Snow snow quick quick snow

Snow snow quick quick snow. I don’t know where that catchy phrase comes from but that’s been the way of things around here for the past 36 hours.

One minute you’re thinking: “Goodie – a blizzard. Global warming is a lie. Things are just like they used to be. The winter really is winter - and it is beautiful.”

Then you’re praying: “Hope it doesn’t come down in a big dump – I’ve got places to go, people to see.”

And then: “Wait a minute – it is – it’s snowing. Let’s get the sledge out – this may be the last time we’ll ever get to enjoy skimming down the hills in snow if climate change really does take a hold.”

.

Your winter weather pictures.

In the end I took the dog for a walk and enjoyed every last scrunching freezing footfall of it. Snow does something to a landscape – the blanket of white transforms the way things look far more than you could ever expect it would.

Suddenly you notice distant fields that you’ve never spotted before. I saw the famous old incline of the long defunct West Somerset Mineral Railway, cutting its way clear as a bell down through the think forests above my home.

People often ask me where it is and usually I wave a hand in its general direction. I know the place because there is a tuck in the hills that gives away its location, but you can’t see the 45 degree railway bed for the thick trees.

Our winter weather pictures

But now the trees have lost there leaves and, because the snow settled deeper on the old permanent way than in the surrounding scrub, I could see quite plainly the dramatic route of what must have once been the Westcountry’s most crazy, frightening and vertiginous bit of railroad.

There’s another thing I like about walking in snow. The countryside sounds different. Somehow the white blanket both muffles – and amplifies certain sounds. And so there seems to be more in the way of silence – and yet the bark of raven can ring out in the skies far more prominently than you’ve ever noticed before.

And here’s a thing. I mentioned in these blogs before about the red kits that have come to live in the valley. This morning when I took these photographs there was no sign of these elegant birds – this afternoon, when I went for a second quick stroll with the dog and didn’t take the camera because it was quite simply too cold – there was the kite.

Flying just 30 feet beneath where I stood on the steep hill.

It would have made an amazing photograph with its reddish plumage set against the white snow – but in this snow snow quick quick snow world, you win some and you lose some…