Soaring above the Moor

Recovery at the edge of the tide.

Friends,

This is a RIMA story. Paid subscribers can listen to it by clicking the link below. Hope you enjoy it.

This morning on Bradnor Hill a red kite hung in the air so close to me that I felt I could almost touch it. I could see its ice pale eyes watching, its head moving back and forth as it constantly adjusted its wings to let the wind hold it still. It leaned and began to slide down the sky. It circled for a while then gained height and was gone across the valley to its nest in Yeld Wood. Those huge wings are no hindrance to the bird’s agility. I’ve seen them hang still in a gale, adjusting, adjusting, adjusting, not moving an inch. I’ve seen them dive through the bars in a gate, or rise vertically from a roadkill to dodge over a hedge. I’ve seen a pair of combatants twist in the air while hurtling vertically downwards only to break contact just before impact and glide away.

When we moved to this area, seeing a red kite was a rare thing. The first time I witnessed one was up on Ireland moor, a remote plateau, as bare and windswept as the Welsh uplands get. It’s a haunted place, scattered with ancient standing stones and path-side graves, where winter lasts nine months of the year. I’ve walked there for hours and seen nothing at all, not a single bird, not one insect. There are a few icy pools scattered on the plateau, pale eyes staring at the heavens; and towering outcrops of mudstone, soft shaley cliffs you can pull apart with your fingers. Curlews can sometimes be seen at the muddy edges of the pools, and a pair of peregrines roost in the cliffs, shrieking and cursing the world. There’s something deeply romantic about the place - in the Coleridge sense of the word:

Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!