Friday, December 26, 2008
Winter Sky
Posted in Musings
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N and I went for a walk this afternoon, unaccompanied by children, who would rather be out with friends or keeping gifts company. It's been a blue-sky day, fairly chilly in contrast to the mild days just before Christmas. We parked near Cotcliffe Woods, which is an escarpment, and, the woods being thick mud, walked up the road and over the hill down to the A19. This road is too busy to cross lightly, even to visit pretty Leeke church, which reminded me, on the one occasion I've been in, of something out of Harry Potter. It's a little country church, which in the UK means it's old, dating from the times when churches were dotted around the countryside and it was a bit of a journey from the farm to get to Sunday morning services, but people went nonetheless. Nowadays churches are urban things, the old country ones - and some town ones too - share a vicar amongst several congregations and some have become defunct as people move out of the countryside into the cities. Leeke church isn't defunct - it's a cosy little place and in the back we found the bit that stuck in my mind as straight out of the imagination of J K Rowling: a little room with a small gothic window, church robes hanging on a peg and, on a counter which memory or fantasy tells me was covered in gingham sticky-back plastic, a kettle. It could have been a Weasley kitchen but for one thing: the Weasleys could never all have fitted in at once. Anyway, we didn't quite get there today. Topping the hill, the noise of the road reaches you suddenly, and the car headlights are already lit by around 3.30. We wandered down to the junction and I found what I thought must have been the original line of the road between a field hedge and a line of trees bordering the road, but N thinks it's part of a long ditch running by the thoroughfare. Someone had lost a wheel-trim so I propped it against a road sign and we made our way back towards the setting sun. There are hedges either side of the narrow road, and occasional trees. As we went along and the sun neared the horizon, the trees showed black against the warm orangey-yellow of the sky. There were copses with the trees tall and very straight, their branches clustered at the top and black against the pale blue of the zenith. There was a little cluster of two short conifers in a wayside garden, a tangle of brush obscured in the darkness beneath them while the brilliance of the yellow sun was fragmented by their trunks and branches. There was a also a lone oak, silhouetted against the empty winter sky as absolutely black, yet when we looked back it was a humble winter tree in muted colours, set in the wide landscape of the valley, lit by that quality of light that is more like gilded water. We met nobody but Boxing Day riders hacking in a leisurely way between local liveries and saw in a field eight sportsmen shooting..what? Probably rabbits judging by the location. The Boxing Day walk is a sort of tradition, borne of necessity after Christmas Dinner. Today's was unusually clear and bright, and the sun had set by the time we reached home and put the animals away for the evening. It will be freezing or below tonight, thanks to that clear sky. And of course, I didn't have my camera. |
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Thursday, January 1, 2009 - Untitled Comment
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Posted by Denise 