Bingley Moor, West Yorkshire: Up here the black soil is saturated, and so am I. But the birds are in their element, bringing the punchy gusts to life
This is bruising, buffeting weather, gusting winds, slanting rain, dished out across drenched green farmland under a shifting canopy of silver-lit cloud. It’s not weather that needs any additional shape or texture – I can feel its heft every time the wet westerly slaps me across the chops. But still, that’s what birds do – the hard-flying woodpigeons cutting across the grain of the weather, the crows and jackdaws showboating on the updraughts, the buzzard banking low through the rain – they bring a sort of embodiment to the high tidal currents of climate and weather.
As I make a slow way up toward the moors, a great cloud of fieldfares erupts into the grey from a stand of bent-backed trees. It’s as many as I’ve ever seen in one place – 700-plus, I guess. The flock tilts on the camber of the wind and comes coursing back overhead. I can hear their worried chatter over the weather noise. I watch for a bit, but I don’t want to disturb their berry-picking. It seems to have been a pretty good berry year round here; hopefully that will mean a good year for the winter thrushes (though even thrushes fat on autumn berries will struggle if a hard frost bites).
I pass a dead rabbit in the last field before the moor edge. It’s lying crushed under the capstone of a drystone wall. Someone, I suppose, found it poorly by the path – myxomatosis, “the white blindness” of Watership Down, remains endemic among wild rabbits – and did the hard, kind thing. Then the moor, and the peat, and the burnt-black heather, and the great ribbons of rainwater carving apart the hillside. The black soil is saturated.
I make it up to the stark plateau of Bingley Moor before the rain really comes after me. I’m squelching through a cold stew of streaming water, mud and clammy November air, deeply, profoundly, importantly wet, but happy, even so, as the path becomes less path than puddle, and red grouse – the privileged pets of the Bingley Moor Estate – come leaping out of the wet bents around me.
Eventually, the rising wave of the landscape breaks, and Wharfedale falls away below me.