The slow love for winter light

It took me many years to love the beauty of winter light. Every November I would start raging against the season, seeing it as a blank and empty time, until I recognised that living in the northern Pennines and hating six months of the year is not the way to happiness. So I started looking hard at things and slowly, like love, it developed into a full scale passion. The extraordinary life of small things.

This old stone gatepost is on the way out to Frosterley. I haven't walked there for a few months as the fields have been full of feisty cows with calves, never a good combination when you've got dogs with you, so I've steered clear of it. But they've been taken in now for the winter and so I've got the fields back again.