Run for home...

Northumbrian landscape

Every year, as the clocks go back, I think of where I grew up in Northumberland, and the skeins of geese that would pass overhead as we climbed on the sandstone outcrops of Belford Moor. If you’ve not been there, then I suggest you go. For in autumn, beneath its steel skies, with the Cheviots to your west, and Lindisfarne to the east, lies one of England’s finest and least spoiled landscapes.

The irony of this tribute to my home county is that I now live almost as far away as it’s possible to be on the UK mainland. I love my adopted Pembrokeshire, and don’t regret the journey which brought me here. But the pull of home never quite goes, and as I get older, I feel its gravity ever more keenly.

A few weeks ago, I ventured back to scatter the ashes of my mother, who passed away this summer. We did so at the shingle-shored bay where she wrote a children’s hymn that’s now published and sung worldwide. Titled, I listen and I listen, its simple lyrics invite us to pause and make connection — spiritual or otherwise — to the sound of the sea.

In Welsh, that translates as sŵn y môr, coincidentally the name of a cottage down the road from mine. Perhaps aptly, it has no sea view, so whenever I pass, I’m reminded that landscape is always more than what we see. In communing with it, we engage all our senses and not just the ‘physical five’, but our sense too, of the past and what’s to come.

This morning, as I rode my bike over the Preseli Hills (rather like the Cheviots in miniature), I paused to take in the sweep of Cardigan Bay. And as I did so, as if to mirror my thoughts, a skein of geese flew overhead, honking rudely at the figure below. 

To my surprise and delight, they were heading north east…