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You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/04/country-diary-avian-pipers-gates-of-dawn-lune-estuary-lancaster
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| Version 0 | Version 1 |
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| Country diary: avian pipers at the gates of dawn | Country diary: avian pipers at the gates of dawn |
| (7 months later) | |
| It was becoming light, but not light yet. Water, salt marsh, sky: these were names for things that did not exist in the dark before dawn. Then the glim of something, maybe a moon-piece, as befits the Lune, made its way in to where it was possible to look but not go. There was the cold, face-wash quiet of the air and the slight rub of dry sedge trodden on the road. There was frost, if that smells of silver. A spectral breath returned inside after exhalation, setting the mind afloat. There was a slow opening in the east and then the nets of river fog filled with gold. | It was becoming light, but not light yet. Water, salt marsh, sky: these were names for things that did not exist in the dark before dawn. Then the glim of something, maybe a moon-piece, as befits the Lune, made its way in to where it was possible to look but not go. There was the cold, face-wash quiet of the air and the slight rub of dry sedge trodden on the road. There was frost, if that smells of silver. A spectral breath returned inside after exhalation, setting the mind afloat. There was a slow opening in the east and then the nets of river fog filled with gold. |
| As shoals of light swam through the air, the river and the land floated in banded layers of colour, none of which lasted longer than a few seconds. This was a weightless landscape, at liberty and so insubstantial that any ripple could disperse any or all parts of it to drift away in different directions. As the sky blued into being, a bow of geese flew northward and a jack snipe lifted from somewhere indefinable between marsh and water, jinking bat-like out of and back into the mist. Far off, some oystercatchers piped the first bars of their call and then, as if a signal that dawn had broken, a curlew summoned sunrise, its song a weir of keening but without grief. | As shoals of light swam through the air, the river and the land floated in banded layers of colour, none of which lasted longer than a few seconds. This was a weightless landscape, at liberty and so insubstantial that any ripple could disperse any or all parts of it to drift away in different directions. As the sky blued into being, a bow of geese flew northward and a jack snipe lifted from somewhere indefinable between marsh and water, jinking bat-like out of and back into the mist. Far off, some oystercatchers piped the first bars of their call and then, as if a signal that dawn had broken, a curlew summoned sunrise, its song a weir of keening but without grief. |
| The morning opened everything up: the reed and sedge thatch scattered across the road from the last high tide; huddles of plastic flotsam in the bank; an upturned armchair on the marsh; junk thrown out of the back of a van; a trickling spring through ash roots; smoking chimneys, towers, turbines; rooks investigating the mystery of how this was not quite the world as they left it last night. | The morning opened everything up: the reed and sedge thatch scattered across the road from the last high tide; huddles of plastic flotsam in the bank; an upturned armchair on the marsh; junk thrown out of the back of a van; a trickling spring through ash roots; smoking chimneys, towers, turbines; rooks investigating the mystery of how this was not quite the world as they left it last night. |
| The day was full of daytime things and journeys that returned us 134 miles to Wenlock Edge, where the dusk began to settle. Walking in the woods I found a fragment of blue shell in my pocket that I’d picked up on the Lune Estuary that morning. I put it in the fork of a hawthorn, a gift brought back from the sea. Through the silhouettes of trees, the fields purpled and blackbirds let their last songs trail into echo as a golden light, strange and wonderful from behind the hills, swept across the woods. | The day was full of daytime things and journeys that returned us 134 miles to Wenlock Edge, where the dusk began to settle. Walking in the woods I found a fragment of blue shell in my pocket that I’d picked up on the Lune Estuary that morning. I put it in the fork of a hawthorn, a gift brought back from the sea. Through the silhouettes of trees, the fields purpled and blackbirds let their last songs trail into echo as a golden light, strange and wonderful from behind the hills, swept across the woods. |
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| Spring | Spring |
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