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January snow

17/1/2018

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Picture17 January, en route for Scout Scar
 There is no one to be seen, only a few footprints.  Mid-January weather is volatile, something of everything:  fresh snow thawing,  squalls of hail, a north west wind ripping through a holly bush like  an express train,  flinging a raven high above the escarpment, inflating my hood and seeking to rip it off, blue sky and a sudden menacing darkness.
This afternoon, I am 'In Search of Mary Shelley' . 1816, the year when Mount Tambora erupts. The year without a summer, disharmonies in the natural world apt for the creation of Frankenstein.


Missing in action.  Finding animal tracks in fresh snow tells the stories we rarely see.  Here a fox made for a stone wall, turned, and turned again, and vanished.  He was not scent-marking. He must have leapt the wall.
Light snow over Kendal Race Course, the earth soft.  The wind hit as I climbed toward Scout Scar escarpment, a finger-numbing wind that made it difficult to operate a camera.  I watched the sun struggling to be free of clouds and saw ash trees illuminated for a second, and dull again.  Black rooks fed in the snow, by the bales of haylage left for the cattle.
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    Jan Wiltshire is a nature writer living in Cumbria. She also explores islands and coast and the wildlife experience. (See Home and My Books.)

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