The banks of the road leading into the village where I live are now white with snowdrops. The day is noticeably longer, though it’s still a long dark drive when I commute to work. For those days when I’m working at home and want to watch dawn glide across the moor it’s not impossibly early to walk up the lane and get high enough to see colours fill the sky. 

I’m writing this blog on the 1st of February. Today is Imbolc, the start of Spring and Saint Brigid's Day. We’re now halfway between the Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox, and at the start of the lambing season. Soon my moor walks will be graced by the sight of lambs gaily gambolling and tottering about whilst their wary rather exhausted looking bedraggled mothers keep watch and have their udders regularly head-butted. It makes me wince every time.

Although the snowdrops are out, as are the dwarf purple irises that I have in a pot by my front door, everything else is waiting. There are catkins on the hazel trees but they are still small and hard, and the tiny bright red female flowers are yet to appear. 

I know it won’t be too long before Blackthorn fills hedgerows with white blossom, so I have a sense of gathering expectation because before then, or around about the same time, the curlews come back. There is a rock shaped like a chair where I go and sit in the early morning to listen to them.

I have a square of oilskin lined with tweed that I sit on to keep the cold and damp where it should be on the rock and not let it seep upwards to me. If I want to see the dawn I’ll need to get up earlier than I do now; and there is still plenty of opportunity for a some weather excitement with frost and snow. Around this time of year there are usually several days when I get snowed in and can’t get to work.

For our Sunday poem, here are a few stanzas from ‘At Bridget's Well’ by Doireann Ní Ghríofa published in the Irish Times a couple of years ago:

We each spoke a spell of stone

and in her gloom heard prayers turn poems.

Ask her, Bríd, what will be

come of us?

Listen. Liquid, the syllables;

the echo, luminous.

The traditional seasonal markers such as Imbloc help me navigate through the year and create a sense of cultural continuity that connects me to the landscape with its dry-stone walls, rough meadows and moorland. Do you follow these markers too or use another way of counting through the year?

Rowan on the moor

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