Windswept

An extract from Life at Red River Croft: The great complexity of life and landform on the croft and surrounding coastal and mountain landscapes create an ever-changing panoply of colour, texture, light and shade. No two days are the same. Flux and motion are constant companions. As autumn progresses these complexities intensify; they become louder and bolder, overwriting the golden calm usually associated with September until the days themselves lose their gentle gold and silver fragility. A week or two after the equinox autumn spreads down from the hills and in from the sea. Large swathes of hill country, once so richly purples, darken. There are shadows on the hills like spilled tea. In the once-green flashes where bog cotton and moor grasses dances, there is a dry crispness, as if everything was made from tattered strips of parcel paper. But even these colours fade - rust to grey, cocoa to flax. More of the detailed shapes and forms of the fields and riverbanks are visible. Lumps and bumps appear everywhere; ditches and steps are revealed; the remains of houses, old fence lines, boulders and tree stumps emerge. What Cathma had disclosed through our growing friendship was emerging in the physical characteristics of the valley as vegetation slowly began to die back. In the low golden light of our very first autumn, the land slowly began to disclose its secrets. In subsequent years, secrets turned into stories.