rosebay willowherb. It gained the first name because it
likes to colonise burnt-out spaces, and famously turned
post-war Britain into a blaze of pink. Its common name
refers to the soft grey leaves that look like those of the
willow. In late summer it is crowned with bright pink
f lowers, but in autumn it does something marvellous: it
burnishes its fire-loving nature so that it looks like an
autumn bonfire as those grey leaves turn red from the
outer edge in, like burning embers, a brilliant orange-
red, the seed heads wisping up like smoke. Here was a
whole uninterrupted bank of colour, burning away. It
was beautiful, fiery, unapologetic about its final call.
It singed my retinas against all the grey gloom. Like
a touch-paper, it lit up the bit of me that lives outside,
and I remembered who I was and why I was there.
At the end of this blaze was the M5, its huge concrete
bastions holding up a distant roar. Those cylinders
were so vast I could paddle between them. The din of
the motorway and the train line beside it made the
place so deafening that it became almost peaceful. You
could do things there you couldn’t do elsewhere.
So: I howled and howled and howled. I sobbed so
loudly and so uncontrollably that I f loated my boat
along with nothing but a heaving chest. I clawed at
the boat and at myself.
I cried in a manner far more unhinged than I can
remember doing before. I outstripped the version of me
that had howled on a station platform when I had first
left Charlotte. I sobbed more violently than I had at the
weekend or when I had left my marriage bed.Song
BY NEIL ANSELL
Neil Ansell loves solitary walking, a passion that
has become more precious as his gradual loss of
hearing affects his relationship with nature,
especially the calls of the birds, which are
gradually becoming silent to him.T
hough it was only a month since I had last been
here, things had changed vastly. The woods of
birch and oak were in their full autumn leaf; all
yellows and oranges but not yet ready to fall. They
looked exquisite, painterly. The purple heather of the
hills was gone now, but the moor-grass had faded from
the lush green of my last visit to a whole palette of
earth colours; yellow ochre at the tips, burnt sienna at
the base, and umber at the root, so that the hills looked
scorched by the fires of summer. The first snows had
already fallen on Ben Nevis but the sun was shining.
Great f locks of redwings and fieldfares had arrived
from Scandinavia, drawn by the glut of rowan berries.
The scattered f locks were so vast that they might take
several minutes to pass overhead, and then they would
suddenly tumble from the sky as they came to anotherIt sounds farcical now, but in all the time I had been
wandering around asking people to accept the new me,
I hadn’t asked the old me to do the same. I let go in all
that howling. I have no idea if anyone heard me or saw
the strange sight I must have made. But I let go, and
once I had, I felt gloriously free.
Taken f rom Hidden Nature by Alys Fowler
(Hodder & Stoughton).“The scattered flocks were so
vast they might take several
minutes to pass overhead”