Blog Archives

There is something about winter which pares all living things down to their essentials – Moya Cannon, Winter Paths There’s quite good local walking where I live. River, woods, lake and nature reserves within reach. Kestrels occasionally, kingfishers rarely but memorably, perhaps once a year. There are owls in the woods. In the pandemic lockdown […]

In the mountains, there you feel free – T.S. Eliot Some years ago I met two ladies in a Lake District pub. They were animated and interested in whatever was happening and who was there. I was enjoying food and drink after a walk. They’d been exploring valleys, not the high places, as a weekend break more than […]

  It can stay silent a lifetime. Who knows anyway what it is, that wild, silky part of ourselves without which no poem can live  – Mary Oliver Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us – Susan Sontag The Lascaux paintings are some of the oldest art we have. Palaeolithic, […]

  But now and then comes an hour when the silence is all but absolute, and listening to it one slips out of time – Nan Shepherd I barely noticed this line in Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain until recently. It’s a book worth reading again, with observations you might not immediately absorb. She describes […]

  There’s an idea about nature we might call encounter. We encounter it, without complete understanding. Encounter it, outside the parameters of society. Encounter it, because we see forms of life not ours. It’s a good description, and there are books about it. Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk, J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine, Elli Radinger’s […]

  There are many ways I like the outdoors and walking. High mountain treks, camping wild and on camp sites, woodland strolls and wild flower hunting. In my local area there’s a river I often visit, good for a surprisingly long walk, because it’s not the countryside. I saw a kingfisher there last week, in […]