Two busy weeks at work and a road trip to Edinburgh left me feeling disconnected and distant from the country around me.
My eyes have spent more time scanning the screens of a computer, phone and car satnav than the fields and hedges, and I’ve missed the quiet contemplation of the lanes and footpaths.
So, when Mrs F and I emerged from Friday night drinks at a neighbour’s house and looked up to see a near full moon spotlighting the village, I felt the familiar urge for a night hike.
I hardly had to say a word. “You should go,” said Mrs F.
Dark skies and moonlit nights do something to me. Like a tractor beam, I’m drawn outside.
It started when I was a student. I lived for a while with a family who owned a chateau in Brittany, France, and I would walk the estate at night. The ancient avenues, woods and moonlight over lake water were other-worldly at night. Alone, I was a little afraid, especially among the trees, but also comforted by the stillness and absence of people.
Sometimes in summer, when other students came to work at the chateau, a few of us would stay out all night. Occasionally, in August’s heat, I would fall asleep hand-in-hand with a girlfriend, gazing up at the stars.
But May in Rutland has been frigid. While Wales and Scotland basked in 24C heat this week and a farmer friend in Cumbria @lakes_cowgirl wrote on Wednesday to say it was “roasting” in the Lake District, it’s been 13C here and we’ve shivered in an incisive north-easterly.
I headed out for my night hike layered up in a fleece and waterproof, and immediately regretted not taking a hat. My ears turned to glass.
I was soon beyond the last of the village’s mercifully sparse streetlights and out into the country.
All week I’ve been listening to John Grant’s Pale Green Ghosts. It’s a monotonous, pulsing electronic song about a car journey along a highway in Colorado lined with Russian olive trees whose late May leaves are luminescent in moonlight.
Pale green ghosts at the end of May
Soldiers of this black highway
Helping me to know my place.
Pale green ghosts must take great care
Release themselves into the air
Reminding me that I must be aware.
On Rutland’s roads it’s not the trees that are luminescent, but the cow parsley. It’s beginning to fade but lines the lanes like faint, low level fairy lights. I stop to take a photo on my phone, the screen blinding my now night-adjusted eyes in a blaze of battery-powered light.
Despite the moon disappearing behind a wave of cloud that’s rolled in on the cold breeze, it’s light enough to see without a head torch.
Along the hedge-lined bridleway, I stop to listen for wildlife. I’ve often heard little owls here, but tonight it’s the ke-wicking of a lone female tawny owl.
A bat darts around, flying close enough to make me duck.
Then, the sudden bark of a muntjac deer jump-frights me. Its mysterious guttural shriek resonates on night waves, an horrific call. Such curious little creatures, like an alien hedge-dog.
I’m not sure what drew me to night walking all those years ago, and why it retains its hold on me. Perhaps it’s a poetic appeal, the romance of the night. Or perhaps it’s simply the other-worldliness, the surreal quietness, the sense of mystery. We spend our lives rushing around, assuming control and mastery of the world about us. But on foot, at night, alone and in the dark, one feels small, a bit-part in nature.
When the moon rose in even more alluring fashion last night, Saturday, the same thing happened again. After a day’s gardening, Mrs F and I had walked down to the allotment to water recently planted purple flowering broccoli, kale and cauliflower, hauling a bucket on a rope from the stream. As we were finishing, the moon revealed itself through the branches of the trees and then rolled up, large, round and rosy over the village.
Once more, Mrs F told me to be on my way and I strode home to pick up a jacket, before walking south to watch the moon rise over the Welland Valley.
For a couple of hours I wandered around on the north side of the valley watching the moon’s ascent into a clear cold sky. I left the public footpath and trespassed harmlessly along a wide grassy field edge bordered by woods to get new perspectives. A soft, mellow half-light was thrown over the landscape, illuminating the fields, trees and hill tops.
I take long pauses, mesmerised, and wish I could stay the night. It’s as if the moonlight is beaming through me.
I’m conscious that night walking is a privilege not afforded to all. Not everyone would feel safe walking alone at night.
I return home and, as it passes midnight, re-read a chapter of a book by my bedside, Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers and Mavericks Who Shape How We See the Natural World by Kathryn Aalto (@kathrynaalto).
The opening chapter is dedicated to Dorothy Wordsworth whose letters and journals reveal the role she played informing the rise of English Romanticism and the writing of her brother, William. Kathryn Aalto writes:
“More people have read her uncredited work than they know. In a revision of his book A Guide through the District of the Lakes, William Wordsworth includes a letter Dorothy wrote to a friend about her 1818 ascent of Scafell Pike, now considered one of the most notable ascents of a mountain by a woman during the Romantic era. However, he didn’t attribute the letter to Dorothy, giving the appearance that it was his own climb and he wrote the piece.”
Women who walked alone at the time could be subject to verbal abuse and could suffer “reputational anxiety”. Aalto continues:
“Dorothy herself received a steady stream of letters from a disapproving aunt and grandmother reprimanding her for her daring habit of walking in the moonlight and at twilight. Women of this era were often trapped by marriage and society into states of dependency, but Dorothy seemed to escape this fate, at least until the end of her long life.”
The pages of the book are softer than the harsh light of a computer screen and with thoughts of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Lake District, Brittany in summertime and my own small county, I drift to sleep, a silver slither of light penetrating the gap between the curtains.