A little sunshine illuminates autumn, renders its colours luminous, dazzling, magical. Such days are to be treasured, of course, but there are also days like these: you crack open the car door and the first thing that hits you is the scent of leaf mould and damp earth. It’s mushroomy and moist, and the autumn gold resists a kicking by clinging heavy to the ways. To put it mildly, we’ve had a lot of rain this week, and the sky looks like we’re not done yet. The brooks are running, and the falls are falling. But it’s still beautiful. Dream-like.

The little blue car delivers us to Hall Avenue at Rivington. It’s a busy midweek. I count three coaches parked up awkwardly. I’m wondering if we’re now included on the “See Britain in a Week” package tours: next stop, thirty seconds in Grasmere. But then I hear the euphoric sounds of schoolkids set free, excited voices muffled by the woodland. It’s amazing how many people a forest can absorb and still afford each of us a sense of privacy.

The light is poor, of course, so we’ll have to see how it goes with the camera. We’ve picked rather a slow lens for the day, but if we click the ISO up a notch we should be okay. The yellows and golds, of course, eclipse the dull skies.

No new ground today – just a familiar walk, a zigzagging meander up through the terraced gardens. I’m still not firing on all cylinders. Never am at this time of year. Some walkers are born Range Rovers, effortless cruising to the top. I’m more your Morris Minor (Cabriolet version) – chugging along in a cloud of exhaust smoke, and hitting bottom gear early on. We don’t always get to the top either, but when we bail out we like to think we do it with a kind of antique stylishness.

Anyway, we’ll not be pushing our luck too much – just three or four miles on autopilot, an eye for the colours, take some pictures, meander back down to the Barn for a coffee, then home. Coming up on five years retired now (have I mentioned that before?) and things still aren’t wearing thin. Familiar ground, yes, and walked a hundred times, but like this, on a whim, midweek, mid-morning — may I never take it for granted.

Still dreaming of work, though I usually take it as a proxy for something else now — the characters standing in as symbols for the particular emotions they aroused back then: frustration, despair, intimidation, anger, loathing. Some of the more tyrannical and driven characters I can remember have been turning up in Hawaiian shirts, full volume, dancing like they’re trying to make up for lost time. Some are dead now. Work and tyranny were all they knew. I hope they found peace, though I doubt they would know what to do with it. God bless them.

Mushrooms, fallen trees slowly rotting back to atoms. A light wind sends cascades of gold through the forest’s gloom. The dream of autumn recurs and we welcome it with open arms. Full moon tonight (at time of writing) – halfway through the lunation – lunation 319, if you’re counting by Meeus, or 1272 if you prefer to go by Brown – and yes I know most of us don’t do either, and it is a little eccentric. But dreams can overwhelm once you get into the habit, so I hold them in chapters and title them by the moons. And the dreams respond, loosely – there’s never a precision with the dreaming. But if anything, it disproves the old rationalist misconception that dreams are just unprocessed garbage. There is an intelligence behind them, a depth to the soul. At the minute it’s been telling me not to hold myself too much to the old standards of rationalist doubt, that at my time of life it doesn’t matter what others think. That it’s a time for deepening rather than seeking the social safety of conformity.

Slippery underfoot — wet leaves, wet gritstone pavings. Puddled ways, the sound of falling water from the ravine. As always, there is the feel of a lost citadel about the terraced gardens — a lost era certainly, but much of what we see is not much more than a hundred years old. It’s had a chequered history since it passed out of the hands of Viscount Leverhulme, fallen into ruin several times. But since the Terraced Gardens Trust took it over with a huge grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, there has been a transformation — so many of the old structures, once dangerous, are now restored, and the vast area of hillside and zig-zaggy terracing maintained by an army of enthusiastic volunteers. In otherwise dark times, when all the pointers are pointing down, it’s done me good over the years to come up here and see what can happen when things are pointing the other way.

We reach the Japanese Lake – always a pleasant pot, especially when the falls are running. Here we settle a while, break out a nutty bar. A rambler’s group emerges from the woodland and spreads out to take in the air of repose. They remind me of the group I invented in my angry novel “Winter on the Hill”, and called themselves the “Autumn Tints”. The memory links back to earlier writings, essays and poems all inspired by this area.

We wind up in the autumn of 2003:

There’s little left but ruins now,
Of glory days gone by,
And images in sepia,
Of gardens in the sky.

Paved walkways and pagodas,
And a house upon a hill,
A place to gather up one’s thoughts,
And measure out one’s fill,

Of dreams and schemes and visions bold,
To change the lives of men,
Improving what had gone before,
With the flourish of a pen.

But what a man can render up,
In mortar and in stone,
Does not always last for ever,
Once the visionary’s gone.

Sometimes a dream is just too big,
For other men to grasp,
So all we’re left is ruins,
Of a dream that didn’t last.

I’m not sure about it now. There’s been a lot of water over these cascades since then. The original vision of Leverhulme, his grand northern retreat, and these gardens by Thomas Mawson had an all too brief yet rather magical flourishing. But the material world is ever ephemeral. Like the years, things come to harvest, and settle back once more to autumn. But autumn brings the dream time, and if you’re settled and in the right frame of mind, the dream of this place goes on.