Category: Nature lover

Sunday, 27 April 2025

Making my coffee in the silent kitchen at 5am, I lean down to find out the colour of the dawn under the lowered blind: grey. Relief. I can take my time. No need to rush through toast and skip the wordle to make it out in time to see the sunrise.

Why get up so early if the sun isn’t even out? Another person might ask.

My car is first to the layby, and will still be there alone when I finish my run. Before crossing the road to the footpath, I stand to watch the trees hover in the mist at the bottom of the valley, and listen to the skylarks. The sky is grey, but the pearly grey of a shell, lit by the sun. High overhead, fishscales of cloud are separating to reveal pale blue above.

I start my watch but not my podcast. Begin running. In Old Sulehay Wood, I hear a garden warbler and a chaffinch singing from the dark canopy over the path. I run up the hill and pause at the top to hear the sawing of a great tit and piping of a thrush. I walk between the two giant horse-chestnuts on either side of the path. Their white candle blossoms are the height of praying hands. I hold still for a minute, watching for movement. I don’t want to move on.

At the far edge of the woods, there is a gate marked “Private” leading to a field of waist high grass. Walking up to it, I surprise two young deer and they bound and leap away in an S-shaped path. I turn back to the trail and then right onto Sulehay Road. A car pulls into a driveway opposite and I hear a peacock calling in the garden behind a grand stone archway. At the junction with Kings Cliffe Road, I finally turn on my podcast, ready for the company.

This part of the run is the dullest, but a road with no cars is always a gift. I drift into the centre of the tarmac and think about my legs landing and pushing and lifting and falling. I pick up my feet. I drop my shoulders. I turn left onto the stony trail along the edge of Rockingham Forest Park.

There is an old quarry off the east side of the track, its scrapes and scrub made mysterious by the pearly light. May blossom is beginning to froth at its edges, pushing through the fence. I run slowly with a deer trotting ahead of me, unbothered. Two swans whomp overhead and the deer disappears into the undergrowth. I rattle down the hill through Great Morton Sale over loose gravel. Stop to catch my breath at the bridge and look back at the path, a brown swoop of carpet framed by tall beeches like the nave of a cathedral. Blackbird songs echo through the trees.

Emerging again from the woods, I take the winding road to Apethorpe, turning left at the signpost before the village. The rolling fields are hazy and muted. No chill in the air but no warmth either. Pheasants, linnets, yellowhammers, goldfinches. A buzzard. Kites. Rooks. On the lane out of Woodnewton, I stop to watch the Willow Brook gurgle and hear a cuckoo calling. Low and insistent. A distant metronome.

In Fotheringhay, I pass a perfect cottage with clematis, apple blossom, and a cherry tree splashing pink flowers over its garden wall onto the pavement. I catch the scent of wisteria from walls warming up in the first rays of the sun. The occasional daffodil beams from roadside verges. Cow parsley is not fully out yet – low and timid after little rain.

Past the church, I turn to cross the brook a second time, to run up the long, straight road up to Nassington and Yarwell, and back to the car. A dog barks to my left – an alsatian straining at its lead. I push on, head down, ready to get home. A van beeps as it passes me, speeding past too close. I see myself from the outside, suddenly aware of the effort it takes to pull each foot from the floor. I walk the final hill.

The car door closed, I sit quietly, maybe not yet ready to leave. As I put the key in the ignition, a whitethroat lands on the hedge opposite. 8:30am. In London, elite women are beginning their marathon. Other people are waking up. Just getting in. Sleeping in.

Not me.

Marking the equinox

Last Sunday was the autumnal equinox. A moment of uneasy equilibrium, when day and night briefly share 12 hours before daylight tumbles towards the winter solstice. I meant to go for a run, and pay special attention to the sunrise or sunset. To mark the moment with pictures, maybe write about it. I didn’t remember. I did run but it was raining and, behind the clouds, the sun was just an assumption.

This morning while I drank my pre-run coffee I read about the equinox. I learned about the “solar terminator” – the edge between night and day – that separates the part of the earth experiencing darkness from that experiencing daylight. A circle constantly rotating around the earth’s surface, twice a day, moving at 463 metres per second. At the equinox, it moves around the globe like a spinning line of longitude – bringing darkness on one side, and light on the other.

In spring and autumn, at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, both poles see the sun, and both northern and southern hemispheres share the light equally. Afterwards, one’s loss is the other’s gain.

The weeks around the equinox are a dream time for running. Every pre- or post-work run catches a sunrise or sunset. One wet evening I chanced on a rainbow in the eastern sky, the nearby clouds lit purple. But really I’m a sunrise person. In between some biblical rain, this month I’ve seen the mist rise from the River Ouse over York Minster, caught the first light of the sun turning a gate into a magic portal, and gazed on ghost trees in the fog over flooded fields.

At sunrise, I have the paths to myself. I like to run along the river, or in the woods. The colder nights and still warm days mean that vapour rises from the water and floats among the trees. The grass is soaking, and fences drip with tiny golden orbs of dew. In the city, the neon lights of the Esso garage are briefly a fairground ride against the technicolour sky.

This morning I remembered the Equinox – a week late, but does it matter? The sun rose today at 7am, and will set at 6:41pm. The nights are being drawn in for us in the northern hemisphere, whilst the days loosen their grip, extending their warm grasp southwards.

At the gate to Old Sulehay woods, the fog was lying over flooded fields, with a sunrise lightshow peaking high above. To the south of the path, the meadow was waist high with grasses lit ochre, mist blurring the trees and bringing everything closer, nearer. I took some pictures and they are spectacular but they don’t contain it. The sounds of birds rustling and settling and jostling the leaves. The distant cars that never appear. The tiny lights of a farmhouse on the horizon.

In the woods, the lightshow is reduced to a strip of gold and blue overhead, with clouds looming pink in the west over the horse chestnut trees. A carpet of curling leaves and conkers litter the top of the hill. It is darker here, and a tiny bit creepy. I take my earbuds out so that I can hear the birds, but also the sound of anyone approaching. Back on the road, the sun has risen and drifts of roadside weeds burn orange against the fields. No interesting birds today, just pigeons and magpies, starlings. A few pheasants.

No hares in the fields, but plenty of deer. I run a couple of miles along the road to Kings Cliffe, stopping for a wee behind a gate. Over 11 miles, I don’t see any people. A few cars, but no cyclists, runners or dog walkers. Everyone is at home, in bed or inside, enjoying the warmth. Maybe putting the heating on for the first time. Maybe preparing to go out later, when I will be at home warming up and hiding inside.

This summer, on holiday in Sardinia, I took a video of a sunrise over the sea as it lapped against a ruined tower. When I uploaded it, instagram asked me if I wanted to flag it as AI. At dawn, the world looks so perfect that it doesn’t seem possible, or real. Mid-way through the clip, a tiny mosquito buzzes across the screen on its way to biting my arm in three places.

Run early, and the day is Thine

At St Guthlac’s church in Market Deeping, a pair of sundials are built into the walls of the bell tower. The one on the south-eastern wall says, “The day is Thine”, and measures out the hours from five am. On the north-western face, its twin warns, “The Night cometh”, and marks the few daylight hours from four pm.

I walked past the church this Sunday in the afternoon gloom and smiled, thinking about my run that morning. It was the day the clocks went back, so waking up at 5am to eat breakfast before leaving the house at 6:30am was really waking up at 6am – practically a lie-in for me.

Contemplating where to run, I couldn’t face any route from my house. They are all worn out with overuse, even in their autumn colours. So I cycled west to Nene Park, watching the full moon descend into pink clouds. At the lake, I stopped to take photos of the cormorant tree, surrounded by circling rooks. Mist spread from the river as I crossed Milton Ferry Bridge, and the first rays of sun peered over my shoulder.

I locked my bike to a post at the top of Ferry Hill, and stuffed my coat into the pannier. I jogged slowly down the hill to Castor village, with the sun lighting the treetops bronze and gold above the green. On the road from Ailsworth to Helpston the ploughed fields were flat and brown – devoid of birds and life – but the roadside trees glowed in the morning light. At the edge of Castor Hanglands, I caught a glimpse of a deer as it pranced away from me into the woods.

I chose this route so that I could run along my favourite bend in the road. I can’t remember when I was there last; probably spring. Time telescopes. A Sunday run from 2021 could be yesterday – familiar but strange, with odd things to notice: a gate standing alone with no fence around it; a sign warning that “deer management is in progress”. Last Sunday I ran past a tree with four red kites in it, perched like ancient kings on their wooden throne.

If you run the same route every day, your brain doesn’t see it – it mostly fills it in from memory. It takes a new scene to feel new things, to make new pathways in your mind. The day is Thine. The Night cometh.

Three minutes of nirvana in a business park

It’s midsummer and I’m jogging eastwards on the cycle path that runs between Lynch Wood business park and the Oundle Road. I’m sweating and tired from five miles of running. 22 degrees at 7am, the sun is high above the treetops already, and there’s only a hint of freshness in the air to remind me it’s early morning.

I turn the corner onto the shaded path. On the left, office buildings are hidden behind trees planted 35 summers ago. To the right an occasional car can be heard, but not seen, passing on the A605. The hawthorn hedge is bursting with umbellifers after a rainy spring. Even the tarmac is a pattern of leaves: the penumbra of plane, hazel and ash. The leaf shadows shift and move in the light, blue and gold against the grey. I slow down, and move to the right, as a man passes with a loping dog.

Alone now, my jog drops into a walk. The shadows deepen into forest on either side of the path, and I shade my eyes with my hand against the sun. I drink it in. Pollen and insects loop around in the breeze, backlit gold on dark green. A bee hangs in the air, a still point as I move past, wings beating furiously to hold it in place.

Ten metres ahead, a muntjac pushes through a gap in the hedge on my right, turning its head to look back at me. It hesitates, deciding whether to push back through. Instead it trots ahead, keeping to the path. I try to keep pace, to keep it in sight between patches of sunlight. After a few seconds it shimmies through a different gap in the hawthorn and off towards the road.

Uplifted, I start to run again. Slow. Aware of the sound of my breath and the brush of air on my arms as they move. I turn back to check for movement: humans, dogs, deer. Looking west, the light shifts into the harsh glare of summer. Leaves lie flat against the sky, and I’m aware of how weary I am. How much I don’t want to get home, to the heat, and all the work I haven’t done.

The end of the path approaches. The avenue of trees opens into a concrete junction. A roundabout, bollards, road signs, kerbs. A mock-tudor office block. For a few minutes, nature took over the suburbs, and joy pushed up through cracks in the concrete.

I ran in May

Walking through Castor Hanglands a few weeks ago, my mum looked at the trees finally coming into leaf and said, sagely:

“Oak before ash – we’re in for a splash, ash before oak – we’re in for a soak“

I’d never heard this before in my life. Which came first this year then, mum? I asked. No idea! she laughed. Either way, we got the soaking in early May. Rain fell continuously for weeks, every single day. The meadows of the Hanglands (the name ‘hangra’ is Old English for a wood on a hill) were boggy, clear water standing on the surface, reflecting the looming clouds. May skies rolled in, full of thunder, hiding an invisible sun.

Running slowly through Thorpe Wood in early May, dying bluebells were replaced by rampant clouds of wild garlic. Jogging home, I swear I could hear the grass growing on either side of the path – shooting up like drinking straws to catch the constant rain.

Everywhere there were puddles and piles of blossom, petals bruised by careless feet. For days, I couldn’t catch the sun on my skin – it would only come out when I was stuck in meetings, or on the train. I wasn’t running much, only two or three times a week to help my knees recover. Every time I planned to run, it poured.

The timetable of spring was jolted out of order by the downpour. Tulips refused to open. Dandelions clocks were weighed down by water, unable to share their seeds. Cowslips fared better, sprouting in fields and roadsides untouched by mowers. It’s nearly June and I haven’t seen a single orchid – it’s usually peak season by now.

One Sunday in the middle of May, I ran along the footpath to Short Wood and Glapthorn Cow Pasture. It’s a favourite route, and by parking at the top of Southwick hill I could cut the run short to 5 miles, just manageable on my creaking knees. At first I was disappointed. A fine mist rose up from the fields and stayed there, the sun never quite breaking through. But the birds called through the fog, a hare hopped away as I approached, and cow parsley crowded in from every roadside and hedgerow, jewelled with drops of water. In Glapthorn Cow Pasture, I walked slowly along the path, catching my breath and holding it as a trio of nightingales sang to each other.

After the fog lifted, a sudden shift. The sun peeped out and the rain stayed away. My two-to-three runs a week became three-to-four. I made it to Ferry Meadows in the early morning and saw goslings, ducklings, baby moorhens, swallows, swifts, sand martins. I heard the cuckoo. I “cast a clout”, and took my gloves off.

Now we’re nearly at the end of the month. The hawthorn blossom is finally out and my gloves are staying in the drawer. I’m not running far, but I made it over to see the buttercups on the Nene Park rural estate, and out on a run with my friend Laura. Two months on from knee injury, regular gym sessions are helping my mobility. I can’t run fast or contemplate a training plan, but I’ve achieved my goal. I ran in May. I’m training to keep running.

Staying in the moment

My daughter is nine, and developing a nice sideline in life coaching. On Thursday night when I was fretting about work while making the dinner she said “worry about work when you’re at work” and it worked. I did stop worrying. One of the biggest challenges of being a parent – for me at least – is staying in the moment. There are so many distractions, from existential worries to whatsapp alerts. I know that this time is precious. Soon, she’ll be a teenager and won’t want to talk to me for hours at 9pm, and then she’ll have a phone and I won’t want her to be on it.

My aim for today’s run was to stay in the moment: to enjoy being outside on this cold and clear January day. I did enjoy it, but not in the mindful way I had hoped for. My feet were moving calmly, but my brain was running everywhere. Remembering something I said in a meeting that I wished I hadn’t, worrying what trainers to wear at the race I’m doing on Sunday, wondering if I needed to get dad something else for his birthday.

Occasionally I’d stop to walk and find that my mind cleared. The constant beat of questions and worries stopped and I would notice the gutter of ice at the edge of the road, a golden plover in a field, or the fingers of an oak branching into the blue sky.

After my run I swam a few lengths in the swimming pool at the gym. It was nearly lunchtime and very quiet. Shafts of sunlight rippled through the end of the empty fast lane and I ducked in to bask in the glow, eyes closed. I was happy and I can’t remember what I was thinking about. Maybe summer. Maybe nothing.

I used to be scared of the wind

When I was 8 years old, I was so scared of the wind that I got into a stranger’s car and asked him to drive me home, just to get out of it.

Every morning before school, I would open the curtains to see if leaves or rubbish were being blown along the street. If I could hear the howl of the wind in the chimney, my throat would tighten and my stomach would begin to churn. “I feel sick”, I would say, and mum would let me stay at home. Why didn’t she make me go to school? Mr Leroyd, my teacher, had told her that 8 year olds often develop sudden phobias which go away if they are ignored, so that’s what my parents did.

I don’t remember what happened when I got out of the stranger’s car when it pulled up to our kerb, but I do know that the man took me to our door and spoke to my mum. It makes sense that letting me stay at home to watch tv was preferable to that.

It’s been windy this week, and I have hated it. I had to get the train to London on three of the days, which meant cycling against the wind to the station for the first time in weeks. My knees are creaking as a result and, today, I cycled so slowly back from the supermarket that I nearly fell off my bike. It’s a short, flat ride.

Running in the wind isn’t as hard as cycling. Today, on my day off, I cycled to the gym (why do I hate myself?) so that I could go for a cross-country run. On the bike, the wind was grim. On foot, it was fine. Refreshing, even. I ran from Thorpe Wood, up Ferry Hill and out towards Marholm, then across the public footpath which skirts the Milton Estate to Castor Hanglands and back through Ailsworth and Castor. I love this route in every season. It’s high ground (for round here), so even at its muddiest it’s still a pleasure to run.

The path goes through farmlands and woodlands. Flocks of linnets rose and crossed my path from field to field. A single skylark struggled against a gust, eager to get away from me. Approaching the crossways of two footpaths, the windsock that marks the private air field was being blown horizontal. A long sward of clipped green grass sat temptingly behind the PRIVATE sign. I always think that this airstrip would be a great place to do interval training, though someone would probably shoot me for it.

Back on the Helpston Road, a pheasant scooted across my path, backlit by a weak winter sun. A constant comb of light, a few shafts breaking through the clouds, hovered in the eastern sky. As I approached Ailsworth I slowed to a walk to get my heart rate down, the remains of November’s covid still lurking in my lungs. Before the A47 bridge, birds of prey circled concentrically: red kites on the left, a buzzard on the right.

I was surprised by the January colours on this run. I was slow, and had lots of time to look at the landscape. The ploughed fields looked purple, but shards of hay glowed orange in the furrows. So often, colours seen at a glance reveal themselves to be two quite different ones, in close up.

This week I went to a training session that’s been on my mind. It was on polarity thinking, something that can be used for ongoing problems that have two correct answers which are interdependent (eg, self and others; continuity and change). There are upsides and downsides for each pole, and the aim of polarity thinking is to stay in the upsides of both poles, without sinking into the downs.

As I was running, I was thinking about being scared of the wind. Was it the wind that was frightening, or its effect: how it made me feel? The swirl and howl of a gale raised a panic in me that I couldn’t deal with. Indoors was safety from that. Outdoors was risk. I’m not frightened of the wind any more, but I am scared of heights, stairs that you can see through, and really big dogs. Staying inside my house would keep me safe from all of those, but stop me from doing almost anything. You never know when an architect is going to put one of those staircases in.

My new year’s resolution is to not have this cold

When I was getting changed into my running kit this morning, my nose started bleeding onto the bathroom floor. I’ve had The Cold for three weeks now and I’m still not tired of complaining. It’s been horrific – like having a head full of glue – but so satisfying to moan about. I had to start my run breathing only through my mouth, and the bleeding stopped.

I left the house with no plan as to how far I’d run or how long. I didn’t have a purpose for the run other than to get outside. Headphones in, I started off with an audiobook, but there was no space for my thoughts so I put some music on. Music makes my mind wander; speech doesn’t, which is usually what I want. But today I wanted to wander.

From my house, all paths lead to Nene Park, so I knew I’d end up there, but would I do a muddy river run, a lakeside loop, or a longer outing to Castor or Alwalton? If I don’t start a run with a plan, I can listen to my body, adapt to the weather or conditions, and it can be less boring. But it can also be bad, of course: much easier to give up, harder to stay focused. Today I didn’t finally agree with myself how far I was going until mile 5. I had been hoping for 10, but settled on 8. I ran for 1 hour 15 minutes, but was outside for another 20 minutes on top of that, looking at birds and taking pictures with my phone.

On the path to the park I saw a couple of big groups of runners out together, in their high-vis jackets, chatting and looking cheerful. Friday morning is always busy on the trails around Nene Park, but it was much busier than usual. There were lots of walkers and runners, most of them older than me, with some wearing the odd outfits of newly reformed new year’s resolution runners. I always love seeing the random things people wear to run – it reminds me that anyone really can just leave the house and go. Today a wiry Jacob Rees Mogg type dashed past me with purpose, sporting long grey socks and a faded country casuals cotton rugby shirt tucked high into bunchy shorts, his gold framed glasses slipping down his nose.

I took a lap around the nature reserve at Woodston Ponds. I’m never sure if it’s ok to run on the wooden boardwalk – I don’t want to damage it as I know it has to be repaired by Wildlife Trust volunteers. If I’m doing a gentle pace like today though, I figure it’s ok, I’m not pounding around scaring the birds. From the entrance gate of the reserve, I spotted a heron high up in a tree overlooking the River Nene, and he was still there when I made it to the river side of the loop, surveying his domain.

Herons and cormorants are common birds around here. So common, I rarely notice them until they fly past unexpectedly – a heron lifting off from the bank on silent wings, a cormorant wheeling onto the water. They make me remember: dinosaurs still live among us. Today I got the rare treat of an egret, on the backwater near Goldie Lane. When I stopped to get my camera out, it stalked away through the reeds, less like a heron and more like a flustered hen.

At the furthest point of my run, just before I turned for home, I noticed a group of cormorants in the middle of Gunwade Lake. They kept disappearing underwater so it was hard to tell how many there were – maybe six, which felt unusual. Or do groups of cormorants fish together all the time when I’m not looking? I thought about all the people I’d assumed were new year’s resolution exercisers, like they were rare egrets, and I was a common heron, even though I haven’t run regularly for weeks due to Covid then The Cold. We were all out there together, on our feet, in nature.

2023 in running: a miserable and magical year

It’s been a funny old year. But haven’t they all been, lately? A journalist asked for some stats at work the other day and I had to write an email justifying why no two years are really comparable and then I stopped and thought: why am I doing this? Of course you can’t compare 2020 to 2021 to 2022. We’re living through a series of crises.

It has not been a vintage running year for me. I picked up a calf injury by pushing too hard in a 30k race in February, deferred my Brighton marathon place, trained fitfully over a hot summer, ran the Rutland marathon and did not enjoy it, then finally got Covid and missed the beginning of the cross-country season. My annual mileage is set to be my lowest for many years.

But, surprise! I still love running. When I have managed to get out for a run – even (especially?) the ones where I walked – I’ve loved it more than ever. The injury and Covid were rotten, but they made me appreciate running more. I missed being outside, covering ten miles with ease, and getting out of my head as well as the house.

I went part-time (if 4 days a week with some work on fridays really counts as part-time, which I would argue it does not) in March, with the intention of doing some creative writing on my day off. I’ve found it hard. Not working quite so much has been great, but it turns out that creativity is not a tap I can just turn on when I have a spare few hours. Also, there are a whole heap of other things I want to do with six hours to myself, and running is high on the list.

My best runs this year have been Friday morning runs. Some of them with Lazy Girl Laura, but most of them alone. Does running count as being creative? Maybe not, but it definitely does count as beautiful. I’ve shared some of my favourite running photos from the year in this blog. You can’t see me in any of the pictures, but I was there.

Play Misty For Me

I get excited when the overnight temperature on the weather app drops to single figures, but the days are still warm. On a clear night, mist will rise from the river and spread its cold fingers over the water meadows, leaving wisps of cloud floating over the lake. As the first rays of sun peep over the horizon, the mist disappears like a magic trick.

Sunrise was at 6:36am, and I didn’t want to run in the dark, but I did want to be by the river at first light. I set my alarm for 5:35am. I know it’s mad, but this doesn’t feel early any more. In lockdown, I became obsessed with running before anyone else was up, and as the days got longer, my alarms got earlier.

I had a coffee but didn’t eat breakfast. I did my usual activation exercises. Ten years ago I would have thought this too was mad: who would sacrifice 30 minutes of sleep for a coffee and some squats? But ten years ago I could have sprinted in heels. Now I have to warm up just to walk downstairs.

I jogged through the estate in the twilight, crossing the railway tracks and the weir before I saw another person. Three women in hijabs, who I sometimes see at this hour, said good morning as they ran past me on the bridge.

Taking the river path, I could feel the mist cold in my nostrils, and damp on my arms and legs. Over the footbridge and into Ferry Meadows, the sun was up and the pale light turned briefly orange. Over the lake, the sky was settling into blue, and terns wheeled and skimmed the surface. A heron sat hunched on a buoy in the middle of the lake and invisible fish rippled the water from below.

I felt completely free to enjoy this run. It’s the second Friday after school started, my parents are away, I don’t have to work, and it’s the first Friday in a few months where I can put myself first. I didn’t have to do the school drop off. I didn’t have to run fast, or far. Still, I had a goal. Every run has a purpose. Sometimes you set it, sometimes it’s set for you, and sometimes you learn it afterwards.

Today, I ran to drink in the beauty. I don’t care if this sounds naff because it isn’t. I learned that in lockdown too.