All that remained, a tangle of fallen branches, found favour with the tree pipits at least. They moved there in large numbers, with a territory around every standing tree or shrub. They would perch at the very top, then hurl themselves into the air and parachute down in their display flight. Tall spikes of purple foxgloves emerged everywhere, and then the whole site was taken over by the long pink-flowering heads of rosebay willowherb, fireweed. That first autumn after felling, when their flowers turned to seed, a breeze from the west would send vast quantities of down drifting across my front field, like a flurry of snowflakes. Then, after the land had been left to rest a little, it was replanted, but this time with mixed hardwoods. And one day, when the spindly saplings there now have matured a little, it will grow up to be a fine, fine wood.
Penlan Cottage has a new roof now. First the well-weathered barge boards disintegrated and crashed to the ground one by one. Then the exposed beam-ends began to rot away too. Every year that went by found the cottage a little more decrepit. Everything about the cottage was original, more than a hundred and fifty years old. When the land agents came for an inspection, they thought at first that it might be enough to replace the ends of the beams and put in new eaves, but it was not to be: the damage was done, and had progressed too far. The work was overdue really, as was the replacement of the rotten window frames. The botching I had done over the years was just deferring the inevitable. All the roof timbers needed to be replaced, and the workmen also found that the entire weight of the chimney stack was resting on a rotten oak beam, so that had to be rebuilt too. I had sometimes wondered in a storm if the jackdaw ash was about to drop through my ceiling, but I had never suspected that the sudden descent of a half-ton of bricks was equally likely. The work had to be done in the middle of winter: not such a nice job for the roofers but the bat colony in the loft had to be protected from disturbance at other times of year. All the original slates, with their discs of lichen that had taken a century to grow, were replaced with perfectly even synthetic slates. My main concern was whether the bats would take to the new environment when they returned from their winter hibernation, for long-eared bats in particular are very loyal to their traditional haunts and seldom move into new locations. Most of their nursery roosts have been continuously occupied for well over a century. But I need not have worried; if anything their numbers seem to have risen a little since the new roof was put in. Perhaps the old roof was becoming a little too draughty for them as time took its toll and it gradually fell to pieces.
My cottage is not the only place that has had a revamp. The crumbling old crook barn down the hill was sold off for development, even though it was in a state of complete dilapidation and had no redeeming features whatsoever aside from the one that mattered: its location. The ancient barn was listed, so the couple who bought it had to strip it down to its bare skeleton, the exposed ribs of its original timbers, and build their home from scratch around that framework. It took them years, during which they started a family in a mobile home at the site. They said that sometimes of an evening owls would come and watch them from the fence. Tawny owls are so sedentary that these are almost certainly the distant descendants of the owl that used to shelter on the cross-beams of the old barn all those years ago when I first arrived in Wales. Now that the barn has finally been rebuilt, Penlan Cottage has a new near neighbour; still not one visible from the cottage though. Before the work had even begun, the first job that had to be done was to put in a negotiable track the half-mile or so from the lanes. A part of its route followed the old cart track along the stream, and its starting point was at the bridge where I had put my postbox. Though, sadly, my postbox was no more. The lane here was a tight zigzag, following the stream closely, sticking to the valley bottom, first following one side of the stream, then a right angle over the bridge, then another right angle to follow the stream again on its far side. Late one night someone had been driving these lanes way too fast and had lost control at the bend. They had broadsided my postbox, crushing it beyond repair, and taken out the gate, gatepost and all.
I had first moved into the cottage in the springtime, and it was in the spring a little more than five years later that I decided it was time to move on. Five years is a good long stint at doing almost anything. I had the feeling that if I didn’t leave soon then I probably never would; I would just stay put and spend the rest of my life there, growing old and no doubt gradually more eccentric, alone on my hill. This was not a prospect that in any way alarmed me; I knew my way around this lifestyle now and staying would have been the easy option. I had watched the turn of the seasons over and over, and knew the worst that would be thrown at me. I had lasted through hard droughts where my water supply had run out and I’d had to carefully ration water, and I had been through spells when it had rained unremittingly, torrentially, for weeks on end. I had been snowed in, and sat out the hardest of frosts and the wildest of storms. I had coped with illnesses severe enough that I’d been effectively housebound. Most of all, I had learned that I could live a life where I did not know how long it would be before I next had company, or even a meaningful conversation, but could be confident that the wait would be one not of hours or even days, but of weeks. And feel perfectly at ease with that. When I had first moved to the cottage, I had no idea whether I would prove capable of tolerating a life like this, and had seen it as a challenge. But I had long since ceased to see it in those terms. If it had ever been a test, I had long ago torn up the exam paper and walked out of the room; this was just me, living the life that I had chosen.
After five years of watching the local wildlife I had encountered just about every species I was likely to, but I knew that there was no end to what I might see were I to stay. It is not a matter of going somewhere and counting off what it has to offer, as if using up its finite potential for new experience. It is more like peeling the layers from an onion, a series of reveals of deeper and deeper understanding. And some of my encounters were unique, unrepeatable moments. There would always be the possibility that something extraordinary, something totally unpredictable, might happen.
Five years is long enough to become aware not just of what stays the same — of the repeated cycles of life — but of the changes that take place over time, in yourself as well as in the world around you. Not long before I left the cottage I took one of my occasional forays to the village for supplies, following my regular route along the riverbank and the long-abandoned railway embankment. As I neared the village through that last plantation of conifers by the riverside I saw slotted tracks along the badger trail I had been following. Not an escaped lamb, I knew. When I recalled my childhood it felt like something was missing here: a party of fallow deer out in the fields at dawn, perhaps, or a pair of roe deer emerging at the edge of a woodland glade at dusk, only to dissolve back into the trees as the darkness fell. But there were no deer in this part of Wales. Until now. On my next trip to the village I looked again, and looked more carefully, and this time saw droppings too, which made me sure of what I had found. So when I had bought my few requisites from the village shop and was on my way home, I dropped by the field centre to speak to the doctor. He was not surprised; the previous day he had been driving along the lanes past these woods when a muntjac had hopped out of the plantation where I had found the trail and run across the road in front of him — the first record for the county. But in fact over a year earlier the estate workers who lived by the river had been out one evening pushing their baby buggy along the old railway track when they had seen an unidentified mammal slipping between two woods. Like a fox but not a fox, was how they had described it, and with no tail. It now seemed highly likely that this was a pioneer among the deer that now seemed to be following the heavily wooded river valley into the heart of Wales.