
Blog January 25, The West Country…

By Lynne Pearl
It’s a snow alert!
It comes suddenly even when media channels and newspapers have been trumpeting it for weeks ahead. When it does come it does change everything. Priorities change.

Travel becomes slower and more unreliable and plans have to change.
The town from the train is covered in snow the evening before when I came home. I didn’t even recognise my stop, it looked so different everything was white, the roofs especially. So I looked for a landmark anything, so that I didn’t get out at the wrong stop, a mistake that takes ages to fix when you have to wait for the next train which is an hour away at least. But there it was I could see in amongst the soft heavy snowflakes the tower of the church in the middle of town, our Greystone tower, like a castle really, except it’s a church not a battlement, but it towers over everything else in the main high street.

It was very cold last night and we had heavy snow over us from the nearby Hills, that stretch in an unbroken chain from one end of the next county and on into us. Whenever the hills get snowfall it comes our way as well, as we are sort of joined on. It’s like we have a micro climate of our own because of being joined onto that set of hills. When we have the snow if that morning you take a double decker bus down the hill to the sea about half way down the fjord- like valley, the snow stops. The fields turn green and we are right out of the snow- belt instantaneously. The snow peters out as we go down the hills to the nearby sea. It’s not so much that it has melted as that it never had any snow anyway. One field is covered in snow and next door there is no snow and just brilliant green grass. At the top of the valley the sheep are huddled up against a hedge for shelter and further down the valley they are grazing in peace and quiet.

When the bus climbs the hill out of town and approaches the hill through the trees, all the trees either side of the road are covered in snow, it has clung to their branches and the little forest has turned into a magical wonderland as pretty as any Christmas tree. Today the sun is shining on the white, white trees and their shape is highlighted as they no longer have their leaves whether green or bronze in autumn but the bark rather than wet and black is now shining white, with snow clinging to every curve and branch. And the sun is shining on all this beauty.

Away down below you can see the sea was glistening in the bright sunlight which made the snow glisten and shine for us. There in the bay formed by the two sides of this deep cleft valley is the sea that reaches to the sky.
From the top of a double decker bus you can see for miles.
After our local seaside town there is the next bay or two. The bus must climb out again, and from the top deck we can see the huge hills stretching away mostly covered in white but punctuated by deep green of evergreen trees and hedges lining the edge of fields. It’s a very hilly landscape. Then this drops suddenly to the sea at the next seaside town.

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Art by Cath Whitehead, ‘Haytor’