Windswept on Birch Tor
Early February, close of day
The sun is milky pale, laced by swift clouds. Winter is a quiet time - sheep off the hill, birds dormant, grass pale. Though the wind keeps its own conversation going, the moor is otherwise sleeping.
From a distance, this tor seems concise, small even. But once we’ve walked up, heads down into February’s wind, and come to the tor, we are standing in the midst of an outstretched rack of giant stone knuckles. I try to find shelter from the wind in the lee of the lichen-covered rocks, but nowhere is windless, or silent. The wind revels in its voice, battering against stone, troubling my ears. I pull my hat tight, and look across the snowless winter landscape, way over towards Holne Common, and to Princetown, and the changing sky pulling itself towards night.
Below the tor, brown rushes jostle, and there’s swaying in the blush of dried heather. In this land, what grows is seldom still.
We wander down to look at a pair of walled-in squares, long-since denied their purpose of holding animals. One square is full of heather - no room even for the more adventurous sheep. The other is covered in last year’s bracken, dried now, and some trees - a rowan, a holly, a hawthorn - stand as if lost - in place but out of place.
Then all of a sudden, cloud comes in and surrounds us in greyness and drizzle. All distance is lost, the tor hidden. All the light I have as the day fades is at my feet, with the hundred greens of mosses and the paleness of the shy heather buds, holding future flowers. Wind bites at my back and the day is done: it’s time to leave.
