Spring in the valley

Sunset over the valley

I have just spent two weeks in another of my favourite places – a few miles from Oswestry and a couple of miles into Powys. It's been nearly a year since I was last there and I was keen to see what had changed in the garden since my last visit.

Jeni came with me to spend a long weekend with Dawn and Tony, with whom she gets on really well. We set off from Somerset just after 10.00 on a morning that saw the first (and last?) snow fall of the winter here, and the journey was interspersed with flurries of sleet and rain. We broke our journey at lunchtime at the Bellmans Cross Inn at Shatterford just north of Kidderminster, where I had lunched twice before. On both previous visits I had been, more or less, the sole diner but when we called in this time we were lucky to get a table! Despite the fact that there was only one person waiting at table, assisted by the French chef, Dominique, we were served remarkably quickly. I have to say the chips that accompanied our panini were the best chips I have ever had, anywhere! Fully fortified we continued on our way and arrived at Moelfre at about 4pm, where we were given a great welcome.

The next morning we woke to a light dusting of snow, but it soon melted allowing us to do a bit of work in the greenhouses and garden, although this was limited by the sodden ground from weeks of rain, but on the Sunday there was slightly more snow which took longer to melt, so Jeni and I worked in one of the cabins painting the walls and window frames so that it was ready for the first let of the season, just after Easter. (If you fancy a tranquil, 'glamping' experience check out wyldwoodsretreat.co.uk ). Sadly, Jeni had to go home on the Monday, so I took her to the station at Gobowen, just outside Oswestry and saw her off on the train, before returning to Moelfre.

Early on Thursday morning, amid a flurry of last minute activity, Dawn and Tony left for Brittany and I was left alone with just Jasper (the Miniature Schnauzer) and Missy (the cat) for company.

The silence was profound. It was so quiet that the silence seemed to push in on me and I was aware of the sound of the blood pulsing through my head. If it hadn't been for the birdsong I could imagine that I'd just been struck stone deaf! As last year, there are no sheep in the immediate vicinity at the moment, although I could hear ewes bleating for lambs and vice versa, away down the valley towards the little village of Moelfre, and the eerie sound of a donkey braying, but here there were just the birds.

A cheeky squirrel waits his turn on the feeders

His friend cleans up underneath the feeders

I began to compare the situation at home with the situation here and realsied that 'rush hour' started at about the same time – 5.30am! At home it is the gradual build up of traffic on the A37, rushing past to Bristol and Bath; here it is the noisy explosion of the jackdaws as they throw themselves into the sky like a black Roman Candle firework, before turning en masse and heading off east down the valley for a day of feeding in the fields. They are shortly followed by traffic going in the opposite direction – a formation of about ten Canada geese who honk their way west up the valley from their safe overnight haven on Moelfre Lake. From then on it's just the constant to-ing and fro-ing of the birds on the feeders. Dawn has a feeding station just outside the window where there are two peanut feeders, a fat ball feeder, a seed feeder and a niger seed feeder. At first I couldn't understand why I was having to refill both peanut feeders and the seed feeder every two days until I got up a bit earlier one morning and, on looking out of my bedroom window, saw two squirrels eating seeds and then counted at least six jays visiting the peanut feeders! For the rest of the day, it was a constant fast food takeaway for dozens of blue-, coal-, great- and long-tailed-tits, nuthatches, goldfinches, chaffinches, robins, blackbirds and the resident woodpecker. I also spotted a siskin and a marsh tit (I think). The majority of the birds visiting were blue tits and they would usually feed quite happily with the coal tits, who were very shy, and the long-tailed tits, but they all deferred to the great tits when they turned up. Most of the birds retreated to a safe distance when the woodpecker came to feed, although the long-tailed tits were cheeky enough to feed from the other side of the feeder, but everything retreated when the nuthatch turned up! They are quite aggressive birds and will chase everything away, including the woodpecker.

As dusk creeps into the base of the valley and gradually climbs up the steep valley sides, the little birds stop feeding and disappear to their overnight roosts but, in the sky overhead an amazing phenomenon happens – the jackdaws come home. It didn't happen every night, and some evenings were more spectacular than others, but they start to appear from all points of the compass, in small groups that gradually join together and wheel above the night-darkened valley in an intricate swirling ballet – hundreds of them! It is like a starling murmuration but they are much bigger birds and they call continuously as they dance in the darkening sky. The collective noun for jackdaws is a 'clattering' but that seems to imply something chaotic, whereas this looks like a well-choreographed and well-rehearsed piece of dance. (I managed to capture a video of part of this, it is about six minutes long and can be found on YouTube ref: https://youtu.be/VLcLLjFhPpU ) and then, at some hidden signal, they fall out of the sky into their roost and peace returns to the valley for another night. Spine-tingling stuff!

The weather improved dramatically during the week that I was there on my own and I managed to do some gardening and paint the front of the larger lodge. I'd taken a lot of things to do if I was stuck indoors – knitting wool and needles, crochet hooks, my peg loom and a couple of books, but I hardly needed any of them. Because everything was so sodden and slippery in the garden, Tony and I hadn't even discussed the vegetable plot so, after I'd done my annual tidy up of the potting shed (which took a fraction of the time it normally takes – perhaps my influence is rubbing off, although it's more likely that Tony has been occupied on hard landscaping and building projects of late!), I started weeding the raised beds at the bottom of the plot and just worked my way uphill. I discovered that, if I put my old gardening jacket on the ground, Jasper would happily sit on it for hours while I weeded, without fussing or wanting to wander off. In the end I only managed to weed four of the beds (there were another five or six to go) as I overdid it and made my back ache too much to continue – obviously not as fit as I thought I was. I did however, manage to have a good bonfire, although there are still loads of fallen twigs and small branches to be collected around the garden after the winter storms.

At the end of my week of house-sitting, I reluctantly packed my car and left Moelfre, with the hope that I get to return at least once more this year, and headed south. The day, which had started out beautifully sunny at Moelfre, quickly deteriorated into a sullen grey, and my decision to come back a slightly different, and potentially more scenic, route began to seem like a bad one as any view of the Shropshire hills was blanked out by low cloud and mist. For most of the journey down the A49 towards Ludlow and Leominster, I was behind two lorries and the steady 50mph proved very tiring. I'd planned to drive cross-country to Gloucester and then blast down the M5 to just south of Bristol before making my way back across the Mendips to home, but I was so tired by the time I reached Gloucester that I stopped in a lay-by and rang my Mum in Cheltenham to see if she was in. My intention was to stop for a couple of hours, have a cup of tea and a chat and then continue on my way, but Mum persuaded me to stay overnight and continue my journey the next morning. I didn't need much persuading, as my back and shoulder ached quite badly by then.

So, next morning, after a good night's sleep, I set off across the Cotswolds once more, retracing the route that I'd used a few weeks ago. When I got to the small crossroads where the two wall-builders had been busy, I just had to stop and take a photo of the (almost) finished wall – it is a work of art, and will probably last for another hundred years. The icing on the cake, as it were, was that, as I came up the hill past Dyrham Park, I was thrilled to see that my report of the demise of the Tollgate Tearooms was premature – it has just been undergoing a revamp! There is a new, more upmarket sign outside which still shows the old teapot, so I really must stop there at some point and have tea!

The rebuilt Cotswold stone wall