Llancaut Nature Reserve, Wye Valley

The white winter sun shone low above the rows of red tiled rooftops, a bright blazing point of stillness amid the busy rush-hour traffic of Bristol below. I squinted out the open window into the pale blue sky, with the morning frost dissolving into sun warmed mist, rising up from the roof tiles, and wafting into my bedroom, in swirling eddies of icy air.

I took the decision to pack for a day out in the sun, and headed for Lancault Nature Reserve, nestling in the river cliffs of the lower Wye Valley, by a long abandoned medieval village, near the castle town of Chepstow

I arrived at the small car park at the top of the high, vertiginous river cliffs of the Wye Valley, carved out spectacularly by the raging melt waters, that flooded out of the giant ice sheets at the end of the last ice age. As I walked down the leaf matted, muddy path, I peered out through the trees with their few remaining, clinging leaves, over a soft white sea of mist resting gently and ghostly over the river valley below.

I descended into the cold embrace of this airy apparition slowly enveloping me. The surrounding, dark silhouetted trees became more and more indistinct, as if in a fading memory of a dream, going in and out of existence. The path descended steeply through dense woodland, then emerged out into a more open vista of the river valley, by a wooden gate and a dew soaked oak bench.

A small ruined chapel slept quietly in the hollow below, its time-worn stone edges, lightly etched in the mist, with the river as insubstantial as spirit, glistening in the opaque sunshine beyond. Broken gravestones laid along the outside of the chapel's old stone walls, carved with the half visible memory of someone's beloved, now lost to time and neglect, but once, no doubt, a vibrant, hearty and living presence in the community.

A Christian chapel is believed to have stood in this place since the fifth century AD, and successive generations worshipped here from the local village, abandoned after the ravages of the black death, which called out from deep time to our own modern plague spreading around the world.

The chapel once contained a renowned lead font filled with iconic imagery, now preserved in Gloucester cathedral. The chapel was attended by parishioners up until the late 1800s, and had the posture, presence and atmosphere of an ancient, sacred place, perched over a great arc in the river Wye and over a great arc of ancestral history.

I walked inside the now roofless chapel, where another intact, but greatly worn gravestone, dedicated to two souls departed at the end of the 1600s, lay facing up to the weathering sky. I felt the greeting presence of ancestral spirits all around me. I looked out through the high, narrow, stone window frame to the white sun shining its glittering path on the river, thinking of the generations that had lived, worshipped and died here. I cleaned the grit and stones strewn across the gravestone to honour the memory of those long buried, but still somehow here and present.

I walked out and down to the riverside grasses, as the brown, glistening mud banks stretched down to the low tidal river, beautifully carved with complex water channels spreading outwards like networks of veins draining into the river's watery body. Further down the path, the grasses turned to thick, wet mud, and I took off my trail shoes to squelch, slip and slide barefoot in this cold, foot-soothing mud-bath.

I eventually turned off the path and up to my destination on a small hillock which stands proud above the banks, overlooking a sharp U-bend in the river. The mist still lay thick in the valley here, so that the sun shone palely and I could only just make out the silhouetted skeleton branches of the trees on the far side of, what appeared like, the mythological river Styx. A tawny owl hooted mournfully from the vertical, grey slabs of river cliff rising up behind me, to further fill the valley with an eery, deathly quality.

I sat silently, in this darkly lit underworld, closing my eyes, connecting deeply with the natural elements surrounding me as the cold wind swept down the invisible valley dusting my brow with droplets of misty condensation.

While my eyes were long closed in contemplation, a magic spell was weaving all about me. I opened my eyes to find the mist lifting in great, steaming convolutions, chased away down the valley by the gathering strength of the mid-morning sun, which now pierced the former gloom with linear spears of white light.

The land of the dead where I had been wandering reflectively only moments before, had risen up in a resurrection of the living day. The mists retreated further down the valley where great river cliffs rose victoriously out of the dormant dark to become solid and manifest again. A small flock of seagulls shining white as newly washed linen, standing out starkly against the mud~brown of the river water below, flapped and interweaved their way up the newly emerged valley. They flew past me, then collectively reconsidered, and turned back to land on the shining banks of mud, to pick through the rich population of invertebrates living out their lives in their trillions below the surface.

A commotion of crow caws then impressed upon my attention, and I looked around to see a large buzzard rise majestically out of the thick corridor of trees skirting the valley floor, chased by two scrabbling, squawking crows, protecting their own. The buzzard gained an effortless elevation and soared in a wide circle above my head, looking down upon me loftily, her long speckled wings fanning out, before drifting over the river cliff behind.

One of the chasing crows, relaxing after the buzzard's departure, settled on the mud at a distance, surveying the wide river. I watched him for a while, feeling my way towards a connection with his inner being. I silently asked him to come and visit me. At that very moment, he lifted into the air and flew over to a low grassy perch not far below me, and seemed to look at me curiously through eyes lit like shiny black polished stones of jet.

In a misjudged attempt at kindness, I threw a small piece of apple that I was eating towards him, but my sudden move spooked him and he lifted back into the air to return to his former spot. I regretted my rash move, and the crow flew out across the river to land in the gnarly branches of a hawthorn tree which was growing brazenly amidst a thin stand of other hawthorns precariously stretched along a large muddy spur of the river bank.

The white, diffuse sun, traced a low passage across the winter sky, casting deep shadows in the jagged river-cliff rocks, where peregrines occasionally screeched like banshees unseen. Long, thin, shadows of the river bank trees stretched out across the silky chocolate river water, which was now rising inexorably with the Severn estuary tide, and providing an almost perfect mirrored reflection of the cliffs and trees above.

A large fish leapt out of the depths further upstream, but I looked over just after she had returned to her watery element with a resounding splash that echoed up the valley. The surface waters rippled and sparkled in the late afternoon sun. A large bumble bee hummed up past me, and a small green spider made himself at home on the sleeve of my waterproof jacket. I gently blew him off for his own protection, but he held on with an extended silken thread, to wind his way up to return to my sleeve, persistence personified.

I looked up to find that a heron had perched herself, preening, on a horizontal branch of one of the hawthorn trees on the opposite bank, warming and drying herself in the descending, waning, sunlight, after a long day’s fishing.

Time flowed on languidly with the river flowing gently backwards with the rising tide, white bubbles curling inwards in natural ‘paisley’ patterns forming and then unravelling, in the brown surface sheen, revealing the hidden pull of deep undercurrents.

The sun began to fall behind the thick woodland layers of the leafless trees’ bare canopies, on the far side of the river. The tawny owl hooted behind me, giving notice of the dusk’s soporific, and dreamy approach.

As I got up to leave, an older man, with a lyrical welsh accent approached in a friendly manner, and we exchanged a few polite words, before I left him to take in the wonderful view that I had been gifted alone all the day.

As I made my way back up the steep path, I encountered a herd of black sheep feeding lustily on the thick grasses near the old chapel, their thick woollen coats catching the last of the evening rays of sun, which illuminated the whole area in an orange, ethereal, almost unearthly glow. The sheep almost took flight at my approach, but we sniffed a greeting to each other, and they relaxed to return to their chewing of the grasses, with a rhythmic crunching and wrenching sound.

I continued climbing the steep path, winding its way back up the high river cliffs, past elaborately coloured fungi and mosses on a fallen tree, all glowing vividly in the evening light. I took one last look back across the dimming valley, before passing two old stone lime kilns, and banks of Yew trees, with roots flowing over limestone rocks still glowing in the last shafts of dwindling sunlight.

Above the valley cliffs’ long curving, jagged rim, a large, pale blue waxing moon rose effulgently into a slowly darkening sky, joined closely by Mars twinkling reddish pink.

After returning home, whiling away the evening hours, and preparing for sleep, I sent my thoughts back to the chapel at Lancaut, musing that the tawny owl would be abroad, hunting in the valley. I turned over to my own dreaming, night journey down the river Styx in the mist.

Woke up to sun
Mist on the Severn
Above sea of mist at Lancaut car park
Ancient chapel
Feeling at graves
Barefoot on muddy path
Sitting in the mist
Tawny owl calls
Mist clears magically
Small bright flock of seagulls
Crow comes to visit but I scare him
Peregrine screech
Reflections on the river
Buzzard flyover
Bee visits
Buzzard emerges from cliff
Small spider
Heron preaning in the tree
Welsh man
Black sheep
Evening sunlight
Waxing moon in pale blue sky
Moon and Mars in night skyRead more