For weeks now, being in the Cumbrian countryside has been like walking through a 70s Flake ad, only with no innuendo and barely enough chocolate. The meadows are extraordinary this year. I’ve never seen so many buttercups, such clover and poppies, never mind the numberless others I can’t name; and I can’t remember seeing a farmer, one man, mowing a meadow (sorry) for hay, so early. But on this hot Bank Holiday Monday the freshly-cut fields were corduroy-striped with (more…)
Category: walking
thing 14: ‘the dearest freshness deep down things’: lamb-hunting
Call me Ishmael.
Don’t worry, though. I’m not talking harpoons or shotguns here. It’s just that I do get possessed, each spring, by a need to find and gaze upon lambs—the wobblier and boing-ier the better. The obsession comes on really strong in early February and lasts till Mayish, when wild-swimming fever takes over. So there was never any question that lamb-hunting would be a Thing.
And now it’s time! It is a bright cold day in February and the flocks are dotting the green. Well-swaddled, I (more…)
thing 11: ‘the peerless crust’: sarnies on a hillside in Lancashire
In Notes from a Small island, Bill Bryson puts it like this:
‘I counted thirty-three people there ahead of us, huddled among the fog-whitened boulders with sandwiches, flasks and madly fluttering maps, and tried to imagine how I would explain this to a foreign onlooker—the idea of three dozen English people having a picnic on a mountain top in an ice storm—and realized there was no way you could explain it’. And you can see what he’s saying. However. Whether it’s Britishness, or nature, or nurture, in the end it (more…)