A Day on the Hill

A warm, sultry day, cloudy and occasionally sunny.  And still dry, no serious rain now for some weeks.  We spent the day on and off the hill behind the house, as a friend was cutting some felled trees for our kitchen counter tops. The beech tree was felled some weeks ago, and we hoped would be big enough for some counter tops.  Sherwood and Rob arrived with a double chainsaw and a Land Rover full of kit, but the tree had a strange inner space - chamber, abscess - caused by long-ago rainwater; invisible from the outside the water had created a large black void within the tree.  So our counter tops won't be as big as we had hoped, but we have some two-inch thick slabs of wood - no other word - which will make something.  And we had a lovely day in the beech, oak and chestnut woods on the hill above the sheep fields.  I managed a short walk away from the chainsaws onto what I realised is moorland, a thin crust of tough grasses and heathers and dusty stone paths.  Warm breeze in the heathers, iron-red stone breaking the mat of grass.  And I saw a red kit below us, lazily quartering the valley, turning sharply on the thermals, until it turned into the sky and disappeared.