Bluebells

We have followed the bluebells towards the midnight sun. The journey started, tentatively, in Sussex. Since then we have migrated north, quickly at first through familiar territory, then more slowly as we broke free of the urban tangle of Manchester, through the Dales, then finally leaving the M6 for the soaring peaks of the Lakes.
As the distractions of city life slip away once more I take exquisite pleasure in time spent seemingly doing very little. What greater peace is there, than to sit and watch the emerald light through dancing young oaks, or a fat tumbling bumble bee amongst the may flowers.

Spring travels north in the UK at around 50 miles per day, so by luck we have spent our first month on the road accompanied by a mist of azure blue. Everywhere I look there are bluebells. They graced an early spring walk on the South Downs, but since the Lakes their presence is almost ubiquitous. Roadside verges, heather moorland and deep in old oak woodland, a stavalu* of blue fills the eye. Since the Lakes we have continued on through Scotland and I write this sitting on the banks of Loch Lomond, the wild peak of Ben Lomond ahead and a shimmer of blue behind and a little to the left, where the grass is long and the gorse glows deep yellow in the evening light.

*the Gaelic word for a heat shimmer. With thanks to Robert Macfarlane’s ‘word of the day’.

What greater peace is there, than to sit and watch the emerald light through dancing young oaks, or a fat tumbling bumble bee amongst the may flowers.