The house near Gorsey Hill Wood

My house stands above a busy road, but my writing desk looks across to Gorsey Hill Wood, where there's a heronry. At the foot of the hill is a large Victorian mansion, ornately gabled, which hosts a roost for pipistrelle bats. My own much newer and more modest home is a maternity roost, where bats come to give birth to and nurse their infants. Once I found a baby bat in my front porch; it had fallen from the gable end, and was seeking shadow.

The copse of sycamore on the north side of my drive is home to a tawny owl, and in winter the ivy that clambers up the trees is browsed by red deer. At the end of my small back garden is a water meadow rich in wild flowers, a soakaway field for the infant river Roch. Beyond the river is the Rochdale canal, and beyond the canal, a broad stretch of rough pasture leads steeply up to the millstone grit outcrop of Blackstone Edge. 

Not a wild landscape, but a landscape that offers much. It's full of interest: air that's never still, light that changes with the hour and with the season, trees, meadows full of buttercups, and a host of small creatures, asking of me only that I notice them going about their daily business.