Last week, before the oncoming polar vortex: slip out the door, leave it on the latch and off up the field with the dog.
It’s been cold for a while. There’s ice in the sheeps’ fleece and the ground is hard and rutted. Breaking the ice on the water troughs is a daily task and it’s half an inch thick some days. Cold I can cope with though – far better cold than wet. The weeks before this cold snap was so wet and muddy I found my wife googling holidays to the Canary Isles. And with the cold comes a sky that’s vast and blue and empty.
Through the top of the field it’s much more exposed and less orderly. One of the farmers comes past along the road and mentions some cows she’s left up ‘on the mountain’. That’s what all of the farmers seem to call their remotest, highest, largest fields, and looking back to the nineteenth century tithe maps, it seems to have been true then, too, at least in Welsh – Mynydd is the word they used.
Around here, there are a fair few triangles of land, some quite large, that are only a road or two back from the main valley roads, but might as well be a different county. They’re only a few miles away from the national park, but they’re not really on anyone’s radar beyond the locals, so we often have the hillside to ourself.
We skirted around away from the cows to a big pond up on the top with ice thick enough to send stones skidding across. There was a buzzard up there, and something else that might have been a harrier, and then we turned back at the edge of the woods which stretch for a whole valley and a half.
Now we’re just locked down and waiting to see what snow hits us, if any. At the moment, it looks like it might fail to deliver – I’m not sure whether to be relived or disappointed.