Into the New Year

28th December 2013

    The stars were a reflection of my dreams.
    The sharp crescent Moon lit the countryside and Saturn was approaching Mars in Virgo. Jupiter was shining in the west, and in the east, Vega and Altair: so bright. Such a glistening after the storms.
     I waited under that sky for Dee and Maisie, then we drove to Kilndown for a year-end walk through the debris of the last few days of destruction and flood. We parked nearby to Christ Church and walked downhill toward Goudhurst as the light increased. The birdsong excelled as we passed Hillside Farm and Kilndown Place; the avian voices increasing lately. The limbs of trees were everywhere, and great boughs were lying at strange angles, twisted and broken. The ground was sodden and running rivulets were bubbling out of the clay and down to the valley's streams. Nearby Hope Mill, by the Tiese, two ponies were grazing on the verge of the lane. They began to follow us to the Goudhurst road. To save them from the danger of the road, I took one by the halter and led them back to the relative safety of a copse. They began to graze, and we left them there, hoping that their escape from a field somewhere would soon be discovered. At Crowbourne Farm, our way was blocked by a conifer laying across the path. Scrambling over the tree and then over a fence, we made the climb uphill through the soaking fields to a peaceful Goudhurst Village.
    Downhill again to Smugley Farm, there were still Pheasants for Maisie to chase which she finds great sport, but is never successful, and at the swollen stream there, a tree had fallen to create a dam and the water was rushing over into a crashing white foam. We sat on a felled Scots Pine log near Three Chimneys farm, with the watery Sun warming us, and drank tea and ate some of Kay's excellent Christmas fruit cake. The trek through Bedgebury Forest was quiet: no walkers or cyclists, and the paths were streams that we splashed along and some trees were lying higgledy-piggledy. It clouded a little as we came to the Pinetum, and threatened rain, but it soon passed, and the Sun shone, blinding, low in the sky. We stopped for coffee and a bacon roll in the cafe to rest, before the last leg back to Kilndown.
    On the lane to Kilndown, which had been recently resurfaced, above a bridge over a brook, the rushing water had undermined the road and lifted the surface into waves of tarmac. And the lane uphill was flowing with water. We got back to the village at 1pm for a New Year's toast of mead and went home tired and muddy, but satisfied.