THE SOUTHWESTER PAPER, AUTUMN 2022
Letter to a Friend
Dear Em,
Do you remember when we first arrived?
In the combe below the swaying pines in a February storm. Those same trees that now house a nest of ravens.
Do you remember how the primroses carpeted the bank to the quarry wall. Their blush and yellow flowers scattered below the apple tree. And how they persisted. For months and months until the celandines and long legged daisies took hold. All the while, the smellscape then was of wild garlic, growing like grass over the woodland floor.
Spring beckoned and a blackthorn winter befell these valleys. Looking down from the iron age hill fort, the white blossom peppering the woodland below brought a sense of promise and hope.
Do you remember then the boggy earth teeming with cuckoo flower and ragged robin while the woodlands were filled with bluebells? The smell of the wild garlic intensified as their white stellate flowers opened and overran the coppiced hazel tunnel behind the house.
May arrived and with it an abundance we had waited those long winter months for. Wing mirrors clipped billowing cow parsley, bright fuchsia campions and solemn dark purple columbine and villages were overrun with pink and white valerian that protruded from every available crevice of the ochre masonry.
Do you remember then those long warm nights as the solstice neared? Swifts, swallows and house martins screeched and wheeled overhead through glittering, golden clouds of insects above the farmyard brook and common spotted, pyramidal and bee orchids could all be found if you knew where to look for them.
In the arid days of July, the Longhorn cattle scuffed the chalk dust of the hill fort and the lavender of dwarfed harebells and gold of stunted lady’s bedstraw. clinging on to the battlements, were a lesson in complementary colours.
Do you remember the sweeping views over the ubiquitous summer tone of this landscape as we neared our time to go; that of gold? Gold every where but interspersed with pointillist magenta pinpricks of lesser knapweed and lilac of the seemingly suspended heads of field scabious.
Those languorous, sultry days we are leaving behind, but we will return to changing seasons. Golds will turn to copper and the scorched earth will gradually return to its dampened, verdant self.
Do you remember seeing beech trees in autumn in other places? Yellowing and orange tipped, their black branches fanning out and dispersing the autumn light.
We do. Not though, of this ancient place. But soon we will know what it is to be bathed in their rusted glow. For we will be on deep drovers lanes walking beneath them.
Walking southward, to the sea.
With love, from me.
x
