As I drove to this tiny moorland hamlet, the dawn sky looked so grey that I imagined it must have 100% cloud cover. Actually, there was none, and as the blue slowly crept in overhead, I could see that frost was everywhere.
I also realised that there was no breeze and every sound seemed distilled, so I stopped by the first farm to record my blackbird. He has mastered the sweetest imitations of displaying golden plovers, but this was my first chance to capture them. And there he was, doing his plover notes, but throwing in snippets of curlew as extras, and when he stood in profile at the roof apex, singing, bill wide, throat feathers spiked against the heavens, I knew the morning would be magical.
So it proved. There was not just one but six ring ouzels. They come to this stopover place on passage, probably en route to Scandinavia. There are birds and then there are ring ouzels: shy, enigmatic, unpredictable, migratory and now – alas – declining.
Yet it’s not this that makes them so compelling. It is all of the above blended with the subtleness of their appearance. Every feather on the undersides of the one male I saw seemed rimed with frost.
I worked out gradually that it was the touch of last night’s ice on everything that made the whole dawn so special. The sheep-shorn fields were all an exquisite whitishness. As the sun came over the far slope, the molehills and dead thistles threw across the glittering sheet the softest grey ellipses of shadow.
Nor was it only these visual effects. The cold air had somehow glazed all the morning sounds in extra clarity so that curlew calls appeared literally to shine, while skylark song came down like an endless shower of something crystalised.
I came to realise, as I left the faintest prints in the frost, that I was not only going forward. I was going backwards, gathering as I walked, half a century of memories of other dawn outings, all the way back to those made before school every Wednesday.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024, is available now at guardianbookshop.com
