Flights delayed

As the crow flies, I ran a kilometre or so into the hills yesterday, conscious of geographical constraints on our exercising. Not being a crow the ran route zig zags up the logging road south and then through the hills north then west, and then south again. To save energy I crossed the Bold Burn where an ash straddled both banks allowing me a steep short cut up through Glen Pest pastureland and into gloomy larchwood, not yet green, scattered with bleached sheep vertebrae and 60 years of unsettling tree bones. 

I was keen to arrive at my destination: a copse of fir trees, the other side of a steep gully that cut down from the Minch Moor plateau. Much of the surface landcaping up here is by bulldozer and other heavy forestry plant, and so your ankles need to pick their way carefully. But slowly, as the old boles and branches mulch down, the gully, the road banks and the gloomy larch and spruce woods are returning to nature. At least until the next harvest.

There`s ash and birch and wild cherry here too. Still quite dormant and unresponsive to Spring. Like travelling two weeks back in time from the valley floor.

And the sounds belong 50 or even 100 years in the past. A profound silence, but for trickling water, windsong, birdsong. No aeroplanes. And almost no people; just three solitary cyclists. Two in sky blue shorts.

I was up here to see the osprey pass over or settle in the pinewood canopy. I wanted to see, by the angle in its white wing, the high mewling cry, balsa light corkscrewing of a warm updraft, that this was not a buzzard. And in so seeing, settle mid run to watch and marvel. 

There was only deep blue sky. I felt a sense of loss, expecting nature`s cycles to be anchoring and constant . I hung around a good while; imagining the bird gliding her territorial circumferences. But as time passed the silence only deepened into a lack. 

So I ran back through the pine wood, turning into the larch wood, feet padding softly on a larch needle trail. And down eventually to where three logging roads come together and where the Bold burn levels out, quietens down, slows up, drawn across the forest`s northern edge to the big river.