Neil Ansell
DEEP COUNTRY
Five Years in the Welsh Hills
Prologue
The drivers always seem bemused when I tell them where to drop me. On a long, fast sweep of the road flanked with serried ranks of pine, there is a track through the woods, but it is invisible to anyone who doesn’t know exactly where to look. It is the merest whisper of a trail; I doubt that anyone other than me has trodden it for many a year. I step into the cool hush of the pine forest and make my way down to the valley floor. Through the trunks I can see the glimmer of light on water far below. Way above me a sparrowhawk is circling in her display flight.
There is a footbridge over the river, an old suspension bridge, and I pause midway to lean on the rail and look downriver at the water boiling over submerged rocks and veering around little mossy islands. The hours I have spent watching this river roll by, sometimes at a crawl, sometimes in a raging brown torrent. And then I look up; the day is wearing on and I still have a mountainside to climb. The steepest of steep fields, if you stretch your arms out in front of you as you are walking up it you can almost touch the ground ahead of you. It is May and the field is a haze of blue, the air thick with scent. Bluebells are flowers of the forest, not the field, but long, long ago this field was wooded; the biggest stumps, those too big to be dragged out by tractor, still stud the ground. And the bluebells still emerge in their thousands every spring in remembrance; the ground layer of the ghost of a wood.
Over a crumbling gate is the moor. The tight coils of bracken are unfurling, the whole hillside is bursting into life. Before long the bracken will be head-high and the trail will be a green tunnel. A pair of red kites circles lazily above the valley, and a solitary raven flies straight and determined above the fields below me, cronking as he sees me. I follow his course; I know exactly where he is headed. The liquid, bubbling call of a curlew trickles down the mountainside. The hills are calling; they always call me back.
Unless you know where to look the cottage is singularly hard to find, and that’s the way I like it. I reach it just before nightfall and kick open the back door; this is the only way to open it. I don’t have long before dark, and there is plenty to do while there is still enough light to see by. I must fetch in water, bring in logs from the woodshed, and fill the lamps. I must get the fire lit and make up a bed, and hang a kettle of water for cooking dinner. Then I’ll sit out front with a cup of tea, look out at the view as the sun sets, and count the bats out of the loft. It’s good to be back.
There are some mornings here when I could be on an island. In the night the valley fills with fog, in the darkness I can just make out a snake of it settling on the valley floor, following every twist and turn of the river. But when I wake the sunshine is streaming in through the curtains and I throw them aside to look out across a sea of foam. Here, at a thousand feet, it rarely reaches me. The tops of the nearest trees emerge like mangroves but beyond that it is twenty miles to the nearest dry land, the looming whale-backs of the Black Mountains, the spires of the Brecon Beacons peering over the long ridge of Mynydd Epynt. Sometimes the fog is so thick that when I step outside it laps at my feet in waves, and if I walk a few paces downhill I can barely see my hands. And then as the sun rises higher it starts to burn away, the tide turns and the fog retreats down-valley, leaving a hillside glistening with dew.
Morning comes, and I am alone but not alone. There is a redstart on the wire and a wagtail bobbing on the roof. Blackbirds are nesting in the woodshed, on an upturned hoe hanging from a nail on the wall. The redstarts seem to be nesting in the gables, they must approve of the new roof. Their nesting box they have surrendered to the great tits; when I open the lid eight hungry mouths gape up at me. After a few seconds, four of the baby birds slump back down, but the hungry ones keep pushing up, refusing to accept that I have nothing for them. The hole in the ash out front, which becomes home for some bird or another every year, has been occupied by a shy pair of stock doves; it is finally their turn. In the early-morning sun they display together in celebration, launching themselves from their nesting tree, and flying in a tight circle together, so close they are almost touching. The lead bird holds a little twig in its beak, as if it is returning to the ark.
I sit in my front porch looking way down across the valley to the faraway hills while sharpening my saw. Twenty-one strokes to the right, and twenty-one strokes to the left. There has been a dry spell, so it makes good sense to saw as many logs as possible while I am here, to split them and shed them before they have a chance to get wet. With the weather here so unpredictable it is reassuring to have several weeks’ wood in reserve in the woodshed; a backlog. As I sit preparing my chainsaw I see that the swallows have built their nest in the porch; I reach in and run my finger around the smooth mud lining. There is a single egg, she has laid her first today. She will lay another egg each day until the clutch is complete and she can start to incubate; then it will be time to abandon my porch to the swallows, and just use the back door.
I was always surprised by the number of birds that chose to nest in close proximity to the cottage when I lived here full-time; now the place is even less disturbed there are more than ever before. For the very first time, a pair of goldfinches is nesting in the garden. It takes me a while to find the nest in the blackthorns just inside the gate where the chaffinches sometimes make their home. The goldfinches are delightful little birds with cherry-red faces and brilliant golden bars on their wings. The nest is far from the trunk as is their habit, where it will be tossed about in the breeze, but the little mossy cup is built so deep that it will not be upset by even the wildest wind. The nest is about two metres up, too high to inspect, so I hold up a mirror over it to see the four tiny eggs nestled within.
I have picked a fine time for a visit; the spring evening is as balmy as any summer’s night. Tomorrow, if the weather holds, I shall head for the hills. As darkness begins to settle lightly on the land, a falcon appears over the front field. Birds of prey can be hard to tell apart on the wing, but not this one. I have it pinned immediately as a hobby, from its arc, its spirit. It is far from its usual haunts; even after all these years, the place can still bring me surprises. The falcon doesn’t seem to be hunting, more just celebrating life. As night falls, I watch enraptured as it swoops and banks and swerves on its scimitar wings, until I can see it no more. Never before have I seen a bird that looked so like it was dancing in the air.
The grass in the garden, fenced off from the sheep, has grown tall and rank in the months since I was last here. I can barely make out the shape of where my vegetable beds used to lie. I would cut it back were it not for the hares. Hares are the hardiest of creatures; they live out in the fields all year long and can breed at any time of the year. But this year they have chosen the spring, and have chosen my garden. There are two leverets now grazing just a few feet away in the lush grass of the fertile soil where my vegetables once grew. They are almost the size of rabbits, and must already be weaned as the jill is leaving them largely to their own devices; I have only seen her once. The two little hares watch me watching them but don’t seem to mind me so long as I keep my eyes fixed on them. If I glance away for a moment they seem to just melt away into the long grass.
I lived alone in this cottage for five years, summer and winter, with no transport, no phone. This is the story of those five years, where I lived and how I lived. It is the story of what it means to live in a place so remote that you may not see another soul for weeks on end. And it is the story of the hidden places that I came to call my own, and the wild creatures that became my society.