Or, yannow, just a good Autumn walk amongst the freshly-harvested fields, watching crows fly on the wind.
There's something about the smell of freshly cut wheat and barley stalks that takes me right back to harvest time when I was wee, in those long-ago days of rectangular hay-bales. We'd pile these building-block bales on top of each other to make high and unsteady walls, create entrances that were scarily prone to collapse just as you were crawling in (‘lintel' not yet earning a place in our vocabularies), and a look-out was always stationed close-by in case the farmer noticed a pack of semi-feral bairns climbing over their livestock's winter fodder!
I took a walk (Epic Walk No. 1 direction) one blustery afternoon in early September to find that not only had the fields been harvested, but all signs of wavey, wheatey life had been removed. Barring the odd forgotten stalk here and there...
The difference in outlook is always remarkable after fields have been harvested. The soft-focus lush and overgrown green pathways bordered by whispering fields of gold that speak of late Summer, turn into the pale beiges of tall grass cut to sunless levels, and the harsher bronzes of stubble and earth.
This change also means that I get to see the countryside in its new state for the first time in a decade or two...
I remember walking through Sorghvliet Park for the first time in full Summer, after first acquainting myself with those Dutch woods in their denuded Autumn form, and finding myself lost on more than one occasion because I literally couldn't see the trees for the forest, as it were. All my points of reference - tall and stark oak over here, magnificent beech reaching for the sky over there - were obscured by the grand foliage explosion of Summer, and I wandered in circles for want of a leaf-free vista more times than I'll admit to...
This time the experience was reversed. Suddenly being able to see more on the horizon, being able to see more detail, and unobscured potential landmarks led to a confusion of too much information!
After walking up Clatto Hill, through Blebo, and round by Flisk, I decided to take a walk through one of the shorn fields in the direction of a (to my eyes) picturesque group of trees away in the distance. So I climbed the gate (something the larger me of yesteryear would not have contemplated, never mind actually managed) and crunched my way through the stubble only to realise that this group of trees was the same group that I saw whilst walking in the other direction, further to the south. I somehow didn't recognise this from when the pathways were full of tall grass and surrounded by swathes of wheat and barley, but that little copse of trees in the photo above, looking East, is the same little group of trees to the left-hand side of the second photo, looking West, and I could have walked straight on past the green field of sheep to the edge of the field to join up with the pathway and head home the same way I arrived, had I decided on taking the short-cut!
I didn't, of course, or I would have cut out half an hour's walk, so instead I retraced my steps back to the gate, and carried on down the track to the road, then headed back up to eventually reach the village again (hills. Lots of hills) by way of a photo opportunity over the River Eden, Tay Estuary and the distant hills to the north.
I have to say, though, that although those roly-poly bales may be more convenient to collect and store, their fort-building properties are decidedly lacking...
I took a walk (Epic Walk No. 1 direction) one blustery afternoon in early September to find that not only had the fields been harvested, but all signs of wavey, wheatey life had been removed. Barring the odd forgotten stalk here and there...
The difference in outlook is always remarkable after fields have been harvested. The soft-focus lush and overgrown green pathways bordered by whispering fields of gold that speak of late Summer, turn into the pale beiges of tall grass cut to sunless levels, and the harsher bronzes of stubble and earth.
This change also means that I get to see the countryside in its new state for the first time in a decade or two...
I remember walking through Sorghvliet Park for the first time in full Summer, after first acquainting myself with those Dutch woods in their denuded Autumn form, and finding myself lost on more than one occasion because I literally couldn't see the trees for the forest, as it were. All my points of reference - tall and stark oak over here, magnificent beech reaching for the sky over there - were obscured by the grand foliage explosion of Summer, and I wandered in circles for want of a leaf-free vista more times than I'll admit to...
This time the experience was reversed. Suddenly being able to see more on the horizon, being able to see more detail, and unobscured potential landmarks led to a confusion of too much information!
After walking up Clatto Hill, through Blebo, and round by Flisk, I decided to take a walk through one of the shorn fields in the direction of a (to my eyes) picturesque group of trees away in the distance. So I climbed the gate (something the larger me of yesteryear would not have contemplated, never mind actually managed) and crunched my way through the stubble only to realise that this group of trees was the same group that I saw whilst walking in the other direction, further to the south. I somehow didn't recognise this from when the pathways were full of tall grass and surrounded by swathes of wheat and barley, but that little copse of trees in the photo above, looking East, is the same little group of trees to the left-hand side of the second photo, looking West, and I could have walked straight on past the green field of sheep to the edge of the field to join up with the pathway and head home the same way I arrived, had I decided on taking the short-cut!
I didn't, of course, or I would have cut out half an hour's walk, so instead I retraced my steps back to the gate, and carried on down the track to the road, then headed back up to eventually reach the village again (hills. Lots of hills) by way of a photo opportunity over the River Eden, Tay Estuary and the distant hills to the north.
I have to say, though, that although those roly-poly bales may be more convenient to collect and store, their fort-building properties are decidedly lacking...
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