There’s a time when it’s no longer winter, but it seems unwise to speak of spring. Before blossom, before warmth is a turning point felt rather than observed.
This year it was distilled and formalised for me on an Imbolc pilgrimage to the Uffington White Horse in Oxfordshire, led by the apothecary Charlotte Pulver, the druid Chris Park and the singer-naturalist Sam Lee. I found myself barefoot in a chalk spring, shedding tears for a woman I’ve never met while hugging her sister, and later crouched in candlelight and heart-rhythm in the cramped chamber of the 5,500-year-old long-barrow of Wayland’s Smithy.
