larkworthy Retreat.

[ii] The Glorious Oyster

The month began by my annual shift towards earlier waking in the morning, ousted from bed by faint pink sky peeking through the blinds. Standing outside in the chilly morning air, the village began to resound with multiple bird songs, layer upon layer of sparkling song of Wren, Robin, Blackbird and Chaffinch. I regret the years when I hadn’t yet learnt the sacredness of early morning, but I can blame low blood pressure on waking and clutching to the myth that I am not a morning person. We can learn to do hard things, it seems. Those mornings in early April were a secret time where there was little other human sound, a fleeting glimpse of abundance, a hint of how things were before we took over the planet. Once more, I was reminded of the importance of writing my place, capturing the presence of bird and tree, light and cloud, keeping a record for the times. What struck me about Gilbert White's description of Selbourne was the sheer profusion of birds and wildlife that he witnessed and recorded in his diary. Who knows whether others might cry at how abundant our world once was, or marvel at how little we had compared to what came after.

One day, I took a different walk up to the moor’s edge at the northern tip of our village to avoid the cold easterly wind. Welcome spots of yellow furnished the greening hedgerows along the lanes, and the sight of shiny new celandines and discrete narcissi signalled that the time had come to visit the Ramson Path. It is the path that crosses the stream at the top of the village which fills to its edges with smooth green tongues of ramsons (wild garlic) at this time of year, with just one or two sending tentative shoots up ending in white cups, holding their tiny flowers. We had it all to come.

Another bright early morning, I drove across the moor to spend a delightful few days with colleagues at a writing retreat over on the eastern side of Dartmoor in startling white sun and chill air on the moor’s edge where the toes of Haytor peeked over the northern horizon.

Through April, the light continued to grow beyond the trees where our house sits, one step away from the edge of the village. We live in the bird world here. Dim pink smudged the darker trees and Magnolia was at full exhaustive pelt towards completion. How she gave and gave in those early days of spring! A lesson in generosity and glorious exuberance, if ever there was one. For a time, our pear blossom was at maximum creamy frothiness, a tower of branch and flower. The forget-me-nots began to lend a blue tinge to the greenery, and solid red and pink blocks of azaleas brought a gift from other worlds to our garden. The moor filled with fresh yellow gorse and early white hawthorn blossom, but the land remained resolutely bald with little sign of life, tethered to last summer with its crisp-bronze old bracken growth. On an evening walk to the top field looking over the village, we came across an oblong of cuckoo flowers echoing the geometry of the fields below us. Last year, I was astonished to hear a Cuckoo call from the tree above our house (not far from where this picture was taken) but there has been no sound of him this year.

Alongside my stepping out into the places around me, a couple of threads travelled with me throughout April. The first was the mulling over of how far my experience of this place and my sense of home is constructed through cultural representations of the Devon landscape. As a human geographer, I appreciate (and won’t try to convey here) the wealth of scholarly writing around representation. The premise goes that how we experience place and landscape is in good part down to how they have been represented (literally re-presented over and again) through art and culture. For a time, painters captured aspects of the landscape that prompted us to feel awe in the immensity of the landscape and invited us to observe, and be transcended, by the sublimity of wild nature.

These days, television and films play their vital part in re-creating the landscape. The twentieth-century writer Agatha Christie is one such cultural reference point, often appearing in the modern Devon landscape. I enjoyed an adaptation for the BBC of one of her books, Toward Zero, which was delicious in its costume and vistas of art deco Burgh Island on the southern Devon coast. Just last weekend, I spotted the new statue of Christie sitting on a bench, recently unveiled on Torquay Harbour, near to where she used to swim as a young woman. As I queued at the traffic-lights, I caught a glimpse of a person sitting next to her, posing for a photograph, recreating once more the sense of place as represented by our most famous crime writer. I have also been absorbed watching another BBC series Beyond Paradise, a playful look at police life in a fictional town on the south Devon coast. Each scene of town, moor and coast is familiar, and I think again of how Devon is re-created through these representations. Sometimes I find a strange kind of sanctuary in fictional Devon and I wonder what that says about me, about the bruising currency of the world.

In the final days of April, I spend two days’ walking with my brother from St Anthony-in-Place (a short but enchanting ferry ride from St Mawes) to Mevagissey. It was the most time I had spent with him, perhaps since we were in our late teens and I wasn’t sure what to expect. But it was glorious fun - an adventurous event of encounter with people and places (and cows). I have written before about my solo experiences of walking the path, but this walk was different. My powers of observation diminished in company but I attended to other things. We plan to do more walks in the future. We are still a few weeks away from the launch of the new film The Salt Path based on Raynor Winn’s book, one more re-presentation of this place. I anticipate it with a degree of trepidation, wondering what will become of my precious path as more people from around the world learn of it and want to participate in its magic. Towards the end of April, my husband G and I also catch the final day of a months-long exhibition Planet Ocean at The Box in Plymouth: a final layer of re-presentation of this place in photograph, paintings, sculpture and collection of plastic lifted from the sea.

My revisitation of representation was prompted by reading an excellent book, found in a tiny independent bookshop in Frome back in February – Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper by Alexandra Harris. And this brings me to the second thread that carried me through April - how the lessons of history can bring surprising comfort in these troubled times. The 1930s were experienced as a dark morbid time and the visceral fear for the world’s future provoked in some writers and artists (like Virgina Woolf, John Betjeman, Evelyn Waugh and John Piper) the urgent desire to capture England before it was lost. We know what cultural treasures they left behind and our sense of England in the past is largely thanks to such careful observers.

It is difficult not to spot the parallels with our world today. Social commentators are quick to remind us that the new populism being experienced in America was last seen nearly a hundred years ago in Europe and we need little warning of what calamity faced the world soon after (indeed, I am writing this on the 80^th anniversary of Victory in Europe VE Day). Romantic Moderns charts the revival of some sense of Englishness through place and nature in the 1930s and 1940s, and the many ways in which such artists and writers returned to the countryside, seeking refuge from the chaos of the world. I too feel my own urge to retreat but reading this cultural history I find an invigorated sense of purpose in what I am doing. Perhaps now, more than ever, there is a need for writers and artists to remind us of the life beyond our screens and concrete and terrifying news. Can a feeling of stillness be found in modern times? Amidst the noise and the constant clamour for our attention, what are the counterpoints? Where are the quiet places, where we rest eyes and mind, the places where we can simply be with? I hear all the writers from the past shouting to us across the years and I join them. To be amongst the trees! To hear the birds!

I am reminded again of the notion of being a seed-keeper: we all have roles to fulfil in the world and some feel called to notice what is precious and record it for generations to come. In my own small way, I am part of a long tradition – re-creating my place, finding comfort in stillness, adding to the layers, carrying the threads onward.

Notes on writing:

This month, I had a flurry of sending work off to prospective journals for consideration for publication. I am piling up the rejections (or worse, the absence of any kind of response) and I feel abruptly birthed into the competitive world of publishing. I have read many other writers speak of the process but it is quite another thing to experience myself. I will continue to send things off but each time, I question what the purpose of it all is, and whether it might be more fun to continue to write simply for myself and for you kind readers who have found me here.

I have spent enough years attending to my craft that I believe writing as something I do is here to stay, a permanent presence in my life. But I am always learning how to feed the different moments along that process: going out and experiencing the world (for what else is there to write about?), slow reading and note-making, thinking, free writing in response, journalling. Then there is the crafting of ideas and fragments into something more substantial, whether these are Substack posts, short essays, thoughts for a longer essay, or the book that forever lurks in the middle distance of my consciousness. Or the abandoned novel that I intend to complete in the coming year.

Now summertime is here I face the challenge of finding moments to write amidst ever-more squeezed time. Early morning sunshine calls for more bike-rides and less quiet reading and thought. Later evening lights calls for walks. The hours in between demand concentration at my desk or on campus, where refrains of being snowed under, back-to-back, and even the alarming at breaking-point (haven’t we been there for months, years??) echo down the corridors of learning. I am becoming accustomed to a new understanding and experience of time. Weekends demand family time, chores, helping others. Time is precious, time is fragmented, time is snatched, but time is here and now, and I in it and still grateful.

Soft early mornings of middle-March passed, each with photons of sunlight gracing particles of ice. Tender Magnolia buds waited for the signal of warm-enough days. The trees were still bare against the pale-blue promise of sky but there was enough warmth one morning for me to sit on the porch with my cup of tea. My fountain pen ink on the page was almost topographical in the sunlight. I listened to Great tit see-sawing above me and the voices of my mother-in-law and her friend chattering through an open door.

One morning whilst working on campus, my husband sent me two photos of a tiny purple crocus emerging from beneath Apple Tree and the delight rippled across the miles. I recall days and days of clear blue skies, each beginning in a hard frost before opening into warmth later. The gentle light arrived earlier and earlier and I could feel the march of spring, the buds and shoots drumming on distant ground, the life gathering momentum before it swept through this place.

We had our first bike ride of the season. Up the lane, past the churchgoers making their way down into the village for Sunday morning service, across the common, heart pounding, ears singing in the cold morning air. Determination to fight the desire to return to warmth and comfort. Meavy Lane rang with Sunday bells, then over the narrow bridge we went, where the river shone below. Streaks of field runoff split the roads, forcing my eyes to make quick judgments on hidden potholes or potential ice. We stopped high on the moor for sandwiches and looked down at the sweep of the valley below. Ah, now we remembered the point of it all. As I predicted. We paused beneath the wide Beech whose arms shone fiercely against the sky. How extraordinary that we see the colour blue, said G.

On other March mornings, I devoted my time to watching the early morning light grow from my window: reading, learning, thinking, writing, always putting aside ideas for later (whenever that is). It takes no effort to counter the intensity of my working days with the soft ease of the more creative ones. I wonder briefly if one requires the other in juxtaposition to remind me that to recognise levity, we must know weight first. All life exists in tension with something.

March presses on and there is a birthday lunch up at the garden centre on the edge of the common with a dear friend, where we sit in the sunshine and unpick the difference between empathy and sympathy, and ponder the lure of historical television drama. We walk back to her car, carrying her plant presents, further than anticipated and colder in the wind, but the clarity of light across the distant tors was fair compensation for my cold fingers. The biting wind refined the air somehow, as dark clouds rolled in from the north.

March was a dry month. For a spell of a few days, I sighted almost daily fires up on the western edge of Dartmoor on my journey home. The stream below us in the village diminished to a trickle. Blackbird sang from the hawthorn tree in the front every evening, a new perch for this year, an early claiming of territory.

The vernal equinox came, finally. There was stillness, light, of course. Wren and Robin speckled the air with their flutey song. Light grew beyond the trees to the east. A new notebook also arrived: my writing year had arranged itself, it seemed, so that it began and ended in the hopeful fulcrum of the year. I liked the symmetry of that. Equinox. I was poised, ready for the flood. The light swept over the hills, and my heart was glad of it.

For two days in late March, as the evening light yawned towards twilight, I stood at the window and watched the rooks gather over the church. The northern sky paled into strips of light and cloud, the faintest tinge of pink above the far western hills of Cornwall, the church bare in its grey flecked stone. Rooks from the churchyard trees merged with those from our nearby Beech trees and circled in pairs, then dropped to the treetops before surging up and around together. Aerial cartographers making their momentary maps in the sky. They are harbingers of light and gathering and kinship.

Magnolia opened her flowers on the same day as last year, my journal informed me. Satin licks of petals teetered on the tops of the southernmost branches, searching for the sun, another reward for our winter patience. The man on the radio said this year feels like a reset and I felt a flicker of hope. Light, growing light, oh, the light! Life stirred in the garden with welcome freshness of green shoots of crocosmia, cream flecks of pear blossom, tulips unfurling, purple crocuses nodding their heads. Hedgerows shimmered with celandine and primrose.

It is April now and the new season is fully underway, but there is a temporal nature to spring that strikes me with increasing force each year: an urgency sensed by all creatures, to gush forth or to jump ahead, as if we were always waiting in the wings, waiting for warmth and light before we can bloom and thrive. What can I say about the arrival of spring that hasn't been said one thousand times before? I sag under the weight of all those writers and artists before me who each renewed spring in their vision. I am saying it all again. I hope I shall keep saying it for many years to come. Forgive me.

1. Confluence

The last day of January was clear and bright, dry and cold, and it was still light after five o’clock. The prospect of living in the light - walking to work, putting the rubbish out on Thursday evenings – was within my grasp. In the winter, twilight is an exquisite time of deep teal and aquamarine skies, edged with salmon and peach, and that night I wanted to see the rare planetary alignment that was honouring our skies.

When I went to stand outside by the front gate, the sky was dark except for the recent glow from where the sun had set. The app I had downloaded on my phone showed the sun just beneath the horizon line and I imagined it was just down there - through our gravel path, beneath the apple tree, past the roots and mycorrhizae, and out beyond the far tilt of the planet. Somewhere, perhaps, just out to sea beyond the coast of Cornwall.

In my tiny human’s mind, I had imagined a confluence of planets to look like a small cluster of stars in the sky, close to each other. But that is the earth-at-the-centre-of-the-galaxy perspective for, of course, our planet is but one of those in alignment. It took a while to find them all, but there they were. Mars shone red to the east, behind the tall sycamores that edge the field above us. Jupiter was a white blur of moons, in an arc moving south. I followed the line and found Venus then, gleaming like a speck of quicksilver and faintly beneath it, Saturn. The alignment was less of a line and more of an immense sky-wide curve, but I grasped the essence of confluence.

I stood there, my arms spread wide and held each of them in the reach of my fingertips. I was at the centre, I always had been. I was one creature among multitudes, alive in the solar system. Such an incredible thing, to witness, to be there.

2. Ancestors

It was a damp evening in early February and another new experience awaited me, this time a silent disco at Plymouth Aquarium, organised by my sister-in-law. I had imagined a silent disco to be, well, silent, except for shuffles and stomps, but we could hear the singing from outside on the damp harbourside that reeked of fish. The sound of collective song grew as we collected our headphones and followed the fluorescent-patterned corridor into the aquarium.

My brother and I looked at each other, bemused: what did one do at such an event, where did we stand, how long before we could reasonably hand the headphones back and go home? As I always do when I’m unsettled, I sought out the more-than-human and found a small tank next to the cloakroom. I crouched to watch two other-worldly creatures, strange and lonely jellyfish, magnificent in the shifting colours. I wondered what they could sense of the fluorescent party going on beyond their container.

The feature auditorium in the aquarium had an enormous glass wall shielding the big tank. Three different DJ's were orchestrating the sounds from a mezzanine level above the stomping crowd, the altar to ‘80s music for the evening. I flicked between the channels on my headphones, easily distracted by the roar of singing or cheers from the (mostly) women around me in ‘80s rah-rah skirts and Madonna-style jewellery. When (I’m Gonna Be) 500 Miles by The Proclaimers came on the green channel, my brother and I started to sing and move (it was about walking, after all) and he leant in to shout ah, it makes sense now. From that moment, we were all in: swaying, air guitars, hands in the air, all inhibitions gone. The fish and sharks and stingray circled their vast (but not vast enough) tank above us. Towards the end of the evening, we joined together to bellow I owe it all to you (Dirty Dancing), and I looked up and saluted the creatures above us. We owed it all - these swaying arms, these bony legs, these gill-like jaws, this compulsion to belong to the shoal – to them.

3. Isolation

Every time I used to drive into Plymouth from the north, I would pass four lofty and magnificent Scots pine trees on the edge of the city. For the ten years we have lived here, they have been magnificent way markers in this place: signalling the city limit, framing the sky, reminding me that we chose a kind place to call home. But ever since I heard of the city council’s plans for the junction (in service to our demigods, our personal vehicles), I have feared for those trees. One morning in early February, harsh metal fences were set up, corralling the trees. My belly was heavy with dread of what I knew was coming but powerless to stop.

The next day, the chainsaws had been busy in the intervening hours and all four trees had limbs missing, their beauty already truncated but not quite lost. Only the crown of the finest tree remained, mighty in its isolation. The next day, two of the four trees were bare poles, their limbs neatly stacked at their feet. I looked up to the diminished crown, unusually packed with rooks, their black shapes once spacious but now sat close.

How dare we? I seethed in my car (I appreciate the irony here) and swallowed a stone of loss, of the grief that seemed to come all too readily these days. The next day, the trees were finished. Later, I wondered if the rooks would seek out that tree top and find nothing but empty air, echoing with the drone of the cars beneath. A little more creaturely life lopped away, a little more human life taken precedence. I wondered if the minutes we would spare on our morning commutes would be worth it.

4. The road not trodden

I walked with my brother out from the door, up to the common, down to the river. I had looked up to this path each time I have come to this place, but I had never taken it before that day. We followed it up to West Down for a different perspective, then ate our sandwiches at Double Waters, where we watched glacier-clear water speed past. We talked of the world events that came thick and fast those days. Of the leader who was proving worse than we feared, the known sands beneath our feet that were shifting. Later, I could sense the onslaught of world politics, the ongoing war on our values, and the constant checking-in with our mutual well-being, and how none of it was conducive to creative practice. I needed to take a step back, to keep looking up not down at the actions of distant others. There was still birdsong in the mornings and the mid-distant trees in the eastern sky were still there when I looked up.

5. Consolatio

I had been reading about the history of the personal essay and came across the concept of the consolatio. It is a personal essay of consolation, its purpose being to console another after the death of someone close. What might I write, I wondered, to console myself? One night in late February, my husband called me to the kitchen window to watch the murmuring of the parish rooks. Hope is the thing with feathers. How precious that they chose this place, as we had, to come together and embrace the sky. It is going to be OK. These are the good days. This too will pass. Gentle mantras to cling to in turbulent times, but we need more fleshy tethers to the here and now. We need solace and comfort in such times and, heaven knows, we need justice and peace: I understood then that I had been seeking small consolations for the tiny daily death-throes of a world I thought I knew. I had found my consolations whenever I had looked up.

Notes on writing

It appears that these posts are finding their own space and rhythm as short report cards of a month in my life. This process of pulling the disparate thoughts together that I have in the month, combined with my observations of nature, provides an anchor of sorts, a stamp in time that says I was here. I saw this, I took part. For someone who feels time’s winged chariot ever bumping at my heels, this is an act of signifying. An act of passage.

I decided earlier this year that my writing intentions would be directed towards producing some essays and sending them off for publication. Thinking in percentages helps me plan my time (I know, I am one of those people, a time-boxer extraordinaire) and so I have chosen the figure of 80% of my time, energy and attention to be given to writing essays for publication. The remainder of my writing time is to be given to this newsletter on Substack and to expand the topics I cover beyond nature-writing on the edge of Dartmoor. Many of the writers I love most on Substack manage to blend everything: nature, life, writing. I want to do the same.

Instead of asking if I want a cup of tea in the early mornings, my husband has taken to asking if I want blossom juice, a personal reference to my creative time, my blossoming, and the first iteration of my blog many years ago that I named The Blossom Quest (after a soulful encounter with the almond blossom in Costa Blanca). I am crafting a writing life, taking it seriously, generating the words, making the connections, filling the pages.

I have walked many miles this past month or so out in our near-Dartmoor landscape, meeting the cool midwinter air with its meagre lights and self-generated joys. Our brains relish new information and on one of my daily walks around our village over the festive period, I noticed the path textured with fallen leaves. Normal enough for midwinter, but something felt wrong: these weren't the darkening russet of long-fallen Chestnut leaves or the almost blackened plates of Sycamore, but two shades of conspicuous green. Their crenelated spiky edges flashed lime-green against a deeper regal tone. Deck the paths with leaves of Holly, of course. I had never witnessed the species shed its leaves, all at once. The calamity of leaves unsettled the naturalist laws that claim that this species is evergreen or this one flowers in late May. Something had called our village Holly trees to jettison their own, to sever ties to their own life-support systems.

On another walk a few days later, we walked through the old narrow village of Bere Alston and down to Tuckermarsh Quay, skirting the northern edge of the Bere peninsula where the old Tamar loops and meanders in still tidal reaches. We came across more places where the brown mulch was troubled by fresh green and puzzled over them. I suspected the trees were in distress. My brother, once back home, continued to puzzle and sent me a screenshot of possible causes – frost, cold weather rapidly followed by warm (could be), or Holly leaf blight. Next time I was out, I looked more closely at the leaves and there were the purple blushes, tell-tale signs of blight. I don't know if they will recover but I wish the trees well and pray that they, like us, can find resilience and courage in these trying times.

Everything takes on a messy hue in the winter, farmyards slick with mud, lanes deep in potholes and puddles. The universal law of entropy is so much closer in these winter months. Without a garden, I could imagine myself free to watch the hedgerows burst and expand, free to step away from being responsible for managing the decay. I hanker after order and wonder if it is because my mind can rest.

The weather has fluctuated between mild and wet, followed by cold and dry. There was a stretch in the new year when our corner of the world froze deeply. Millions of tiny shards of ice grew out from the cars, the leaves, the clumps of soil, the bird feeder, the deck. In the afternoons, where the low sun caught the land, thawed patches left triangles of white projecting into the northern spaces. Then, the deep cold returned after dusk to the leaves of the Camellia, once glossy green but then shimmering with fractured ice crystals, directionless, without order or reason. Those cold evenings, I hoped that the swelling buds, coy in their velvet coats, managed to hold fast and dig deep into their core purpose. To live another blooming, to spread another seed, to delight me one more time.

Mid-January offered wide blue skies, low skewering sunlight, industrious birds in the garden. There was a faint stirring of memories: of days spent outside, of light, of purpose beyond the confines of my study, of travel and camping, of contentment in simple chores. G brought me my first coffee of the year outside at the porch table, the sun just barely breaching the quarry wall, my face tilted in supplication to the inveterate light. All is neat in our garden, clipped, tidy, without colour or form, poised for a spring revelation. When the land is blessed with these almost spring-like days, I know that liberty of all souls follows liberty of air and light.

As my academic work intensifies, I am dismayed to watch my intimate relationship with nature dwindle. It feels like the connection must be constantly tended to prevent all-consuming slippage into the human world with its imposed deadlines and unnecessary diversions, all designed to distract and detract from the ultimate point: to experience this world as fully as we might, to join in the deafening bellow of life.

Winter limits experience. The darker months cannot fail but curtail our sight and with it our hope. To see into the distance is to see into the future but, when all is dark, we can do nothing but turn inward and look back. But the dawdling depths of January are interspersed with moments of joy. Walking along the perimeter fence of the disused airport one morning on my way onto campus, a small rectangle of light grows on the horizon and I see a magpie sweep before me up to the fence. It grips carefully between wire barbs, one leg poised above the other, such that its angle reveals perfectly its sleek blue-black feathers, where it cocks its beady eye and holds my gaze for a long moment.

January is a fulcrum of darkness becoming light, and stillness stirring towards movement. It is a time of productivity, my work days filled to their very edges with tending to the learning needs of a community. It is also a month where I practice the art of waiting, as I work through crisp blue days when sunlight illuminates the porch, through the teal and peach twilights, through the storms.

For now, my slow and dark mornings remain a gift. I am joined by the Robin outside my window, singing into the dim emerging light, aware of the potential of yet another day. A male Tawny Owl hoots as the night is dismissed. One morning, I open the door, and the village has turned silver, licked by the giant lupine moon.

The land waits. Black branches stand stark against baby-pink morning skies. Buds of Pear and Apple, Quince and Elder dwell in the cusp of life. Do they sense the light returning as I do? Do they know how perfect they will be?

Notes on writing

Substack is a platform of writers and, as such, it offers regular and plentiful insights into the craft of writing. I thought I’d add an occasional section to this newsletter where I can share what I’m learning about this craft.

In our writing group back in early December, I was asked how I wrote my last post – well, I read through all my journal entries over the previous two months and did a bit of thematic analysis, pulled out the core theme and wrote a narrative that made sense of it. “Thematic analysis, who does that?!” laughed Christina (over at Chasing Words and Wonder), “I love it!” It struck me that as an academic with considerable research experience and tasked with teaching others how to research, I approach my own writing in a somewhat scholarly way: by observation, sifting through the evidence, picking out the themes, and synthesising them into the semblance of something coherent and narratable. Don’t be fooled though for I am not nearly as diligent in my own work as when I’m paid to be in my academic work, but I feel it is time that I acknowledge and celebrate this general approach or methodology.

I like the idea, then, which is slowly dawning on me as I write this, that this Substack newsletter helps me make sense of what I am encountering, what I see, hear, read, think, learn. In a manner, it is a kind of quick-and-dirty thematic analysis of my daily encounters with the more-than-human world, and the cultural and emotional worlds I drift between. Not in the sense of lessons learned in an instructional restrictive school kind of way, but rather an account of being alive and curious in the world and making tentative steps to sort through and make sense of them.

I have little time these days to spend crafting longer pieces so I make do by writing short scraps of text in my notebook most mornings, which helps in some small but crucial way to make sense of my passage through time and space. In the early hour before daybreak, I cast about for words that capture the subtle shift in the season, describe what I have seen outside, ascribe sentiment to the change in air, in light. It anchors me to an embodied sense of reality, an act I find myself needing more and more to temper these dim perilous days.

From the perspective of these first few days of winter, I have fully embraced the planetary tilt towards darkness that we experience in these northern isles. But, it was not always so, and when I gathered the entries I have written since those glorious two days spent walking the South West Coast Path, my resistance to the approaching darkness is palpable. In my mind, an appropriate metaphor for winter is a dark basement (and this was before I read the prologue in Inciting Joy this very morning, where Gay uses an almost identical metaphor for sorrow). My basement - perhaps you have one too - is where I am condemned to spend winter, shut away from society, where no light reaches within its dank walls, and it smells fusty and foreboding. With this metaphor in my mind in those last days of summer, it is no wonder that I have traditionally feared the annual ‘descent’ into this basement.

But, indulge me if you will, and let me lay out the tentative steps I have taken down that rickety staircase into that basement these past two months, and some lessons learnt (or re-learnt) about metaphorical descents into the (very real) darkness.

A few days after I returned from my coast path walk, I lay reading in bed as the low morning sunlight bounced off the shiny azure-blue andorhinas (swift) bookmark I brought home from Lisbon. Their printed silhouettes reminded me of the three swifts I had seen rising and dancing over the cliffs of Lantic Bay, and I understood now that they were wrapping the summer up in their tiny wings, ready to steal it away across the water. I had read the news the previous day that the swift had been placed on the Red List by the British Ornithology Society and the weight of impending loss crushed my chest. Since I was old enough to learn about such things in geography lessons, I have lived an entire life with this spectre of environmental collapse. To bear witness feels like an unbearable responsibility. We live in a world of wounds, as Aldo Leopold said, inflicted years ago.

We hurtled past the Equinox (September 22). Nights were drawing in fast now and I could feel the descent into darkness calling me. Darker thoughts began to creep in: I felt gloomy, my skin began to itch, I was overwhelmed with work, I didn’t feel qualified for my new promotion. All colour, except green, was vanishing from the garden and all that remained was one steadfast glowing stand of rudbeckia, the blush of one apple, the sucking purple of tiny verbena. I wanted to stand and stare amongst the dying fronds, to join the great wave of dissolution. The Harvest Moon brought bright, powerful dreams. Memories invaded my sleep.

A post in The Marginalian caught my eye one morning, about writers who keep diaries or journals. Delacroix said that the future is black, as is the past, unless we capture the days. Those days, I wondered what there was left to say as the roses squeezed their final drop of colour into the dimming world. I knew the geraniums - my constant cheery companions since May - would soon stop producing flowers. But, in those late days of September, each luminescent flower of rudbeckia was still pristine. Not a petal out of kilter, each sepal smooth as the last. What an art, I thought, to hold so perfectly strong, whilst all around you succumbs to entropy and loss.

The days passed, and words came in quick succession in response to the bodily tug down those dark steps. October was rattling through the rooms of my life, sweeping me before it, and I could sense modern life close at my heels, with its

Insistences

Urgencies

Intricacies

Complexities

Inconsistencies

Imbalances

Punctualities

Deadlines

Standards

I wrote that the straight lines of the human world exhausted me and it was only in the more-than-human world that my bones and breath could find rest, when I could I feel my cells release. I knew that I was not out there nearly enough, with the balance tipped firmly towards human endeavours. Then, after a week of urgency and deadline (isn't it always, this urge to progress, to be better all the time?), I took a day off in the sunshine and not a moment too soon. First, a bike circuit around Burrator, then a long walk from my friend’s house through bright woods and past rushing water.

Autumn pressed on, its golden breath at my shoulders. For days, I rarely strayed further than the front garden where the rudbeckia - my symbol of summer - had tipped over from the weight of the rain. Hedges of quince lacked vigour. The narrow lanes around the village were still claustrophobic with brambles and ferns, almost touching across the tarmac, but they were weakening, browning, thinning, their energy spent. The air was still deceptively warm though and, when the sun shone, the days were as soft and expansive as days could get.

I took a long-planned trip to London to meet a friend to walk the city. We covered 36 miles in three days, walking east across the city from Chiswick to St. Katherine’s Dock, then all around the City of London and Temple, up into Holborn and onto Bloomsbury and the British Library. Secret courtyards harboured shining beech trees. We passed through other streets, other lives, where leaves stained the pavement and colour drained from the sky.

Even amidst all the gold, I could feel the light dying. Most green plants around were shutting down ready to survive the winter and I sensed the collective slowing down, turning inward. There was an inevitability to it. I made myself a promise to seek life in those dead times, knowing I would surely wish my life away otherwise. This was the turning-inward time after spring and summer spent out, out, out in the bright air. The Hunters Moon burnt bone-white in the early morning sky. When we have known the light, it seems cruel to accept the darkness so soon. How might I spend these autumn days with renewed eyes, I began to ask myself?

As I tried to pare back the weights and responsibilities to see more clearly, I landed on the idea that perhaps all that matters is to write this life, this sensation, this momentary being here, alive. Yet, in those darkening days, the words had been drifting out of reach and I wondered for the briefest of moments if I should let them go. Then, with a start, I came to my senses and pulled on the thread that still connected me to the words and I gently pulled them back. I pictured a swimmer, pale in the moonlight, drifting towards the darkness, seduced by the insistent inky black of the deep, then coming to their senses and feeling the tug once more of life, stretching for the rope, almost out of reach, reeling themselves back towards the light. Towards life.

On the final weekend of October as Samhain approached, I wrote an ode to the light. It felt extraordinary that the weekend we were to tilt into the darker portion of the year was the weekend filled from dawn to dusk with light. Dusty sunshine peered beneath trees, blinding me around corners, pouring warmth into the porch, warming my unfamiliar bones in the cafe, refracting off the misty windscreen. The change in the clocks brought daylight back to the early morning and I was reminded for the briefest moment of our early morning bike rides through spring foxglove fields. Sheer sun beamed around every corner, rich russet-orange-red colours glowed, and the summer garden of our local Garden House still towered with dahlias.

Yet, amidst all the light, death kept in step, and I could smell the darkness beneath me. Three white birches spread to the sky, their leaves a thousand shimmering ghosts. Hydrangea flowers were caught between the living and the dead, pink-blush like warm cheeks. Leaves coated the gravel paths, each step taken amidst a necrosis of leaves. The year was dying. Two birds - a Blackbird and a Robin - flew into our windows and died in G’s hands that weekend. Twice, my heart was broken amidst all that beauty and colour and light. Death kept knocking from the basement, enticing me down those steps.

And so I looked away, again, distracted myself with striking entropy from our home. I cleared cobwebs that had gathered on the mantlepiece, cleared the leaves from the porch, pruned old rose growth, mulched the perennial beds, swept the dust and grit from the wooden floors. I stopped to look at the rudbeckia. The flowers had finally toppled and I watched a tiny fly walk along the black curlicued seed head, casting its tiny antenna as if tasting the air before it. Each flower head was a study in decline. Disappearance. The season was vanishing before my eyes, even as I grasped its fullest expression. We lit the first fire of the season.

By mid November, I was craving stillness. Time to let the frantic weeks settle, find their place, offer their lessons. Trump was elected in America and the world darkened a shade more. Meanwhile, autumn careered through the house and winter began to shine its weak light through the windows. The joyous yellow of the summer garden gave way to black balls of seeds, soggy green patches, curling apple tree leaves. I wondered briefly how we could ever move into this new world that we no longer recognised, how we could remain sane, happy, fulfilled within it.

One afternoon, late November, the afternoon light was soft and salmon pink clouds streaked above the lowering sun. As we drove back out of the city and across the moor, low mist gathered around the gorse and hawthorn. The sun was a rare sight but there it was again, that warm light blowing around the beech trees, which still held their coat of rust leaves. I was surrounded by exhausted people, people at the very edges of coping with life, dedicated to their educational work, but ever depleted by it. I wondered how I could hold fast for them. I looked for the light.

As I teetered down those creaky November steps, I craved a return to those things that inspired, that soothed me. I worked out ways to put some words together by recalling things I’d seen in nature that day. Words lead to more words, as they so often do, and soon there it was again, that spark: stripped pared-back lanes, diminutive versions of the spring and summer ways, a year breathing in, fattening, thickening of the hedges, of life than a slow exhale, a thinning, paring back until we reached the midpoint, the solstice. The clump of gunnera at the side of the road was theatrical in its death throes, flinging its huge arms and limbs out in all directions, desperate - as we all - are to stave off the drooping, the sucking of water out from its leaves, the browning at the edges, the final crisping and mulching. The river appeared to have skin, painted with leaves falling from upstream, each pinned to a skin of marble. It slipped past me, unseen, unloved, going about its watery business, taking the land back to the ocean. There is always life amidst the darkness. Ah, I remember now.

And here we are. In early December, taking our final steps toward that darkest dwelling. It has taken more than two months of resistance but, at last, I remember everything about the gifts of this season. This retreat from the light is necessary: to restore us, to rebuild our reserves, to nourish our roots, just as every living thing beyond our windows here in the northlands must do. I am ready to take my seat in this dark dwelling place but, in this approaching season of sparkle and comfort and joy, and whilst I have breath left in my body, I find myself on tiptoes sometimes, looking towards those fragments of light.

I have enough experience now to know how important it is to steer toward the things that makes my heart sing. It takes effort to do so: it is always easier to stay home but I know I simply must carve out time amidst my daily responsibilities. Because to commit to some alone-time on the coast path, before the chaos of the university semester truly takes hold, is to make a down payment on my sanity in the darkening months to come.

After last year’s solo-(mini)adventure from Plymouth to Looe, I decided to continue the path and take two days to walk from Looe to Par, via an overnight stop in the small harbour town of Fowey. Last year, I embarked on a stretch I had never walked before from Rame Head to Looe. This time I was retracing steps from my walk nine years ago but from the other direction. This time, the sea would be on my left and I would head west. I’d like to take you, if I may, on my walk along this rather special stretch of coastline.

The frost on the car windscreen surprised me and I almost missed my bus from Yelverton. I wanted to be self-sufficient and reach Looe entirely by public transport (well, after the short drive to bus-stop – it was early), entailing the bus into Plymouth, the mainline London-Penzance train to Liskeard, and the delightful branch line Looe. A baby-blue sky was streaked with peach, and the low sunlight scattered through a smeared bus window. I caught brief Larkin-esque glimpses down pink, white and terracotta terraces bathed in golden light, where car headlights beamed through the sunlight. It was an odd sight, light refracting light. The city was waking to its business.

“It’s going to be like this all day,” said a voice to his friend from the back of the Penzance train carriage. I was recovering from a cold earlier in the week (I almost cancelled, until I knew it wasn’t Covid) and my lingering fatigue struck a thin note of anxiety in anticipation of the long miles ahead. There was going to be sun all day and I knew how exposed the coast path was for much of the route. I knew I’d be grateful later for the T-shirt I had thrown on last minute before I left.

The train was quiet, Liskeard station even quieter. I waited twenty minutes for the connection to the Looe Valley line and read the posters about the marvels of late Victorian engineering that had created a loop to connect the final stretch. A brief intimate journey shuttled me along a creek, then a stream, then a widening river, where a string of little white egrets soaked up the sun. The tide was out and the sands were stippled with wading birds. White buildings on the west side of the river were jigsaw-perfect in the morning sunlight, catching the full force of the morning rays and mirrored exquisitely in the green still waters of Looe River. I crossed the bridge, stepping over long slant shadows of railings that lined the riverbank, and past a couple of young men chatting to the fisherman on the water, metres below the pavement, eager for a fishing excursion for mackerel.

The coffee shop with its tables on the edge of the harbour was sorely tempting but I headed out on the coast road that ends in a gate that leads to the coast path. The sea was blue beyond Hannafore shore, the sky was blue, a couple of spear-fishers out amongst the rockpools revealed at the low tide, and past locals walking their dogs. Then, I was out on the coast path proper. This was the feeling I was yearning for: the expanse of shining sky, the scent of late summer, the still waters, and the colours settled into deep green and the liveliest blue I’d seen in a while.

Why do we walk alone? According to Hannalene Schilar in the Routledge International Handbook of Walking, there are many reasons: the relish of the adventure and challenges faced and overcome, a stronger connection to nature and to the path, the quest for enough solitude to allow deep reflection and thinking, the desire to be away from everyday urban or modern life, or that some people simply don’t find someone willing to walk long-distance with. Whatever reason we walk, there are two constants, she writes: moving forward and turning inward.

Looking down to the shallows below the cliff, the pale sand radiated up through the turquoise water and strips of darker rock channelled out from the shoreline. Gorse fussed at my ankles. The land tilted gently to the cliffs for a while, clothed in the last blackberries and despondent bracken. A honeysuckle flower sent steamy scent towards the path, another small sensory world to pass through. There was little movement in the air or out to sea. An occasional lazy swoop of lighter blue hinted at long-passed boats.

Three glorious miles later, I reached the small collection of buildings (including two cafés) at Talland, where people were milling and sitting on the beach like it was still summer. The numbers took me aback. I was reminded of geography lessons on the ‘honeypot’ theory of tourist management, which allows some popular attractions to attract a clustering of humanity around them to draw pressure away from more fragile areas. It had always been the spaces in between that attracted me. I teetered across the rocks to find a quiet spot alone, precarious with my coffee, then settled my eyes on the emerald green waterline, beyond the faded purple rocks studded with barnacles. The notice in the café had warned of weevil fish in the shallows and encouraged the purchase of their swimming shoes. I didn't need the extra weight but I envied those who were swimming. Two kayakers glided across the sparkling sea. It was a brittle peace, disturbed first by a man with a bucket and fishing net, then a small family with baby and dog. A desire for solitude pulled me from the sharp rocks and up the lane past the café, back onto the path.

I thought it was going to be quiet, but sound tramped the path with me, every step. The hedge that rippled with flies. The sound of munching from within dark holes in the bushes. Bees humming around a wall of flowers, each a constellation of magnetic attraction. I stepped in, through, and out of multiple insect conversations: ivy bees, bluebottles desperate to find soft pulpy vessels for their eggs, grasshoppers that littered the path at my feet, black beetles that crossed the path on frilly feet. The sea puddling lazily up the rocks below.

Onto Polperro, a sparkling jewel that bright morning. Steep white walls towered over narrow streets that bristled with visitors, another honeypot. The façade of a house was elegantly bedecked with shells. The hump of the hill across the harbour framed the picture and lent a model-village sensibility. I crossed the small channel that tips three streams into the sea and lingered in the claustrophobic harbour. A chalkboard advertised boat-trips beyond the harbour and described the week’s weather with sun emojis and sea states that progressed from Smooth/Calm to Slight to AMAZING!

I was sorely tempted to set sail but instead I took a brief rest in the cool dark interior of the Blue Peter pub with an icy coke, where I felt a flicker of anxiety as the landlady informed me that my next seven miles was the toughest section of the coast path around. A string of strenuous hill climbs and descents lay before Fowey, my resting place for the night.

It was a tough few miles. When you walk the coast path, an inordinate amount of time is spent staring at the ground a few paces ahead - watching for changes in ground cover, cheeky roots that cross the track, too-smooth rocks that might cause you to slide, sharp drop-offs into chaotic vegetation that may hide an uninterrupted tumble down a cliff. Walking the coast path can be a hazardous business but I found that the ground, and the space close above it, gives its own gifts (I think of David Whyte’s poem that urges us to “Start close in, don’t take the second step, or the third, start with the first thing, the step you don’t want to take”. The path is not all about the miles covered or the views or the challenge but about the small, micro-actions of foot in front of foot, treading on the land that heads west.

I passed briefly through tunnels of windswept trees and peeked through gaps in high hedges to the sparkling sea beyond, before the path opened out. Dizzy cliffs sheered to impenetrable beaches at their foot. The path flowed through sloping fields of long brown grasses, where imperious seeds of willowherb barely moved in the warm air and delicate hands of wild carrot were preserved in death. My head yearned for shade and I began to obsess over how I could achieve total immersion in cool water when there was no way to reach the sea below me. It is a cruel path at times like that, all the while luring the weary walker with delicious vistas of shimmering sea but no means to reach it. The stretch of the path was exposed and I found no shady respite for lunch. I searched the map for tell-tale contour lines that showed where the path descended low enough to access the water.

Just before three in the afternoon, I found the place. Lansallos Beach. I was disappointed to see two people already sunning themselves on the beach – no swims in blissful solitude for me then. Around the corner there were even more people, couples everywhere perched almost comically a safe distance apart, perhaps each hoping for some solitude in this beautiful place. I ignored my self-consciousness and plunged into the water.

Would it be dramatic to say that the swim saved me? Perhaps not in a physical way - I was never in real danger only discomfort - but in another way. The last three miles walking that day were spent in reverie. As the intense heat of the day retreated, my thoughts floated by and memories slipped in. I recalled every moment I had ever felt gathered in the sun, the quivering potential of summer days long gone, perhaps never truly grasped. There was an embodied sense of belonging to the path, entwined with the warmth of the lowering sun, the stillness of the September air, and the creatures (I rescued a beetle on its back!).

I stopped to watch three swifts above Lantic Bay and the sense that all of us were heading home that afternoon was powerful. I didn’t pass a soul all the way to Polruan, where the warm narrow streets were eerily silent. A short wait on the quay for the small ferry, then I was walking up the other side in Fowey to my home for the night, the Safe Harbour Inn. The name fitted somehow.

The next day was as blissful as the first, as sunny and bright, as warm and generous. The stretch was more familiar (I’ve walked it several times) and I was reminded once more how much I loved that part of the southern Cornish coastline. Walking the coast path is always a celebration of place. A profound sense of home deepens each time I walk this path. There were memories of walking particular parts that layered on my embodied experience: that cliff fall in Talland that had diverted the path nine years ago, now mended and resumed on its original home hugging the clifftops. Those holiday pods that were double-booked when my friend was in desperate need of a break with her troubled daughter. Our old neighbour’s mother who once lived in Looe, the television-set of the BBC series Beyond Paradise. That time I went to see the play Rebecca at the Theatre Royal in Plymouth and imagined the coastline stretching west to those mystical creeks and lonely beaches of the Menabilly estate or Manderley as Daphne de Maurier called them in her novel.

It was a week off the Autumn equinox. As I walked the final few miles through Polkerris and across the wide sweep of beach to Par, the delicate dance continued between the directional tugs I’d felt those past few days on the coast path: the constant urge to press on and the intricate inward entanglement of thought, memory and reflection. My own personal equinox.

I have a smooth round pebble on my desk that I collected from the beach at Polridmouth. When I feel the familiar weight of this world, it becomes a small rocky portal to the joy of two gentle September days spent (mostly) alone on the edge of this land. And a tender reminder that to be alive is to always be seeking that balance between the push to move forward and the pull to turn inward.

This has been a summer to do, not to think. I guess that makes sense. It is a time to embrace the light, make hay while the sun shines, as we have said since we were all field-dwellers. We have seized each fresh morning to get out on our bikes and my time spent in the saddle has been truly joyous this year. But, without my regular routine of reading, thinking, and writing, at times I admit I have felt adrift, a little untethered. Uncertain what it all means and left assuming it probably doesn't mean anything. A daily life without meaning making at its core runs the risk of becoming meaningless. I have spent time with the idea that this is perfectly acceptable but I’m reminded once again to return to my pen and notebook, to make time in between the pull of life, to pause and sit with the birds and soft hum of the summer air. To reflect on what's gone before and what is passing before my window. To place myself once more.

1. There is a dim and damp day that is rich-green with the palest dove-grey mist, glancing the roofs of the cottages below in the village and obscuring the hilltop. Summer passes on and the trees on Pound Lane offer the richest avenue of green: green-gold, green-turning-brown-in-patches, green-black in the early morning shadow. The hedgerows along our lanes are full and overgrown, tangled with little colour save the white-china tops of umbellifers and the dusty-pink plates of hemp agrimony.

2. The rooks call to me as I put the sheets out to dry. I tidy the dead and dying growth back from the front garden, remnants of the midsummer surge. The rudbeckia is almost out, verbena is still standing tall and strong and capped in purple. The buddleia is a happy calling place for the butterflies. I try to consider that summer could be a time of distraction, of wallowing in the sheen of it all. Not of getting busy, head down, that comes later in the year, when the dimming autumn-winter months force productivity. This August is patchy with work, quiet days marking scripts at my own pace, taking sunny days off when I can.

3. Sparrowhawk sits on the fence. I sit on the deck and watch him. Can he see me? He turns his head and one black eye swivels my way. He remains, unmoved by my presence, unlike mine by his. Flecks of white dazzle brown feathers. He is unafraid, all powerful in the skies, and on the land it appears. The bird feeder is empty.

4. It is time for blackberry picking. We walk along confused hedgerows, trying to read the patterns where berries swell and darken and where they remain red and taut. We trace the hedgerows, two south-facing, one west. It is a popular path out of the village behind the church and the hedgerows have been denuded of berries already. Although ten miles from the city, I feel this urban fringe in some places, where nature is tired and put-upon, depleted of its once abundance. It's a scarce resource in these isles, everyone wants, needs a slice. We move to another field, berries thicken in the less-visited hedgerows and we leave with enough to make jam for the year ahead, our little pots of summer memories. Past hawthorn, holly, bramble, one or two skeletal, barely recognisable foxgloves, their joy and exuberance in June almost forgotten in the damp mists of August. Wind tugs the leaves and rock the grasses. It is like the season wants to leave in a hurry. Wait, I’m not done. I haven't felt the water on my skin yet.

5. Walking past the old airport on my way to campus, the long grass from midsummer is now roughly shorn and left as stubble. There's no one here, perhaps there never will be, and yet they still work to keep nature out. Later, I pass a place where the large perennial patch of rosebay willowherb is now joined by clumps of hemp agrimony, on the edge of the common. The blurred sepia-pink blushes and pink-cream heads of agrimony sway like fantastical palaces, each a cosmos of containment, a world-in-itself. I want to stop and level my eye with its whorls, look through the dusty pink and let it paint my day, wash over me like the finest watercolour light, airy, barely there.

Ah, the colours of August. Monochrome grey-green on the wet days. Deep-gold and umber on the dry days. White, bright sun, thinning at this time of the year, just as it fattens in April. Two luminous bookends of the time of growing. Glorious deep-yellows of rudbeckia, finally out, purple of verbena behind, greens-becoming-yellow, foxgloves now dust-brown. Leaves have florid patches, scattered on the footpath, recent winds tussled them from their holds. Crocosmia is taking its leave now, its flowers disappearing one-by-one from its tips, leaving nothing but bruised purple seedheads behind. Yellow stars of tormentil and harebit dot the common still. Rowan berries fatten and their rouge catches our eyes as we pass, each a perfect cocoon of warmth and solace.

Yellow, purple. Yellow, purple. Yellow, purple. Blush-red apple, lime-green leaves, glossy laurel. The mornings are cooler now, pale-pink clouds skitter through sunrise skies. Leaves dampening, flowers dropping, colours changing, hedgerows closing. The collapse of the year, the musky scent of autumn, the last whiff of honeysuckle along the lanes, the tug back to the source.

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July, this year, was a long summer month of stillness, space, heat, weight, and pause. For me anyway. Not so for the politicians who fought the UK’s general election campaign, not so for the Olympians who prepared their muscles and determination for the Paris games, not so for the wave of our old viral companion.

In the early days of the month, I give myself permission to step back from the jealous grip of academic life and spend my days sitting on our porch amongst the flowers, reading The Song of the Earth by Jonathan Bate (thanks Ian Grosz for the recommendation after my last post on the call to dwell in May), and writing. I scribble copious notes, but it is going to take some time to fully absorb all that the book revealed about our need for poetry (and the poetic) in our world. It invigorates my thinking about what I like doing, whether I feel it serves any purpose, and what others may get from my writing. It is enough for now to say I step away from the book enlivened: to witness and write the intricacies of nature in this place, the sacred task I mentioned in my last post. It feels joyous and important, a steely combination that will surely take me through the dark nights of winter. I know it will be one of those books that anchor me to my purpose and guide me back to it when it too easily gets forgotten amidst the sucking of daily life. I set it on my shelf, alongside Annie Dillard and Aldo Leopold, those great writers of place and its companions.

The weather in July is varied. It rains for almost two days: soft rain trickling through every leaf and blade of grass, every molecule at home somewhere; hard rain bounces off the roof, the car steaming after the momentary sun's heat. Colours are muted, mauves and green-greys, deep verdant patches illuminated by a purple buddleia flower or peach rose. Ox-eye daisies flatten and rise triumphant again, like tiny moons in a green cosmos. Lupins swagger and sag. The last of the army of foxgloves troop into soggy exhaustion, every joule of energy spent in producing those spikes of flowers that once soared to the heavens. Every surge of growth has its path, its time, as we all do. The foxglove hands the baton to the buddleia, and the long, glorious song continues.

There were plenty of days when I did not write about nature. There is something about summer - the exuberance, the rampant-ness, the overwhelm of leaf and flower - that is exhausting. I saw it in the birds, worn out by the ever-hungry mouths of their offspring, and I saw it in the plants that line the lanes. The foxgloves are exhausted, their never-ceasing pinnacles of flower slowly faded and turned to seed, with one or two lone flowers spying the world like periscopes. Grass is warm and brown, long blades sway and tilt, lining the pavements, edging the roads, building their banks of seeds amidst alternate heat and deluge. The ox-eye daisies, flat and tatty, cling on to life. The geraniums twine themselves between the white, generous with their rich purple patches. Rose is poised for a second spectacle. Buddleia sends out deep magenta and mauve whorls of flower.

I spend a scorching few days on a surreal green and pristine golf-course resort in Cornwall with my university colleagues on a writing retreat. I make a swift visit to my parents in their seaside home in Torquay. I share a seven-mile walk up into remote Dartmoor with my brother in a cold wind. The next day, the reason transpires for my below-par energy levels as the summer wave of Covid finally reaches me. An uncomfortable week follows. I slowly try to work, but endure waves of frustration, unsettling, painful (oh my head, my sinuses). Taste and smell gone, zero energy beyond ten minutes of being up and about, daily chats to compare progress with mum and dad, both of whom have it. A week passes with scattered thoughts, tired dry eyes, sudden coughing fits that feel I will never loosen that tickle down my throat, then hot flashes, dizziness, racing pulse, oppressive chest. It is extraordinary the range of symptoms the virus produces this time. For days, whenever I try to read or listen to the radio, I tumble swift and deep into an open-mouth stupor, then wake fitfully again, exhausted beyond measure.

All the while, our wild garden grows beneath the quarry face. Its journey from neglected turning-circle to deliberate life-enhancing space has been satisfying to watch. It has called us to strike a delicate balance: of keeping the almost public space neat enough for our neighbours’ clipped standards of gardens, whilst being increasingly more concerned for the creatures that also call this place home. It is dotted with youngling fruit trees. Mists of fine yellow nipplewort, mint, deep purple buddleia, beaming yellow heliopsis, foxgloves browning, almost ready for seed scattering, a sword of memory from June days in fields on bikes. One immense white blowsy hollyhock breaches the deck in the back. Phlox get ready to bloom. Burnt orange crocosmia, the wildflower of modern Cornish cliffs, shower the gravel beneath the wisteria, itself enjoying a second bloom. Late July whites and purples and yellows, a palette of fire.

I see out the final days of July, with the apple tree just beyond my window, listening to the rooks begin their day. The village is summer-holiday still, the air sticky and close, and we have a few surprise days of heat and high pressure. I read The Woman in the Fields, an essay by Kathleen Jamie in Sightlines about the passing of time, youth, and place and it stirs memories of collective endeavours of my youth. Days spent as a child standing on my hands, perfecting a cartwheel, racing around on my bike, yearning for a BMX like my brother. Days out in the streets, long years ahead with not a clue as to what I would spend them doing. Older age is a lonelier time, it turns out: friends are dispersed and busy with their own lives, days are spent in our small family of three, events must be planned and booked, moments squeezed into ever-decreasing spaces.

The hottest four days in the world, on record, in the last week. The Olympian dreams of young, strong bodies. The sound of a faint television, a whiny buzz of yet another winged creature caught in the glass-glare of our porch. Melancholy cloaks me like humid air, impossible to escape these days. I make deals with the virus, bargain away my dreams, and accept reluctantly what I'm given this day.

I’m not sure when I first flagged May as a month to be taken seriously. For most of my teenage years and into my university days, it was a month of sufferance, of revision, exams, hay fever, general torment. Perhaps it was not until my twenty-fourth year on this planet that I finally began to understand May had a power all its own - when I travelled to the isle of Mull on a National Express coach and camped amongst the buttercups for a week, on the shores of the western tip of Loch Linnhe. I felt as if I had uncovered a secret. Everyone went on holiday in July and August, so going away in May felt forbidden, bizarre almost, like I should be somewhere else, working hard.

It has taken me some years to come to grips with the full gift of May, and to understand that to fully appreciate its glories I should avoid working through it where possible. Last year, at last, I made a decision. Mindful we only get so many Mays in a lifetime, I marked the month in my internal calendar as worthy of saving my annual leave up for and spent some delightful time with family and distant friends, taking them for picnics in woodlands and aimless meanders through gardens, all near our home on the edge of Dartmoor. This year, once again, I accurately anticipated that my future self, starved of light and life from the winter months, would stumble into May in a kind of a panic that once again the land around me was presenting its most joyous, burgeoning self and I simply had to spend the month outside, free.

This year, I booked two weeks’ leave for the first two weeks of May. After a shaky (and cold and rainy) start, we settled into a circumstance-enforced holiday-from-home. I can’t complain - our home sits in a charming valley between the two holiday counties of Devon and Cornwall, so there are plentiful day trips to choose from, and places long on our list to visit.

One of the first we took was a bike ride through unknown lanes to Meavy, Sheeptor, and Burrator, the reservoir that waters Plymouth and surroundings. Skylarks chattered above us, singing Moor as they scooted about the expansive palest-blue sky. Gorse bushes cast the scent of coconut around our heads. We watched a Buzzard. We were high up the moorside, so it was at a level with us and it soared, sun on its back, without a breath of effort. Buzzard folded his wings abruptly, poked his nose down and soared into the space beneath. He narrowly missed Raven, it was intimidation clearly. We hear a distant Cuckoo, a cow. Skylarks, the persistent soundtrack to this corner of the world, to a summer in the wings. Specks of yellow tormentil, tufts of new grass blades. I felt held by my chosen land. We couldn’t see the water: the land tilted gently to the valley below, the far side a patchwork of bronze-brown gorse, new green swathes with fainter green-brown tracks between. Slices of tended green fields nosed into the uncultivated moorland. There were hawthorn trees, oaks below us, an upper stand of Scot’s pine denoting a house and someone's labour from centuries ago. We talked of the old cinematic skill of matte painting and imagined the towers we could superimpose on Wotter Moor with its ready-made quarry slab. I closed my eyes and let the skylark song tumble over me. (extract from my journal, May 4)

We took a brief trip to the tip of Cornwall, to watch the early morning sun over St Michael’s Mount and to visit some National Trust properties. In a meadow at Godolphin, I wrote:

A warm May afternoon. Is there anything more lovely than lying in a meadow watching the swallows dip and glide, stall and swoop? Dandelion clocks. Breeze shakes the leaves, almost cool. Buttercups. An old lichen and moss-coated granite wall around the Kings Courtyard. Such closeness to power and inheritance, titles and landedness. Shapes emerge, appear to step out of the wall but, no, it's a trick of the light catching that soft silver-grey plant. Is it Old Time that I'm feeling? I have a strong sense of a spring day that John Clare may have had, dreaming in the meadow, tools lain down for the moment, watching the swallows. (Godolphin, Cornwall, May 9)

Later that afternoon, we walked along the coast path and I wrote some more from the beach at Trebah Garden:

We sit on the shingle beach and listen to the insistent drum roll of the windswept Helford rivermouth. The sun, so long hidden from searching eyes, strokes my bare skin with an intensity that only new light brings. Rocks root and hold fast to the eternal beach. There are pebbles of grey slate and white quartz, small round jewels of white heat, glimpses of buried crosses, white-on-grey. A scattered tide line of dulce, kelp, and cuttlefish, the familiar detritus of lost lives. Sea thrift waves from pockets of flowing rock that pauses only for human time, but always still pressing forward, weathering back. A fly tickles my knee. The waves play their old tune on the shingle stage. White frothed confusion tops the arcs of water, scaled with light and salt. The water, like life, retreats. Too soon out of reach, witnessed for a moment, it is the twisted ebb and flow of moonpull. A ship skirts the horizon: close your eyes for a moment and it's the galleon from that Georgian painting at Saint Michael's Mount. This land and water is layered with saints and wealth, mining and fishing, prayer and rest, skimmed now with a flicker of tension and unrest. The garden we have walked through to reach this shore was created over so many lifetimes, now gone, lost to time. Are we all brief waves, making our mark on the shore for a crushing moment, then retreating to stillness, contracting?  A gull follows the edge line of water. Fragments of wave and tip of water refract the sunlight, cracking my heart open into a thousand mirrored pieces. It has always been so in these places. The pull of life, the repose, the reverie, the moments when we tilt towards the inevitable end. Soon, there will be a gathering of coats, a return of flask to bag, a remembering of phone and apple amongst the rocks. An inexorable leaving, tracing our footsteps back through the garden of devotion, back into our lives. (Trebah Beach, Conrwall, May 10)

One afternoon, when we are back home, I listened to a conversation between Krista Tippett and the children’s writer Kate diCamillo. Kate shared a phrase she wrote in one of her books and it caught my breath:

“[Rainer Maria] Rilke never lost his conviction in the utter reality of the world or in our human capacity to redeem it through that act of transforming attention, which is naming, or love.”

What if my sacred task in this life is to speak of the wonder of nature? To tell stories of how, if we learn to pay attention and to notice, we will be shown how to live well on this miraculous planet? What if this were enough? To name it simply, and to name it often, to speak clearly of the world so that another soul might learn to love it as I do?

I see you, May, in your shiny newness, your bright zesty verdure, your multitudinous growth.

I see you, Clematis as you shine your mauve and purple plates next to the linen-white roundules of your neighbour, Wisteria.

I see you, Bramble, staking your summer claim to soil and space.

I see you, Lupin, bursting each hour it seems with fortitude and colour.

I see you, Red Campion, splaying your hearts, pinning me down with your tiny beauty.

I see you, Rhododendron, at home on the quarry bank, spilling your fuscia-pink tongues across our soil.

I see you, young Ash sapling, so rooted and sure of your footing, yet so naive to the fate of your sisters around you.

I see you, Pear, Plum and Apple, offering your small pockets of tissue-white blossom that promise to mop up my tears.

I see it all. My phone is full of blue and green photographs. But, I have discovered something else this May. There is something profoundly different about seeing May and dwelling in it. It is not enough to simply see May. I want to crawl inside the life outside my window. To share its energetic channels towards the light, to reach beyond the knowing of desktop and page, to dwell in it. To pay attention to every cell, every tiny buzzing life, every perfect song of new bird. This yearning has no resolution, I fear. It is an impossible puzzle. It needs time.

Dwelling invites an immersion, where all nerve-endings of our bodies are alive to the exuberant growth of it all: the light, the life, the potential, the shout of it. Now, back working at my desk, I steal the occasional glance out of my study window, grateful for the pots of flowers, rose, and fatsia that we have planted for the arrival of this moment of disconnect that I encounter at the end of every free period. I am no longer dwelling in it. I’m not even sure what that means from this vantage point, but I have the faintest memory of it, a lingering trace on my skin.

My advice to you for next year: book some time off in May and sit with the swallows and the buttercups. Take a notebook. Dwell. Your soul will thank you for it.

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