Call it corporeal, fey even (though to be sure even Morgan herself may have been up there last night, what sorceress wouldn’t want to have been?) – the strident barrelling wind at the summit where the Cotswold escarpment bleeds its rock from the golf course and signalling position replete with transmission towers and the party line etched in the noise of fighter planes – where that lone Buzzard is mobbed in extremis by a gang of crows until it can finally trace it’s way out and away on the line of strong thermals a hundred yards out, head dipped, body tipped ever so slightly into the wind – carcasses of caddy trolleys and Victorian mangles, dark brown with rust, emerge half gorged by grasses, clambering zombie-like from the earthy basins at the foot of the escarpment face, itself orangey-red where exposed, pitted with the entrance holes of summer residents nests and other sources of primal erosion – the bleak woodland at the margins (lovely promise in the word ‘margin’) holds a million secrets fading with the light, the rustling and call of unseen creatures stirring or coming to rest for the night, fleeting motion in the shades; and the whole capped with an etched line, the sinewy forms of the newly naked branches (though further in, where less exposed, there are still trees bearing the effervescent gold and brown autumnal markings, a bloom of colour within) – the damp floor is littered with russet leaves or else scarred with fallen timber, silver grey, elephantine – a lone Fieldfare sits in a Hawthorn bush, his chest puffed out under his scowling stare, picking occasionally at the seedy red pods – finally, breaking the high horizon line above where the silhouettes of the land (and walkers) are strongest, the moon shows itself, smoky at first, a bright smudge –
Cleeve Hill, Gloucestershire 21/11/07
Cleeve Hill, Gloucestershire 21/11/07
