A wet winter’s day along a puddled track. The footpath leads away from the river, bordered with hedgerows and fields either side. Earlier in the year the fields sounded of sheep bleating, mouthfuls of grass torn with a rip, and the rapid, dull thud of alarmed sheep bounding away from passing walkers.
A few sheep remain outside at the end of the year. They sit quiet and huddled under hawthorn hedges, dark shapes through a mist of rain.
Apart from the traffic beyond the fields, the most insistent noise is the familiar drumming of raindrops on the umbrella. A private acoustic performance aimed at me, beneath, listening within the seclusion of my little domed roof.
After travelling away from the river I turn left and meet it once again, crossing over a high bridge. The rain slants through the water, creating chains of ripples that crash into each other, perpetually active.
Over the bridge, a sidetrack leads towards woodland and the raindrops are caught before they reach me, their sound changing to a patter on tree leaves. Fog blanks out much of the landscape, but there are pheasants silhouetted under an oak tree in a neighbouring field. Their colours are indistinct today, but the familiar
shape of angular heads look like cutouts against the grey backdrop, while long flicks of tails bob and sweep through the rain.
The path becomes increasingly waterlogged. As the sludgy muddy track peters out, the footpath continues through grassland. Marshy puddles bubble through reeds wherever I step, and there are small pockets of flooding. At first I can walk through them, but eventually I am crammed to the side of the path, crouching
through leafless shrubs and small trees, whose whippy branches allow me through.
Eventually the path descends towards the lake where it dissolves into the water. A short way beyond this point stands a newly made island – a wooden bench. The lake has crept past its boundaries and merged the landscapes of land and water. The blanket of fog encircles and shrinks the landscape to a stretch of water edged with the dark spiky tangle of a winter forest.