A hill and I - Winter
The final story about paths, ancient wild living, wild dying - walking with ghosts...
Dearest friends, readers, writers, curious newcomers, as always, I am delighted you are here sharing a few moments of your time with me.
A huge and heartfelt thank you for returning for the last of four essays exploring the paths and terraces, flora and fauna, traditions, beliefs and remedies on and surrounding the hill I live on - a wilderness of past and present entwined in seasonal change.
For those of you who are new to A hill and I and would like to (t)read the paths of previous seasons, you’ll find a link at the bottom of the page. For those who may, like me, have read so many other incredible pieces of writing here on Substack Writers since that you can’t remember the idea behind these essays, here is a recap;
The outline of the project very briefly:
I was invited way back in December 2023 to guest write a post for Alexander M Crow, an offer I accepted with an equal dose of surprise and pleasure.
Alex asked this;
“discuss a walk you take around where you live, as seen from the perspective of nature observation and through the eyes of our hunter-fisher-gatherer ancestors.”
I have deviated somewhat over the four seasons from Alex’s guidelines but I hope you enjoy them nonetheless. Whilst they are not works of fiction, I have woven a little enchantment into the words which themselves are woven around the seasons of the year and the paths I choose to endlessly wander.
This is the final essay, whisperings of ancestral ghosts and natures ways on the hill called Le Paradis where I live.
Winter’s story…
Winter Solstice - December 21, 2024, 10:19 am
Winter sends out its first seasonal, bitter kiss in the wind. It is a time for endurance, conservation of energy, hunkering down, the closing of shutters and doors.
The first gentle frosts arrive. I wake to a crisp, bright landscape of frozen white sheets on puddles, crunchy leaves, delicately decorated grass seeds—a last sigh of summer—gossamer spider-webs numerously strung between branch and leaf, masterpieces exhibited in ice.
Warm winds from the South have drifted, carrying with them all notion of romantic wanderings, soon, those from the North, bitter and twisted will sidle up the valleys, then howl down the slopes leaving every living thing shivering and shrivelled within their arctic blast. These winds, traditionally the advent of ice and deep snow, frozen water and earth like iron are true winter.
A winter that no longer exists.
Heavy snowfall is now, but a beautiful white whisper from the past which taunts me with an occasional iridescent flake. Nevertheless, hibernation has begun, there is a stillness spreading, an emptiness and when the North wind sleeps, there is silence.
Fog devours the hill called Le Paradis for many days in the cold months. Obscurity, labyrinthine and circulatory, confuse common senses. We, the hill and I, are mere ghosts cohabiting in a wilderness of volcanic rock scattered with the remnants of its history; chestnut, beech and oak, stone walls and paths, centuries of seeds. The fulfilling of continuity aided by fruits nourishing wild boar who feast on the bounty fallen beneath gnarled boughs. These trees, their seeds, the animals that feed from them, are the last turn of a perpetual cycle, invisible within winters distorted countenance.
Layered in mist the starkness of this steeply sloped land bared to the elements of three cruel months is more defined by stone and soil. It is no longer gentle. Naked trees written in twisted calligraphy along the horizon on a rare clear day shout a clear message. Paths meandering once more are no longer hidden by the suffocating story of summers overgrowth, nor, even, the decay of autumn’s colourful poetry. All colour is faded, all softening of contour belittled by winters hard lines. And, everything, everywhere is silent. The only exception the cawing of crows as they gather in winter crops in hope of a wayward seed, the whistling of buzzards in search of prey or a plaintive moo, in reminder to the farmer that his herd is still in the meadows, that the time has arrived for the warmth of their winter quarters’s.
Only the robin sings a persistent chorus of sweet notes in the darkness.
From the fields below the house the sparrow hawk returns to our gable, her young, those that survived, have flown, but she remains in the nest, perhaps it is the perfect vantage point for spying and trapping her prey, perhaps the walls are warmed, as they have been for the many hundreds of years they have stood there by heat from within. Whatever her reason, she and her ancestors have nested in between the stones and lime that hold our home in its place for as long as anyone can remember and she reprimands me fiercely for trespassing every time I walk past her abode. Her warning needs no clarification ‘this is my home’.
I do not argue… she has been a fierce and protective feathered resident for far longer than I.
In the often liminal light between dawn and dusk at this time of year, when only the hardiest of creatures stay on the slopes, when the cold air is filled with scents of woodsmoke and must, when morning light drifts gently into day but too suddenly disappears into night, I am easily lost in deep rooted—admittedly romantic—fascination for winter’s dark physicality’s, the intangible way in which an often bittersweet contrast between what the eye sees and the heart imagines can be engraved into the landscape. Latent mysteries above and below continue their labour of untamed, remarkable connections.
Perhaps, story’s told by ancient hill folk gathered around crackling fires as they watched tiny pipistrelle bats circling the warmth before hibernation had little notion of romance, or even beauty. Doubtless their primary occupation of mind and body was staying warm, fed, dry. Tales told in the long slow hush of winter evenings of the many nuances and shapes that natures form takes would have been engraved into the soul when living off its bounty was the difference between staying alive or dying, becoming decomposed nourishment for the forest they sheltered in. The practicalities outweighed the intangible, they had to, though I still wonder of the fairytales, the boundaries to reality they may have stepped over because here “glimpses of the afterglow, retinal ghosts and psychic gossamer1” in dense fog the edges are never so far distant.
If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.
Edward Abbey
My knowledge of ancient paths is by far, less extensive than Robert McFarlane’s. But I know when he states “it’s hard to create a footpath on your own” it is no exaggeration of the facts; my own attempts to retread lost paths have been long and laborious, those in stolen woodland attached to the land I caretake are now—almost all—established, once again though it is a small bite of what remains. Elsewhere, because I cannot walk them every day—though I wish I could—all efforts are constantly reclaimed either by agriculture or nature. Some reappear in winter but single handed, I will always be defeated.
Many hundreds of woodland paths zig-zag a seemingly haphazard map across Le Paradis, some are human-made, connecting hamlets and farms to villages over hundreds of bygone centuries, physical lines of human footed communication between one family to another; the fastest routes to warn of danger, birth, fire, disease or death, trodden and formed over eons. They are still evident, lined by stone walls and huge cobbles though too few are maintained. Without further necessity to modern day living the tracks and lanes are abandoned, now, also predominantly impassable. Tarmac has covered earth and cobbles. In places, three lanes of traffic tare across the hill where the original single tracks were wide enough only for bullock and cart. Great swathes of hill country gouged away taking not necessarily the fastest route nor, even, the least damaging but the simplest to construct and navigate thereafter. Those that endured the ravages of man-made machines and nature are few, used by farmers for moving cattle or connecting isolated meadows, and, my own endless wanderings.
In the depths of the cold, sparse winter months, regardless of modern living, of neglect and mismanagement, elsewhere animal tracks are clearly visible, can be followed for miles. They weave in seemingly directionless twists and turns through forests and undergrowth, around edges of fields from hilltop to valley bottom, a timeless applause to all of natures lives that never change, these creatures are survivors. They have learnt the old ways and adapted to the new over generations, they are as canny and cunning as they need to be in order to abide.
The cycle turns, lingers and moves on…
“The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape.
Wendell Berry - The Art of the Commonplace
I send you my thanks, as always, for reading and commenting. I hope you have enjoyed this final entry of four seasonal wanders over, across and around Le Paradis.
May your wanderings always be an adventure of delightful discovery…
Susie X
Please do take a moment to visit The Crows Nest published by
who writes with a deep knowledge of our ancestral links to country traditions both lost to time and still practiced. He also writes in detail on the art of survival in the wilderness of which he has first hand experience as described in his section A Fall in Time - I recommend reading his entire adventure to anyone pondering any such wild journey, whether alone or accompanied.
Blatantly stolen for Robert McFarlane’s, brilliant and unputdownable, The Old Ways.