Deep and Crisp and Even

Redesdale enjoyed something of a thaw last Saturday but the days since have seen the winter's grip on the valley re-tightened. Thankfully, there's been no more snow but today, having to travel five miles outside the village to the nearest Post Office, I thought the roads quite unpleasant to drive along. I was glad just to buy stamps for my Christmas cards and, once back in the village, some vegetables and a woolly Peruvian-style hat at the mill shop before returning home for my lunch-time soup and a sandwich and an afternoon with Patrick Barkham's enchanting The Butterfly Isles, which I am very much enjoying and can thoroughly recommend.

When leaving the mill, this view of sheep feeding in an adjacent field caught my eye ...


And in the garden, the birds return again and again to the food I put out for them at their temporary feeding station on top of the wall at my front door. Here's another of the Brambling pictures I took from my living room window last week ...

Brambling (Fringilla montifringilla)
And a Christmas-card Robin ...

Robin (Erithacus rubecula)

Hard Times

Since the weekend, the winter weather, which was at least picturesque in my last my last piece, has continued to tighten it's grip on Redesdale. The accumulation now is certainly as deep as last winter and clearing it has meant a lot of hard work for me and my new plastic snow shovel. The car-wide track down to the road, created on Saturday when I dug out the six inches of snow lying on my drive, has filled and been cleared twice again; on Monday the snow was twelve inches deep and there was another six inches yesterday. And if I felt up to the task this morning, five inches more has fallen overnight. It's still snowing heavily as I write so I've voted for a lazy day. Sadly, the garden birds will not be able to relax.

Winter

We've had quite a lot of snow in Redesdale this week. Not as much, perhaps, as other parts of Northumberland, and certainly not as much, yet, as we had in the last week of the old year and the first two weeks of 2010 when I was snowed-in for three weeks. But worryingly, the large scar, marking a car-wide track down to the road that I dug out of the six inches of snow lying on my drive yesterday, was almost entirely filled by the overnight snow.

For all of this, the countryside around me is looking picturesque as I discovered this afternoon on a short walk up onto the village trail.

A view west across Redesdale to Padon Hill
On the village trail looking north
Looking east from the village trail to Fawdon Hill