The Old Way

Confined to the house all day, I got a little stir-crazy, obsessed with our western horizon and the stark silhouettes of the trees on the ridge at the head of our valley, as the light faded. The other side of the ridge are our bees and one of the headwaters of the (Stratford) Avon. The ridge itself is an ancient thoroughfare; you can follow it to the 3000 year-old site of a fort near the village of Chastleton, or go back another two millennia to the nearby Rollright Stones. Cambridge University gets rather dramatic in its description of the route:

"Along it must have moved the invaders of the early Iron Age to their conquest of the Midlands, establishing a line of strongholds of which Chastleton must in its original condition have been a formidable example" 

You can see the tree trunks, thickened in winter by their ivy shrouds. Richard Mabey asserts that there are two conflicting theories about the effect of ivy on a tree: one that ivy does harm by physically restricting the tree or creating a home for harmful organisms, and one that ivy protects the tree from extremes of weather and physical damage. He thinks there are areas of the country that cleave mainly to one theory, and other areas that favour the other, and that you can see this in whether the ivy in the area has been left alone or cut at the base 

I drank in the light while I could. We look to be set for a warm, wet and rather gloomy Christmastide from here on