In a sequence of grey mornings, this one was especially dismal. It was cold. The trees were dank and thick with mist, bark slick with moisture, whatever was left of last year’s foliage drooping wetly, the bracken not bronze but dun, sliming into the earth, spring’s promise unfulfilled. I dropped my chin into the collar of my jacket and started up the hill, eyes fixed on the uneven ground at my feet, marshalling enthusiasm.
The change, when it came, wasn’t gradual but instantaneous, as though a child had laid a ruler across the landscape and drawn a line, colouring in below with nondescript browns but above it with dazzling white. Overhead, the cloud thinned from dark to milky grey, the watery sun appearing on the horizon as I climbed out of the valley’s warm bed of moist air on to the glittering moorland above. I found myself laughing, the day upended. Every tree and shrub was now coated in frosty geometric shapes, each one stacked madly on top of another.
A bushy rowan had pretty much disappeared under these shards of ice, “bristling / Galactic encrustations”, as Ted Hughes described them. Hughes was writing about hoar frost and, strictly speaking, this wasn’t frost at all, but rime ice; not water vapour desublimating on to a cold surface, but water droplets freezing on the chilled vegetation. The effect was similar, though rime creates spikier, heavier formations, useful knowledge if you’re steering a sailing ship.
The south-west breeze aided this construction, pushing mist across the moor, where it accumulated in crazy piles on the windward side of scrub and heather. The geometry of these formations is part of the spell. How can something that seems so complex and deliberate not be magic? I spotted an epiphyte – a plant that grows on another – in a nearby birch, a cartilage lichen, silver-green and wildly branching, topped with an even wilder crown of white thorns, woven from air, the tangle of ice evidence of a power unseen, or, as Hughes had it, “Like a wand / That has swallowed its wizard.”
• 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
