A Pink and Lilac Day

Thursday’s walk wasn’t a pleasant one at first.  The windfarm path, which is walled by giant gorse, has very few gaps revealing the surrounding countryside and winter trees.  There are signs warning against digging, as there are high voltage live cables underground, and a mobile number to phone. The airbase is around a tedious, far too long, concreted road.  There is something frightening about the turbines, towering ominously, like Stalin’s ‘Seven Sisters’, and the path so close to them, with warning signs of no mobile signal – how are you supposed to call the permission-to-dig guy then?  Another warning, don’t walk when lightening’s forecast.  It was ‘War of the Worlds’ scary.  It’s the HG Wells Walk.  The worst thing was, there was no birdsong anywhere near the turbines.  

However, had planned to find a new path to Whitehills.  Turning left at the Boyndie Centre, there is a grand house, self-catering cottages, a tea room and a farm at the crest of the hill.  Fields freshly ploughed, one still golden with corn stubble where crows, gulls and geese were congregating under the waxing gibbous moon.  The feeling of well-being, moon to the left, sun to the right, whirlwind of birds getting ready to roost in the middle.  The sun, apricot behind indigo clouds, the moon in a pink and lilac sky.  Straight out of a Thomas Hardy novel, without the quirks of fate.  I passed an elderly woman, and asked if this road would lead to Whitehills.  She said, best way was to go through the gate across the road at the end of this one, there was a path right into Whitehills.  I found the gate, sure enough, and had a hilltop view of a silver-blue flat calm sea, the pink moon, glowing with pleasure at the beauty of it all.

“Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Images for this journal have been posted on Insta @purplehaze_journal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_(Moscow)

Credit: 'Tess of the D'Urbivilles', Thomas Hardy 1891, serialised (bowdlerized) 'The Graphic', published in entirety 1891.