by Neil Ansell
This was the pattern of my days, a simple life led by natural rhythms rather than the requirements and expectations of others. Imagine being given the opportunity to take time out of your life, for five whole years. Free of social obligations, free of work commitments. Think how well you would get to know yourself, all that time to consider your past and the choices you had made, to focus on your personal development, to know yourself through and through, to work out your goals in life, your true ambitions.
None of this happened, not to me. Perhaps for someone else it would have been different. Any insight I have gained has been the result of later reflection. Solitude did not breed introspection, quite the reverse. My days were spent outside, immersed in nature, watching. I saw as much as I did because of two things: the first, quite simply, was time, the long hours spent out in the field; the second was alertness, a state of heightened attentiveness. My attention was constantly focused away from myself and on to the natural world around me. And my nights were spent sitting in front of the log fire, aimlessly turning a log from time to time and staring at the flickering flames. I would not be thinking of the day just gone; the day was done. And I would not be planning tomorrow; tomorrow would take care of itself. The silence outside was reflected by a growing silence within. Any interior monologue quietened to a whisper, then faded away entirely. I have never practised meditation, but there is a goal in Buddhist practice of achieving a condition of no-mind, a state of being free of thought, and I seemed to have found my way there by accident. I certainly learned to be at ease with myself in the years I spent at Penlan, but it was not by knowing myself better — it was by forgetting I was there. I had become a part of the landscape, a stone.
3. The Sheep in the Trees
I was sitting in my wicker chair in front of the log fire, still wearing my boots and overcoat. The candle flame guttered in the draught. The house was always draughty; it had to be to feed the fire. When the wind blew from the north, it swept down the hill and forced the smoke straight back down the chimney, and there was nothing for it but to open the front door to clear the smoke, no matter how cold it was. The floor was bare, the original clay tiles had been fired in a kiln down in the valley, along with all the bricks that were used for the estate cottages. The chequerboard of black and red was cracked and sunken now, but it was easy to mop clean of the mud that I dragged in on my heels.
When I moved in there were a handful of old paraffin lamps here, but their thin glass chimneys shattered easily and were almost impossible to replace. No one had used them in earnest in fifty years and if they are available at all it is purely for decorative purposes. So I had candles stuck in bottles, and a couple of storm lamps for when I needed to move around the house or go outside, to save spilling hot wax on my hands. Eventually, I worried that I would get eye strain from reading by candlelight, and I got hold of a hissing Sid, an old tilley lamp with original brass fittings that last saw service in the power cuts of the 1970s, and renovated that. It was a fiddle having to light the mantle with methylated spirits and keep priming it to keep the pressure up, but when I hung it from one of the ham hooks in the ceiling it would give off as much light as a 40-watt bulb, and gave a constant reassuring hiss that I learned to love.
Winters here were hard. It was not so much the cold as the long nights, and I tended to sleep early and wake with first light to minimize the hours spent sitting in darkness in forced immobility, idly tending the fire. My life revolved around that fire. My mainstay was ash, which burns well even when green. Oak is dense and heavy and needs to be well seasoned; a log of it will last for hours once the fire is hot enough to get it started. There was a stand of dead elms in the top field, long since killed off by Dutch elm disease even though down the track were a few full-grown ones that seemed to have escaped. They were still standing, barkless white skeletons, and I worked my way through them one at a time. There were a few crab apple trees in the fields, a treat that would fill the room with a scented, fruity smoke. I would use poor-quality wood too, a little at a time: birch that would spit and crackle and burn away fast, and alder that would smoulder and ooze. Everything went in the fire save for softwoods, which would coat the inside of the chimney with black sticky resin and ruin it, though I would collect basketfuls of pine cones to use as firelighters. Tending the fire became as automatic as breathing, it was my lifeline. Once I fell suddenly ill. I could feel my temperature rising fast and knew I didn’t have much time. As quick as I could I brought in water and a pile of logs from the woodshed, then made up a bed by the fire and climbed in fully clothed and shivering uncontrollably. When I woke to a sunny morning on the third day, my fever had broken. I felt weak and shaken but knew that the worst was over. I had no memory at all of the whole time I had lain sick, the days were a complete blank. But the fire was still burning.
Though I missed the freedom to roam that summer brought there was a part of me that enjoyed the austerity of winter. Summertime, and the living was easy, but I didn’t come here for an easy life, I came here for a hard life freely chosen, and could not complain if I found it. The stream of friends who had wanted to come for weekend visits in the summer would dry to a trickle, and then it was just me, my own devices, and the elements. The few friends who attempted a winter visit mostly discreetly decided that the next time they came back it would be when the weather was better. I don’t blame them; the cold got into your bones, and no matter how many logs you threw on the fire, you never felt truly warm. The only person I regularly saw was the farmer, up to check on his sheep. In the wintertime my world shrank; as the nights drew in, I drew in too, closer to home and hearth. The hills became forbidding and lifeless; the pipits and larks that teemed there in summer had abandoned them. Just a few crows, perhaps a circling buzzard, and the occasional winter snipe that would jink away in zigzags, tower, then drop back to the ground a couple of hundred yards ahead. Everything else had headed to warmer climes, or at least to lower ground or the coast.
At home I would huddle close to the fire. There was a coal fire in my bedroom, but there simply wasn’t enough draw so the room became too smoky and I seldom used it. Instead I would keep piling on the covers until the day that the spider’s web of rime on the inside of the windows, my frozen breath, was too thick to see through. Then I would move downstairs. I had a single bed on castors that I used as a sofa, and I would roll that close to the fire at night, and for the rest of the winter I would live in just the one room. The bats had left long ago to their underground winter roost, and the mice no longer troubled me; I was alone save for the little clusters of peacock and tortoiseshell butterflies that clustered in the corners of the upstairs ceilings, sleeping the winter away. I would have to keep an eye on them in the spring, to let them out when they woke.
In my first full winter at the cottage, almost on a whim, I decided to follow the birds. Not the migrants, the international travellers that had gone far south, but the moorland waders and birds of prey that had deserted my hills for the coast. I was brought up by the sea and missed it sometimes. So I walked down the hillside, crossed the river to the main road and hitched a ride north-west. First I stopped off at Aberystwyth, to watch the choughs on the sea cliffs. Choughs are our rarest and most elegant crow, glossy black with a long slender red bill and broad butterfly wings. They floated weightlessly in the updraught, calling continually, and fed in little packs on the clifftop fields. Then I headed back to the road north, to reach the estuary before nightfall. It was a cold January day, the ground was iron beneath my feet, so when I got there I booked a night in a bed and breakfast.
It was a beautiful spot. The estuary was surrounded by snow-capped peaks. Thick oak woods led you to the salt marsh, the reed beds, and pools still unfrozen in spite of the deep frost. And beyond that the mudflats, teeming with flocks of waders. Almost the first bird I saw was a glaucous gull, a rare vagrant that had followed the icy north wind down from the Arctic. Skeins of Greenland white-fronted geese lit on the marsh, gaggling and cackling
, and snake-necked red-breasted mergansers dived repeatedly in the pools. A little female merlin raced back and forth along the woodland edge, never resting. Out on the flats a lone peregrine, a tiercel, was sitting on a post preening himself. He could have been the bird I watched regularly at my local eyrie. He was being, I would have to say, harried, by a male hen harrier, the palest of pastel greys save for his black wing-tips, gracefully swooping towards the falcon, over and over, then sweeping away. The pere-grine seemed not to care, seemed not even to notice, he just carried on preening himself calmly, and eventually the harrier tired of this sport and went back to quartering the reed beds in search of an unwary bunting. The peregrine shook his feathers, lifted from his post and flew low and slow along the water’s edge, flocks of waders scattering all around him. He dropped slightly and scooped up a redshank. He had not even been hunting, but had virtually tripped over a free meal. There were rich pickings to be had here. At dusk, a barn owl emerged from its roost in the tangled roots of an old oak. It waited there patiently, looking out inscrutably as the sun finally set and darkness fell. Then it lifted off, pale and ghostly and totally silent, and began to hunt, criss-crossing the marsh in systematic transects in search of its prey. And with that, I left and headed back to my own eyrie in the far hills.
Deep on a winter’s night I was woken by bloodcurdling screams. If I had been of a more timid disposition it might have unnerved me. The mating call of the fox — their season is the dead of winter. I got up and gently pulled aside the curtains. A pair of foxes was mating on the track right outside the cottage; in the daytime they would keep their distance, but the darkness had made them bold.
The stoat that I saw in the rain on New Year’s Day I didn’t see again until the following New Year’s Eve. It was a fine winter morning and I was sitting out on my porch. The stoat came bouncing up the hillside like Tigger, alongside the fence. Just across my track was a boulder, and it hopped up on that, stood up on its hind legs and cocked its head from side to side, weighing me up, twitching its short black-tipped tail. And then, having seen enough, it bounded back down the field and was lost behind a turn in the fence. I remembered reading as a child of an old gamekeepers’ wheeze, to call stoats by impersonating the squeals of an injured rabbit. I had absolutely no idea what an injured rabbit sounds like, but I stood up, and by sucking through my teeth made, well, a noise. And incredibly it worked. The stoat came back, reared up on to its hind legs again, and stared at me intently, as if to say: Who are you? And what on earth do you think you’re doing?
Stoats are notoriously brave and inquisitive. I remember once in Sweden I took a rowboat out across a lake to a small forested island. While I was sitting on the rocky beach, a little head popped up from behind a fallen tree trunk, then disappeared, then popped up again. It was a young stoat playing peekaboo with me. I stood up to get a better view, and it ran over, nipped me on the toe of my shoe, then dashed off again. It did this three times in all before it got bored; there is no end to their boldness.
The winter season had its rewards. When I woke to a new, softer light and an unmistakable muffled silence, and knew that the first snow of winter had fallen during the night, it was like being a child again. And once or twice each winter, the wind would turn and the temperature suddenly plummet, and I would emerge into a crystal world. Every blade of grass, every strand of gossamer would be sheathed in frozen dew. My breath was a cloud of steam and the ground crunched satisfyingly beneath my feet, like I was walking on broken glass. The woods were completely silent, and completely still. It felt as though a moment in time had been frozen, and the world was holding its breath.
But the world does not stop and start. The seasons are not discrete, they have no true beginning and end, they merge into one another and overlap, all part of the flow. On a mild Christmas Day, I watched a bat circling in the valley in broad daylight, a pipistrelle flushed from hibernation by a warm snap, and was surprised by a sudden cascade of birdsong. A wren, with such a big voice for such a tiny bird. And though the birds might start singing to greet the spring before the year is out, there was one thing I could be sure of: it would snow in spring, in March or even April. It came every year without fail, that last fall of snow. The locals even had a name for it: lambing snow.
The winter thrushes had come. I liked the idea that while our summer visitors had headed off to Africa, these birds had flown all the way from the Arctic Circle and elected to spend their winters here on my hillside. They came and went through the winter; I kept thinking they were gone for good, and then they were back again in force. Scores of fieldfares, big, brash and noisy, fell from the trees to the ground and back again. The redwings, neat little birds with a glorious blood-red flash beneath their wings, were in their hundreds in the open fields. They worked their way steadily across their chosen field, all heads facing the same way.
I was walking down the track one day, watching the redwings feeding down the hill from me, when I was met by a quad bike being ridden by the farmer’s niece who helped out on the farm occasionally. She pulled up and stopped for a chat. Looking out over the valley below to the far hills she said what a fine view I had up here. I commented that the landscape here was beautiful. I wouldn’t really know about that, she said, and shrugged. I’ve never lived anywhere else. She would be marrying soon. I could see the farm she was moving to from here; she pointed it out to me. It was across the valley, only two or three miles distant, but it might as well have been another country. This would be the last time that I saw her. The farmer, her uncle, had also spent every night of his life on this hillside. He had never been to England, not thirty miles away as the crow flies. He went to Cardiff once, to get his teeth fixed. Didn’t like it.
While we were talking, something slipped out of the pine woods above us, a streak of slaty grey hurtling straight towards us just an inch or two above the ground, following every undulation in the hillside. Just when it looked like collision was inevitable, it swerved around us at the last possible moment, picked up speed and crashed into the redwings feeding below. The male sparrowhawk had just used us as cover for hunting. He had passed within a foot of the farmer’s niece, and she hadn’t even noticed him.
These were hungry times. It wasn’t long before I saw the sparrowhawk making another kill. He skated down my track from the top of Penlan Wood, and passed between the posts of the open gate towards a little flock of cock chaffinches that were feeding unaware in the field at the edge of the oak wood. At the last moment they saw him racing towards them just above the ground and lifted for the safety of the trees. The hawk flipped upwards and executed a perfect backwards roll, and when he landed on the grass there was a chaffinch seized in his talons. He stood there immobile for a few seconds as though thinking, but was in fact squeezing the life out of the bird with the force of his grasp. It seems harsh but it’s a quick death. Only when his prey was still and lifeless did he begin to pluck it. Hawks prefer their prey on the ground, while most falcons specialize in birds on the wing. A peregrine will stoop on its prey from a great height and at incredible speed, killing it on impact.
I would go out walking every day, without fail, whatever the weather. With eyes wide open I never came back disappointed. There was always something new to see; not a new species necessarily as there were only so many here to be seen, but behaviour I had never seen before, or something I had overlooked, or simply something beautiful. There was more out there than you could ever learn. If nowhere else, I would at least take a stroll down to my postbox; it was a pleasant short walk for a bad day. Down the front fields along the edge of Penlan Wood and between the old hollow oaks below. Through the gate at the bottom of the field was a crook barn, one of the oldest buildings on the estate, overhung by a row of sycamores. The barn was constructed from huge curved beams split from the trunk of an oak perhaps five hundred years ago and looked like the upturned hull of a galleon. I always peeked inside, and often there would be a tawny owl sleeping in the rafters. The place was dilapid
ated now, collapsing on to the rusting old farm machinery inside, though one end had been fixed up into a byre for the few cows and the pair of ponies that were kept in these fields. The fields here were steep, rocky and overgrown, no good for sheep, and wooded with oak and alder.
Down through the woods was the stream, and a crumbling stone bridge, with a keystone dating it to 1839. There was once a cart track that followed this stream all the way to the river from the hills, but it was impassable now, overgrown with brambles, bisected with fallen trees, or simply washed away. I walked upstream along what remained of the track. The dingle was deep and dark and heavily wooded, and the stream tumbled below me, one waterfall after another. Perhaps there would be a party of long-tailed tits bounding from tree to tree, swinging from slender twigs like acrobats, their tails longer than their bodies, with their camp followers behind them, treecreepers and goldcrests. The goldcrests are the smallest of all our birds. In the summer they hide away in the plantations but in the winter they emerge and somehow manage to survive its hardships. Perhaps I would see a sparrowhawk skimming the treetops, surfing the canopy in search of the flocks of siskins that fed on the alder cones. And that was enough.
Finally I came to a gate, and there by the gatepost was my postbox. I say postbox, but it was actually an old ten-gallon whitewash drum salvaged from my woodshed, perched on a couple of breeze-blocks, its lid kept on with a boulder. This was the point at which the lanes came closest to me; they went on to three more farmhouses, then petered out altogether. There was a bridge here too, in far better repair than my forgotten bridge in the woods. Come the spring, the grey wagtails would be nesting in a niche in this bridge. If I had any post I would sit on the wall of the bridge, swing my heels over the gushing stream below, and read my letters there.
If it was pouring with rain, I would make do with my trip to the postbox; I could make it there and back in little over half an hour if I rushed. But usually I would spin out my walk for an hour or two longer. In winter I tended to stay low, where there was a modicum of shelter. Most often I retraced my steps along the old cart track by the stream, back to the lost bridge. Squirrels would be chasing each other, skittering through the trees. At the bridge the stream divided into two around a rocky island. Long ago a massive oak had fallen, across both branches of the stream, island and all. Its moss-covered trunk was just a racetrack for the squirrels now, a short cut from bank to bank. Out of the four-foot-wide stump of the fallen oak grew an almost full-sized beech tree, the only beech in this wood. Before I was even born a jay had brought its prize here and secreted the seed of a beech in the crown of the oak, cached for the winter. But the jay had never returned, lost to a sparrowhawk perhaps, and the beech had taken root and grown into the hollow heart of the oak, finally bursting it open.