Fox

Hoar frost hangs in the air. A robin greets me. A clatter of woodpigeons flies too close for comfort. Two crows, their black plumage bigged up against the cold air, fight over a chunk of bread. 

In the field next to the farm a fox, the fog dulling down his russet coat, meanders slowly across the grass. Head down, tail down, he is rootling for earthworms. Foxes eat a lot of worms. Rain, such as we had last night, brings them to the surface, but now the ground is almost frozen and it will be a while before he can unearth his breakfast. I am glad to be well-wrapped up. I am glad to have made it out this early.

Following the sun

Where the canal broadens out, a large flock of Canada Geese float on the water. A heron, hunched on a low-hanging alder branch, turns his back on them. Cock robins, pert and handsome, stake out their territories in the hawthorn hedge. They count me out along the towpath, and count me back in again – I might be up to no good. Stealing crab apples, perhaps, or gathering in holly for a Christmas wreath.

As I turn for home the geese take off, in groups of twenty or more, yapping and barking. They are following the last of the day’s sunlight, heading for the mill lodge hidden behind the hill.

Bracken

The rain has stopped, but the ground is still sodden. I walk through puddles to the canal, and by the time I reach the towpath my boots and the hems of my trousers are splattered with mud. The grasses beside the track across the field are flattened and yellow, the taller clumps dull ochre. And yet the hills are green, a green made even greener by the redness of dead bracken. The painter John Constable knew how to use red to strengthen the colour green; as a child I’d searched his pictures for the red - a scarlet cap or waistcoat, or an ornamental saddle to bring out the green of stream and meadow.

Today the redness of the bracken is astonishing; it defies analogy. Not amethyst, not chestnut, not madder, but all of these and all at once, a rich deep drowning of the hills in garnet. And the redness is doubled, each bracken frond reflected in the ebony surface of the canal. It is quite simply breath-taking.

A poet's notes from Blackstone Edge

Apoet'snotesfromBlackstoneEdge – what do I intend by this? I don’t yet know. Writing’s often like that. I don’t know what I’m going to write until I’ve written it. And I’m not good at blogging. 

Blogging calls for an immediate write-up, but I like to reflect on what I write. Poetry suits me. However . . . . I’m growing older, and running out of time, and as there are many things I want to write about, I’d better get blogging. Perhaps I’m hoping a blog will take me somewhere new. But then too, as a writer, I want to share, and right now what I most want to share is the valley that I live in. If this blog has a focus, it’s the short stretch of canal that runs between the ancient hamlet of Warland and the small town of Littleborough. I live mid-way between the two.

The Rochdale Canal near Littleborough 
C Sheila Wild

I’ve spent most of my life living near a canal – the Avon and Kennet, the Union, the Leeds and Liverpool, and now the Rochdale Canal. The landscape hereabouts is beautiful. It's full of history; its roots reach back to the Mesolithic era. And you don’t have to look far to discover that it’s full of wildlife. 

It’s not a challenging landscape, but my trekking days  are long gone. These days I walk like an ageing Labrador, stiff-legged and with a list to the right. Even with orthopaedic shoes I can only walk a couple of miles. So, this small, tight valley with buses that can ferry me over the difficult bits, suits me very well. It's what I have to hand, and it's what I'll write about.