The Magic of Being Outside

A blog featuring articles for Devon Preservation Association

"Encouraging all people to enjoy the power of nature"

Bruach-On the Brink of Winter

Written in a Pudsham Meadow October 2025

Rustling leaves, vibrating birds' wings, a beetle spins off a leaf. Clouds of aphids rise out of the oak canopy. Trees shudder in their roots, one tears at the wind. Winter is on the way.

4.00 Speckled wood butterfly wing-torn grapples onto a fence post in Sylvia's field. Over the high moor at Grimspound cloud manes fling back. Lightning flashes. A herd of ponies race down Pil Tor, their hooves shake the ground as the half-moon rises. Down in the grasses the Meadow brown butterfly shifts uneasily rustles the scapes of Plantain, husks of anthers alive in the wind. Thrush sings, little darts in the ear. Its message, a storm is coming!

Dark greens fern the distant moor the shape of a grouse wing quivering.

As I picnic hurriedly on cake and wild apples and piping hot tea, the warbler alarms. Perhaps one of the brood that first flew close that wet day in spring when I sheltered in the hut top of the meadow. Sun sinks down the skeleton of ash tree. Beams slant through the Rowan.

Change is in the air. In this Dartmoor meadow time has changed slowly at first from the earliest eras through Bronze age into medievalism and up till the modern day. The sound of beasts and scythe in the meadow were heard here. Now the noise of cars on the road to Widecombe on a Sunday afternoon.

The cycle of life is turning. Evolution is slow but the seasons are fast and unpredictable these days and all is uncertain on Earth. The wind is blowing through the shrinking leaves, the last bumble bee searches for a hole to overwinter. Urgent as the young bees I saw learning to gather nectar, tumbling off pignut blossom on that day in spring. Change is imminent. Winter is over the horizon.

Spring and summer I've witnessed the meadow transform, watched butterflies emerge from crysalides, beetles hatch, grasshoppers evolve, skullcap leaf, orchids grow. I found caterpillars, each had burst out of lid or aperture of a dimpled or frosted or crater, numinous gold or amber chamber. Caught glimpses of insect eggs glittering on leaf undersides like blue lagoons. In April willow-warblers blew in, singing off sea wind, chiff-chaff, cuckoo, nested and fledged. Lamb's bleated on the heath. Robin built her nest in the wall. Now the birds have left, willow warbler, swallow and martin and the trees along hedge and wall have fruited; Elder and Rowan. The oaks, their acorns beneath them like cobble-stone pavements.

The plants are seeding too, dying back into their roots. Yellow Iris disarmed by change, not one leaf dagger drawn, gold seed pouch spilling into the spring. All summer the meadow grew words and thoughts. I watched them flower. The willow-warbler, chiff-chaff, raven and buzzard nested word hoards hatched in my hand. Flew in Summer. Vanished in the dog days. The corn mint corollas fell like purple powder.

Now the chiff-chaff cants from perch to perch in his daily ritual round the meadow marking its territory before flying back to its southern home. Thistle seeds shimmer, caught in scapes of plantain. A moth struggles in a spider web. The scapes of the Plantain have gone to seed now - dirty rust, balded and singed are the knapweeds. The dark ground takes back life we won't see for months. Nature claims all in due time. Dear friends die. In the mirror fine lines appear on my face. All is in a state of flux. No sure ground after all. And now the season is changing.

4.10 The wind takes up in the silver birch, last gold leaves splitter splatter in first drop of rain. 4.20 A goldcrest perches above me then searches for shelter. 4. 25 A fox flees across the meadow.

I see myself less willing to go out. It's difficult in the weather. But I know from experience of writing in nature that to feel the change, the turning of the season, to feel connected I have to be willing. And nature can change us. I've learnt the names of flowers, butterflies and birds by listening and watching. I've learnt that flowers are ready to be pollinated when the bees enter the meadow, come somersaulting through the flowers and that the wind dishevels them, that they bob and rustle, that the pollen and nectar, its oil and scent is released in sumptuous clouds of perfume. I've learnt to get close down smell them, touch them, feel them.

4.30 Silver birch shakes out a charm of gold finches into the knapweed, they twitter, peck at the seed heads left them tufted.

4 .35 A blackbird panics and yells younger birds excitedly calling. Far western moor flowers into a bruise blue and yellow lichens.

I learnt each place in the meadow is special, slope or spring side, sweet or sour soil, attracts its own fellowship of plants and with them they bring their guildsof insects. That in each wild, self-seeded place where a native plant succeeds in rooting, flowering and seeding, it is a champion in its place. Each inlaid in the melody of the meadow.

This ancient Dartmoor meadow not only modulates its own change, like an octave rising and falling back to its root note, people change it too. Pulling up suckers of blackthorn and willow this week, falling over in the mud, doing the work bear and elk once did we kept the clearings open. For that is all a field or meadow is, a clearing in a forest, a 'close' as the old word has it in Devon.

Raven in the pine north of Goat Field squawks, wheels above the gap, panics. The jay in Bagley Wood squeals and pockets a crop of acorns. Badgers take to their sets. Deer gather, bucks to leks, hinds to lowlands, winter crawls out of a lair in the north. Spiders scurry.

5.00 Weather draws in. Far on the western moor over Holne Cross sun bright on black wing, ripple like adder through grass. Where is life of meadow now? Was it a mirage? Did I make it up?

The seasons pass, winter claims the world before our eyes but out of it nature above ground is reborn. From the cut willow a new stem rises. How we look forward to that in the spring. The first daffodil sprung from the winter bulb in the garden and the next and the next. Humans can be destructive through ignorance as Edward Wilson writes; by not knowing what is aleady thriving in a habitat, by insufficient knowledge. To learn to live in nature is a delicate knowing dance Patrick Holden put to me. In this ancient meadow it's easy to appreciate the complex delightful life forms, but it is all around is if we look and listen. If we don't we damage the beauty without realizing it.

For first time I feel the shiver of a raven shadow creep along the wall.

5.30 The temperature drops as cloud pitches over Widecombe vale.

Sky darkens. A wren creeps into the boulder crevice in the corner of of the meadow.

A leaf clatters onto hard earth, another and another, bish-bash of acorn and ash key. A wood dove flees out of cloud to the oak in the meadow side, a young buzzard all summer precarious on narrow wings regains balance, quivers, banks over the heath mewling for its mother.

5.35 Ivy in the hedge leaf-beats like hooves retreating. Suddenly it grows dark as twilight. Wind holds its breath. Rain straiths open, loud like machine gun fire. Finger tips purple with sloe berries I break cover and flee to the old stable in the corner. Then roar! granite grind of thunder. Rain threshes out of cloud barns into the quern of the meadow. A peacock butterfly winnows over my shoulder before me into darkness of the shed. Deep purple, damask closes to black. She lights on the timbers under shadow of a wrens nest bats her wings slap slap slap. To warm herself. My fingers ache. My toes are damp. She shuts her wings into the shape of a triangle and sleeps. Rain-glit strikes, drips through the corrugated iron roof. The wren's nest mildewed and empty.

The Storm arrives. Tears up fists of leaves and hurls them up. Trees, the hawthorn and rowan fight the wind. The oaks on the western side grip, twist, their roots tensile feel the friction. The keen wind buffs the leaf loads. Buzzard screams from her perch. Wind awls her out. The trees sway, receive the blows. The oaks resist, they lean and lay their canopies eastwards taking the knocks. The leaves roar back, each leaf contributes. Small birds cower in hidey-holes in hedge and wall crevice. Smelting rain pelts hard, wrecks spiders webs, hulmed cobnuts smashed in laneside. The knuckles of the hemlock dropwort useless now against any storm.

The storm has broken. Change has come.

*'brink', 'edge' Old Irish

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