Katharine Stewart

“We filled our lungs with the cold, still air and forgot our small needs and worries. We had a sound roof to shelter us, peat and wood for warmth, milk, eggs and potatoes in plenty to keep us fed. Health and strength we knew to be enormous benefits they really are. We were free to open our minds and let the stark beauty of hill and moor and sky strike into us.”
― Katharine Stewart, A Croft in the Hills

“The larks are singing!' Each year we make the announcement to one another. The words are sober enough, but what they convey, it is almost impossible to express. It means that our hills and moors are again fit places for new life, for song and work and laughter, all the things we cling to so passionately in the name of living... After the larks come the peewits. They usually arrive at dusk, and far into the darkening we hear their wild crying. Next morning we go out eagerly to watch them flashing and swooping over the bare, brown field. Each day after that we listen for the curlews and, when we see them gliding over the moor in the evening light and catch the sound of their call, which seems to come from some other very far-off place, we know that spring is really with us.”
― Katharine Stewart, A Croft in the Hills