Leaderfoot old road bridge with the viaduct behind
Walking from Earlston, in the Scottish Borders, down the path towards the Leader river, such a sense of joy and liberation. The thick wads of leaves, the earthen path, the silent, jubilant trees – they are, they are – all this feels so good. So glad to be right here, in this place and in this moment.
Sitting on the bench, in front of the Black Hill, the hillslope opposite, on the other side of the river, shows different colours. There’s the dark green of the pines, there’s the light pinkish-purple of birch saplings, and then higher up, the yellow-tawny bare branches of larch trees. And at the treeless top, just yellow grass and a few stony, rocky areas. The hill has a very definite pointed top, seen from this angle.
It is impossible to get onto the railway viaduct, it has been closed for many years. The high steel gates are topped with loops of razor wire. Steel spokes ray out from the sides of the gates, also laced with razor wire – to put you off, should the idea have come to you to swing round the side of the gates and gain the low wall on the other side. This could not be done without lacerations and the view from the wall of the viaduct tumbling way down into foliage below.
It’s another couple of miles from the bench with the hill view to the end of the path at the old bridge with its view of the viaduct. The path goes up and down through wooded areas and across fields and more level areas. Sometimes it stays close to the river, at other times it moves further away, up into the woods, where the bank has eroded or become impassable. In some places big tree trunks have fallen across the path. You can climb over or walk around. I sit for a while on the tree trunk, almost as wide as a horse’s back and look down its red slope, to the river.
There’s lots of river views on this walk, at this time of year when the trees are bare, their twigs and branches forming a netting cover, like fishing nets or wire mesh, like fingers threaded together, like cats’ cradles, like patterns, like screens to protect birds.
The light has changed, I can feel it already. The sun has paused, in the last part of the sky, showing a thick finger of light beneath the thumb of cloud. It is as if the sun has gone at its usual speed across the small palette of sky assigned to it at the end of December, and then, realising it has a few extra minutes, it slows down, dawdles almost, because it has those extra minutes tacked on, since the winter solstice.
It feels as if it’s looking back over its shoulder, before it flicks aside the curtain at the stage set edge, some line of hill, because we are not by the sea, we don’t have a flat horizon here, we have hills of different heights that cut off the view of Sol, before it reaches that edge of world or edge of ocean and gathers most of the day’s light to go with it. Most of it. There’s always just a little left behind. That the moon and bright stars have as their own, these distant stars but still, their light reaches us, to keep us company when our own star’s entourage of day has swept off to illuminate the other side of the world, to pass the Day time there.
But we have other stars, to show that there is always light. It is almost too much sometimes, to apprehend the heat and warmth of our star and the everything it gives to us and to the trees and rivers, to all the animals. At other times, I’m so immersed in the little tasks of being human that I hardly think of it when say, there’s a big queue in the Post Office, when there’s a tailback at the roundabout. But sometimes there are these drifts of uneven colours in the sky and they remind me. There are many different shapes and heights of hills – so that the sun can disappear and then appear again and that reminds me too. And I wish I was beside the sea so I would be reminded all one long cloud-covered evening, because these coloured clouds are angels kneeling down before the setting sun and when you see this, well, you can’t forget because they show the colours of the glory of it all.
**
January 2025.
The viaduct cannot be crossed but the bridge leading from one year to the next, that is easy, time does it all itself. On January first, it snowed. The year makes its statement. The next day shows a clear blue sky, perfect for a walk. First of all uphill, where the snow has frozen into ice, treacherous to walk on, and then, back along the old railway track, where deep snow has wound around the dead stalks of plants and there’s thick uneven grass under the snow cover. The crust of ice over the snow, the grass, the red brown stalks of willowherb and other tall plants, their dried out stems, all of this you walk through or round or they catch on your clothes, listen they say, or, look at this, this, the group of pines on the hill slope nearby, next to where the badgers live, the sunlight on the ice and snow, the field of sheep, some of whom watch me goose stepping slowly past, some move away a little, they are all clustered round the hay bales, necessary winter feed on snow-covered fields.
And the buzzard overhead, one piercing cry that wraps round all the hill sides, and down into the valley, the hollows of the old railway track and the built-up embankment with the short and stunted hawthorn trees, all the twigs with their gloves of ice, long fingers of ice where the sun half melted the coating of snow before it froze again.
The snow covering the fields and grasses, the dips and hollows, the curve of the bank where the old railway swept around, the snow like time itself, braking the past and slowing down the future until the earth is stilled to now, this moment, just as the sun makes its gentle curve across a quarter of the sky, and there’s the constant lifting of the feet over the vegetation and the long grass and the stalks of willowherb and the snow and the way feet push through the cracking crunching icy cover. And I feel longing for a hard and stony path beneath my feet. Not this yielding, uneven, blisteringly white terrain.
A rabbit, just a metre from me, breaks cover and lopes ahead, and disappears into the same colours and frayed shapes and contours and uneven surfaces and textures of the landscape that it came from.
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