Wednesday 30 November 2016

Winter



Cold. Finally, it's cold. Minus four or five most mornings, the frost never leaving the shadows of the day before being built upon the following night. Plants encrusted with ice crystals three days old. Soil so hard as to turn aside the fork and spade as though they were made of rubber. I walk the hills and fields as the ground crunches beneath my feet. The natural cycles of the years weather and seasons are integral to the smooth running of the rural landscape, habitats that have developed over hundreds of years are perfectly attuned to this. 
Living in cities most of my life this connection is lost but out in the country estates I now work you can feel the very earth beneath you breathe and drink as the seasons roll over its surface. To see a landscape like this bejeweled with giant frozen crystals formed over days of freezing conditions is to see a landscape in it's element and it's beautiful.