A recent early taste of winter makes for a strange mingling of colour. With the ground covered in autumn’s still-fresh leaf fall, and many leaves still on trees, the patchy powdering and layer of snow over such golden toffee shades seems incongruous.
Kick through the piles of leaves banking the edges of the lanes and there is still a layer of straw underneath, carded by hedges from passing trailers of straw bales.
Down Hollow Lane, steeply banked and lined with trees, bright leaves lie on and under snow – the long serrated tongues of sweet chestnut, the lacquered toffee pennies of beech leaves, yellow-green hazel and buttery field maple are all still crisp and separate, uplighting the lane with a glow against the grey sky. Snow has fallen as if through a chute through gaps in the canopy, and the whole effect is a reversal of a Narnian streetlamp, of white light on golden ground.
Out in the fields, snow has accumulated in subtle pits and hollows, revealing fresh or old secrets the way drone photography might in a drought. Fine furrows curve over chalky contours like a rake through sand, and ancestral badger highways crisscross them in long continuations. One goes for a mile, through hedges, under fences, through the churchyard and on through another field, before it is lost to view. In the wood, there are snow-free patches that show where the fallow deer have lain.
In a small copse, the musty-sweet, sugar-beet smell of decaying sycamore leaves mixes with the sharp iron tang of snow. It provokes nostalgic memories of when snow at this time of year wasn’t unusual, even in the south, and of golden straw, spilling like light from the cowshed and stables, then strewn across the compressed polystyrene whiteness of the yard for purchase. The summer’s store of harvest-field gold, warming the wintery scene like lamplight.
Returning down Hollow Lane, I find it filling with a meeting of blackbirds. Some of the 10-15 million that overwinter in the UK from northern Europe – identifiable by a darker eye ring and bill – meet their resident cousins. And in them, there it is again: the field-maple gold ring around the eye and bill, glowing against the dark, against the snow.
• 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
