We don’t get winters like we used to. Trust me, I have lived through seventy of them. Even in the south of England, where I grew up, you could count on a few snowy days most years, and certainly on waking up fairly often to find your bedroom window decorated with great leafy frost-patterns. It was never enough for me. I loved snow from a very early age and dreamed of living somewhere where they had real winters, with several feet of it, lasting for months.
I finally got what I wanted in 2011, on a snow shoeing holiday in Heaven. I mean Lapland.
When I remarked to a young student the other day that we could do with a good hard frost she professed perplexity. But then she’s from Spain – and what did they know about cold weather, prior to this week’s eight-inch snowfall in Madrid?
I explained to her about mud, and how horrible it has been trudging through it all these weeks – and how much nicer it is to hike over firm, frozen fields with nice clean boots. Not much more than a century ago, a lot of people would have welcomed a good freeze. It made travel possible – along firm tracks and frozen rivers.
A slow thaw had set is when we left the village of Wolsingham – and that meant that the snow on the paths, firmly trampled, and kept in deep-freeze conditions for several days, was now covered with a thin layer of water. Only one word to describe it: treacherous. So it was a relief to get away from the riverside and into the fields. Some were several inches deep in snow; others had been stripped almost bare by the winds, their grey patchwork colours barely distinguishable from the midwinter sky.
It was such a pleasure to be reunited with the ways of snow, how it gathers in the lee of stone walls and hedges, or rushes through an open gate to dump a nice drift on the other side. I claim to have encountered snow on my holidays in every single month of the year, and am trying to compile pictorial evidence. No problem with January… but I can never resist posing for another photograph.
Some time I’m going to dig through thousands of photos and find evidence to support my case. (July and August are easy: I ticked off inside the Arctic Circle a few years ago.)
Our seven-mile walk took us through a thoroughly wintry landscape. Even so, there were signs of life, like this exotic fungal growth that had found a niche under the bark of a decaying tree.
Trees are very much on my mind right now. Given the travel restrictions, it seems that this is the ideal time to conduct a survey that has been on my mind for several years. It is to monitor the progress of a selection of common woodland trees through the springtime period. April and May are a thrilling time of year, but the passage from tight bud to fat bud, to leaf-burst and blossom, happens more quickly every year. This year I am hoping to observe it daily and capture something of it in pictures and words.
