‘Our route becomes less knowing and tentative as we progress under the increasingly heavy pitch of oak, hornbeam and beech. Senses being heightened and alert to the unfamiliar noises of the night’
I’m on top of a high point and looking over moonlit meadows and fields, below, at their feet, down there in the ink smudge of night my village nestles peacefully with only a light or two aglow. I’m sure one of those beacons is the pub sign, which has a tendency to be left lit with or without revelries. Darkness becomes less so as my eyes adjust, revealing silhouettes of the church and its searching lone spire. I enjoy night walking especially in early autumn, and have never thought it an obstacle or as some fearful of it – however it does challenge perceptions of time and space, making the known purely a facility of memory on occasion.
Tonight our first footsteps are relatively keen due to the illumination afforded along the footpath by clear skies holding a full autumnal moon.
Soon enough we will be cocooned under what remains of a leafy canopy, a floor of fern, bramble and eyefuls of incredibly tall turned digitalis. Luminescence is occasional, the already disappearing path will be overgrown and completely and out of sight as we move deeper into the wood.
Our route becomes less knowing and tentative as we progress under the increasingly heavy pitch of oak, hornbeam and beech. The echoed snap of a fallen branch underfoot startles such is the intensity in finding one’s way. The sound of witch hazel ‘popping’ seeds from their taught exploding capsules (dehiscence) is around us in pockets of friendly fire. Fallow and fox bark from shadows, owl’s hoot, and above the leaf and branch a cradle of stars and moon beams awaits to guide us over the shoulders of the valley.
All a sudden Wynne and I stop, remaining motionless we both feel a palpable change in the air, a subtle movement of damp, cooling fluidity passes around us suggesting an end to the wood and the beginnings of an open landscape and somewhere over there water. This sign quickens the stride, as we near the clearing trees the spirit of the pool calls softly, I start to imagine all that awaits – the deep reed beds, the never ending lily rafts, and the willow and alder that offered shade and refuge from what has been a Mediterranean spring and summer.
And so, now, in the brightness of a recovered landscape we again receive the glowing transmissions from a plenary orb who dutifully obliges in showing the way. The cusp of night and day is a magical hour, the light becomes ethereal, ghostly even, it lasts fleetingly and heralds such change in voice and character as the nocturnal, that otherly world gives way to ours. By the time we arrive at the streams westerly edge the rising sun will have begun to flood colour across the landscape. Corvids, thrush and buntings will have found their voices and Wynne and I will have crossed the stream, to end our walk beside an old estate pool whose waking stretches will be over in a blink of an eye.
Being chalk stream fed this pool is forever in capacity, there’s a good three feet around its margins always. The reed here are raftly, they create mini reserve peninsula’s, hawkers and damsel rise with the sun and are on the hunt instantly, boatmen not at all lethargic contrarily start with such enthusiasm, and the sight of great diving beetles creating the smallest of bubbles, interspersed with the odd on or two huge ballast bursts as they rise and fall. Birds have already ruffled a feather and found the choirmaster aligned with their need to sing. These are the simple pleasures an angler may experience as a new dawn begins.
To Be Continued
Writing & Images – Pallenpool, North Norfolk, Summer 2026
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