April 2020 – COVID Spring

There has been a perverseness to spring this year.

While many have been locked indoors, unable to escape,

spring has hurtled through April with, officially,

the most sunshine on record.

Easter heralds the start of the tourist season and with weather such as we’ve had the mountains and footpaths of Cumbria should have thronged with visitors, but not this year!

Cumbria is closed.

I count my blessings and my luck at living, where walking from my door, there are woodlands and the outlying Cunswick Scar,  high enough within twenty minutes to at least see the mountains.

Confined to lowland locality I’ve discovered tiny lanes and byways previously never given a second glance. Efforts to find variety, mean my OS7, south lakes map is now pretty much etched in my memory.

I’ve learned that spring has a different richness in these lower lanes. Mountains turn from a tired burnished brown, to deep green. Colour found mostly with tiny alpines in hidden crevices.

Down ‘here’ it has no such subtlety. Daffodils waved in April. Hedges began bare and brown. Slowly the buds burst as the thorns set their white against a seemingly endless blue sky.

Spring has been a journey slow enough to notice changes I’ve never before had the time to appreciate. Colours have spread from pale yellow primroses to deep addictive blue woodland carpets.

Enhanced by a surreal Mediterranean sky. For once without the incessant vapour trails of planes.

Traffic has been absent. Small lanes have been a delight to walk down with birdsong echoing loud, unhampered by 21^st century buzz. I’m now woken by an uninterrupted dawn chorus not the rattle of early commuters.

Clean air’s returned as pollution’s dropped. Walking across waxy leaves wild garlic permeated the air. Yellow gorse wafts a deep buttery smell as intense as it is yellow.  The unusual sunshine wakened the unique aroma of bluebells to woodland walks I’m more accustomed to taking in the rain.

Seven dry weeks have been blissful for local strolls but some plants have struggled. Foxgloves beginning their journey to flowering in June, have been looking very sad.

Just now I’m watching that damp drizzle complicit in the making of Cumbria so beautiful.

That lovely weather spell has come to an end,

just as lockdown will.