Finding Beauty – A Year of Nature Outside Your Door.

Well they are here and I did say in my blog last week that I’d be jumping with joy and I am. The books have arrived back from the printers just in the nick of time for Christmas, but like my dog are for any and all times of the year! ‘Finding Beauty – A…

‘Finding Beauty’ the new book is almost ready. Here’s what’s been going on for me this year…

This was just going to be a blog about my soon to be released new book ‘Finding  Beauty – A Year of Nature Outside Your Door.’ I was going to be showing you pictures of the boxes of books, photos from inside it, telling you  where you could buy it, it was all going to…

‘Summer is a-coming in’…nature in the Old Cemetery

  I’m sitting up in the Old Cemetery in the intense heat of a midsummer’s day. I have been coming up here on the same day every month for the past three years to write a piece for the local Herald about nature in this space. It’s full sun above me today but the sky…

The Beginning.

The mist made a mockery of the world. Disappeared the familiar routes. Turned the roads into a mystery of unseeing, cloaking everything in muffled silence. I lost my way, or it lost me. All sense of reference gone. Found myself in another place. Ancient, mercurial, liminal, tricky. I turned around. Followed my heart. Inched the…

Breathe

We arrived late. Dusk falling and rapidly giving way to darkness. Muntjacs were grazing blatantly on the road verges and a few hares ran across the stubble fields. The sky held just enough light to illuminate the large skein of pink footed geese flying over our heads before they disappeared into the reed beds of…

Spring Equinox – Ostara

Walking out into this beautifully bright, sunny morning, I’m suddenly thinking of the eighties film ‘Highlander’. The bit where Sean Connery’s character is explaining to Christopher Lambert’s highlander about the ‘quickening’, that surging pulse of energy and life force that makes him feel stronger, more alive and immortal. So today, standing on top of Windmill…

Spring

Down under the long slope of the Edge, a woodpecker drums for spring. The steady beat echoes out over the woods, a new seasons dance. The trees gladden to his bass line as blue tits, blackbirds and robins join in the orchestra. On the ground below celandines angle their buttery faces up towards the light….

Yew

Yew roots fan out like the folds of a skirt. Great octopus arms encircling the earth in coital embrace. In between the tangle of limbs, faces appear and dissolve again as I draw near to explore the hidden places within. Each tree growing its own signiture of anchoring curls. I’ve been visiting these yews for…

Finding Beauty in an Ordinary Place.

Last night the sky was clear and full of stars. The temperature had finally dropped from the unseasonal mild spell and the air promised a frost. I was longing for it to finally feel like a proper winter, so maybe I wished it into being as the day actually began with a light dusting of…

The return of the light.

The morning greeted me in a cold, damp embrace. The last full moon of the year had been hidden the night before in a blanket of fog and the light of the new day was still struggling hard to break through it. We pushed up the Windmill Hill, just high enough to be raised above…

To Everything, Turn, Turn, Turn….

   It’s the start of August, the height of the school summer holidays but something very tangible has shifted. This morning on my dog walk over the Linden fields, the wind was blowing in a storm and the lime tree walk was raining down leaves like a flurry of confetti. The nights are noticeably drawing in…