Neil Ansell Quotes

“October, and the trees were in full fall. The larch woods were gilded, the beech woods bronzed, and as for the oak woods, well, each and every tree seemed to be a harlequin of every possible autumn hue. Only the ashes would disappoint, their greenery just fading a little before starting to fall. And as soon as the time had come for the ashes to start shedding their leaves, the jackdaw ash on the rocks behind the cottage would give up its struggle; one day it would be in full leaf, the next I would look and it would be totally bare. It would always be the first. All the others would take weeks to surrender to the inevitable and become leafless save for the bunches of keys at their tips, which the wood-pigeons would come and unpick, swinging from the slender twigs with surprising dexterity.
The winds came, and blew in gust after gust of redwings, huge numbers of them but in discrete flocks of twenty or thirty travelling at impossible speed with the winds hard behind them. They came all day long, newly blown in from Scandinavia, and gathered down in the valley.”
― Neil Ansell, Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills