Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills

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The drivers always seem bemused when I tell them where to drop me. On a long, fast sweep of the road flanked with serried ranks of pine, there is a track through the woods, but it is invisible to anyone who doesn’t know exactly where to look. It is the merest whisper of a trail; I doubt that anyone other than me has trodden it for many a year. I step into the cool hush of the pine forest and make my way down to the valley floor. Through the trunks I can see the glimmer of light on water far below. Way above me a sparrowhawk is circling in her display flight.

There is a footbridge over the river, an old suspension bridge, and I pause midway to lean on the rail and look downriver at the water boiling over submerged rocks and veering around little mossy islands. The hours I have spent watching this river roll by, sometimes at a crawl, sometimes in a raging brown torrent. And then I look up; the day is wearing on and I still have a mountainside to climb. The steepest of steep fields, if you stretch your arms out in front of you as you are walking up it you can almost touch the ground ahead of you. It is May and the field is a haze of blue, the air thick with scent. Bluebells are flowers of the forest, not the field, but long, long ago this field was wooded; the biggest stumps, those too big to be dragged out by tractor, still stud the ground. And the bluebells still emerge in their thousands every spring in remembrance; the ground layer of the ghost of a wood.

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