ShiverWriggle

Blaeberries are running rampant through the Brushwood, pushing heather aside and throwing their early season not-yet-ripe berries sunward. They cheerfully bump shoulders with the natural regeneration birch trees, still finding their footing. Auri has become fixated with the Brushwood, choosing to walk that path – and only that path – as often as she can….

Everything had doubled. More than doubled. I ran down the main path, goat willow on one side and broom on the other. Occasionally, I’d receive a sudden but gentle slap of coconut from the gorse. Further down, light was filtering through the upper branches of the Greenwood, lighting last year’s leaves on the woodland floor,…

The evening was all about poetry. Specifically, two favourite poems from my childhood. A quick jaunt turned into a gentle evening stroll, into and through the Greenwood. The sun wasn’t fading – nothing that rich could be described as fading – but it was slipping away to be somewhere else. Grey and ghostly shadows were…

The bluebells are finally out at the bottom of the Greenwood, just past the Douglas Fir. Quietly stretching upward from the forest floor with a graceful and easy elegance, they complement the vivid greens of May perfectly. Those greens have become even more vivid over the last few days – hours, even – as we’ve…

At the end of The Avenue, I turned left at the crossroads, trying to stick to a relatively level gradient (if not level ground) for my morning run. Usually, I would head straight down the hill to the large Douglas Fir at the further crossroads, or head sort of diagonally right into the trees towards…

Things always come back to us. When Auri was much smaller – a baby, rather than toddling around – she pulled her hat off in the woods and tossed it aside. Euan only noticed when he returned home and was gently extracting her from the baby rucksack and discovered it was nowhere to be found….

At the bottom of the Greenwood, if you carry straight on after The Avenue instead of turning towards the Obelisk, you reach a crossroads with a towering Douglas Fir. Just past this, if you turn towards the castle and the arboretum, the woodland floor becomes a mass of bluebells in mid spring. We were too…

When I was very small, we had “Folk at the Phil!” by The Spinners on cassette. I knew all the words to all the songs, even if I didn’t understand some of them. One of those was “Silver in the Stubble”, and I could never understand why my parents seemed amused when I sang it,…

Today was a day of rustling creatures. We startled a newt, resting on a long-blown tree trunk just before The Avenue; and a mouse in the holly on the way to the river made quite a racket given its comparatively tiny size. The wood anemones were on a mission, catching up with the periwinkle. It…

All week, the April showers had brought snow rather than rain. By the weekend, the overnight frosts had got thicker, and a light dusting of snow had even settled for a while. The gorse aside the main path had gathered barely melting ice, and in the Greenwood the paleness contrasted with the auburn of last…