The Shining of the Woods … February, 2024
As I write today, there are patches of blue among white clouds sailing over, but in truth, my goodness it’s been a wet and windy start to the year. Between flooded roads and incomprehensible, prolonged road closures, it’s been hard to leave the village sometimes, and mud is a daily companion. The various village WhatsApp groups – loosely divided into hamlets in this strung out village – have been both supportive and funny. On the wild, wet and rainy teatime of a power cut, which seemed to hit random houses, we were scurrying down the dark lanes between powered cottages, with covered pots and pans of half-cooked meals to finish off on neighbours’ generous stoves. Goodness only knows what passing cars thought we were all up to …
But I love the winter and am never ready to leave the season behind, really – I love the dark, soot-calm of the nights – and the thrill of them, too; walking under starlight or moonlight, or thick cloud cover when the darkness is deeply profound. The night is truly wild. I miss the frosts and the snows as climate patterns continue to shift, with a great, unsteadying feeling of loss. But here is the dog’s mercury, the cuckoopint, the milk-white drop-pearl earrings of snowdrops, that are as tough as anything else out there, piercing the one deep frost we did have, with an ear on brightening the mud.
February is the time of the shining of the woods – the point in the year where the woods are barest; where almost everything has been scoured and rotted-down, the curtains drawn back. Deer the same colour as the ‘wanwood leafmeal’ are visible only when they move. But any sunlight, reaching its weak, marigold fingers into the wood makes lighthouses of holly bushes and ivy – sometimes, of the scourge of cherry laurel in the keepered woods, too. The sun reflects off their wet, shiny leaves and turns them into shimmering beacons.
The birds are picking up the pace with their singing – the mistle thrush a constant; and though I love his song dearly, it has an association with the cold, wet tang of metal gates, closed celandines and wet feet, as another pair of wellies gives in to a thousand flint cuts. It’s a song of the see-saw of winterspring. I heard the first woodlark yesterday, out on the arable field; and it won’t be long until those high, treetop rivers of babbling winter thrushes get going, before they head back north to breed.
My Guardian Country Diary this month was a visit to my old haunt of Winchester. Beloved city of my childhood, then early twenties when I returned to protest road building, then as an (older) student, and so many visits and memories since. It’s one of those cities you can enjoy and walk away from into countryside very easily. This takes me on a walk beside the Twyford Down cutting, into Plague Pits Valley and up St Catherine’s Hill – the upfolding chalk of the Winchester anticline, a mizmaze and some terrific graffiti .. here’s an extract:
“From here, people are enjoying the view. There are paths along the River Itchen’s water meadows, the blue-and-bone flint of the Hospital of St Cross and Almshouse of Noble Poverty, and the city: my hard-won university, the prison tower that saw the end of Thomas Hardy’s Tess, and the squat magnificence of the cathedral. Above it all, an ecclesiastical kestrel balances like a flag on the thin whip of a hawthorn growing out of the slope.”
It’s here too: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/07/country-diary-this-chalky-old-city-gets-under-your-boots
My Countryfile Magazine column this month is on the ‘crows’ of controversy. It’s not online yet, but last month’s is and you can find it here: https://www.countryfile.com/people/nicola-chester-winter-can-be-brutal-in-the-countryside-but-community-prevails along with Lynn Hatzius’s stunning illustration.
Until next month, then. You can also find me clinging on to the good stuff still on Twitter, and I’m trying to be brave about Instagram …
nicola chester 
Hi Nicola,
Can’t comment via WordPress, so just doing so by e-mail to say what a gorgeously written piece this is. Particularly loved ‘the seesaw of winterspring’.This perfectly catches the essence of this time of year. It’s a time I love – I also like winter and will miss It’s quiet, particularly in the prosperously busy village I live in, where home improvements and other activities ratchet up the noise level as the warmer weather begins and the days grow long. In winter and at night, there’s a certain peace which reigns. I too like walking at night, though it’s the less adventurous sort – brisk walking for exercise just half a mile or so from home. Despite the constant, blurry report of traffic from a nearby road there’s a sense of wonder in the stars above and feeling inconceivably small under the vast dark dome of the sky.
Your writing is so descriptive and the language you choose is refreshing but evokes certain things so vividly, such as sunlight on winter trees. It’s lovely to read your Nature Notes posts once more. I look forward to the next one. Good luck with your Countryfile writing.
Best wishes,
Genny Sandalls
Hello Genny! Really lovely to hear from you – and thank you for your lovely comments and beautiful descriptions and writing! The seasons progress at pace! Nicola x
Would love to follow you on instagram – I have stopped doing twitter as too toxic….. fingers crossed you brave it!
AH! I shall look for you – I am there, but intermittently and timidly (not sure I know what I’m doing yet!) x