run down now and youâd have a heart-attack if your eight-year-old, your ten-year-old disappeared into it for half a minute for fear youâd never see him or her alive again. (The place of harmless Willie Winkie with his padlocked hut, and of feral Hughie Bach, taken by the spectres of addiction and abduction now.) As for the delicate trout, the polluted stream probably gave them all heart attacks long ago.
As I grew older, I ventured beyond the Glen, by field and hedgerow, bird-nesting, in the lovely hilly countryside of what we knew then as Denbighshire. Then I might follow the feeder stream up beside Peulwys Lane and under the road, away into the woods and farmlands of Parciau, or in the other direction, up and along toward Pentrâuchaf, or far beyond, under the droning telephone wires, to Dolgau and to the Dolwen crossroad, or even to the hamlet of Dolwen itself, the ancient village of Llanelian too.
Here the hedges in the spring were full of songbirds: blackbirds, song-thrushes, dunnocks, chaffinches, greenfinches, goldfinches, yellow-hammers, robins, wrensâ¦. Here swooped the sparrow-hawk. Here the kestrel hung breathtaking in mid-air, preying on vole or mouse. Here on the telephone wire the yellow-hammer called for a little bit of bread and no cheese, and swallows twittered snatches of composition, minims and crotchets on a stave.
It was up in the direction of Dolwen you might see Miss Brodrick in her bowler hat, trotting in her trap, drawn by a white Welsh Cob, of which variety she was a world-famous breeder, out at Betws where she lived, at the big house of Coed Coch, a person of note. I remember my parents pointing her out, as you might point out a rare bird, and a rare bird she was, with her sanguine cheeks and her black bowler. She owned Coed Coch... the Red Wood itself, wherever it was. Her white pony then would have been some descendant of âCoed Coch Madogâ, if not the aging beast himself, a grandson of âCoed Coch Glyndwrâ, legendary animals.
* * *
The two hinges of the year, spring and autumn, are the sweetest, surely, when the door opens and closes, when change turns the heart on its axis. Climate change now necessitates the re-writing of everything. Annotation is required to know the shepherdâs calendar, to know what March and April or October and November, Spring or Autumn, once meant to Edmund Spenser, John Keats or John Clare. But I still catch myself registering the aura of spring as I used to, foretasting it, in light as it lingers in a bare wood, loath to go under and earlier to rise. The little finger-hold of daylight clinging on beyond its time, before its time, the first of birdsong, sometimes misplaced, make me look up and look, now, in my sixtieth year, to those old-fashioned bird-nesting days when the carrion crow, inveterate egg-robber itself, began to mate and brood. It would sail in its windy crowâs nest, come the end of March and early April, to hatch four or five blue-green eggs, magically blotched and spotted orangey-brown, way out on a limb. So the rook would rebuild, and the bare-knuckled hedges come into bud. What though that little lightâs probably an illusion now, some freak moment of false November or December?
Time comes round none the less, however out of joint the day, and the need to reproduce coursing in the blood prompts the birds to build and whistle and sing, cry or crow, mewl or honk, coo or quack, twitter or chirrup, as ever they did, since the start of time, proclaiming their territory. On such burgeoning mornings, to step out across the road to the Glen, and to wind up away on Dolwen or Llanelian hill, or the gorse-blowing Marian, the known world of Wales in view below, and sky swept cloudily grey, in downpour or in dry, and the sea running on the coast with its seascape sky, was a dream come true, a dream nurtured at bedtime and hatched once more with the day, head full of hedges and banks to comb and search, in vivid
As I grew older, I ventured beyond the Glen, by field and hedgerow, bird-nesting, in the lovely hilly countryside of what we knew then as Denbighshire. Then I might follow the feeder stream up beside Peulwys Lane and under the road, away into the woods and farmlands of Parciau, or in the other direction, up and along toward Pentrâuchaf, or far beyond, under the droning telephone wires, to Dolgau and to the Dolwen crossroad, or even to the hamlet of Dolwen itself, the ancient village of Llanelian too.
Here the hedges in the spring were full of songbirds: blackbirds, song-thrushes, dunnocks, chaffinches, greenfinches, goldfinches, yellow-hammers, robins, wrensâ¦. Here swooped the sparrow-hawk. Here the kestrel hung breathtaking in mid-air, preying on vole or mouse. Here on the telephone wire the yellow-hammer called for a little bit of bread and no cheese, and swallows twittered snatches of composition, minims and crotchets on a stave.
It was up in the direction of Dolwen you might see Miss Brodrick in her bowler hat, trotting in her trap, drawn by a white Welsh Cob, of which variety she was a world-famous breeder, out at Betws where she lived, at the big house of Coed Coch, a person of note. I remember my parents pointing her out, as you might point out a rare bird, and a rare bird she was, with her sanguine cheeks and her black bowler. She owned Coed Coch... the Red Wood itself, wherever it was. Her white pony then would have been some descendant of âCoed Coch Madogâ, if not the aging beast himself, a grandson of âCoed Coch Glyndwrâ, legendary animals.
* * *
The two hinges of the year, spring and autumn, are the sweetest, surely, when the door opens and closes, when change turns the heart on its axis. Climate change now necessitates the re-writing of everything. Annotation is required to know the shepherdâs calendar, to know what March and April or October and November, Spring or Autumn, once meant to Edmund Spenser, John Keats or John Clare. But I still catch myself registering the aura of spring as I used to, foretasting it, in light as it lingers in a bare wood, loath to go under and earlier to rise. The little finger-hold of daylight clinging on beyond its time, before its time, the first of birdsong, sometimes misplaced, make me look up and look, now, in my sixtieth year, to those old-fashioned bird-nesting days when the carrion crow, inveterate egg-robber itself, began to mate and brood. It would sail in its windy crowâs nest, come the end of March and early April, to hatch four or five blue-green eggs, magically blotched and spotted orangey-brown, way out on a limb. So the rook would rebuild, and the bare-knuckled hedges come into bud. What though that little lightâs probably an illusion now, some freak moment of false November or December?
Time comes round none the less, however out of joint the day, and the need to reproduce coursing in the blood prompts the birds to build and whistle and sing, cry or crow, mewl or honk, coo or quack, twitter or chirrup, as ever they did, since the start of time, proclaiming their territory. On such burgeoning mornings, to step out across the road to the Glen, and to wind up away on Dolwen or Llanelian hill, or the gorse-blowing Marian, the known world of Wales in view below, and sky swept cloudily grey, in downpour or in dry, and the sea running on the coast with its seascape sky, was a dream come true, a dream nurtured at bedtime and hatched once more with the day, head full of hedges and banks to comb and search, in vivid
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