Poet's note: a posse of herons

In 2011 there were sixteen nests in the heronry. This year, the winter of 2017 having been so hard, there are only three.

The male birds arrive at the end of December to eye up the old nests and work out what needs fixing. The heronry is an old one, and so the nesting platforms are huge untidy affairs of branches and twigs fetched up from the surrounding trees. Once the females have arrived, courtship begins. It's a surprisingly graceful ceremony of neck stretching and beak snapping, and once it's over, the birds begin to rebuild their nest. Repairing the nest is a leisurely process - herons do everything slowly - the male flying in with building material, the female reweaving the platform. 

Herons begin incubating their eggs as early as February, and I know when incubation has begun, because I can see the females hunkered down on the nest platforms. The males fly in with food, their long necks outstretched and stuffed full of frogs and fish. The birds remind me of planes coming in to land. They're so ungainly I wonder if they're going to make it, but each heron carefully lines himself up and taxis slowly into his allotted docking space, within easy reach of his mate's hungry beak. 

The parent birds are so large I don't need binoculars to see them, and even the chicks are big enough to be seen peering over the edge of the nest. Heron chicks are scrawny and scruffy with the most fantastical punk hair-dos, spiky quiffs of off-white feathers. 

I wonder what its' like to be a chick growing up in a year with so few nests. Is the heronry uncannily quiet? Is the room service better than usual, or has the hard winter killed off the food supply too? Are the few remaining parents unduly anxious? Is three nests enough, I wonder. Will the heronry survive?

Poem: The shadows thrown by millstone grit

Landscape or topographical poetry isn’t popular, or, at least, far too many people have told me they ‘don’t like landscape poetry’.  

I wonder what they mean. Are they saying the writings of John Clare, William Wordsworth, and, from the valley next to this, Ted Hughes, are of no worth? Probably not. I think they must fear sentimentality, but also, I suspect, they have no idea that the landscape is an active partner in the writing process.

Throughout my life I have been attentive to place. I’ve lived in many different parts of Britain: Bath, where I was born; Peterborough; Richmond; Uxbridge; Harrogate; Sheffield, Manchester, and now, here in the South Pennines. Always on the edge of a town, and almost always near a canal.

I can pull a poem out of each of these places - even Peterborough, which I left when I was only four years old - for the place that I inhabit is an extension of me. I’m attentive to where I live. I project my thoughts and memories onto the landscape and in turn it projects its concerns on to me. And something comes out of that exchange.

The shadows thrown by millstone grit

From where I’m sitting I can see the hills.

The sun’s shining and tomorrow

the clocks will go forward.

Something catches my eye;

a hiker climbing up to Blackstone Edge,

the jizz of him young and fit.

I don’t know where memories come from,

only that they turn up unexpectedly,

and demand to be let in.

Why today, when the sun’s shining

on moor and millstone grit, should I recall

a cousin dead these fifty years?

I cannot see his face, but his hair’s still fair,

and his hands still slender,

his nails bitten to the quick.

I was eleven, he eighteen.

Between us, there existed a polite affection.

He took his own life.

No-one told me why, or how, or thought

even that I might grieve, my being still a child,

and he a cousin I saw only twice a year.

But I did grieve.

I still do.

© Sheila Wild

Poet's note: The first swallow

The first swallow, so thin and tired that at first glance I'm not sure if it is a swallow, but then comes that unmistakable twist of wings at speed, and a bubble of happiness bursts inside me. 

Poet's note: The swallows are not yet here

The valley is holding its breath, waiting for the first swallows to arrive.

The chaffinches are back, and the goldfinches – where have they been? – and the long-tailed tits. The robins have never left home, and now a pair have nested in the cypress hedge.  Sparrows are chirping in the hawthorn bushes, goldfinches twitter as they flit from one drystone wall to another; jackdaws holler as they dive down from the high outcrops of millstone grit. 

But the air over the canal is silent. The swallows are not yet here.

Poem: Clearing the valley

When I was a child I spent my summer holidays with an elderly and much-loved aunt and uncle. It was they who introduced me to this valley. Sixty years on, the valley is busier and more densely populated, but the air is clearer, the stone cottages have been sand-blasted clean of a century of industrial soot, and the trees are coming back.

Some people say the trees are the wrong kind of trees, not native to the valley, and it's true that you’ll seldom see an oak or an ash, but you will find whitethorn, birch and alder, pioneer species perhaps, or maybe small enough to have escaped the axe, for it was the deciduous hardwoods that were hacked down to provide scaffolding for the construction of the railway; their absence is in itself part of the valley’s history.

Clearing the valley

the thorn trees

they let alone –

not that they were

superstitious,

only that the trees

cried out when cut,

and they couldn’t stand

to hear a woman curse

© Sheila Wild - Equinox

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.

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.