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

Orton in old English means ridge top settlement, and a glance at the OS map’s contour lines confirm that Northamptonshire’s Orton does indeed straddle a ridge top. Land falls away steeply to the North down to the Slade Brook, and much more shallowly to the South, towards an unnamed brook. All this geography was academic at the time I cycled along the wet and puddled lane to Orton from Foxhall. There were no views to enjoy due to the misty conditions and general gloom. The general atmosphere drew my consciousness in to things up close. The sound of tyres on wet tarmac and gravel, the squelching through mud, the splashing through the temporary fords, the bare may hedges, uniformly straight and level after hedge clipping, and the colourless sky, so low that it put a muffling lid on sound.

As I entered Orton on this cold midwinter’s day, my thoughts turned to the bone numbing cold of the recluse hamlets and farms a few generations ago, when winter sleet tore through the miry clay valleys and the remote ridge tops. How bleak and hazardous life was when crops from the fields of ridge and furrow, the common fields scraped out of the forest brambles and clay, had to be eked out through the iron months of frost.

Today under the thatch are fridge and freezer. Supermarket delivery vans scurry about the little wet lanes, whilst handymen in white vans, piled high with ladders, maintain ancient cottages that have never looked better, whilst villagers take holidays.

At a nearby school which began life as a grammar school for boys, endowed by the local lord of the manor, mothers turn up in four by fours to collect their kids, who turn out aglow, running and laughing.

We can look with thankfulness upon the less arduous life in the countryside.What was once a place to flee for a wage, slate roof and coal fire in the city, has become a haven of escape in which to retire. Online cottage dwellers scrape from the internet images from around the world whilst cosy warm in front of their blazing woodburners. What they see and hear gnaws at the illusion of escape at every moment. How long before the tsunami of globalisation hits? The isolation of the recluse hamlets has in all senses gone. You can run (or cycle), but you can’t hide.

© John Dunn.

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

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