Tag: nature

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.