For 10 days Buxton was buried by snow and further bound, night after night, in sub-zero conditions. At Lightwood there’s a steep-sided dell enfolded beneath old beech trees and held in almost permanent shadow, so that as I threaded a precarious route to the bottom, I could feel a further instant fall in temperature.
The goal was a water pipe. Its outflow cascades for barely a metre, but relentless spray has scoured as its catchment basin a gritstone arc 3 metres across. Those rocks are plastered by platyhypnidium moss, while the drier south side is adorned with frost-wilted remnants of broad buckler and hart’s-tongue ferns.
What drew me down was the way the spray had built up along the margins as a glorious ice showcase. Beech saplings down one side had been drenched and slowly thickened into lateral ice pipes, each with a living twiglet at its core. From these horizontal supports had developed a further chaos of icicles, but they didn’t depend as differentiated “teeth”, so to speak – they were welded into a rippling jawbone like fossil remains of some fantasy carnivore from an age of ice.
The way the whole organism glittered to its core, partly as I moved and shifted the angle of light but also as the beech-sifted sun specks glanced off the ice bone, was extraordinary. Equally weird and beautiful was the formation at my feet. This whole shelf was an ice block, but not as a level water-resembling sheet: it was irregularly raised and globed up like molten metal or polyps on a coral formation.
What was most intriguing was that all these suggestive forms had been made by minute droplets splattering randomly outwards, day after day, then solidifying into ever-increasing complexity. In this they seemed reminiscent of life itself: the way that monocellular organisms – and recall that for a full billion years microbes had the Earth to themselves – have self-assembled as ever more complex life forms. Out of bacteria came wonderful creatures such as the smilodon, the nautilus and the orangutan.
Weirdest of all is that I went back to the spot two days later. Nothing remained of that whole world. Except the words written here.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
