After a clear, chilly night, the thick mist melts – first on the great wooded ridge that splits the Somerset Levels east to west, then later below on the “moor” itself, where the grid of grass fields and rhynes forms a silage factory. Even down here, a mellow sunlight, slanting low, picks out colour in the sparse hedges.
The seasonal and the drought-driven are tangled. It’s confusing to this eye, trained to the seasons’ changes from more than 50 years in rural occupations. Stress creates a superabundance of seed, but also the stunted, wrinkled form of some berries of elder and hawthorn. Blackberries, again, are plentiful but many are small and wizened. Travellers’ joy, profuse in its silver-green, pre-fluffy form, touches yards of hedge with rippling liquid light.
The oaks shrugged sturdy shoulders at the drought and never varied their summer green until lightly brushed now with season’s colour. Ashes too – those not dying back – put out giant yields of seed but kept their summer foliage; now they are a bright, light yellow.
Drought’s hand has fallen lightly for the most part, but many of the chestnuts and beeches are near to full winter nakedness, standing ankle deep in fortunes of discarded gold, dropped well before their time. This, attended by the overproduction of conker and mast, creates a strange sight, such bareness and profusion together.
The beeches attract pigeons in small flocks, climbing and hanging as they gorge on mast. They are not so much in evidence on the stubbles, but are everywhere in the hedges, elder and hawthorn berries being great favourites. Maize is the main stubble left, a barren monoculture but attractive to stock doves. I have counted 50-plus, wheeling and swirling as one.
Many small birds have emerged from their summer secrecy, a giant charm of goldfinches, 300 at least, feeding on the chicory seed, and two full families of long-tailed tits tsss-tsssing away as they pour into a thorn hedge, fleeing the slate-grey sickle of a sparrow hawk. Chaffinches are in good numbers in a cider maker’s yard, but rarely a bullfinch in the nearby orchards.
Rooks, crows and jackdaws racket around the plough and raid the outdoor pigs’ feed. Overhead, the raven’s kronk and the rival buzzard’s mewing foreshadow the year’s knell.
• Country Diary is on Twitter at @gdncountrydiary
