Autumn Mists

by Jane A. Mares

'September... a bountiful mingling of flower and fruit, holiday-time for many insects in their final days, a lull between the toil of summer and the stringency of winter'

A golden day in the first week of September and on the edge of Timberscombe Common butterflies twiddle and vie above a patch of creeping thistle. A few mauve, marzipan-scented flower-tufts, scattered among the tousle of downy seed-heads, have drawn meadow-browns, commas, gatekeepers. A tortoiseshell flicks its wings in a vexed, twitchy gesture that momentarily deflects rival nectar-drinkers. At noon on the high moor simmering bee-hum, only a shade less volcanic than in August, charts where workers are busy in the heather-bells. Small white butterflies skip hither and thither above the yellow autumn hawkbit that dots the grass verge from Mudgate Cross to Sandyway. In great stands of rose bay willow herb bumble-bees purr among spires of dawn-pink flowers while lower down, ripe capsules are already splitting open, puffs of plumed seed rising silently, weightlessly on the warm thermals.

According to traditional weather lore, September dries up wells or breaks down bridges. Yet it can be one of the kindest months on the moor: a bountiful mingling of flower and fruit, holiday-time for many insects in their final days, a lull between the toil of summer and the stringency of winter.

A ladder, standing idle, leans its shadow against the barn wall, the loft chock-a-block with hay. Soon to be carried, the last cylindrical straw bales offer a handy perch for a young buzzard which scans the stubble in hope of a mouse for breakfast. When he flaps away, profitless, to another hunting ground, a rabbit in the neighbouring pasture scuds for cover, sending scores of spindleshanked craneflies rustling up from the grass. Some drift like tired thistledown along the hedgerow, one becomes entangled in an unseen web, another trails its gangling legs among brambles and stays to savour a sweetly-ripe blackberry.

A crowd of rooks heads for the stubble. In these genial days even old sobersides can display moments of madcap jollity. One bird, then another, is suddenly moved to break the flight-ranks of the plodding flock, and comes waltzing and sporting down the blue sky in headlong swoops and rushing zigzags. At day’s end, beating homeward across an apricot radiance, they will again travel in orderly procession. But as the roost slowly settles, the garrulous voices from the twilight carry an undertone of contentment that tells of full crops, families grown, cares in abeyance.

A grey dawn, mild and overcast. Around the great beech tree beside the lake a swirl of house-martins, swooping and curving out of nowhere, white rumps flashing to and fro, the morning abrim with chirruping, buoyant notes.

At first there are only a score, some of them youngsters still being fed on the wing; but more and more arrive until the air is animated with eddying, paper-dart forms, a loquacious whirlpool, loosely shifting but never expanding beyond a certain invisible radius that holds the excited throng together. For long moments they dominate the sky, layer above layer, the highest birds only visible as dark specks below the cloud cover. Perhaps they are making sky maps, taking their bearings at the start of their great venture, southbound on pathless airs for Africa; who knows the meaning and purpose of the ancient hostings?

As they pass away over the lake the clouds thin, the water turns azure beneath them, every colour in the landscape enriched with a farewell gift of sunlight. For weeks yet there will be travelling groups: family parties of late fledglings from second and third broods, solitary stragglers flying silent and intent, glimpsed well into October. But the great, collective departures mark another station reached in the year’s natural calendar, signal of less obvious changes underway.

Dew lies thick on the churchyard grass in silvery imitation of chill frosts to come. Bells ringing for Harvest Festival flush a flock of mistle thrushes from the trees where they have been thinning the ripe crop of yew berries. Past the equinox, shadows reach farther and linger longer. There is a dankness on the air in the deep lanes when afterglow outlines the distant hills and wood-owls flute clear and low.

At month’s end a lone swallow, hastening across the border at County Gate, swerves back in pursuit of a midge, then speeds on towards the coast. Its brief, summery twitter coincides strangely with a sound epitomising autumn – the bolving of a mature stag from the shadowy woods in the valley’s depths, roused that moment to break his year-long silence.

October, arriving with a gentle shower, spangles the hawthorns with glittering droplets and hangs the red berries with pendant, pellucid doubles. Green, yellow, russet: bracken paints the hills in mingled hues as fronds age variously; among the verdant beech woods there shows a golden tint here, a copper bough there. September yearns back to summer, November faces forward to winter, but colour-changing, leaf-rustling October stands at the heart of autumn.

A gossamer morning, fields of silk refracting the first sunlight, every grass blade glistening with filmy threads – the work of the populous Linyphiinae family. Face to the breeze, small dark spiders busily exude liquid silk that the wind teases into long strands: guy-ropes upon which the young ‘linnies’ sail away, aeronauts in search of new worlds to colonise.

A wood mouse with a mouth full of hazelnut, skips for his hole in the bank as a squall of starlings descends to squabble over the last sagging clusters of elderberries. Hearing a horsebox rattling down Landacre Lane, crow, never picky, grabs another bitter sloe as he lifts from the blackthorn above the bridge. A jay, caching acorns at the foot of the hedge, startles a squirrel heading back from the field maple where he has been nipping wings off the ‘keys’ and eating the ripe nutlets. He dashes up the oak and indulges in an outburst of tutting and wheezing, conducted with artistic sweeps and flourishes of his beautiful tail. From a grove of birch trees comes the tiny pattering of countless drifting seeds and now and then a plaintive whistle, the pan-pipe note of feasting bullfinches.

Rowan, beech, sweet-chestnut... there is scarcely a tree this month that is not a wild fruit stall or free larder, offering fare to all-comers.

Two stags break from the darkness under the conifers where night still lingers. They have been shadowing the hinds moving up through Doverhay Plantation, and now leap the bank and turn in confrontation. In their fourth year, the young rivals are well matched in size and weight. For a moment they stand face to face, black silhouettes as the sky over Crawter Hill pales towards sunrise. Then an untimely van comes grinding up from Luccombe with headlights ablaze and the pair bound off, side by side, over the brow and away towards Halse Combe.

Something is calling down by Chetsford Water. The sound rises intermittently above the cadence of the prattling stream, a strange, needy cry that might be bird or beast or squeezed rubber-toy. Then a brown head with widespread ears is moving among the rushes above the bridge – a young deer-calf, separated from its mother, perhaps in the turmoil of the rut. The calf runs up and down the fence, risking unwanted attention with its cries. But as the light grows, a deeper voice with a matching note of urgency answers from Hurdle Down. A hind jumps onto the beech-lined bank and leans over the barbed-wire strand topping the fence. The little one stretches its neck, reaching up to sniff noses. The hind hesitates, then clears the wire with a light, graceful bound. Two more deer follow. The calf rushes to nurse – more as an act of comfort and reunion than from thirst. As daylight floods the hills, the group moves off in single file: hind, calf, hind, pricket, hugging slack ground, stealing away downstream towards Nutscale.

From yellow leaf to bare, dripping twig, the year moves on in a daylong downpour that swells the rushing rivers to flood level. Queen wasps seek winter-quarters. Snails crowd into flowerpots and seal themselves against the cold. Flies die on their backs in window-corners. Instead of cricket’s song, under midnight stars there falls the zeep of redwings, the goblin chuckle of fieldfares fleeing starvation weather in Scandinavia.

Water, the shape-shifter, visits November in many guises. A sharp hail shower goes hopscotching down the stable roof. A leaf afloat on a brimming puddle is overnight framed in swirls of ice. Mist writhes spectrally among the ancient, cranky oaks of Badgworthy.Wood. The last cattle left on the moor move through wisps of fog that seep from hollows and veil the hilltops. Rime coats furze bush and serried rush.

At twilight, breath charted on the freezing air, the herd of Exmoors bunch together, ears pricked towards the revving of quad and landrover. The memory of the gathering is still fresh in the ponies’ minds. But it is the Scotties that flow away across the moor, shepherded in for dipping and to be put to the ram. Above the peaceful sound of renewed cropping, a guttural ‘pruk, prruk’ marks the passage of two ravens. The pair cross the darkening sky with the steady, rhythmical beat of long-distance travel, flying north-east into the icy wind, heading towards nightfall and the reaching shadow of winter.

From Issue 44 Autumn 2008