Winter and monochrome

 

Pedestrian chain bridge, Melrose

By the river Tweed, in the Scottish Borders. Over the chain bridge from Melrose, to walk on the other side of the river.
“On either side the river lie/Long fields of barley and of rye”.* Except the fields have long been harvested.

The trees have changed since my last walk, they are almost all completely bare. In the time it takes to get there, clouds have appeared, though sometimes the sun comes out. The river is still high and in places the edges of green banks can be seen underwater, a memory of what was once dry land. So there is little colour but when the sun comes out, all is transformed.

 

Colours are subtle, so much so that I turn some of the images into black and white.

 

At one point I hear some geese flying in their scrawling formation across the white clouds and patches of blue sky. They slip behind a bare tree.

 

 

Part of the path leads through a beech tree wood and the leaves crunch underfoot. Then the path regains the river.

 

Towards the end the river bank rises up steeply and the path veers away and joins a back road. Which leads to a stone bridge. 

 

Cross the bridge and follow a road that leads to the train station car park. But there are few cars and only two people, who have just got off a train.

The clouds have disappeared again, and here is this train station car park, so deserted, surrounded by trees and beyond them, fields and hills in the background. It is like a part of civilisation that is not so much abandoned as poignant, in its symbolism of modernity (trains & car parking area) yet so silent, so depleted of the people that give purpose to transport links, to going joyfully from one place to another. And all the while, the wintry sunshine, the vivid blue of sky, the whole area bordered by huge beech and pine trees, watching.

It’s the train line terminus, but occasional buses come past here, to take you in one direction or the other. One soon appears out of nowhere, the road hidden by woodland until this bus circles the roundabout, glinting in the sunlight. There is no other traffic. It’s a little like the Cat Bus in My Neighbour Totoro. Except that it isn’t night time and it isn’t raining. But there is that quality of complete surprise that out of this ancient and timeless landscape, something as modern and as helpful as a bus should materialize. 

Out of the backdrop of hillslopes and yellow fields, “that clothe the wold and meet the sky”* out of such a rural idyll, like an anachronism, leaping out from some future time, the bus appears. Stops at the bus stop and I get on.

* The Lady of Shalott, Alfred, Lord Tennyson