The Cottage - Day 17
The earlier you get up the longer the shadow from the mountain. By the time the sun is high enough to reach the cottage the sun is behind clouds.
The dog’s blanket is outside her bed. I cover her. She will sleep late now having slept uncovered in the cold.
Dark rain clouds cover everything to the east. They are coming to cover us. Everything to the west including the village is also covered. Sun and blue sky run in a narrowing strip from the cottage to the islands.
Bring the empty cardboard boxes in from the barn.
I see 2 red jackets a mile away on the road across the bog. The sheep are a field nearer, down from their hill of the last few days. The dog growls less the nearer they are.
I don’t want to put my paints back into storage. I’ve only just seen them for the first time in a year. I don’t want to put all my unfinished paintings back into storage. I don’t want to put all my blank canvases, papers, and art materials back into storage. But without a home I have no room.
It’s raining at sea but missing the islands.
I begin the job of putting things in the cottage back to the way they were when I arrived. The cottage is no longer my home. It will be hard to ever come back to this part of the country, remembering that all too briefly it was my part of the country.
A line of white clouds hangs over the islands like a curtain that doesn’t reach the floor.
Walk to the gate. 100 meters from the cottage the driveway comes within 20 feet of the far end of the field that the sheep are in, separated only by the marshy wedge of another field which has been left open. Dog-dog ventures in and makes straight for the entrance to the field with 50 sheep.
Before the dog works out that the fencing acting as a gate is very low I roar at her. She doesn’t come back but I have her attention. I scream at her. She’s not moving but I still have her attention. So I tell her that after going to the gate I’ll give her something nice. She races around the long grass out of the field and past me on the track. The sheep are safe.
After seeing nothing in the postbox we return to the cottage for food.
I see a goose fly towards the gap. It’s not a Canada Goose; I wonder if it’s a Greenland White-Fronted Goose?
The sea looks cold in its greyness. Its horizon is blurred into the greyness of the clouds, but it’s not a smooth blur. Something feels different. I look closely with the naked eye and yes I think there’s a tiny bump. With my monocular I can just about see a blurry grey blob in the shape of a ship. Or a sinking ghost lighthouse.
We walk. With packing up home being the only job for the next couple of days, our walk isn’t part of a new set of routines, but part of a farewell tour.
We walk 5 miles. I notice there are berries on the hawthorn. There’s only a few, and despite their redness hanging from grey bark, they are rather lost for impact in the sea of surrounding fuchsia.
There are so many bees on the fuchsia that it seems to vibrate with life. And when you have fuchsia on both sides of you it is very loud and creates a sensation that you are walking somewhere you probably shouldn’t.
A kestrel hovers over the bog. To the east where the houses are, is where we will walk to. By the farms, stone walls and green fields. The cliffs on the far island are just magnificent in the sun. Sheer and jagged, a wonderful collection of contrasting shapes in shadow and sun, the stuff of fairytales. Then you remember that the cliffs really are the stuff of fairy tales, of myths and legends that have been around far longer than the cottage or the village.
I look at the road as we walk on it, thinking of friends who ask me how I can adapt to one side or other as I swap countries and their rules of the road. But there is no left hand side of the road when the road is only 5 foot wide.
We go down by the quarry. The road gives great views of the headland a couple of miles further on, and great views of some oversized houses mid-construction.
A sign says “Danger! Cliff Edge. Quarry Road Only” so naturally I want to walk past its locked gates and down this forbidden road. If the sign hadn’t been there the thought wouldn’t have occurred to me. It’s like when you see a sign that says please don’t pick the wonderful fruit hanging above your head, and it causes you to look up and think, what a great idea. Signs that say don’t shouldn’t.
But the walk is long enough without sending a small dog on a cliff rescue mission, so we walk down to the main road instead, which is surely much more dangerous.
We also walk backwards. Because of the mountains. The great far mountains include the highest peak in the county, and every 50 meters we walk we have a different foreground to the fantastic backdrop of pointed peaks and slopes of slurry.
And always, dominating everything, you have THE mountain. Our mountain. The one that is our back garden. It stands untouched by clouds magnificent in its presence, and sometimes a small cloud stops by just to rest gently on its wide peak before continuing through the sky.
It’s greener over here. With more animals. And I ask the dog for permission to stop as I look at cattle, horses, and sheep. She rarely sees them herself though because they are behind stone walls, so the peace remains. Some walls are almost entirely covered from ground to top with earth and luscious grass growing from it. Others just have heavy coverings of moss.
We walk along the main road. There is 12 to 18 inches of a shoulder. That probably rules it out of being called a shoulder, but we are very grateful for it. Not much traffic comes, but what comes is going 60 miles an hour and more. Sometimes much more. We are walking around a blind bend, and while I think it is madness to do this with a dog, I’m confident that only meters away there’s a turn that leads back to our world.
It is a total of maybe 300 meters that we have walked on the main road before we can cross over and join our back road. It leads to the crossroads, the one from where the red women walkers appear, and where Rex reigns.
There are no cars all the way home. I run past the point where I know the smell of the decomposing postman is. As we crest the hill from where the cottage comes into view, I stop and look at the sun shining through the long moss on the top of a fence post.
-There’s our house, dog-dog.
Alone on a bog road, with no vehicles to yield to, we saunter the last mile to what we briefly called home.
Clouds slip by. It’s warm enough for a t-shirt outside. It’s chilly in, though. As I go to and from the outbuildings there are 8 bumble bees clinging to the white of the cottage for warmth.
There is no wind. I see a piece of paper in the grass. I don’t understand where it came from, because there is only me. Picking it up I read the small print. It is part of the wrapper of a roll of flashband.
In the evening drippy sun I look at the soft colours in the distance, and the bold and luminous ones close up. So still. No movements from the trees or bushes. No vehicles. No people visible in the fields. Never any people visible on the beach. If you wait for a bit you see a wave break at the rocks at an island end. Sometimes a bee flies by. A robin sings again from the top of the hawthorn tree.
The light of the lighthouse throws out a flicker against the hazy pale pinkness of the clouds that sit along the horizon. The rest of the sky is blue. I put down a cardboard box, walk around the back and stare at the mountains. I am back in that place with a giant hand, reaching out and stroking their textured colours.
Read the Next Day at the cottage
Read the Previous Day at the cottage
List of all the Days at the Cottage
More from The Cottage:
• Day 1 at The Cottage
• Photos of The Cottage
• 12 Photos of Scenery Around The Cottage
• 12 Photos not all Mountains and Islands
Eolaí gan Fhéile:
There will surely be pictures. I, who can’t draw for nuts, I could explain to someone who can paint, I can read this diary to them and they can paint a picture.
There is art here.
I love this Eolai.
Eolai and Dog-dog I feel so badly for you to have to leave. It all sounds so lovely this cottage by the sea. Since we are reading the past I know it’s too late to offer any help to fix the roof if only that were even a remote possibility. It’s the thought that counts. I keep thinking there must be another cottage nearby that’s vacant so you don’t have to leave.
Sniffle - I can’t take any credit for what’s in front of me. And I’d rather paint it than describe it in words, but thank you very much.
Roxanne - Thank you. The dog is doing fine with it all, but that’s maybe because the implications haven’t fully kicked in yet.