Tag: Painswick

Nature notes from Cranham Common

No more EU, no more referendum, for now.

On a very different tack, or since I’m on land not at sea, on a very different track – the track across the local common, with its glorious sense of space. The valley to Painswick opens to the south and beechwoods lie behind me and to my left and right. And underfoot the closest to a carpet of cowslips that I’ve ever seen. No fertiliser touches this land, and currently it’s grazed on a rotation basis by a few contented Belted Galloway cattle. I can see them often from the bedroom window, beyond the cricket field, each with its single wide white belt.

Last year cowslips just touched the land, now they’ve almost taken over, and I’ve never seen the like. They’re small and they droop, gently, and there’s a kind of mute acceptance, a contendness of place, about them. It’s almost as if they’re apologising for being there, for holding on to one stretch of country when once they covered the fields and meadows of England.

Spring has come suddenly this year. The chestnuts were late, and even now the ash is holding back, no leaf green yet emerging from the buds. But we’re high here, exposed to winds, and Spring is just a little behind the lower country. A few daffodils survive, and the bluebells and wood sorrel are abundant, the celandine reclusive, and the wild garlic anything but. They’re not quite in flower yet, but the smell in places is all-pervasive. Driving back from Oxford last night, passing through woodland, the smell invaded the car, almost as if we had a well-seasoned Sunday roast in the back.

On my morning run, down by the stream beyond the common, by the delightfully named Haregrove Cottage, the birds were in chorus, and it was 9 o’clock – four hours past dawn. How many decibels higher will it be tomorrow when we walk out at 4.30 on an organised dawn chorus woodland excursion? It amazes me how the birds launch into their chorus almost as soon as they stir, sing their hearts out, and then subside into a more occasional chirping and chirruping as the day takes hold.

And here I am writing. Outside she’s mowing the lawn – she turned down my offer. But you can clip the edges she said. So that I will do…

A winter’s day in a deep and dark December

Paul Simon’s opening lines to ‘I am a rock’.

And there’s the fourth verse:

‘I have my books and my poetry to protect me
I am shielded in my armor, hiding in my room, safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me …’

I began the day in the Cotswolds.

The wind howled all night. The depressions keep rolling in. It’s way too warm, and the seasonal outbreaks of frozen hands and chilblains are in abeyance. We’ve still, though, got our winter fuel allowance, being over 65. Motorways are a mass of muck and spray, and trains are no doubt already overloaded. Christmas four days away.

First thing I ran down to the Painswick Stream, and up again across the common. I didn’t see a soul, only a few cows, to whom of course I said hello. The southerly wind was strong enough to feel chill, but tucked between hedgerows all was still, and as I began the climb back I could see the sun, just risen below the hill, touching the clouds a gentle pink and red. And yes, there was blue sky.

By mid-morning the storm was raging, and the trees bending before the wind. And I had the motorway ahead of me.

Back in my London flat another kind of peace, the steady hum of traffic on the main road below. Enough, I thought, and put on a new album of Bob Dylan songs recorded by other artists.

‘I am a rock/I am an island,’ is the refrain of Paul Simon’s song.

But the ocean, and the rain, is Bob Dylan’s:

‘Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall’