The Christmas snows came and went and then a few days ago it got a lot colder. I was out this morning in Llandrindod Wells, helping to hang an exhibition and looking at a medieval cellar for dry rot. The Radnor hills were white with a thin covering of wind-blown snow, the horizons fading into a leaden sky. But the valleys were snow-free and muddy, the colours vivid compared with the heavy greys and whites of the hills. Walking the quiet upper reaches of the Wye valley, the contrast was marked.

Cemeteries and Snow

Our local churchyard in the snow.  Nobody had been there since before Christmas, and any Christmas worshippers' footsteps had been long since buried.  With the roads in a few inches of snow and the snow deadening any sound, it felt as if the village was abandoned long ago, and was now a long way from inhabited lands; as if, stumbling out of the woods, we had found a place long forgotten.  

A Time of Deep Snow

The snow came a month ago, and hasn't left since.  Instead it has been topped up with fresh falls, and the day before yesterday it snowed from 6pm until 2pm the following day.  The snow has been feathery, powdery, light.  It falls silently, softly, with a hiss as it lands on dry grasses and dead leaves.  In the churchyard and the church car park and presumably the sheep fields behind the house (and the garden) it is eighteen inches deep, gently drifting, light as crystals, beautiful, pristine, impermanent.  I have never seen so much snow.

Kington this morning was an empty town of alleyways and quiet lanes and dirty slush; misty distances and heavy skies.  The road through the village is impassable in an ordinary car and we got a lift from Thomas the joiner. Even his Land Rover found it difficult.  

Some pictures recently from the summer in New Zealand; it seems a long time since we have seen green.  The landscape is monochrome, white fields and black trees and hedges, the skies grey and featureless.  

Midwinter Snowfall

If December, January and February are the winter months then mid-January is midwinter.  This awareness of season and time seem more marked for me since I started the seasonal journals.  

We are snowed in and have been for a day or so.  Schools closed, airports open occasionally, roads blocked, the usual problems with snow ploughs and grit. We can see the gritters every now and then on the far valley road, connecting New Radnor with Kinnerton.  

I will upload some photographs of the village in midwinter; a misty day, a day of icicles and haze and deep snow.  And the village silent, eerily empty, roads almost impassable.  Midwinter.  

Three Riversdale Poems

Here are three of the ten poems for Riversdale, in situ.  

Lost But Still Visible

How it used to be - apart from the railings.

In Southport over the weekend for my parents' 50th wedding anniversary, a lovely day of champagne and cake and family.  We stayed on the waterfront overlooking the Marine Lake, so we had a landscape in front of us that was layered; sky, sea, beach, tree-covered islands, open water, promenade.  And it occurred to me that this was how this landscape - this waterscape - used to look before it was drained from the 1690s onwards.

The west Lancashire coast used to be a narrow strip of small vulnerable towns on a sandbank/series of high dunes.  I would have loved to see 'inland', a strange dark place called the Moss;  fens, marsh, small island-villages and lagoons of open water. St Cuthbert's body was hidden here from the raiding Norsemen, a furtive torchlit journey by night from island village to island village.  A fragile place; a strong high tide could send water surging ten or fifteen miles 'inland', and in the ugly 1970s suburb of Marshside I could still see the 'cops', a local word for earthen sea defences.  (Got me interested now - I will try and find some of my Mosswalking notes and upload them.)   

And I could see a version of this waterscape from the apartment window.  I once managed to photograph a room that was no longer there, a corner forgotten beneath a bathroom; I will try and find this as well!  The past is all around us and occasionally visible. 

Landscape Readings

I am reading Peter Fleming's account of a journey from Peking to Kashmir in the mid 1930s, 'News From Tartary'.  I find old books very attractive; the faded cloth spines, the heavier pages, the sheer weight of a hard back book.  I often find that these 'undiscovered' books have recently been reissued as part of a 'classic travel writing' series.  

I also find that there is a rhythm to travel writing.  I start the book - and so the journey - without understanding the rhythm and wanting to know everything the writer is trying to tell me.  But there comes a point where I realise that the names and the people don't really mean anything to me, especially as I don't minutely follow the journeys on maps.  This is the point where I would give up the book.  Then I let go of the factual element of the journey and try and follow it emotionally, by trying to understand emotions and experiences, not geographical distances.  Good travel writing does not bog the reader down in place-names and people, but rather allows the emotions of a journey to shine through; physical/landscape description is similar to this.  So that a sense of space and journey is what is left, not names and people.