Winter is a colour

14 hours ago , by Richard Lutz

Richard Lutz feels the chill factor

The temperatures drops. The wind cries freezing. The Water of Minnoch roars. The air bristles with ice. No snow…yet…but winter has held its breath too long. Now November drops into December.

On the shoreline, a work party labours on a steep gully. A grey sea below. A restless sky above. Way on the horizon a faint outline of an island.

The team is repairing a 100 mile coastal path. It’s endless, a Sisyphean task. Four seasons a year. Winter is for serious groundwork, such as step renovations where rain, wear, time and southwesterlies cause constant damage.

Inland- and frost quietens the woods and glens.

On the riverbanks of the Water of Trool, bullrushes freeze and are coated with ice, leaving a white valley.

A wall of bushes, possibly willow, are tinted white too.

The tiny details are not flowers at all, but fragments of frost that have frozen Glen Trool, a glen surrounded by names: rounded peaks called Lamachan Hill and Curleylee, a ridge called The Rig of the Jarkness and a tiny dot of a high level pool called The White Lochan of Drigmorn. A mountain called The Merrick dominates all.

Further down the cold valley, there’s an old packhorse bridge. It goes nowhere. It comes from nowhere. No one knows when it was built to span The Minnoch. It’s lasted for centuries of winters.

It’s a bridge of questions and untold stories. It stands arched, grey and unmoved. We can only see it as we squint into the low lying winter sun. The fading light dims.

The sky, a cold sky today, turns crépuscule….I like that word. Thelonious Monk used it for a piano solo about his wife Nellie. The evening draws over us and it’ll be dark by four.

pix credits: Anthony O’Neil (walker)/ David Baird (river)