Prelude to carnival: A Scottish autumn arrives quietly

What to remember from this moment?

These voiceovers are recorded ‘in the field’ with ambient sounds and occasional stumbles. My aim is to give you an evocation of place and a moment of tranquility.

A fair foundation…

Welcome to this week’s letter from the moss.

I’m a visual person with a design background, and the camera has been a constant companion for all of my adult life. I love words too. It’s hard to separate them from my images, but I recognise that they can interrupt the flow of a written piece—so this week I’m going to try something different. Here the emphasis is on a narrative, to allow you to listen, to read, and to imagine.

I realise too that I have failed to explain the audio…. While these began as straight readings, I now incorporate sounds of nature and place, wherever possible recording them outdoors.

Autumn arrives quietly

Let’s begin.

Picture the scene: late September amid 8,000 or so square metres of acid-rich grassland to the east of the Grampian Hills in Scotland.  A place punctuated with emphasis by regenerating birch, and raised slightly above its envelope of wet heath.  

With the equinox passed, I accept summer’s end.  The previous week’s gift undoubtedly helped: the blessing of a final warm spell—early mist, blue skies, sunshine that reaches in. 

I have also decided that I am missing the water.  This seems a strange thing to say after such a wet summer, but now that fallen abundance is elusive (though the moss looks plump and a little guilty). 

Looking back at my photos from this time last year, the pools along the edge of the moss were brimming with freshly fallen water and I was immersed in discovering new perspectives and hidden truths within the reflections of a complex world.  Now they are lush with Kelly green sphagnum and dotted with sedge in a shade midway between Forest and Celtic.  Even where the water tends to loiter under the birch, only peaty voids remain.  The realisation of this absence, this separation from what at times feels like an amniotic twin, gives me something to look forward to this fall.  

Setting out, the morning air is cool, the sky a pale lightbox ahead of the promised rain. Soon it will be time for gloves and warmer trousers; my thin fleece hat is already in place.  

Sheet webs float over shrubby broom like itinerant swarms of jellyfish, and spill down grassy banks.  Purple scabious still bloom, though some of their flowers are morphing through green into skeletal stars.  

I lose myself in moisture-dotted webs and fading heather whose petals have turned quickly this year.  Some of the ling is still pink and purple, but most of those miniature bells, complete with stamen ringers, have taken on a skin-like tone. Their colour reminds me of the way that even ‘fair’ foundation used to be an orange blush, at odds with pale skin.  Each sprig of blossom is perfect and will remain so into the frosts of winter, the blossom fading but not falling, to become a new constellation of tiny stars.   

Meanwhile a slow yellow rain begins as birch leaves loosen their hold and descend; the sound as they fall to form earth's new shroud initially makes me think it precipitation.  In a sense, it is.  

The leaves—yellow, spotted, brown—sit perched and punctured as adornments on ling, flags and banners on sheet webs.  

What else to remember from this morning?  Autumn’s richness is creeping in, with bursts of horn for emphasis: the smallest of rowan seedlings in party dress; the fiery whorled leaves of chickweed-wintergreen intensified against a bed of green moss or the lichen that carpets the walls and floor of this place with grey-green fractals.   

Soft visions and moods fit the day better than sharp, literal, portrayals: I seek the feel of fall rather than exactness.  

Two hours pass among webs, birdsong, occasional midges, and tiny ticks.  A creeping chill penetrates, and by the time I leave I am ready for the warmth of exercise and the first homemade soup of the season (carrot and cumin).  

I have eight minutes of bird song with which to remember this quiet prelude to autumn's carnival.   

I walk back through singing goldcrests, quiet steps falling on soft ground, and meet the sound of water and a three-way conversation between robins.  What was mizzle is beginning to feel like rain.  

Until next week,

If you enjoy seeing through my eyes, you might like to consider a small one-off donation. To those of you who have done so: a heartfelt thank you.

Encore:

This time last year, I went for a walk up the hill and wrote about it in Embers:

And then my narrative falters as I greedily drink in the views.

All words and images copyright © Michela Griffith except where otherwise noted