• Mindfulness explained

“Snow on a twig. A berry imprisoned in ice. The quietness of a frozen lake”

on the fourth day of Siberian frost there is a dead rook in that field. A rat patters out from the hedge to look at it, then scurries back.

I know why. Under the fence, close to the wood, a fox has slunk and is standing, breath panting white, ears pricked forward, calculating risk. She can see me at the opposite corner of the field. She looks at me, looks at the black fallen bundle of rook. Then darts, grabs with her mouth and lopes away, each padfall sending up a small puff of crystals.

Frost has an antique charm, but after three days it wears thin. The world is over old, and I feel it this day.

Buzzards in the valley over St Weonards’ ridge mew pitifully as they circle the woods. If they come this way they will find small if beautiful pickings: there are the multi-coloured corpses of two chaffinches on the waiting earth table. I seem to be losing birds, not gaining them.

Oh, February. After four days of frost, you do nothing but rain, and then you snow.

Snow is the white stuff of nature detecting: there are distinct marks of rabbits coming out of the wood across the paddock into Flinders, a fox has padded in their wake, then veered to the hoppers, where the beat marks of wings on snow tell a tale of a quick escape. From the laneside hedge into Flinders, a flurry of tiny paw marks goes up to the bird table, where shrews and mice have ventured for the overspill. A mouse-shoal of house sparrows is on the table now, then down on the ground, then flying to the hedge at some imagined danger. The house sparrow, once a bird of the town, is now almost exclusively a bird of farmland. House sparrow: a bird that has lived alongside us since the Stone Age has declined in London by over 90%. The numbers of the house sparrow are also down in the countryside, which is their last bastion. Granaries from which one would see a hundred sparrows emerge 30 years ago are nowadays bird-proofed for efficiency (read money), but also health. In observing the state of Britain’s farmland one becomes an accountant of misery.

And yet… snow falls steadily, making the world anew, burying the land. I’m in the paddock beside Flinders at the cline of day, feeding sheep, the sole real figures in a snowstorm toy. Then a soft-winged barn owl, its back as golden as a storybook grail, drifts across Flinders. I want to sing. I wish I could. From The Running Hare: The Secret Life Of Farmland by John Lewis-Stempel (Black Swan)

Stillness BY NIGEL SLATER

Cookery writer Nigel Slater loves winter; from cold, frosty mornings, crisp with the scents of fir and spruce to firelight evenings reading ghost stories “with a glass of sloe gin, and beeswax candles with shadows dancing on the ceiling”. This evocative book celebrates the best bits of the season, with recipes for every occasion, delicious in every way.

The stillness of winter. Snow on a twig. A berry imprisoned in ice. The quietness of a frozen lake. The bareness of the winter landscape allows us to get a better view of the world we inhabit. No long

grass and canopy of green leaves to confuse the eye. No fluff of blossom to deceive us (their blossom gone, cherry trees surely get the prize for the most boring trees on the planet), just the clean lines of a winter landscape. The architecture is clear and crisp. The shape of a tree, the path of a river, the outline of a barn, as clear as if they were drawn on a map.

I was brought up with the mother of all ‘views’, which as an 11-year-old I somewhat took for granted. From our back door, an undulating landscape of meadows, woodlands, rivers against a backdrop of the Cotswolds and the Malvern Hills. Snowfall would stay untouched for days, sullied only by the footprints of birds, rabbits, squirrels and foxes. (As a child I imagined wolves and bears too). Walking in the plantation of the Christmas trees that backed on to our long, thin garden was like a trip to see Mr Tumnus. No lamplight, but we had the moon to illuminate the frost, like glitter on a Christmas card. The joy of the little forest of fir trees in the dell was that they stayed cool in the hottest of summers too. A place for a child to play hide and play.

The move to the city has brought an altogether different winter into my life. Shorter (city snow is gone in a heartbeat); frosted pavements trashed by pedestrians and the warmth of the buildings; snow in London is as rare as hen’s teeth. I have lived in the city for 30 years now and have seen all too few proper winters. By proper, I mean those winters with snow deep enough to shovel. The bare trees, however, remain, majestic.

I’m not sure you really know a tree until you have seen it without its leaves. Naked, so to speak. They are often at their most peaceful and romantic in the winter, like watching a loved one sleep.

Without the diversion of leaves, deciduous trees take on a sculptural quality; we get to see their bark more clearly, the dance and flow of their branches, their character and form. Large trees are bare for only four months before new leaf buds emerge, first as freckles, then as tiny, opening leaves. This is when I take them into the house; as large twigs break off the horse chestnuts in the street, I gather them up and stuff them, however large, into one of two capacious vases. The branches I value most are those that have a good horizontal, fluid form, large enough to leave a shadow across the table. As the season moves into spring, their leaves will often open, slightly ahead of those out in the cold. A gift.

From The Christmas Chronicles by Nigel Slater (Fourth Estate)

Swan BY PAUL EVANS

Taking a lyrical journey through the in-between spaces of nature – strandlines, mudflats, cliff tops and ice caves – Paul Evans explores a wilderness full of life, where the sounds of birds and the weather changes the look of the landscape.

The swans are easy to see from the road. Sometimes there are hundreds of them on the fields, a striking white-on-green heraldry. The geese are less noticeable, grey like river mud from a

“I’m not sure you really know a tree until you’ve seen it without its leaves. Naked, so to speak”

“The Anglo-Saxons had swan symbols on their swords and dancing through their myths”

distance, full of the flow of colours between sky and water close to. The waterfowl have gathered on the flood meadows, now used for arable crops, to graze as a community in the winter months before disappearing for the breeding season. The flood may have taken much of the grazing land away from them but it has given the birds a renewed grace that fits the flow of wild riverlands.

Before drains, embankments and ploughs, the Severn was a many-channelled braid of flows and expansive in flood. The birds were here then as they are now, drifting on shelves of water at the margins, standing watch, honking through the sky on wings they love the sound of, slapping their own reflections off the surface as they plane in and out of nowhere. They belong to the River Severn’s floodscape and they are part of a mystery of birds and water that travels way back into our culture, certainly to the origins of English.

This is a thousand-year-old riddle: ‘Silence is what I wear when I walk the earth or make my home or stir the waters. Sometimes my beauty and these high air currents take me above the houses and the power of the clouds lifts me over nations. My charms resonate strongly with melody, singing when I am away from the flood or the earth – a travelling spirit.’

Who am I? Silence, water, flight, beauty, music, travel – long before the Norman Conquest, an English writer posed this riddle about the mute swan. This is a translation from the Old English into Modern English and the swan, moved by the power of clouds and its own magic, is lifted through a thousand years of the same language. People we call the Anglo-Saxons brought this landscape from the river valleys, fens and estuaries of northern Europe. They came to Britain with swan symbols on their sword handles and swan maidens dancing through their creation myths and they built the water meadows. Our language and waterfowl were wrung from the same floods.

We can feel the truth of this on winter mornings, when the sun arcs low above the lead-grey water and glints on the white plumage of swans as they slide out of the mist. Silently gliding or wing-smacking the water, our language struggles to keep up with the swans. And the riddle? A question to confuse and then reveal, like a conjuror’s trick: the swan flying into the heart of our culture, linking our lakes and rivers to the ancestral north across the sea – which the author of Beowulf, the first great poem in English, called the swan’s road and sometimes the goose road. Swans and geese are often interchangeable in the language of legends, part of the lexicon of birds and trees that carry meaning between culture and nature. I look along the flood’s edge to see gaggles and skeins: flying, landing, standing, waddling, flapping, feeding, arranged like words in sentences, stanzas – poems of birds.

From Field Notes From The Edge: Journeys Through Britain’s Secret Wilderness by Paul Evans (Rider Books)