207 Bucolic dell in upland meadows (subtle, slow, best with headphones)

Full Episode description

Steep grassy meadows. Grazing sheep. Overgrown hedgerows. Thickets. Narrow stony streams, sometimes with sandy banks. Grit stone walls, with tumbled stones where weather and animals have made a way through. Thistles. Clumps of dense nettles. Patches of tall, well established woodland. A muddy farm beyond. And another behind. And hours, if you want, if you allow yourself, to lean elbows upon damp timbered gates, Put aside what’s to do, and focus every part of your conscious mind on taking the landscape in. 

Here, in the presence of trees, nestled half way up a Derbyshire moorland by a babbling stream, is a good place to practice  taking in the landscape. Where the non-human and the human worlds blend. It may look and often sound bucolic. but this is not in a strict sense wilderness. It’s an edgeland. Farm machinery, A-roads, the flight paths to Manchester’s ringway airport, though quite feint, are in range of hearing. But not distractingly so. Far off. Worlds, in a kind of pleasantly acceptable balance.

This hour, is daytime. A bright morning in August. Clean. Sharp. In a country sort of way. Looking out onto the steep meadow in front, with sheep grazing, and under these tall well established trees, each fresh eddy of the clean flowing stream, reflects off the broad leaves above. Reflects, as soft shifting shadows do. And creates a sense of intimate, tree shaped, space.