Fighting Sadness with Beauty

A late winter journey

Friends,

This week’s post is for those of us who suffer at this time of year - at the end of the long dark of winter - and particularly this winter with its gathering losses and woes. I made a recent trip to one of my old haunts, (the most haunted of haunts) on an especially wintery afternoon to take photographs, which I’ve included here. This was originally meant as a travel post for paid subscribers, but, due to the theme, I’d rather not exclude anyone.

Hope the story helps.

J

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Cold cold cold! I’ve never been on the moor when the temperature hasn’t been 3 degrees lower than anywhere else on earth except Antarctica. Bleak bleak bleak! Or not, depending on your aesthetic sensibilities. Mine lean towards the bleak - all that beautiful negative space, the washed out colours, the quiet pools, the rocky tracks heading over summits and into shallow valleys. Ireland Moor is a place I’ve visited many times, but not at all since we moved to Kington and I’m back there now re-acquainting myself with the place. I’ve missed it.

The sun is low, glancing through broken cloud, only a couple of hours of daylight left. A row of white ponies are silhouetted against the sky - muddy, tatty creatures. They’re walking to the mawn pool where they’ll spend the night sheltering near two spindly rowan trees - so little shelter!

Did Samuel Beckett come here? Did he see the apparition of Godot stumbling along the paths? There are no birds. The sky is empty. And no sound except for the wind ruffling my scarf. It’s a couple of miles to the cliffs where I’ve seen peregrines in the past, but I already have a mind to turn back, head home, run a warm bath. This is allowable on a late February day in sub-zero temperatures, when I’ve already been frozen to the core walking our dogs on Hergest Ridge. But Ireland Moor is always a photo opportunity.

Normally I have an aversion to grouse moors. They’re managed intensely, by burning off the heather, trapping and shooting wildlife - foxes, corvids, raptors. And yet this moor is curlew and lapwing central. It’s the only place around here where you can almost guarantee seeing or at least hearing them in the spring (which still seems so far away). My dream is for all the upland commons in Wales to be left unmanaged, creating a web of forests that cover the spine of the country. But that would be an extinction sentence for the curlews. And I love them.

The views are incredible. Looking south you peer over the Bachawy valley, to the Begwns and the high line of the Black Mountains beyond, which are only a smoke trace today through the winter haze, layers of gauze with calligraphic strokes. They move.

At this time of year I’m often feeling down. The long dark beginning in October inspires me at first: firelight, leaf carpets, steaming soups and stews. But as winter marches on I start to decline. This winter seems to have been longer than most. My mood has dipped low, plunged even. It could be the daily news which is now driving me to despair. I’ve had to turn it off. Depression is a strange ailment. I’ve carried it around with me since early adulthood like a secret thing kept in an old skin bag. I don’t talk about it much, it’s, well, depressing.

In one of his last conversations, when he was in a nursing home in Paris, Samuel Beckett was asked by a friend if he felt that his life had been worthwhile. “Not really,” said Beckett. He was on the whisky at the time and I’m guessing he said it with a wry smile (His work is full of those). Another conversation, with another elder approaching the end of life: Barry Lopez was out on a boat with a retired professor friend, an octagenarian. The old man whistled and sang for most of the trip. At one point he stepped out of the boat and shouted at the top of his crackling lungs “I’m in love with the universe!” This is the most Beckettian of places, with its lone trees and featureless rises. And yet I am, no matter how bleak my mood, in love with the universe.

I reach the cliffs and take out my camera. I see no sign of the falcons so I start to explore the edges of an oval pool overlooked by mudstone stacks. The pool is clear, green below, it ripples softly, white pencil lines over the deep shadows of the rocks. There is a slope of scree beneath the cliff. Amidst the flat stones are old, dark, air-dried sheep turds and green-white vertebra. On the cliffs are epiphytes of all kinds. The spongy ground at the summit has bed-sized cushions of star moss you could sleep on. A lone sheep wanders nearby, limping but happy with its lot, luminous in the low light. Perhaps it’s the ghost of a sheep, or the spirit of all sheep. I click away with my camera. I’ve forgotten my gloves again though, so after half an hour I can no longer feel my fingers and press the shutter. My hands go into my pockets, the camera into its bag. I head back along the track, into the east wind, my neck tucked in like a flying heron’s. My scarf is up over my nose, my hat pulled below my eyebrows. A crow appears on the path in front of me, the first bird of the afternoon. We’re lone bandits in bandit country, both of us too cold to croak a greeting.

When I clamber back into the car I pump the heating until I stop shivering. The ponies haven’t gone far, they’re gathered around the little gravel layby picking at the turf. They’re all mares in late pregnancy. Not a one is blooming, in fact they all bare a knacker’s yard expression. But they’re fat and fluffy, with manes that almost touch the ground, healthy as mountain ponies. I stop shivering and drive. Rain starts to bullet the windscreen. As I approach the valley bottom I notice a row of oaks beyond the moor fence, every twig holding a starling, hundreds of them. I open my window and point my camera. And wait. They’re chattering and chuckling the way starlings do before dusk. Just as I think they’re roosting for the night, and as the cold starts to numb my fingers again, they explode into the air. The camera clicks rapidly as the birds swirl - out over the Bachawy stream, over the farms, back to the trees where they feint as if to land, then switch back into the sky, this time hurtling towards me, rushing only inches above the car roof. Then they’re gone.

Time for me to remember that the universe is also in love with us, and it shows us, even in the bleakest places.

The photos:

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Thanks for reading