The ground was so white that you’d swear it had snowed overnight. Around us every frond of bracken and sprig of heather shone, while the birch trees were dusted into spectral shrouds.
It was the path underfoot that gave the game away. The black earth revealed how the passage of feet printed into gloop days before was now frozen iron-hard, so that a misplaced step might prompt a stumble. There had been no snow after all, just a clear night that had teased water from the air into labyrinthine patterns of hoarfrost that now encased any structure that could support its feathery weight.
The sky was baby blue towards the horizon, where a low sun angled across the moor, which glittered its reply. Four hundred human generations have inhabited this corner of the English uplands, and I’d bet each one of them at some point marvelled at the intricate beauty of such a heavy frost in sunshine, especially after days of wet grey, when you feel your soul’s force weaken. Ted Hughes described stars as “mushrooms in the nothing forest” and there was something of that here, too – so much white light sprouting from the void.
I knelt on the hard ground to get a closer look. Only the higher shrubs were bathed in light. Between them were pockets of bone-white cold where the frost’s designs were picked out not by sunlight but by the blue-grey shadows around them. Crystals form according to what chemists call their habit, but the habits of water are complex. Temperature and how much water vapour the air holds determine the structure ice crystals create, from needles to thicker-based pyramids to hexagonal columns that can be either solid or tubular.
Close by, for example, was the neatly cut stump of a birch that had sprouted with hexagonal columns fat enough to judge as hollow. Yet, in the course of a night, the air can grow colder and the air less moist, diverting these ephemeral growths into different shapes, conjuring fresh magic from timeless laws.
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