March 31st. SomePlace, Pyrenean Journal


The poplars are showing their sienna gold, new leaves; like waiting, ordered armies, they whisper amongst themselves. The lime yellow of the willows joins in the fanfare of spring colour and chiffchaffs, blackcaps and swallows accompany the whole concert. The first swallow arrived on the 29th. March; definitely earlier than last year. Later that day, two more joined up and by the next day there were a dozen or so, swooping and slicing low over the long grass land, inspecting the barns and chattering in their tinkling voices all along the telegraph wires. Non stop sunshine lifts the most stubborn of hearts.

I try to transpose this landscape, in my imagination, into Dartmoor, Devon, Wales, but it doesn`t work. There the signs, - the ditches, fences and hedges, would present some recogniseable language; I could read them as familiar. But here they are different. A group of ash, birch and hawthorn are somehow displaced in my imagination. There are no holloways, trodden by millennia of feet and wheels; no cottage gardens or grand demesnes, only ruined castles and tumbling barns, marking some ancient, landowning histories. These sweeping fields are not divided by trimmed or layed hedges. Huge sweeps of land, vast agri strips, their umber or emerald lines changing direction and stripes, to denote edge and perhaps propriety, decorate this wide space. Clouds of cherry and blackthorn blossom plume up the hillsides and the Prussian blue of the bigger forest crosses to and fro’, upwards towards the mountains. Here the hares are big, the deer frequent, the boar strange and the birdsong pervasive. And in spite of the Wednesday and weekend hunting sprees this a sort of a fecund paradise