"There is no time like Spring, when life's alive in everything." Christina Rossetti, Spring.
This post is nothing more than a visual reminder; a reminder that beauty and simplicity are still very much abroad in the landscape. Especially on a blue-skied early Spring day, taking a walk in the empyrean setting of the Black Mountains, where the green fields of England reach up to the hill country of Wales.
Rhiw tracks traversing the hillside, Lady's Smock and Wood Anemone repeating their ancestral awakenings, and the unreconstructed farmstead of Little Llwygy and Ty Canol field barn holding out against modernity.
"On our way we passed through a maze of hills and valleys, through woods, by deep lanes, by paths over sunken lands; we could see no distances." Arthur Machen, Introduction to 1916 edition of The Great God Pan.
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"To-day I want the sky,
The tops of the high hills,
Above the last man's house,
His hedges, and his cows,
Where, if I will, I look
Down even on sheep and rook,
And of all things that move
See buzzards only above:
Past all trees, past furze
And thorn, where nought deters
The desire of the eye
For sky, nothing but sky."
Edward Thomas, The Lofty Sky.