Spring to Summer

Cracked soil from weeks without rain, leaves curdled prematurely, tall grass when May had only begun, all followed by weeks of dampness, sodden ground and chilly winds. Everything seems off-kilter somehow this year as if summer had come too early, realised its mistake and left again, only to get lost and missed its queue. But during those bright days of early May, hazy softness as we know it from later summer graced the skies and the bluebells were dancing in the rapidly greening woods.

Red grouse called across the cottongrass flecked moors and the short-eared owls glided down fells and through lapwings circling the skies.

The barn-owls appeared late in the valleys, when the last light found the crowns of buttercups to paint them a softer shade of dusk and they would glide above, ghost-like and fey.

One evening, I came past a crumbling old building I hadn’t visited in over a year. When the last of the sunlight slid over the cup of the moors it found the perch of a barn-owl, gilding its ivory head as it peeked at the shrubs where I was hiding before starting its crepuscular hunt.

So spring has seeded summer and the stories of the creatures inhabiting wood and fell are unfolding, forever attached to weather and wind.