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Magical Sunlight on dewy hillsides, a new chill in the air, sun dappled cows and bold fairy – tale toadstools

Monday 22nd September 2025
Walk start time: 8.58am
Walk finish time: 10.15am
Walk area: Gelliwion farm lanes and The Dingle
Miles walked: 3.25

The night has fought at last to equal length, and the shadows of the year are creeping up behind the trees.

Despite this, the morning light of the low autumn sun is bright – iridescent – and this landscape on the brink of change feels never more in tune with the magic at its heart.

This mornings walk is a deliberate ascent. An attempt to get blood that feels cold and immobile pumping through my veins.

Season change is inspiring, beautiful, transformative, but for those who sometimes struggle with mental health it can be a catalyst for instability.

The unknown of a new season, the colder air and darkness – quiet triggers to our equilibrium…unless we can flow into them.

This morning I need to feel my heart pumping, and I need to feel the sun on my face. There is a new and distinct chill in the air heading out today, but there is still a little warmth in the sunshine, and the sky is serene blue and cloudless.

As I head up Gelliwion road, breathing harder with the climb, I marvel, as I always do, at the gradual dissipation of noise from the road with each step I take. The views also improve with each passing footfall, and the low light creates silvery shimmers on the grass across the farm fields

I crunch up the road through the still abundant trails of acorns – one newly shed from the tree lands on my head. A lucky portent if ever there was one, surely. The feeling of bounty they create is enhanced by a generous crop of apples illuminated in the sunshine.

Perhaps one of the great appeals of this time of year for me, is the effect of the lower sunlight on the landscape.

I am fascinated by the effects of light in general, filtering into rooms through windows, reflecting from surfaces, but light diffused through the green, or through the autumn colours of trees holds an incomparable quality.

There is a magic in it that words defy.

Near the top of the road, away from the houses, the landscape begins to open out ahead. I cross a cattle grid to get onto the bracken flanked lane, fields dropping into a sunlit valley on one side, and ascending to sheep dotted hill tops, strewn with lovely tumble down stone outbuildings on the other.

The path climbs steadily, as the quiet becomes complete, the bird song being suddenly turned up, magnifying the surrounding peace, as the town drops away behind me.

Passing the two large farm buildings at the top of this stretch of hill, my path starts to flatten and curve. As it does so a herd of cows appears suddenly in the sun dappled field to my left, and they eye me as one, appearing to be asking what they bloody hell I think I’m doing all the way up here, on their patch. A particularly pretty one lets me give her a brief scruffle on the nose.

Past the cows, the path curves in a large sweeping turn through a little dell before continuing its ascent of the mountain. It is a place I have loved from my first moment of discovering it, and a remedy for a struggling mood if ever there was one.

I discovered recently that the locals call it “The Dingle” a name which suits it perfectly. The lane here turns gently back on itself, wending its way underneath magnificent mature oaks, bracken covered mountainside climbing up to the right, and to the left, marshy fields, always glinting in the light, with a stream tinkling cheerfully from one side to the other.

There is something about this spot, the particular way the light falls, the sound of the stream and the shine from the watery landscape, that makes you feel like you have entered another land and time. It doesn’t seem possible that branches of civilisation could be such a short distance away.

It’s like all the beauty of the surrounding landscape has somehow been neatly folded up in this little bend – bottled, stored and intensified. It feels mythical and untouchable, like a soft but powerful balm to the senses.

As I turn the corner from my refuge, leaving the gentle trickle of the stream behind me, I am ascending again, and the sun penetrating the banks of beech and hazel beside me turns the light golden.

I round the next corner, and I have reached the tops of the hills. Green fields stretch out to either side, with views on a clear day as far as the Severn Estuary.

The landscape before me has gone from the softness of wooded colour to an intensely clean stripe of deep green and blue horizon, on which a cluster of horses take turns to practise for pony pose of the year.

This pinnacle point of the walk was to have been my turning point, but the views are so spectacular, and the feel of the gentle sun on my skin so welcome, that I decide to walk a little further down the lane.

It is so wonderfully quiet up here, and I am absorbed for a few minutes in the lulling sound of my footsteps on the road. I meet this bold sheep, who appears to be attempting some kind of stand-off on the lane.

Normally sheep run off with all the grace of a giraffe in a sweet shop as soon as they see me. This one is clearly made of stronger stuff, and allows me to get within approximately 2 metres before predictably deciding to pelt itself at a closed gate and then simply standing and looking embarrassed.

Crows are busily landing and taking off with loud caws in the fields to my right.

The sound of a crow always makes me think of winter mornings, perhaps their calls resonate differently, more starkly, in the cooler air.

There is something both mysterious and resilient about the sound to me – reassuring. And somehow with crows, ravens, rooks – all the corvids – part of my brain is always imagining them landing on the misty parapet of a fairy-tale castle. If there is any bird that knows magical secrets it’s not telling us, I reckon its a crow.

Some of the magic of actually walking has finally started to click in with me now, today I have actually walked far enough that the aching in my legs has started to invoke peace in my brain.

I stop, deciding to quite simply have a good look at a field on the other side of a stone wall. Maybe there will be rabbits in it or something, it doesn’t matter, I can absorb myself in its study for a minute or two.

I spot a bird of prey sitting upright amongst the grass, and then err… a duck?

Hmmm, no… actually those are both very well shaped clumps of dried grass. Still, it matters not. The calm enjoyment of the sights of my walk is flowing. I feel better.

Turning at this sunsoaked stone wall to wend my way back up the lane to the top, I hear a robin, and see it land on a telegraph wire ahead. I watch it sing for a while, before it flies to a stark tree on the other side of the road to join a sudden swooping flock of its companions in song.

I tried to capture both the robin and its flock., unfortunately I think we can all agree I have successfully captured a telegraph wire and the top of a bare tree. But they were there, and the fleeting song was wonderful, I promise.

Having traversed the open top road again, I start to wend my way down the lane towards The Dingle, where I was previously so consumed with the light through the trees. I turn my attention to the sunlight on the mountainside bank to my left this time, and am astonished to spot these fantastic toadstools, looking like bright illustrations from a children’s book.

Their stark red is rendered even more brilliant by their subtle surrounds of fading greenery and dead leaves. There is colour to be found somewhere, whatever the season.

At the dingle, the magnificence of the trees draws me in again, in particular the light filtered through the canopy of this incredible oak tree, as its carpet of acorns crunch under my feet.

(see also the sport of Acorn Wanging in my last walk The bracken turns to bronze, or the first signs of autumn colour in The first whispers on the wind)

My legs are aching now on the sharp descent down the hill, but I feel indescribably better than when I left the house this morning.

The equinox is a crux, a turning point on which nature balances, and for a time at least, our moods and senses feel they are balancing delicately with it.

The only way to dispel this instability is to allow nature, and the season, to flow, taking yourself along with it.

I will, in these coming weeks, find my equilibrium. I will continue to explore and marvel at nature’s evolving wonders.

Until I am, with any luck, as relaxed and in tune with the changing season as this sheep in its pool of autumn sunlight.

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