This had been the day of the ‘water-music’, the music of the field drains, the splash of tyres though puddles and temporary fords, the rush of the swollen Welland.

I cycled in the overhanging gloom of last night’s hurtling darkness, as the biting east wind continued its troubled buffeting into this half-day.

I cycled up the north side of the Welland Valley, turning off to Gumley before reaching Foxton.

Crossing over the canal bridge, I could glance to the right to glimpse the top of the famous flight of locks.

I passed through Gumley, once a centre of Mercian power, where historical matters of church and the Saxon kingdom were debated and passed into charters and law.

Some contend that the great King Offa lies buried here, and that his hilltop sanctuary high above the wet and once forested claylands below may have provided the model for the Norman French rendition of the Arthurian legends, this place being Camelot, this thin place where old crosses into new and reality into legend.

But at the summit of the climb above Gumley, by the laneside, was another meeting place, this time between old and young, where the dead leaves that had been swept into swirls by the wind all the cold half-day, met the year’s new show-offs.

On this the dankest, darkest, drizzle-ridden half-day of deep winter, the snowdrops were flaunting themselves across the sodden verge of mud, leafmould and molehills.

Lamp-lights in the day’s overcast, so chastely white… and yet inwardly not without blemish. For the fanfare to Spring blown by those small shining bands of trumpeters can be a cacophony of false notes. After their praised but short-lived blooming has passed, we can still expect the worst of weathers, the gales which trouble the dark and fox haunted wood, and drive sleet across the sodden fields to greet the first footfall of new born lambs.

But still, the snowdrops are the first flower, harbingers of the life-renewing cycle, billions of sunrises in miniature. Here they were on Candlemas Day. Candlemas Bells, once planted thickly in monastery gardens to decorate the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin, they ring in the great awakening and the new life to come.

© John Dunn.

You may also like to see my YouTube Channel, called Highways and Byways.

https://www.youtube.com/@drjohndunn2898

It took a low gear to keep me cycling up the hill out of Cottesbrooke towards Creaton. At the summit the view up ahead, slightly to my left drew me to a lane-side pause.

What caught my eye first was the curving, swooping edge to a defined swathe of woodland at the opposite side of the shallow valley formed, over centuries, by a narrow tributary of the River Nene. Creaton Covert, the name of the wood tells of the reason for its planting about one hundred and fifty years ago, possibly more, which was to nurture the population of foxes hereabouts. For the countryside I surveyed before me has long been hunting territory, and has been shaped by the sport.

The hill I had climbed gave me sweeping views to the horizon where, beyond the bounded wood, I could make out the spire of the great Saxon church of Brixworth, in its day the greatest building north of the Alps, dignifying the hilltop stronghold of the Mercian kings.

Almost monochrome, the colours laid out before me were predominantly deep green, apart from the wood, which was a green so deep it fell into near-blackness. I had ridden through fields of ridge and furrow, but now the predominant impression was one of criss-crossing enclosure hedges.

Dark earthy leaf-mould, green pasture, deep dark woodland, the haunt of foxes, these were the textures and colours of that moment. But there was depth beyond immediate sensory experience. I was mindful of the generations who had passed this way before. These people and their necessary tasks, building, ditching, draining, hedge-laying, these people and the search for transcendence through the thrill of the chase, they were all preparing the landscape of my present.

© John Dunn.

You may also like to see my YouTube Channel, called Highways and Byways.

https://www.youtube.com/@drjohndunn2898