Outside this secluded world, autumn turns and falls in yellow, gold and brown. Here, we walk through a different colour palette. Here, as the trees strip themselves bare, the gorge’s gorgeous greens have come to the fore.
There is ivy, of course there is ivy, thick-leaved, stealing long ago over unclaimed ground, shinning up trees, bunching over overhanging banks. But ivy tends to be overlooked and ignored in the vale, such is the lushness and visual impact of two other groups of plants.
All down a deep cleft above the waterfall, in rows, columns and the spaces in between, grow hart’s-tongue ferns, coated with a glossy-dark sheen as if bathed in perpetual rain. Over there is the thickest thicket, a lime-loving profusion, though ferns are apt to sprout from any surface in this rarefied place.
The shuttlecocks of hard shield, soft shield and buckler ferns – I cannot tell which is which – are scattered along the valley floor and up the shallower edges. Plucky spleenwort, with its mourning-black stems, shoots out of the mortared cracks on stone walls of a long-abandoned ironworks.
There is a softer, grass-turf green that is yet more abundant. In the world beyond here, moss felts only the moist north-facing trunks and branches of trees, for the drying sun denies it a hold elsewhere. Within this great gully, where the wind barely blows and dampness lingers, north is south is east is west, and moss is a wrap.
It is the lagging for alder, leg warmer to the oak, tubular bandage for ailing ash. If I reach out to touch its padding on the bark of the nearest trunk, my fingers press, compress, release. Over my head, moss creeps up into the forks, and from its spongy surface burst yet more ferns, green on green.
Nor does this invader by stealth and spore stop there. Over the smaller streamside trees in particular, moss clothes every bough, branch and twig. Some strands have worked loose and trail out as lime tinsel. The conquest is complete: nothing is left uncovered.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
